Islamic Mad Dog Murders Dutch Filmmaker

The BBQ Pit
81

It comes down to whether Islamic values and Western values can coexist. The weight of history seems to declare that they cannot. To paraphrase what someone once said about the Constitution, Western liberalism tolerates dissent and different ways of thinking, but it is not a suicide pact. For example, women have something approximating political equality in the West, but this is alien to most Muslim countries (don’t say “But I favor women’s rights!” - that’s just you.) . There really is no room for compromise on the matter, so if Muslims want to immigrate and not cause violent dissension, they are going to have to modify their views on women. The question is - will they?

Anyone who posts to the SDMB for any length of time is pretty much guaranteed to have bought into Western values - free inquiry, tolerance for dissent, all that. I won’t presume to know your cultural milieu, but voluntary immersion in Western society for an extended period of time will tend to make a person adapt. But large-scale immigration creates enclaves within which there is little pressure to adopt new values, and in fact, may encourage immigrants to cling more tightly to their existing values.

I’m not suggesting reviling or berating Muslims as a group, only that large-scale immigration makes violent conflict more likely. You can interpret that as saying that a million Muslims in Teheran do not concern me, but a million Muslims in Detroit would.

82

But, but…that’d be TERRORISM, Angua! :eek:

You’d be a fundamentalist loony evil mad dog Muslim terrorist if you did that. Hitting him over the head with your clue stick, indeed. What makes you think one clue stick would be enough? I’ll lend you mine, if you like; there’s still some wear left in it. Actually, I could do it for you; then it wouldn’t be terrorism, would it? Excellent!

And the delicious irony of anyone with any sort of an objection to people roughly defined as “but they’re not us” getting hot under the collar at the thought of Heloise and Angua having a snog might just be too exquisite.
A brown lady? And another brown lady?
A single British Muslim and married American Christian?
Oh dear me, what a conundrum.
To get turned on or to demand that they leave the country immediately? Decisions, decisions.

83

Throw in Coldfire and I’ll even get behind the “turned on” option…

84

Actually, if you read the Koran, you will find that womens’ rights are espoused in the Koran. According to Islamic law, in the event of divorce, a man must pay alimony, a woman is allowed to own property, and conduct business. A woman’s property/wealth that she brings to a marriage are hers, not her husband’s. A woman is allowed to inherit (and keep) her parents’ property. Women are allowed to work outside the home. Women are created equal to men, they are not their subordinates.

The inequality you see in Muslim countries is a relic of culture. 100 years ago, women did not have anything approaching the equality that they have in the western world. The women’s lib movement is gaining momentum in Muslim countries, its just not widely reported.

85

Do we have to calculate in Roman numerals? That’s a bit tricky, but I wouldn’t want to taint pristine European culture by using imcompatible numeric system of a different culture.

:rolleyes:

86

I am genuinely upset by the murder of Theo van Gogh and I sincerely believe that it is a harbinger of things to come. So naturally my post was coached in passionate (not to say colorful) terms. Does that make me a bigot, a racist or a hate-monger?

I mean, this is the Pit, right? This is the proper forum for passionate posts.

87

It’s not explained to recent recruits, and I think it should be, that while flaming is allowed in the Pit, people will also hold you to the content of your flame. I myself got badly burned shortly after arriving for exactly the same reason as this thread has resulted in accusations against you (thankfully, my experience was wiped out in a database crash so nobody can see it. Nyah.).

88

You see, if you had just pitted the fucknugget who did this, then, no, you wouldn’t have been a racist bigoted hate-monger. However, when you took the killer’s actions as representative of an entire community, and then went on to call that community:

And your ‘connecting the dots’:

was a huge and crass generalisation, which led people to believe that you think Europe is on the verge of being terrorised by marauding gangs of immigrant Muslim assasins, when it so blatantly isn’t.

Then, you claim

You’re asking the impossible. How about I say “I’ll never trust a white person, until the white community pulls together and casts out the killers and rapists amongst them”? I’d be called a racist bigot, no?

Again, stereotyping an entire community. Many Muslim men have beards, and some tend to be somewhat reserved, particularly in mixed company (its a cultural thing), are they automatically terrorists? How can you tell that someone is ‘murderous’ just by looking at them?

Then, this post:

Again, you’re using the actions of a lone nut to decry an entire community.

You see, its the way you take the actions of lone nuts, OK, in the case of 9/11, well organised nuts who are in the minority with respect to the general Muslim population, and use it to paint an entire community, with the same brush. That’s where the accusations come from.

89

$20 says that a Nazi metaphor will be used before this reaches 5 pages.

90

*Just some more info. [I’m too tired, worried of what may become of my country and too sad to pit anything] *

From: http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=3712805

Police arrested eight suspected Islamic radicals as part of investigations into the brutal killing of outspoken Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, Dutch prosecutors said today.

The suspects were detained in the 24 hours following Van Gogh’s killing on Tuesday in an Amsterdam street, said prosecution spokeswoman Dop Kruimel.

Six of the detainees are of Moroccan origin, one is Algerian and the last has dual Spanish-Moroccan nationality, Kruimel said.

He said the suspects, whose identities were not released, had previously been detained and released in an investigation into a potential terrorist threat in October 2003.

“The suspects were detained at a number of residences searched in connection with the Van Gogh investigation. They were previously known to us,” she said.

“As of now only one suspect is being held for Van Gogh’s murder, but the investigation will determine if others may have been connected. All options are still open at this point.”

Five suspects, including a 18-year-old Samir Azzouz, were detained in cities around the Netherlands on October 17, 2003 on suspicion of plotting a terrorist attack.

All were released within two weeks for lack of evidence, but Azzouz was re-arrested in June and now awaits trial on charges of planning a terrorist attack on targets including a nuclear reactor and Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport.
From: http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=6703639
Liberal politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee given Dutch citizenship after fleeing an arranged marriage, worked with Van Gogh on his film about abuse of Muslim women and received a new death threat on Tuesday saying: “You are next.”

From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3980371.stm

But this time, there were eyewitness descriptions of the murderer’s traditional Moroccan jallaba.

And then there was the manner in which Van Gogh was killed: his throat was reportedly cut, bringing to mind the words of an angry Muslim only a few months ago that people like Van Gogh who blasphemed against Islam should be “slaughtered like pigs”.

91

While I don’t share the hysteria about immigrants and Islam, I don’t see how this could be viewed as anything other than terrorism.

This was a political murder. This was terrorism. This was the killing of a person to send a message to everyone else who would think of publicly criticizing Islam that they will be under the threat of death.

Do I blame all Muslims everywhere for the terrorism? No, I blame the particular terrorist who carried out this particular terrorist murder. But we shouldn’t pretend that this insane terrorist murderer just happened to kill his victim at random.

Just like a anti-abortion activist who murders an abortion doctor is a terrorist, just like a militia member who murders government workers is a terrorist, just like a klansman who murders blacks is a terrorist, just like an IRA nutter who murders protestants is a terrorist. It doesn’t make all anti-abortion activists terrorists, it doesn’t make all militia members terrorists, it doesn’t make all racists terrorists, it doesn’t make all republicans terrorists. It does make the murderers themselves terrorists though.

92

Well, best of luck. Muslim women are behind where the Western woman of 100 years ago was, and historically Islam has changed more slowly than the West, so it is going to be at least 100 years before Muslims are generally going to accept women on Western terms. Maybe we’ll be ready for mass immigration in 100 years.

93

Didn’t Van Gogh refer to Muslims as ‘Goat fuckers’?

That is probably why some fanatic shot him as much as anything else.

94

Lemur: *This was a political murder. This was terrorism. This was the killing of a person to send a message to everyone else who would think of publicly criticizing Islam that they will be under the threat of death. *

In that case, as matt pointed out, we should also be calling gay-bashing murders terrorism. They are the killing of a person to send a message to everyone else who would think of publicly expressing their homosexual identity that they will be under the threat of death.

Myself, I tend to use the term “hate crime” for these violent atrocities committed against individuals in order to intimidate others.

95

From techcentralstation.be (full text here )

The Islamization of France
Is Islam compatible with secular democracy? France may be the first to find out
By Jean-Christophe Mounicq

96

Oh, really?

Brutus was a terrorist.

John Wilkes Booth was a terrorist.

Lee Harvey Oswald was a terrorist.

Notice the link? They were all Christians!!! (Apart from Brutus, who was a polytheist, but who wants to get in the way of propaganda?)

Yes?

Or could it be that they just fucking nutjobs?

Oh… OK… so your arbitrary interpretation of the motivation of the assassin changes their status to “terrorist”?

Or could it be that you’re just-a-little-bit-more than hysterical?

How swiftly the buzzword-de-jour has become assimilated into the psyche of the “we are so embarrasingly unworldy we might have voted for Bush”-ites?

97

Not true. In the recent Algerian election the sitting President won with 83.49% of the vote. In second place came a former Prime Minister who only got 7.93%. The Islamist candidate (a moderate in any case) got just 4.84%. And this election was held to be one of the fairest ever held in the Arab world:

Also, there don’t seem to be many terrorists left in Algeria:

Then there’s the elections in Afghanistan which had a very high turnout and resulted in the re-election of Karzai by a large majority.

The best weapon against fundamentalism is democracy. When people get the chance to vote for their leaders they tend to avoid voting in nutjobs. I read an article in a newspaper (The Independent) about the Afghan election. The reporter interviewed a 109 year old man who had walked two miles through the heat and dust in order to vote. 109. That means he was born in 1895. He’s seen it all, and he thought that democracy was important enough to his country that he was determined to vote even though the effort nearly killed him.

That story about that 109 year old man says more to me than all the politician’s speeches or Osama’s videos. The Afghans have just spent a decade living under one the most extreme religious theocracies imaginable and yet, first chance they get, they show that they quite clearly want democracy.

Then consider the Iranians. If they ever got the chance to vote out the Mullahs, they would be history.

You could argue that the islamist party does quite well in Turkey but that’s only because people know that they won’t cancel democracy if they get into power, so people can always vote them out again in a few years. It doesn’t really matter what party gets into power or what policies they enact as long as the people get the chance to get rid of them every few years.

Take Adolf Hitler. He got in in 1933. If he hadn’t cancelled democracy and had held another election 5 years later in 1938, would he have got back in? (Assume a proper free, fair, secret election). Would he have even tried to invade other countries if he’d known he was going to have to face a public vote in a couple of years? Democracy changes everything but you’ve got to do it properly if you’re going to bother doing it at all.

98

Well, not every assassin is a terrorist. Some are, some aren’t. Some terrorists are deranged loonies, some aren’t. I don’t think bin Ladin is a loonie exactly, although he certainly has some out-and-out lunatics working for him. And I don’t see any evidence that Brutus or Boothe were crazy, although a case can certainly be made for Oswald. And yes, I do believe that intent is what makes a terrorist a terrorist. A terrorist isn’t someone who kills for fun, a terrorist is someone who kills in order to, you know, inspire terror for political ends. Not every political murder is terrorism, not every murder that causes fear is terrorism, not every bloody killing is terrorism. But some are.

Sure, we might disagree on the margins about what terrorism is. But surely we can agree that some things are terrorism, right? 9/11 was terrorism. Oklahoma City was terrorism. The Unabomber letterbomb campaign was terrorism. The IRA planting bombs in UK pubs was terrorism. The Bali bombing was terrorism. The Subway bombing in Spain was terrorism. The Achille Lauro hijacking was terrorism. The Munich kidnappings were terrorism. Or do you disagree?

What makes those murders terrorism, but not this murder? Do you have to kill more than one person to qualify as a terrorist? Do you have to have an Al Queda membership card? Of course muslim + killer =/= terrorist. But some murders are terrorism.

What’s so hysterical about calling the murder of a guy who was killed because he made a film critical of Islam terrorism? And why do you think you can tell who I voted for because I think this murder is a terrorist murder?

99

Ummm…actually, 2 out of 3 of them really were terrorists.

Brutus was part of an armed conspiracy to kill Caeser. He did not act alone. More than a dozen men stabbed Caeser, though I forget the exact number.

And Booth was the leader of a small group that wished to kill not only Lincoln, but his VP & Sec. of War. Only the Lincoln attack succeeded.

A conspiracy to commit a killing for political purposes really is terrorism.

Oswald was a nutjob, to everybody except the nutjobs. They invent shadow armies of killers. :slight_smile:

100

I doubt it. Some people will never accept even a small scale immigration of a different culture.

And as for women’s rights, and power, when was the last time the US, that bastion of social equality, equal rights for all regardless of gender, orientation etc, had an elected female head of state? I can answer that – never. When was the last time a Muslim country had a female head of state? Well, Benazir Bhutto in 1988 in Pakistan, and Ms Megawati in Indonesia - July 2001 to October 2004. My point is is that even in Muslim countries, women do have political power, women do have rights, particularly when the prevailing culture of the region espouses rights for women.

On my way into work this morning (I teach, and do research at a large university), probably 15-20% of the students I saw were Muslim women. Muslim women wearing headscarves, and bareheaded Muslim women. (The Muslim population is the UK is about 5% of the total). Muslim women furthering their education, and getting degrees so as to be useful contributing members of society. In my entire life, I’ve mixed with Muslims of all denominations, and in that time, I’ve only ever met two girls who might have been considered to be getting a raw deal. One girl’s parents wanted her to get married after she left high school. She rebelled, told them she wanted to train to be a beauty technician, and they caved. She is now married, but still has her own business.

Another girl had a place at Cambridge, but her father refused to let her accept it. I talked to both parents. The mother gave her consent, the father dissented, but was eventually cowed by the mother. That girl’s now graduated from Cambridge with a law degree, and is training to be a barrister.

Take my own example. I’m 24, unmarried, and pursuing a career. 50 years ago, in this country, it would have been deemed unacceptable. Within my own community, I am seen as doing “A Good Thing”. My cousin, in Pakistan, at the age of 24 was following a similar course about 10 years ago. No one in her community, or in Karachi in general, saw anything wrong with this. She was a woman who was pursuing a career, in a Muslim country, and was applauded for it. As are most young women doing the same.

My point is is that just because you, in your self contained world, where everything to do with the Islamic world is bad, evil and wrong, don’t see change taking place, it doesn’t mean its not happening. It is happening, and its happening quicker than you’d think.