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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
__________________ Life's a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death! MOTM, Jan 2005, Aug 2007 Golden Cookie Award, 2005. Aug 2006 Perv of the Month Perv. Outreach Award, 2007 |
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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"
__________________ Life's a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death! MOTM, Jan 2005, Aug 2007 Golden Cookie Award, 2005. Aug 2006 Perv of the Month Perv. Outreach Award, 2007 |
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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
__________________ Life's a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death! MOTM, Jan 2005, Aug 2007 Golden Cookie Award, 2005. Aug 2006 Perv of the Month Perv. Outreach Award, 2007 |
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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
__________________ Life's a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death! MOTM, Jan 2005, Aug 2007 Golden Cookie Award, 2005. Aug 2006 Perv of the Month Perv. Outreach Award, 2007 |
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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
__________________ Life's a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death! MOTM, Jan 2005, Aug 2007 Golden Cookie Award, 2005. Aug 2006 Perv of the Month Perv. Outreach Award, 2007 |
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