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The Best Thing I’ve Read About Contemporary Islam, Ever
From The (London) Spectator. There’s so much excellent here, but here’s a telling story:
The night after the Charlie Hebdo atrocities I was pre-recording a Radio 4 programme. My fellow discussant was a very nice Muslim man who works to ‘de-radicalise’ extremists. We agreed on nearly everything. But at some point he said that one reason Muslims shouldn’t react to such cartoons is that Mohammed never objected to critics.
There may be some positive things to be said about Mohammed, but I thought this was pushing things too far and mentioned just one occasion when Mohammed didn’t welcome a critic. Asma bint Marwan was a female poetess who mocked the ‘Prophet’ and who, as a result, Mohammed had killed. It is in the texts. It is not a problem for me. But I can understand why it is a problem for decent Muslims. The moment I said this, my Muslim colleague went berserk. How dare I say this? I replied that it was in the Hadith and had a respectable chain of transmission (an important debate). He said it was a fabrication which he would not allow to stand. The upshot was that he refused to continue unless all mention of this was wiped from the recording. The BBC team agreed and I was left trying to find another way to express the same point. The broadcast had this ‘offensive’ fact left out.
I cannot imagine another religious discussion where this would happen, but it is perfectly normal when discussing Islam.
And this:
We might all agree that the history of Christianity has hardly been un-bloody. But is it not worth asking whether the history of Christianity would have been more bloody or less bloody if, instead of telling his followers to ‘turn the other cheek’, Jesus had called (even once) for his disciples to ‘slay’ non–believers and chop off their heads?
And this:
We have spent 15 years pretending things about Islam, a complex religion with competing interpretations. It is true that most Muslims live their lives peacefully. But a sizeable portion (around 15 per cent and more in most surveys) follow a far more radical version. The remainder are sitting on a religion which is, in many of its current forms, a deeply unstable component. That has always been a problem for reformist Muslims. But the results of ongoing mass immigration to the West at the same time as a worldwide return to Islamic literalism means that this is now a problem for all of us. To stand even a chance of dealing with it, we are going to have to wake up to it and acknowledge it for what it is.
And this, at the bottom of the piece, somehow strikes me as the saddest and most infuriating thing I’ve read in the past 12 hours:
This is an updated version of an article that was published in The Spectator on 17 January 2015.
Almost a year ago. After the last attack in Paris by literalist Muslims. After the last round of lies we were told, and that some of us told ourselves.
Published in General
It’s often the case that terrorists like Maj Hassan and the 911 scum gave warning signs beforehand. What if they’d been shown the door at that point?
Separately, does anyone know any high profile Muslim anti violence websites or podcasts?
We are unable to block immigrants who are likely to go on welfare (40% of Laotian immigrants go on welfare vs 2% of Japanese), who are more likely to get involved in organized crime (Russians and Nigerians), who want to annex large parts of the U.S. (Mexicans), and who are likely to want to kill us (Muslims). Doing so would require us to make distinctions based on people’s past actions and this, by definition, is discriminatory. And discrimination, as we are taught from birth, is evil. So, what do we do?
If you were writing this amendment, how would you define “such belief?” Suppose for instance someone says “there is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet, but I love the US Constitution and support freedom of religion.” Would they be subject to deportation under your proposed law?
I give you Zuhdi Jasser.
I used to hear him on the Glen Beck show. On at least one occasion he mentioned that his advocacy for not-jihad had earned him hundreds of death threats from other American Muslims.
I used to be angry that the US government- then under the Bush Administration- did nothing about those death threats.
Silly me.
But you’re not proposing to make distinctions based on people’s past actions, you are proposing making distinctions based on the likelihood of their future actions.
For instance, a law that required a background check and blocked anyone with mafia connections from immigrating would be a law that makes distinctions based on past actions, while a law that blocked all Russians from immigrating would be based their being “more likely to get involved in organized crime,” even if a particular Russian applicant has no such actions in his past.
Regime change. The present government is such a festering incompetent mess that it will not survive.
Math alone dooms it- and what math wants, math gets.
I’m talking about making distinctions based on probabilities.
Sure, and I’m just pointing out that’s not at all the same as judging people based on their past actions, so you shouldn’t equate the two.
Fair enough.
Every time something awful like this happens, I see a lot of “many Muslims around the world decry this,” or “Peaceful Islamic group denounces attacks.”
…and then I read the words they actually use, and most of the time I’m not impressed.
Right after 9/11, a local Islamic society took out a big ad in the paper. It seemed pretty impressive – hey, they were denouncing the bad guys! – until you read it closely, and realized that they didn’t deny radical Islamic beliefs, didn’t say much of anything damning the bad guys, and mostly were saying, “hey, we’re really unhappy you blamed us for something other people did, so stop complaining.”
The other issue is the tendency of some Islamic groups to “condemn violence” when this sort of thing happens – and then turn around and call for someone’s head when they say something rude about Mohammed…
But speaking of people’s actions, how about deporting immigrants who do commit crimes rather than releasing them in sanctuary cities?
It’s not reasonable, or constructive, but it is a very human response to frightening events.
A thought:
Terrorists lack the ability to win a conventional war, hence terrorist tactics.
What do they expect to achieve? Some dead people, sure, but is that the objective of these attacks?
I argue that this is not their primary objective.
Terrorism is always about getting a reaction – from target people and Governments.
Imho: ISIS’ ideology is not threatened by war with the West, or by the West declaring war on ISIS and bombing Raqqa.
What does profoundly threaten ISIS’ ideology is Western Muslims living as equals in the West – with the same freedoms as everybody else and with the same responsibilities – not separate.
My feeling is that the concept of the “tribes” mingling terrifies them, because most of their power comes from policing the tribe (and that’s where most of their efforts go).
Oh come on!! Have you ever heard any Pakistanis or Malaysians or Indonesians arguing that Palestine belongs to them as much as it does to the Palestinians?
Have you ever heard Palestinians arguing that Palestinian Christians (10% of the population, and all too often forgotten by their fellow Catholics and Orthodox in the West when they discuss the issue) do not have a right to be in Palestine?
Jews started purchasing land in Israel in the late 1800s. As they turned the desert into a garden, the Muslim population in the area increased as people came to take advantage of the growing economy the Jews had created. This was not “colonization” at all.
Victor Davis Hanson says it so clearly:
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427066/waging-war-terror-vichy-style-victor-davis-hanson
I was describing a view common among Western liberals that Israel is essentially a European colony. What Muslims actually think is a separate question from what Westerners think they think.
I had in mind, for instance, the odious Helen Thomas who said:
I’ve never heard Israelis argue that Palestinian Christians do not have a right to live in Israel, either. What’s your point?
There are Christians among the Palestinian refugees that Israel does not allow to live in Palestine.
My point was that these people are for some reason never mentioned by Christians in the West who tend to describe it as a Jewish-Muslim issue. I don’t know if this [not seeing] Palestinian Christian[s]
invisibilityis deliberate or unconscious – I suspect the latter.Consider the need during WWII to round up and imprison German and Japanese nationals. We look askance at these decisions now that we are at peace. But it would have been the height of irresponsibility to allow German and Japanese nationals to roam the country at will.
Now it is Muslims who are roaming the country. From my understanding of what Islam requires its adherents to believe, there isn’t much wiggle room for a Muslim to deny the primacy of Sharia, of Islam itself, of dhimmitude for the rest of us, and, truth be told, death to the Jews.
So, to more directly answer your question, I don’t believe a person can be a Koran-believing Muslim and at the same time love the US Constitution. They have to reject one or the other, both in writing and by conduct to avoid deportation under my amendment.
Agreed. Every time some lunatic here goes on a shooting rampage, the liberals blame the NRA (an organization to which the lunatics rarely belong) then demand the NRA to acquiesce to gun control. That argument is unfair when used against us, it is still unfair when used elsewhere.
That is what most Arabs think – but the Christian Arabs think it too, not just the Muslim ones.
I think Helen Thomas’ family was Lebanese Christian.
You may not believe it, but some people claim they can. That’s why I’m trying to get to the specifics of your proposal. Suppose someone was willing to sign a statement saying “I do not believe the Koran requires the overthrow of the U.S. Constitution,” would that meet the requirement to stay in the country under your law?
Not sure I’m following you, by “live in Palestine” do you mean “within the state of Israel?” They live in the quasi-state of Palestine now, right? I’m unaware of Israeli efforts to round up Christians in Palestine and deport them elsewhere.
Or in refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria. They aren’t allowed to go home (eg to Haifa or to the West Bank).
They didn’t differentiate much between Muslim and Christian Palestinians in 1948 (when this displacement happened) and haven’t since. That’s my point.
It was not just Muslims who were displaced, it was Palestinian Arabs of all religions. It makes little sense to talk about it in terms of religion, and even less to describe it as a Jewish-Muslim conflict. At its heart it’s about land and displacement.
I found it interesting that the discussion with the Muslim in which he was presented with an account written in the Hadith which contradicted his beliefs ended in his demanding that the topic either be terminated or he would leave. I have had the same thing happen in every discussion I have ever had with a Liberal/progressive. I think that is why they get along so well.
Zafar,
Muslims were not “displaced” in 1948, they left, not because they were pushed out by Israelis, but because their leaders told them to.
So how would you describe the two opposing sides, then? Jews vs. Arabs? Europeans vs. Arabs?
But of the Christians in “Palestine” probably 2/3 of those still present in 1948 left during the period before Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. The number has further dropped precipitously in the last couple of decades. This indicates to me that the Christians are very much second class citizens in the Muslim-majority territories, similar to how Christians are treated elsewhere in the Arab-Muslim world. Meanwhile, the Arab Christian population in Israel is growing. That says something about how they are treated in Israel.
Not sure. What is the rate of recidivism? Mohamed was who he was. Anyone raised to believe he is the immaculate messenger and exemplar for Muslims can turn on a dime and start acting like M did, the consequences be damned for non-believers around him.
It would be a closer approximation – though still imperfect.
There are (as pointed out here) many many issues with Islam and Muslims. The refusal of an otherwise well intentioned Muslim to actually engage with the contents of an inconvenient Hadith strikes me as an important one.
Dealing with these issues requires clear thinking.
If people can’t even differentiate between Arabs and Muslims in their own minds – in fact keep referring to Palestinians as Muslims, whether deliberately or just because they think of them that way – it’s not clear thinking. In fact it’s confused thinking.