Another university too scared of being punched-up-at by Muslims to allow open debate.
I have no problem asserting that Islam should be defeated. It is an incorrect, barbaric value system. This doesn’t mean murdering Muslims (which it seems Muslims themselves have a monopoly on in any case) but it does mean not being wishy-washy about the fact that Western secular values are correct and all other values including religion are incorrect and should be discarded.
The notion that disagreeing with Islam is to be cast as “Islamophobia” is an attempt at linguistically asserting what is factually untrue – that disagreeing with a religion is morally on par with racism or homophobia. One’s chosen value system is ALWAYS a legitimate subject of debate, and simply yelling louder and louder that Islam must not be criticized, even as we see what trainwrecks every Muslim society on Earth are by the standard of superior values, does not make this equivalence true.
The fact that Western “progressives” will not simply apply the same rightful disdain for Christianity to Islam is a moral shortcoming. A Christian who won’t sell a hypothetical pizza to a gay wedding because of stupid Christian beliefs is targeted for annihilation; the regular murder of gays in Muslim society is defended by the same people because to have any opinion on it is “Islamophobic.”
The fact that Western liberals are attacking criticism of oppression and intolerance in the name of a religion is hilarious, and pathetic. Such blatant hypocrisy.
It is, to maintain their cognitive predisposition, necessary that we hate all Muslims. Otherwise, they must in fact consider that said criticism is valid. If such atrocities were done in the name of Christianity, they would feel no hesitation. As it is, Islam is a protected class under the umbrella of “multicultural tolerance.”
I’m more interested in telling the narrative of strife as it unfolds. These are the growing pains of the Islamic world churning towards secularism. The keepers of Political Correctness can hurl mean names all day; the machete continues to incise.
The only dissonance is your own, neither you nor your fellow bigot are fooling anyone but yourselves with your badly disguised discourses of hatred. (of course you show the same derangements with your domestic politics, like around the Mrs Clinton and her video… so it is easy to see your extremism extends to many fields; no normal person can watch a banal political campaign video of that nature and be anything more than only bored by it, no matter the politics).
Your silence about your fellow bigot’s hate speech and disgusting attacks, your ignorance of even the actual history and your rapid adoption of a false victimhood, with the ridiculous terms like the “political correctness” - it shows you both for what you are.
As for us who are actually the secular and even liberale as we say in the French, which means for free markets, against the dominance of the state, any such false friends are not needed. You are the enemy of the freedom and the equality, both of you are the types who lead to the camps for minorities, the language of hate speech is not needed to promote the real values. As Miller and others have noted.
the mentally ill one and his time wasting googling obsession for silly links to attack muslims, this we can laugh at now (although how he confused Hindu and Muslim in his obsessions about worship of child marriage gods is funny)
This is both historically false and a nice evidence that you know nothing more than some american TV news.
The american TV news grab bag as the evidence?
The Tunisia, where the secular parties won the commanding majority in the free elections just held and where even the islamist party, Ennahda, shed its hyper-religious wing to focus on the secularised compromise wing? This is a proof of what?
Of course in the Tunisia you do not see the evidence of rejection of “growing secularism” for the Tunisia has been extemely secular - from the founding father of the secular state drinking the orange juice on the national TV during the Ramadan, to promote the jihad of production… - since its independence from the France in the 1950s.
What one has seen is the reaction of the population to the failure of a very ostentatiously secular regime, the regime of Ben Ali, to deliver its promises of the economic growth and the betterment and that regime’s extreme corruption and the concentration of the wealth and the power in the clan Trabelsi. A gross distortion of the first model under Bourghiba, a model mostly oriented to the free market development if in the dirigist fashinon and mostly a secular democratic type approach.
It is not an accident that the populations in the Tunisia that have most turned away from the secularist model are from or live in the geographic zones which suffered the most from the corruption and the lack of opportunity (even while they got the university degrees supposed to open up the doors), while the zones that suffered the least and had the best opportunity remain and voted very heavily for the secularist parties.
The actual experience with the concepts, not waving around vague ideas as banners to accuse, is what determines.
Luckily in the Tunisia, the majority have had enough of a good experience to continue - but removing the cancer of the Ben Ali regime.
The Syria … it is again a revolt against a corrupt, brutal and oppressive dictatorship that wore the mantle of the secularism - the socialist secularism of the Baath - and again a story not of “increased secularism” but of popular anger against a regime that has made the idea of "secularism’ synonymous in the real experience of people with the corruptions and the oligarchism of a dictatorship. It is not a reaction to increased secularism - an ignorant and stupid thing to write - but to a failed model of secularism that was tied up with a grossly corrupt socialism.
Of course no different from the Europeans of the early 20th century who had the first experience with the democratic governments that failed badly for reasons that were both the macro-economic reasons beyond their control and for the reasons of the bad or inexperienced government, the reaction to these bad experiences was to go to the old frames of the government, the authoritarian government although sometimes through the lens of the radical change like the fascist movements.
So it is in the places in the Islamic world where the authoritarian secularist government models of the post-independence periods have failed. these regimes have been propped up most often by the outside subventions seeking a false stability, but this is only damaging the idea of secularism more by making it continue in a context of strong association with the corruption and the oppression.
That is the history of the secularism in the arab world particularly. And it is not surprising to see a reaction against it, although in the one country that has held clear elections that were free, the Tunisia, we saw a rejection of the hard Islamist approach and an embrace of the democratic soft-secularist.
So the narrative is stupid, it is ignorant and it merely shows someone who is unlearned.
Your simple minded analysis is either an analysis of stupidity and ignorant close mindedness getting news from shitty ignorant sources like the Fox news or of the pure bigotry and hate.
Of course there are the extremist groups from the takfiri-salafi movements who are trying to force their model even as it is rejected by the greater population.
This is no different to me, having also the european experience, than the many and the multiple extreme leftist movements of the European zone that saw the wider population was not going to vote their way, and tried to use violence to provoke reaction and I think in the bolshevik language, ‘to clarify the situation’ . It is the same strategy to try to drive the wedge and force the population to the radical position of these groups. Exactly the same strategy.
Only an extremely stupid person would write for this that the “europeans” (or the greeks or the italians etc) were rejecting democracy, etc.
No, not at all, except if you get your knowledges from watching the Fox News, but then you are going to be afraid of the No Go Zones and the couscouses of Magenta.
you have been refuted many times.
It does not make the shit throwing monkey not a shit throwing monkey if he puts his shitty hands over his ears and his eyes and yells blah blah blah you can’t refute me…
It only makes him a shitty monkey.
More people so afraid of being murdered by Muslims that they run away from affirming civil liberties.
You’re not an Islamophobe because you “disagree with Islam” or even “criticize Islam”, but because you want to, in your own words, defeat Islam and see it discarded entirely.
You’re a lying shitbag because you claim you’re merely disagreeing with and criticizing Islam when in reality you want to see it defeated and discarded entirely.
You’re an inept lying shitbag because you’re dumb enough to do things like whine that you’re being called an Islamophobe for merely disagreeing with and criticizing Islam in the very same post you say you want to see it defeated and discarded entirely.
Noah Feldman’s The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State is an excellent historical overview of the various forms that “Islamic states” took in the past, the decline of those states in the 18th and 19th centuries and their near-eradication after the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate, and the recent calls for their “restoration”. Feldman pays special attention to the differences between the traditional Islamic states of the past, and the new, ahistorical forms being called for by modern Islamists and fundamentalists.
Vali Nasr has written a number of excellent, easily accessible works on Islam and the Middle East. I’m starting with his The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future. Even though it was written only a few years after the fall of Saddam, it nailed how the various internal religious divisions within Islam would drive the major geopolitical conflicts within the region. Even though its publication predates things like the sanctions against and resulting nuclear deal with Iran, the rise of ISIS and the Houthi coup in Yemen, Vasr’s analysis accurately presaged the growing Iranian involvement in the conflicts arising from each of those things.
The problem with your history lesson, is that it focuses on governments. These attacks have all been against individuals, not associated with the government, explicitly as retaliation for criticizing or otherwise rejecting Islam.
If, for example, the Islamists were waging war on their state’s government then you may have a point in refuting my argument. Or you may simply be presenting a related but tangential point. (For example, ISIS is overthrowing governments AND killing Muslims/Christians. Why the killing of infidels if this is just a backlash against secular dictatorship?) As it stands, those who lay dead here are lone voices who are being killed for not being “Muslim enough” to the extremists. That has virtually nothing to do with 20th-century dictatorships, except to prove once again that Western democracy and the secular principle of freedom of expression are still largely incompatible with many Muslim cultures.
Wise words from a man who knows the reality of Islam rather than apologist books by idiots. Would that more people had his courage to stand up to the flag-bearers for barbarism, in this thread and elsewhere.
The only problem with my lesson is it shows you are an ignorant bigot who has an idée fixe and cares not for any actual reality of facts, only your ideological points.
Of course I spoke of both the society and the governments, and of course this is the fundmanetal for understanding how an idea, secularism was and is lived in the specific cases - this idea which you made as the supposed the point of your rant - but we can see of course just like in your ranting about your own home country politics, the factual matters come second to your warped ideological view.
Et this is a ‘refutation’? You are a very stupid person.
Yes, attacks by some individuals against some other individuals, and not involving government… Et alors? This says what about how the idea of secularism has been experienced …? Or you believe things arise just like the creation mythes?
Yes there are intolerant and hateful people in the various societies, as this very thread shows.
You are incapable then of actual understanding and merely
IF?
Of course this is happening, you complete cretin. It is the major focus of the takfiri.
But this is irrelevant to your stupid response which is mere moving of goal posts and obfuscation, and of course the fact you are 100% utterly wrong about the issue of secularisms and the sociological history and the political history in the arab or the islamic world.
You are in fact more stupid and more close minded idiot than I thought. It is merited, the nickname you already have here and the contempt you already draw from the posters.
Stringbean, Haberdash: You guys do realize that people refute everything you say, right? Even if you don’t buy it, the rest of the board does. You are the only two people pushing this crap.
What’s the point of posting this crap if you know no one believes you, listens to you, or even takes you seriously?
It is not worth responding the to the mentally ill obsessive bigot, but it is worth it to highlight a thing:
His discourse is the foundational discourse of the genocidaires. They always also make the pretension that the individual is okay but it is the Jewish or the Muslim idea (or the other christian, the orthodoxe or the catholic) that needs to be cleansed. this is double langauge, the excuse making and the disguising since they know that to say openly what they want will be rejected.
Our book this time is The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists, by Khaled Abou El-Fadl. The “great theft” of the title is the hijacking of Islam by modern fundamentalist movements (primarily driven by the disproportionate influence of the Saudi Wahhabis), and El-Fadl goes into some detail about the historical and legal differences between moderate Islam and the Islam of the extremists, as well as what he thinks can and should be done to combat their influence. This is something he’s uniquely able to do, since he’s one of the few people trained in both classical Islamic jurisprudence at al-Azhar as well as Western jurisprudence at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and currently serves as a professor of law at the UCLA School of Law, having previously taught Islamic Law at Yale and Princeton.
Rushdie writes of the fight against “fanatical Islam.” It’s right there in your quote.
No one in this thread is an apologist for fanatical Islam, your continual lies notwithstanding.
.
And yet, merely cataloging the deeds of “fanatical Islam” provokes such furious spinning-about from the “non-apologist” Muslims and progressives in this thread…
“Fanatical Islam” = “sincere Islam.” There are lots of Muslims who are not causing problems. They are, like the good Christians, the ones who don’t actually believe this garbage and are just trying to go about their lives. The idea that the non-Saudi forms of sincere Islam are peaceful and modern is ridiculous. But hey, actually talking about this is impossible because the progressive line remains that all the “real Muslims” are above criticism and too many people are afraid of getting murdered, so here we are.
Conservative attacks on Islam ring hollow because of the huge overlap on the Venn Diagram in their political beliefs. It can be hard to tell the difference sometimes.
Over the last several years a popular belief among the right, demonstrated in this thread, is that the left is somehow defending or supporting Islam, especially re: Obama. It’s interesting, since Islam is, like Christianity and many other religions, openly hostile to liberal beliefs. Sometimes they just seem to be recycling the “soft on terror” meme from the Bush years, but there’s definitely a lot of conservatives who think libs are bed fellows with Muslims because…cultural relativism and PC culture, or something. Odd. Some of the most vicious take downs of Islam I’ve seen have been on lib blogs. They can use the normal rant, just have to change the pronouns. I think conservatives think it can be a wedge issue, but I’m not really sure what they expect to happen. Hope Europe becomes more right wing and xenophobic and we can replicate that here, I guess.
How is that possible? One human being in five is a Muslim. 100 years ago, one human being in five was a Muslim. Almost certainly 100 years from now, (at least) one human being in five will be a Muslim.
That’s a fairly typical example of the closed progressive mind – only “conservatives” dislike Islam, conservatives dislike Obama, Obama is perfect, therefore conservatives are wrong and Islam is not to be criticized.
Of course, no one has said anything about conservatives or Obama until you got here, but the total lack of any foundation never stopped a progressive from drawing a circle around any challenging idea and blocking his mind off from it in the past, so why start now?
Almost 100% of Western Europe was once sincere Christians, with all the backwardness that entails. Now very few of them are. Same process – enough bold people showing how thought and history discredit the nonsense idea, and holding out the moral and material benefits of modernity.