Jihad in the U.S. -- Oh, yes, it's underway here too...

[Snowden]

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.

Professor Hans Kung, a leading Roman Catholic and theologian from Germany, warns in a lecture of a “deadly threat” to all humankind unless new efforts are made to build bridges with Islam. He says in London that Islam has “special problems” with modernity because, unike Christianity and Judaism, it has never undergone a “serious religious reformation”. He questions whether Islam is even capable of adapting to a post-modern world in the way that Christianity and Judaism have done. But he also outlines why he is hopeful that the present problems around radicalisation within Islam can be resolved, and how the other two Abrahamic faiths are subject to some of the same problems on their extremist edges. Violence has been practicised in the sign of the crescent, but also in the sign of the cross, he warns. In his lecture, seen by The Times, Professor Kung says: “The options have become clear: either rivalry of the religions, clash of civilizations, war of the nations - or dialogue of civilizations and peace between the nations as a presupposition for peace between the nations.

“In the face of the deadly threat to all humankind, instead of building new dams of hatred, revenge and enmity, we should tear down the walls of prejudice stone by stone and thus build bridges of dialogue, bridges particularly towards Islam.” Professor Kung, author of Islam: Past, Present and Future, published last year and one of the most authoritative works on the subject, is speaking on “Challenges to Islam, Christianity and Judaism” in a lecture organised by the Royal Fine Art Commission Trust and Sky Arts. It will be broadcast on Sky Arts later this month. He describes how liberal Jews, Christians and Muslims often get on better with each other than they do with fellow Jews, Christians and Muslims from the traditionalist wings of those religions. A Roman Catholic “imprisoned in the Middle Ages” will find himself closer to the “medieval element” of Islam and Judaism than with liberal Catholic believers. Professor Kung says that one of the main causes of conflicts between religions is the persistence of out-dated ways of thinking. Islam and Christianity regard the actual Middle Ages as the “great time” for their religions. But modernity has forced all three religions of the book onto the “defensive”, and they all face challenges over how they react to their own “Middle Ages”. He argues today that Christianity and Judaism have moved on, but not Islam. “It remains an open question if the ecumenical paradigm of post-modernity will develop also in Islam.”

Professor Kung, who aged 80 is a contemporary of the Pope and worked with him as a theological adviser to the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960’s, was influential at the council in persuading the Roman Catholic Church to adopt a more positive attitude to Judaism and religious freedom. He has also spoken out constantly in favour of the official recognition of the State of Israel by the Vatican and for a two-state-solution for Israelis and Palestinians.

Professor Kung, whose own liberal views cost him his official Catholic teaching licence in the last century, says that the essence of all three religions must be preserved, but those who want peace and reconciliation will not be able to avoid criticism. They must engage in self-criticism to enable their faiths to adapt to modernity. Referring to Christianity, for example, he says: “Jesus Christ as a basic model is a constant, but the law of celibacy is a variable.” He argues: “After the Reformation Christianity had to undergo another paradigm shift, that of the Enlightenment. Judaism after the French Revolution and Napoleon experienced the Enlightenment first, and as a consequence, at least in Reform Judaism, it experienced also a religious reformation. Islam, however, has not undergone a serious religious reformation and so to the present day has quite special problems also with modernity and its core components, freedom of conscience and religion, human rights, tolerance, democracy.”

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

[Snowden]

"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.

But the report was flawed in important respects. Most significantly, it was silent about the school's close entanglement with the religious organization with which it is affiliated.

It's a safe bet that if the school in question here were essentially a Catholic school, this wouldn't be a debate. Imagine a public charter located in the headquarters building of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Its principal is a priest and its board chairman is the archbishop. Catholic students there "are comfortable asking questions about their own religion." Latin is required, and the cafeteria serves fish during Lent. Students break for prayer and attend Mass during the school day, and buses leave only when after-school Catholic Catechism classes are over. Such a school would never open.

But with Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy we have something different. It's held up as a model, "religiously sensitive" public school. It is justified in terms of culture and "religious accommodation."

Minnesota education officials need both the backbone and the oversight tools necessary to prevent the blurring of lines between Islam and the public schools. If they continue their tepid response, a separate system of taxpayer-financed education for Muslims may take root here. Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy could be the first of many.

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"

[Snowden]

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.”

Twenty-eight percent (28%) think it is a good idea to ban hate speech, which is loosely defined as comments intended to put down or incite violence against people on the basis of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation and other legally protected categories. Nearly one in five voters (19%) are undecided on whether such a ban is necessary.

Women are less opposed to banning hate speech than men. African-American voters are evenly divided while White voters oppose such a ban by a 57% to 24% margin. Many African-American leaders argue for protection from racist hate crimes.

Support for a ban on hate speech declines when voters are reminded that government would define what constitutes “hate speech.” Seventy-four percent (74%) say it is better to allow free speech without government interference than to let the government decide what types of hate speech should be banned. Only 11% disagree and would give government the power to decide what speech should be banned. These answers parallel findings in other recent Rasmussen Reports surveys showing that voters overwhelmingly view the government as a special interest group that looks out primarily for its own interests....

Jihad Watch: 88% Say Free Speech is Good, But Only 53% Oppose Ban on Hate Speech

[Snowden]

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

[Snowden]

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.

Congressional Democrats have opposed lifting the prohibitions on energy development on nearly all federal Outer Continental Shelf waters for more than a quarter-century, including waters along both the East and West coasts.

With oil prices soaring and motorists paying $4 a gallon for gasoline, political pressures have been growing for more domestic oil and gas production.

"The president believes Congress shouldn't waste any more time," White House press secretary Dana Perino told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

"He will explicitly call on Congress to ... pass legislation lifting the congressional ban on safe, environmentally friendly offshore oil drilling," Perino said. "He wants to work with states to determine where offshore drilling should occur."

Bush also will reiterate his call for development of oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, Perino said. McCain has opposed drilling in the refuge, maintaining that the pristine areas in northeastern Alaska should be protected from energy development....

Jihad Watch: Fast, temporary relief? Bush to ask Congress to lift offshore drilling ban