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| | #71 (permalink) |
| Racy Ol' Lady ![]() | Multiculturalist moral equivalencer says Islam is stuck in the Middle Ages Media double standard alert: if I said that Islam was stuck in the Middle Ages, it would be more evidence of my inveterate "Islamophobia." But when Hans Küng says it, it gets written up favorably in the Times, because Hans Küng holds the Correct Opinions about what must be done about Islam (it's all up to us, not to Muslims) as well as about Israel (terrorists!) and about Christianity and Judaism (just as violent as Islam!). "Islam is stuck in the Middle Ages, says leading interfaith expert," by Ruth Gledhill in the Times, June 16 (thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist): Islam is stuck in its own version of the “Middle Ages” which is contributing to a global crisis, one of the leading experts on Islam, Judaism and Christianity argues today.Does Hans Küng have any idea why Islam has not gone through this kind of reformation? Arguably the Wahhabi movement was a Reformation, a return to the core texts and teachings of the religion, and that just created an Islam more virulent and violent than ever. But why has there not been a reformation in the direction of human rights and freedom conscience? Why might Islam not be capable of these things? Has Küng examined the nature of divine revelation in Islam, and the role of ijma, which make it virtually impervious to large-scale reevaluation? Does he really think non-Muslims can help Muslims get around this? On what grounds does he come to this conclusion? And why does he think that denigrating Western traditions and promoting a spurious moral equivalence will help Islam change in the right direction? It is absurd, yes, but that is what he does: He also sets out what the three religions have in common, such as injunctions against murder, respect for life, and he will explain how must Muslims do not take the extremist view. “They do not recognize themselves in our picture of Islam, because they want to be loyal citizens of the Islamic religion,” says, calling for fairness in the condemnations by the West. “Those who make Islam responsible for kidnappings, suicide attacks, car bombs and beheadings carried out by a few blind extremists ought at the same time to condemn Christianity or Judaism for the barbarous maltreatment of prisoners, the air strikes and tank attacks carried out by the US Army - several 10,000 civilians have been murdered in Iraq alone - and the terrorism of the Israeli army of occupation in Palestine.”Uh huh. Even if those characterizations were true, Dr. Küng, which they most assuredly are not, what Christian and Jewish Scriptures provide a basis for them? What mainstream Jewish and Christian teachings are these "barbarians" acting upon? The analogy with the Islamic jihadists founders on this point, but the likes of Hans Küng and Karen Armstrong never seem to get that far. Dhimmi Watch: Multiculturalist moral equivalencer says Islam is stuck in the Middle Ages
__________________ "The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets." --American humorist Will Rogers (1879-1935) MOTM, Jan 2005, Aug 2007 Golden Cookie Award, 2005. Aug 2006 Perv of the Month Perv. Outreach Award, 2007 Female Moonie Award 2008 |
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| | #72 (permalink) |
| Racy Ol' Lady ![]() | "Minnesota education officials need both the backbone and the oversight tools necessary to prevent the blurring of lines between Islam and the public schools" Katherine Kersten recaps in Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy controversy in "Charter Schools Shouldn't Promote Islam" in the Wall Street Journal, June 14 (thanks to all who sent this in): [...] After my columns appeared, the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union began an investigation, which is still underway. The Minnesota Department of Education also investigated. Its report, released last month, concluded that the school is breaking the law by holding Friday religious services on school grounds; that it should stop Muslim teachers' practice of praying with students at that service; and that it must provide bus transportation home before Islamic Studies classes let out. Dhimmi Watch: "Minnesota education officials need both the backbone and the oversight tools necessary to prevent the blurring of lines between Islam and the public schools"
__________________ "The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets." --American humorist Will Rogers (1879-1935) MOTM, Jan 2005, Aug 2007 Golden Cookie Award, 2005. Aug 2006 Perv of the Month Perv. Outreach Award, 2007 Female Moonie Award 2008 |
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| | #73 (permalink) |
| Racy Ol' Lady ![]() | 88% Say Free Speech is Good, But Only 53% Oppose Ban on Hate Speech Bad news from a Rasmussen telephone survey: this is why CAIR and co. are so unrelenting in characterizing all discussion of the Islamic jihad ideology and Islamic supremacism as "hate speech." It could easily become illegal to discuss these things in the United States -- and then the jihad would continue unimpeded. From Rasmussen Reports, June 16 (thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist): The overwhelming majority of Americans strongly guard their right to free speech (88%). But, a new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey found that just over half (53%) say the United States should refrain from banning so-called “hate speech.” Jihad Watch: 88% Say Free Speech is Good, But Only 53% Oppose Ban on Hate Speech
__________________ "The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets." --American humorist Will Rogers (1879-1935) MOTM, Jan 2005, Aug 2007 Golden Cookie Award, 2005. Aug 2006 Perv of the Month Perv. Outreach Award, 2007 Female Moonie Award 2008 |
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| | #74 (permalink) |
| Racy Ol' Lady ![]() | Fitzgerald: Obama's strategy Obama's strategy has been to play all of his cards very close to his chest -- not letting his advisers in on quite everything -- and in playing for time. He must have known that eventually the business about Rev. Wright would come out. And come out it did, but only after most of the Democratic primaries were over -- that is, after they could do real damage. And he did not do as well after those revelations as he had before, so his gamble paid off. It is the same with the mysterious presentation of, or failure to come clean about, Islam in the life of Barack Obama. He might have said: “Look, I was the son of a man who had himself converted to Islam. That man left my mother when I was two, and had no part in raising me. My mother married (or remarried) another man, this one an Indonesian Muslim, and as a child I lived in Indonesia, and was regarded by the outside world as a Muslim child. I hardly knew what that meant, and it is silly to attribute to me a knowledge of what that might mean, or indeed, a knowledge of the texts and tenets of Islam. “Yes, I was registered on the books of a Christian-run school, open to all, as a Muslim. Yes, I did attend a Koran class, where I remember only that I made faces to keep alert. And that's about it. As an adult, I have always been a Christian. I regard the Christian message as the right one, or the right one for me. I find it extraordinary that anyone would attempt to attribute to me views I do not have, and views that I doubt I could be said to have had at the age of six, or eight, or ten." Yes, he could long ago have come clean, just as he could long ago have come clean about Rev. Wright and the theology of Black Liberation, and attempted to distance himself long before he was forced to because others had a tape of Wright and his political opponents were making hay while the sun shines -- and continue, quite rightly, to do so. Barack Obama and his advisers seem not to realize how potentially troublesome that Muslim background may be. It can mislead Muslims as to where he stands, so that there is overconfidence and miscalculation on their part, based on the notion of their having a "secret friend" and perhaps even co-religionist in the White House. It can also mislead non-Muslim leaders who may be wary of sharing with Obama their apprehensions about, for example, the growing Muslim threat in Europe, and the desirability of a coordinated trans-Atlantic alliance directed at limiting that Muslim threat and depriving Muslims of the weapons they now use to further Jihad: the Money Weapon, and campaigns of Da'wa, and demographic conquest. They might be wary, that is, of sharing those worries and making plans in cooperation with a supposed Leader of the Western World whose true sympathies are not at all clear. Obama is opposed to the war in Iraq, but his opposition does not appear to be of the right kind. After all, Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill were also early opponents of the war, and their worldview is a dangerous one. It is clear that Obama has some kind of notion -- he's a sentimentalist like McCain -- that his very being the son of a Kenyan father, and his childhood years spent outside the United States, somehow make him particularly sensitive to, and particularly attractive to, others who would otherwise be unsympathetic to America. It's the kind of thing that puts one in mind of the teacher who choose books for students to read not on the basis of literary merit, but solely on the basis of the racial, ethnic, religious, or other background of the writers. Barack Obama may be fascinated by his own heritage, and may have all sorts of racial or postracial or transracial considerations that may begin to fascinate others, but at this point, the most important foreign policy question is how to rescue Western Europe, the historic West, from growing and seemingly inexorable islamization. Can someone who looks to Kenya for a genetic memory that he has made much of, and to a few years as a child in Indonesia for what is essentially merely a variant on the sinclair-lewis babbittish "travel-is-so-broadening" idea, be expected to feel keenly what is happening to France, Italy, Great Britain, and all the other countries under assault, and where a new kind of transatlantic alliance is necessary, is indispensable? Will Barack Obama, with his declared interests, background, and affinities, feel this need as keenly as he should, as he must? Barack Obama's "apostasy" is not the problem. His campaign has stated that he never considered himself to be a Muslim. Those who keep harping on the notion that he was once a Muslim at or around the age of ten, and that he must admit to this, are setting themselves up for ridicule. What is worrisome is not that he was once a Muslim, or still more absurdly, considered to be a "secret Muslim," but that he is ignorant of Islam. He has not made any effort to investigate it, and may be sentimental about it, based on personal history: his desire to identify with his absentee Kenyan father, the fact that his mother's second husband was also a Muslim; his childhood experience in Indonesia, which may make him think he knows something about Islam but was as idiosyncratic and unrepresentative an experience of Islam -- as was that "experience of Islam" that a much older, but not wiser, Ambassador Paul Wolfowitz had when he was the American ambassador in Indonesia. Like Obama, Wolfowitz did not understand what Islam was about, and took his experience there -- with everyone trying to woo and win him ("yes, we really hope to establish diplomatic relations with Israel") -- as normative. This naiveté about Islam was not undone, but was reinforced, by Wolfowitz’s Arab girlfriend. No doubt she is a lady with all the right intentions, but as she was herself a would-be reformer or tamer of Islam, in that very role she offered false hopes, and misrepresented the meaning, and menace, of Islam. The problem with Barack Obama's supposed Muslim connection is that he has not shown any inclination to ponder the nature of Islam at its essence, and not in the modified unrepresentative form in which he may have, fleetingly and personally, encountered it. And a greater problem is a lack of historical knowledge, and a naiveté (without the viciousness) about the world that rivals that of Jimmy Carter, and a trust in such obviously disturbing "advisers" as the vicious, and naively realpolitiking, Zbigniew Brzezinski. There's plenty to worry about with Barack Obama and his more-than-sufficient display, so far, of all the wrong foreign-policy instincts, including his dreamy belief that meeting and talking with representatives of Iran would do some good. Some say, what could be the harm in merely meeting and talking? The harm could be great. It would justify, it would dignify, it would give a boost in the minds of its own disaffected subjects, to the Islamic Republic of Iran. It would encoil us in useless, protracted discussions with those who are past masters at deception and deliberate delay, and who treat such meetings not as occasions for the exchange of views that we are expected to believe have not already, and repeatedly, been exchanged, but rather as instruments of war: the propaganda war that Muslims engage in, and we, alas, do not. Jihad Watch: Fitzgerald: Obama's strategy
__________________ "The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets." --American humorist Will Rogers (1879-1935) MOTM, Jan 2005, Aug 2007 Golden Cookie Award, 2005. Aug 2006 Perv of the Month Perv. Outreach Award, 2007 Female Moonie Award 2008 |
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| | #75 (permalink) |
| Racy Ol' Lady ![]() | Fast, temporary relief? Bush to ask Congress to lift offshore drilling ban A partial answer. "Bush to Press Congress on Offshore Oil Drilling," from FoxNews, June 17 (thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist): WASHINGTON — President Bush plans to make a renewed push Wednesday to get Congress to end a long-standing ban on offshore oil and gas drilling, echoing a call by GOP presidential candidate John McCain.Jihad Watch: Fast, temporary relief? Bush to ask Congress to lift offshore drilling ban
__________________ "The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets." --American humorist Will Rogers (1879-1935) MOTM, Jan 2005, Aug 2007 Golden Cookie Award, 2005. Aug 2006 Perv of the Month Perv. Outreach Award, 2007 Female Moonie Award 2008 |
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| | #76 (permalink) |
| Racy Ol' Lady ![]() | McCain: Lift offshore drilling ban. Obama: McCain approach "misguided" For many years now I've been calling for a Manhattan Project to find and develop new energy sources. This has not been undertaken, at least at the government level, unless it is classified and has not been leaked. In any case, such a project will take years to come up with a viable alternative. In the meantime, as a matter of national security and defense against the jihad, we should certainly develop our own oil supplies. Obama, however, is correct that this is not a long-term solution. But not to do it now while they bleed us dry and the jihadist coffers fill ever fuller is simply suicidal. "McCain Seeks to End Offshore Drilling Ban," by Michael D. Shear and Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post, June 17 (thanks to Anne Crockett): Sen. John McCain called yesterday for an end to the federal ban on offshore oil drilling, offering an aggressive response to high gasoline prices and immediately drawing the ire of environmental groups that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has courted for months. Jihad Watch: McCain: Lift offshore drilling ban. Obama: McCain approach "misguided"
__________________ "The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets." --American humorist Will Rogers (1879-1935) MOTM, Jan 2005, Aug 2007 Golden Cookie Award, 2005. Aug 2006 Perv of the Month Perv. Outreach Award, 2007 Female Moonie Award 2008 |
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| | #77 (permalink) |
| Racy Ol' Lady ![]() | The Jihad Against Free Speech by Robert Spencer Posted: 06/17/2008 Freedom of speech is in imminent danger. Concerted attacks on it by the jihadist movement are increasing in number here and in countries that share America’s dedication to free speech. Mark Steyn, the author of "America Alone," is on trial in Canada for inciting hatred against Muslims in an article adapted from that book. Pakistan just asked the European Union to restrict freedom of expression so as to curb “offenses to Islam.” Finland recently gave a blogger 2 1/2 years in prison for “insulting Islam.” When Dutch police arrested the cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot, Amsterdam’s public prosecutor explained: “We suspect him of insulting people on the basis of their race or belief, and possibly also of inciting hate.” Against Muslims, of course. Doudou Diène, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, recently came to the United States, where he held a hearing in Miami on Islamophobia and anti-Muslim discrimination. At the hearing he met with ex-Council on American-Islamic Relations operative Ahmed Bedier, who explained to him “how Islamophobia and anti-Muslim rhetoric by officials and pundits are contributing to hate crimes against Muslims across Florida.” I doubt that Ahmed Bedier could provide even one scrap of evidence for the assertion that there has been an increase of hate crimes against Muslims in Florida, much less show any causal link between statements by any official or pundit, and any of those hate crimes. But the most important aspect of this is the spectacle of an American Muslim activist meeting with a UN official who is interested in restricting freedom of speech in order to combat “Islamophobia.” Spurious charges of “Islamophobia,” and false claims that hate crimes are being committed because of it, are being used to advance an anti-free speech agenda. Americans need to be aware of what’s happening, and resist it at every turn. Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month that “a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack.” That means muzzling speech which the stealth jihadists consider such an “attack.” The New York Times recently quoted Waldron favorably, in a story that glided from the Canadian case against Mark Steyn to a discussion of Nazis and racial epithets, without a hint of the fact that what Steyn said was both factual and worlds away from Nazism or racism. What Steyn wrote was essentially a straightforward presentation of Islamic supremacist statements made by Muslims. If that’s hate speech, so was reporting what Hitler said in 1935. The problem with laws against “hate speech,” such as those in Canada under which Steyn is being prosecuted, is that “hate speech” is in the eye of the beholder. Our First Amendment isn’t designed to protect speech that is popular: that would make it redundant. Rather, it is designed to protect speech that is unpopular with any group, even the majority of Americans. Laws against “hate speech” become weapons in the hands of those who wield political power, or who are jockeying for that power: they are weapons to silence their opponents. The Times will never tell you, of course, that there is a worldwide and ongoing movement by Islamic jihadists and their allies (and useful idiots in the media) to label all critical examination of Islamic supremacism as “hate speech.” And who will be the chief beneficiary if they succeed? The Islamic supremacists, and only the Islamic supremacists. We will be mute and hence defenseless in the face of the jihadist onslaught. Many times, groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations have classified true statements about Islam and jihad as “hateful.” Several years ago CAIR began a campaign against National Review magazine because of a biography of Muhammad the magazine was then advertising; CAIR did not specify that anything in the book or National Review’s advertisement for it was inaccurate though nothing was. This phenomenon has recurred several times since then. We are now in danger, under the guise of forbidding “hate speech,” of forbidding discussion of the reality of Islamic jihad at precisely the moment that Islamic supremacists are pressing forward as never before with their program of stealth jihad against the West. Speaking out against British Columbia’s hate speech laws, attorney Roger D. McConchie noted correctly that “innocent intent is not a defense. Nor is truth. Nor is fair comment on true facts. Publication in the public interest and for the public benefit is not a defense. Opinion expressed in good faith is not a defense. Responsible journalism is not a defense.” He is right, and that is why that law and all such laws are so pernicious. It can happen here. We could lose the freedom to speak out against Islamic supremacism and jihad, and that will only enable the Islamic supremacists to advance farther into the heart of the West. Huey Long is said to have remarked, “Fascism will come to America, but likely under another name, perhaps anti-fascism.” Now we are seeing just that: the anti-jihadists are called fascists, and are being silenced in fascist fashion, in the name of anti-fascism. It’s time to wake up. The Jihad Against Free Speech - HUMAN EVENTS
__________________ "The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets." --American humorist Will Rogers (1879-1935) MOTM, Jan 2005, Aug 2007 Golden Cookie Award, 2005. Aug 2006 Perv of the Month Perv. Outreach Award, 2007 Female Moonie Award 2008 |
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