Mark Durie interview - highly recommended

I'm preparing a blog on Islamic antisemitism that will feature, among others, the work of the Australian scholar and Anglican minister, Mark Durie. So I happened across this interview of Durie by Pamela Geller. And I was impressed by Durie's clarity of mind, his learned understanding of Islam and his explanation of the struggle over world views that defenders of freedom in the West today have to engage. The man is a skilled communicator because he is a civilized man, one whose message for Muslims is not of hate. Yet that does not stop him from recognizing the need to speak frankly about opposing a belief system that widely engenders fear among both Muslims and non-Muslims.

Whether or not you like Pamela's style, don't miss this interview. Did you know that this Sunday is the UN's International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination? Do your duty!

Why Good Canadians must have nothing to do with York University

Jewish Tribune - York University discriminates against Christian and Jewish coalition ahead of Israel Apartheid Week

On Monday morning, York University informed Imagine With Us campus partners Christians United for Israel (CUFI) that the university was cancelling the event due to the fact that Imagine With Us did not meet their requirements. York had required that the organizers include a formidable police and campus security presence paid for by the organizers, a list of all attendees in advance, a minute-by-minute synopsis of all speakers’ talking points and a ban on public advertising of the event at York and on satellite campuses.

York University has said that the requirements were demanded of the event organizers due to the participation of individuals who they claim invite the animus of anti-Israel campus agitators.

In an interview with the Jewish Tribune, Rob Kilfoyle, director of security at York, confirmed the event had been cancelled and stated that the need for security at events is determined on a case-by-case basis and that the participation of speakers such as Dimant and Pipes was the cause of the stringent requirements. When asked why similar demands were not made of the organizers of Israel Apartheid Week events, Kilfoyle stated that even though the organizers of those events will not be paying for their own security – as the university had demanded of Imagine With Us – York will be there “to monitor the activities.”

Welcome to Egypt. York is now a place where you're either thug or dhimmi - no other way is known to the administration. This of course is not the first implicitly antisemitic decision of the York administration when it comes to defending, or not, the free speech of public defenders of Israel. No one should mistake this place (or respect its degrees) as a genuine provider of education. Boycott! (HT: Catfur)

Geert Who?

The news out of the Geert Wilders show trial today is that the Dutch court is refusing to hear but three of the eighteen witnesses Wilders had wished to call.

What is one to make of this but that it shows an obvious desire on the part of the judges to keep things as quiet and short as possible. Once again we see that the "liberal" elites ruling the West simply cannot both defend their dogmatic positions on multiculturalism and "hate speech" without trying to shut up people who point out some of the deep problems with their ideology. And no problem is greater than the question of whether Islam, as it exists today in Europe, is compatible with European liberal democracy.

Diana West notes that it is not just the Dutch judges who don't want to hear too much about Islam, it is also the global media. One might have thought that when the government of a Western state puts on trial the Parliamentary leader of the party currently highest in the polls, this would be big news to those who supposedly pride themselves in chronicling and commenting on the ways of liberal democracy. Apparently not:

If anyone is puzzled as to why there is so little MSM coverage of this trial that is in the shameful and historic tradition of the trial of Galileo, the reason is unspoken, possibly unconscious media cowardice and embarassment: cowardice driven by the chilling effect of the experience of Kurt Westergaard and other critics of Islam under permanent death threat; and embarassment driven by intense discomfort with frank discussion of the gross incompatibility of basic Islamic beliefs with Western society.

In other words, this code of silence is the code of dhimmitude.

This reminded me of Paul Berman's conclusion to his celebrated 2007 New Republic essay on Tariq Ramadan:

The [Salman] Rushdies of today find themselves under criticism, compared unfavorably in the press with the Islamist philosopher [Tariq Ramadan] who writes prefaces for the collected fatwas of Sheik al-Qaradawi, the theologian of the human bomb. Today the menace to society is declared to be Hirsi Ali and people of similar minds, of whom there are quite a few: John Stuart Mill's Muslim admirers, who are said to be just as fanatical as the fanatics. During the Rushdie affair, courage was saluted. Today it is likened to fascism [by the lefist establishment].

How did this happen? The equanimity on the part of some well-known intellectuals and journalists in the face of Islamist death threats so numerous as to constitute a campaign; the equanimity in regard to stoning women to death; the journalistic inability even to acknowledge that women's rights have been at stake in the debates over Islamism; the inability to recall the problems faced by Muslim women in European hospitals; the inability to acknowledge how large has been the role of a revived anti-Semitism; the striking number of errors of understanding and even of fact that have entered into the journalistic presentations of Tariq Ramadan and his ideas; the refusal to discuss with any frankness the role of Ramadan's family over the years; the accidental endorsement in the Guardian of the great-uncle who finds something admirable in the September 11 attacks--what can possibly account for this string of bumbles, timidities, gaffes, omissions, miscomprehensions, and slanders?

Two developments account for it. The first development is the unimaginable rise of Islamism since the time of the Rushdie fatwa. The second is terrorism.

As for Geert Wilders, he apparently is not amused to be tried by judges who apparently suffer in fear of what they might hear and have to judge. Gates of Vienna reports Wilders' comments:

“This court is apparently not interested in the truth. I cannot conclude anything but that the court does not award me a fair trial,” Geert Wilders said after the court in Amsterdam rejected fifteen of the eighteen witnesses chosen by him.

“I have no respect for this,” Wilders added. He pointed out that in a typical criminal case there are often dozens of witnesses heard. He believes that his case, which he calls a matter of great principle, would also deserve that. Otherwise he cannot prove that he has spoken the truth with the statements that led to his prosecution.

The time is come when we all have to decide whether to shut up or face down our fear of the left-terrorist alliance.

As usual, Walker provides a great roundup of Geert Wilders news.

The Other

Could be anywhere, could be anyone, could be sometime.

Doctors working in a hospital where all the bodies, including that of the terrorists, were taken said they had not seen anything like this in their lives.

"Bombay has a long history of terror. I have seen bodies of riot victims, gang war and previous terror attacks like bomb blasts. But this was entirely different. It was shocking and disturbing," a doctor said.

Asked what was different about the victims of the incident, another doctor said: "It was very strange. I have seen so many dead bodies in my life, and was yet traumatised. A bomb blast victim's body might have been torn apart and could be a very disturbing sight. But the bodies of the victims in this attack bore such signs about the kind of violence of urban warfare that I am still unable to put my thoughts to words," he said.

Asked specifically if he was talking of torture marks, he said: "It was apparent that most of the dead were tortured. What shocked me were the telltale signs showing clearly how the hostages were executed in cold blood," one doctor said.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/023716.php

Could be some indefinite event, but we know it's not. We know that there lays in the mind the capacity to do great evil; but seldom does it arise in this unrestrained mode, and then it has to be raised consciously by training and practice. Even savages have an innate restraint.

Islam is a training for jihad. Islam is only one form of politically motivated violence one among many, to be sure, but today it's the most lethal and the most common. Islam is an immediate menace to Humanity. Islam as poligion has the deepest potential for the practice of unrestrained violence. For the most part, Islam is a mere programme for conquest by Muslims. No other religion has such a programme for its adherents. The core of Islam is jihad. The history of Islam is jihad. The essence of Islam is jihad and islam, the latter being "slavery." There is nothing else like it. Savage violence is common enough. Islam is unique.

Islam is unique as a violent poligion. It creates its own counter-forces, though. There's nothing unique in that.

A Proud Canadian

Thank you, Ezra

National Post Published: Friday, August 08, 2008

We are very fortunate to be living in a society that values freedom of speech. But thank God there are also laws that protect people and religions from being vilified by individuals or groups of people who let their actions be governed by the twisted state of their minds. To publish very distorted cartoons of Muhammad in the name of freedom of expression serves no other purpose than to hurt the feelings of Muslims and to incite them to retaliate.

Mr. Levant should be thankful that the complaint launched against him was dismissed. Rather than mending his ways by contributing to Canadian society, he now rants about how badly he's been treated and how unfair the system is, making him look more like a high school bully than a respectable journalist.

Graphic from Military Mom At Home.

If he believes freedom of speech gives him the right to hurt, insult and demean anybody, he should also remember there is a system in place that prevents these things from happening.

Syed A. Rahman, Edmonton. http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=707803

Dedicated Follower of Phashun

Those who know me personally are forever saying, "Dag, you are such a hep-cat!" And don't I know it. I mean, I spend a lot of my time figuring out just how to affect the right image for my presentation to the world, dressing just so, making sure my every accessory is the right piece to give the right impression to the admiring masses. It's a "thing" with me. So you'll see below why I am so encouraged that all the babes who flock to me are now starting to pay attention too to their image, to making sure that when they follow some discrete distance behind me they look "just so" too. And that is? Well, the latest is the Burn Victim look. Yup, all covered up in the latest and the finest. These babes want to be seen with me, they gotta look right. Cause I'm a hep cat.

Babes? Are you ready for this?

Headscarves, the new trend

Headscarves are becoming the new hot trend in Western fashion, with famed designer labels and industry biggest names explaining the appeal of the headwear as a comeback of elegance and chastity to the runways.


"We wanted to revamp the headscarf," Domenico Dolce, co-founder of the Italian fashion house Dolce and Gabana, told The Telegraph on Wednesday, July 16.


"[We want to] give it a new life and introduce it to a younger generation."


The famous Luxury fashion house D&G and other big names in the industry, like Paul Smith, Vera Wang and Jean Paul Gaultier, are now leading the new fad with their designs.


On the catwalks for autumn/winter, many of the industry's noted brands offered the headscarf.


"Our aim was to give it a modern and cool twist," says Dolce.


The trend is also appealing to the customers.


Hermès, the French high fashion house renowned for its range of designs of silk headscarves, has seen a rise in the sales recently.


Vivienne Alexander says the company has been selling out to "a much younger crowd than usual."


And with the rocketing demand, designers are coming out with a wider variety of the head covering in their collections.


"I do think we will be seeing a fair amount of headscarves around over the next few months," says Gaia Geddes, executive fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar.


Industry experts agree the new headscarves trend is about bringing a touch of modesty and chic to the runways.


According to Dennis Nothdruft, curator of London's Fashion and Textile Museum, the headscarf resurgence is about a new sense of "chastity" in fashion.


He affirms that the trend is not all new after all.


"Women wore headscarves in medieval times to maintain their modesty," he explains.


Others believe the headscarf is lending a sense of elegance to woman's appearance.


They contend that customers want to imitate the caliber of famous women who have emphasized the headscarf's glamorous and sophisticated look, like the American movie star Grace Kelly.


Alexander, of Hermès fashion house, says that a sizable proportion of their customers are Muslims, who wear their products as hijab, Islam's obligatory code of dress for women.


But she affirms that the large bulk of the clients are non-Muslims who are seeking a modest, elegant look.


"This is more about a return to that elegant Grace Kelly era than anything else."

Thanks to Esther at: http://islamineurope.blogspot.com/2008/07/headscarves-new-trend.html

from: Source: Islam Online (English)

Yup, I'm thinking Grace Kelly.

Be sure to see the latest in up-and-coming. Stylin'. http://thehijablog.wordpress.com/

Ladies, I'm only marrying the first four of you who turn me on at the moment; but take it easy because when I get tired of them I'll turf them for four new ones, and you might be one of those lucky gals if you don't make it first time out. It's 'cause I'm a hep cat.

Dhimmitude

The next time some youngster sees you with a "No Dhimmitude" sign in public, and accuses you of making up the word, refer him to these powerful videos on the fate of some Coptic Christian dhimmis in Egypt, linked at uppompeii

Technorati Tags: dhimmis, Egypt, dhimmitude, Copts, Christians

English Dhimmi Christian Joke

The best comment I've heard on the Rowan Williams affair is from a chap who just called in to Radio Five.

After saying he was a proper Christian, unlike Rowan Williams, he said:

Jesus Christ will be turning in his grave.

------------------

On a more serious note:

An artist has turned Lincoln Cathedral into a mosque in a protest against comments made by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Local artist Andrew Riddle said he found the Archibishop's comments "ludicrous". Mr Riddle, an artist and farmer from Corringham, near Gainsborough, said: "His comments seemed so ludicrous to me, the idea that different sections of the population should be subject to different laws. . . there was a different picture in the window, but when I heard his comments it inspired me to do this drawing."

There are cathedrals in Istanbul and Damascus that are now Mosques which I would imagine were Mr Riddle's inspiration.Top left, Mr Riddle's drawing, bottom right a photograph of the West Front. The third central tower is hidden from view at this angle.

Have Jews done better under Chistian or Moslem rule?

First off, I want to apologize to my co-bloggers for not having put much up lately. The last couple of days I have been sidetracked at other places, responding to other people's posts. I am, at heart, a denizen of comments sections, and less successful as a first-from-the-post blogger.

Anyway, the question referred to in the title to this post is of course the subject of a number of recent books and dubious arguments by luminaries such as Prof. Bernard Lewis. Wanting to clarify my own thoughts on the matter I attempted to reply to a reviewer, goodmusicman's comment at Amazon.com. Goodmusicman was trying to condemn the work of Andrew Bostom and Bat Ye'Or. Unfortunately, I could not post my comment at Amazon under my nom de blog, without first purchasing products with a credit card under this name. So, I will post my lengthy comments here. The abstract reasoning of the argument will not constitute a writing style that appeals to everyone. It is an illustration of my own religious understanding and if it offends the religious or literary sense of readers, I can only hope you will take it in the spirit of an honest, if misguided, attempt at approximating truth. All clarifications and corrections on points of interpretation will be welcome.


Dear goodmusicman,

I think it rather unnuanced of you so strongly to criticize Bat Ye'Or for being anti-Islam, as if you too were not obviously defining yourself against an Other (Christianity), as we must all do to some extent if we are not to condemn ourselves to nihilism, and our own culture to stagnation and death.

Of course you're right that history is not linear (because it remains open-ended) or one-way, and that Jewish experience under Islam and under Christianity has varied according to place and time. While this fact politicizes the motivations behind any summary of the historical experiences, our political goal in criticizing one or another religious-political tradition may be a worthy one, e.g. to make possible a new international compact in the hope that certain politicized religions and certain states can change their ways, making their internal politics more transparent and open, so as to become more predictable and thus to live according to useful rules and procedures for minimizing conflict. In this respect, some cultures may have more work to do than others.

We inevitably do and should try to sum up things like a religion’s attitudes towards the Jews, or other cultural historical innovators, by mapping the general shape and range of experiences that a religion's founding revelations have so far permitted vis a vis other claimants on monotheist truth. Thus we may grasp how expansive, or profound, a founding revelation has been and when it has been a more or less proximate cause in shaping specific historical events and representations. No religion is endlessly mutable; the experiences it makes possible remain tethered to founding revelations and a religion must be challenged in fundamental ways if it seems unable to change to meet the evident needs for a new international compact.

Anyone disinterestedly studying the life and revelations of Mohamed, as recorded in the Islamic holy texts, cannot help but see a great resentment directed towards the non-believers. About half the verses in the Koran condemn the unbeliever in one way or another, as if Mohamed (or is it Allah?) were an unsuccessful religious promoter who became an active warrior marshaling troops, which of course he was. And, as Andrew Bostom notes in his review of Cohen, there are passages in the Islamic holy texts in which Jews, specifically, suffer dehumanization and violence. Now, in comparison, the New Testament also condemns the unbeliever, though not nearly to the same incessant extent as does the Koran, and in some respects it also specifically criticizes the Jews, though not without a good deal of ambiguity (e.g. Matthew 9:17) about what aspects, or how much, of Jewish life are being found insufficient by Christ, or simply incompatible with the new way Christ proposes.

A book like the Gospel of John can of course be read as Judeophobic, but it is not at all obvious to me, given the context of Jesus' personal struggle with his own Jewishness and its inevitable limits for one focused on redeeming sin (a proper Jew, whatever men’s worldly sins, will see himself working to remain among the righteous, and so the need for a redeemer of those who have come to see themselves as more fundamentally trapped in human sin is, perhaps, not well-anticipated within Judaism, or for that matter in Islam). In comparison to the New Testament's ambivalent positioning of Jews as both righteous and as sinners in need of redemption, The Koran and Sunna simply do not allow for the same kind of ambiguity about the place of the Jews, claiming that the Jews, under Satanic influences, have taken monotheism astray in willfully misrepresenting their original Mosaic revelation. (Christ only claims that Jews have forgotten some things Moses told them).

Muslim certainty about the true Koranic revelation has been both for better and for worse, from the point of view of Jewish experience under confident (ideologically, if not always spiritually) Muslims, in comparison to often anxious (and hence dangerous) Christians unsure whether their New Testament religion of redeeming sin truly transcends Old Testament Judaism, an uncertainty which has often entailed Christians resenting the surviving presence of the Jew. And yet, Muslim certainty about God's word, in comparison to Christian striving amidst the darkness of sin, might lead someone like Bat Ye'Or to resent one religion, or politics-religion, more than the other, simply in respect of its appeal to a Jewish sense of truth in respect for the incompleteness of our religious knowledge.

The righteous, monotheistic Jew, or a sensitive woman like Bat Ye'Or, experiences Islam and Christianity not just in terms of how either treats the Jews, but also how they treat their other faith competitors and humanity as a whole. While the New Testament has some condemnation of the unbeliever, it does not lay out a worldwide project akin to Jihad and this is reflected in the relatively pacific missionary traditions of Christianity and the Christian imperative to translate the Bible into vernacular tongues, to help create many nations and not just one Umma. (Compare, e.g., Islamic and Christian missions in India.) While Christians as secular agents of Western imperialism and racism have engaged in violence when expanding their civilization, the often violent Jihad, which still goes on all over the place, is promoted in the name of Allah and eternal truth, and is thus without any evident or merely plausible claim to promote a secular civilization or a particular nation in which all faiths may find some value.

In my reading, for what it's worth, there is really no comparison in the level of contempt held for the unbeliever in the Christian and Islamic texts. Nor, in respect to the founding revelations, can one make much of an argument for valuing similarly the ethics of Mohamed, the warrior for Allah, and the Christian contrast of a universal morality with a historically shifting, e.g. "Give unto Caesar", ethics, the contrast of a prophet of divine love in a fallen world. Does Mohammed's revelation, or Sharia law, even provide a basis to distinguish divine morality and worldly ethics? Surely Islam, in contrast to historicizing Christianity, is a throwback to the refusal of early religions to distinguish the two, to assertions that a specific and timeless ethical or ritual code for worldly organization is itself the proper realization of a divine will. But it is a throwback without the old pagan’s tolerance for other tribes having different rituals and ideas about the gods’ will.

To return to your point, sure the incredible antisemitism of today's Islamic world has not always been so fierce. And yes, there is a long history of Christian Judeophobia that became genocidal on several occasions. Yet the great similarity between Christianity and Judaism - for example their emphasis on a revelation unfolding in history as man covenants with God - must be considered. Might a Jew concerned with the monotheistic education of humanity as a whole not reasonably feel more confidence in a brother religion than in a more distant cousin, even if the brother's difficult intimacy and competitiveness poses greater threat to him of extreme violence than does the cousin’s more indifferent sense of superiority? Again, the problem with Christianity, from a Jewish perspective, is the Christian's potential obsession and uncertainty that his revelation really transcends Judaism, a Christian bad faith that makes the continuing presence of the Jew, i.e. the Jew's refusal to give up his faith, and any signs of Jewish worldly success, into a great scandal. That Islam has been, if not today, generally much less bothered by the Jewish question, proudly declaring that it has the final and complete revelation, is not necessarily a mark in Islam’s favor if intellectual and spiritual struggle to advance human self-understanding in history is one's chief concern. In comparison to Christendom, perhaps a Jew may sometimes be physically safer, but spiritually or intellectually poorer, under Islamic regimes. How is this taken into account in this debate? Or are we now too materialistic to bother with such perverse questions?

In any case, if safety is your thing, the fact of the matter is that even with all the history of Christian Judeophobia, it is perhaps only in one of the most Christian countries today, the USA (or is this a reality of the Anglosphere more generally?), that Jews can be seen as just normal people, just another ethnic or religious group. The Christian revelation, with its emphasis on maximizing human reciprocity, has finally been allowed, by some worldly interests and powers, to find a fuller realization in the creation of a free market society (that would not have been possible without the Christian revelation) in which Jews have often come to prosper. In the less historically ambitious Islamic world (less ambitious due to its belief that the final and complete revelation of the eternal truth has already been received), everyone, including the Jews, has been kept much more in their supposedly ordained place, and Islamic society as a whole has not evolved so much over the centuries.

Let's say you're a Jew who likes women, all women, not only Jewish women; should you prefer to live under and witness Islam-Sharia's (relatively pre-ordained) or Christianity's (more open) treatment of women? or must the general question, and its claim on wisdom, again dissolve before our respect for "nuance"? or is perhaps the call for “nuance” from so much of the (pseudo) intellectual left today really just a desire for an uncommitted nihilism?

The great majority of Islamic thinkers today, even many in the West, often seem incapable or unwilling to adapt to a global, free-market, modernity without a fight to restrain secular modernity in the name of Islam and Sharia. For all I know, liberals may yet succeed in modernizing Islam, i.e. protecting a secular multifaith order detached from privatized religion and protected from politicized religion (i.e. Orthodox Islam); but as yet there is a long way to go. On the other hand, musicman's argument that the modern separation of Church and State is a product of "the Enlightenment" and not a continuation of Christ's imperative to separate what is owed Caesar and what is owed God strikes me as historically and religiously misconceived in a number of ways. For example, I see the "Enlightenment" as having been an attempt, by intellectuals in declining nations, to understand and codify in secular terms the imperial, scientific, and mercantile success of Protestant countries like 17-18th century England that arose at the expense of once dominant powers like Catholic France, i.e. an attempt to codify the reason and faith behind already well-established Protestant and Gnostic movements within Christian civilization.

Should Jews look relatively favorably on an Islamic history of relative stability and order, even if it has entailed dhimmitude and everyone remaining stuck in medieval conditions? Since Christianity, and not merely “the Enlightenment”, has been the key to unfolding today’s secular modernity and freedoms, has Christianity - with all its difficult and sometimes deadly historical trials pitting, in more ways than one, a fallen humanity against a gospel of love – been obviously a disaster for the Jews?

To sum up: while, historically, many Moslems have not been as anxious as Christians to convert or eliminate the Jews (better, thinks many a Muslim ruler, to keep and tax the dhimmis, since they are often more productive or differently knowledgeable than Moslems), this has been according to the logic of a culture in which opportunities for growth, and an evolving and fuller human self-understanding, have been much more limited for everyone. And when this Islamic culture has had to come face-to-face with the modern world, we get the nightmare antisemitism of a country like Egypt today, a nightmare fostered by its leading universities and media. (And as for free and voluntary conversions, surely Jews have been more likely to find truth in Christianity than in Islam over the years.)

You, musicman, criticize the "unnuanced" position of Andrew Bostom. But yours is hardly more nuanced from the perspective of a Jew or Christian today seeking a sacred basis on which a new international compact may be formed. And to say that things could change tomorrow and life in, say, Arabia (if they let Jews in) may yet become more appealing for Jews than life in, say, today's Europe, is not a fair counter to those who wrongly imply that history is linear, one-way, and that we can know where it is going (e.g. West). We don't know where it is going, but the perspective of the present teaches us something more than could have been known in, say, the year 1200, about the possibilities inherent in a tradition of revelation. And in today's light of secular modernity, Islam seems always to have been destined to fall into a crisis greater even than the crisis of today’s Christian West. Given what we know today about the emergence of, and attitudes towards, free-market modernity, what kind of Jew can reasonably hope for a better future in a society predominantly Islamic rather than Christian? Jews writing history do us no service if their work works to obscure our safer bet, whatever the writer's professional motivations in an academic world full of a desire to express and expiate guilt for white Western historical success relative to those societies that have become immersed, sometimes unwillingly, in the West's claims to have discovered the ethical innovations that will advance humanity as a whole.