I’ll be very surprised if this particular beheading has anything to do with religious strife. That’s pretty much quarantined to our deep South. There has been speculation for years that it may be carried over into Bangkok, but it hasn’t yet. Even the New Year’s Eve bombings of 2006 in Bangkok were traced back to a faction supporting the recently overthrown prime minister, Thaksin.
For one thing, there are Muslim neighborhoods sprinkled all over Bangkok, not really one central area where they can be found – this despite a central area where Muslim tourists do tend to stay – and the good Buddhist population would no doubt set upon the neighborhoods like a pack of wolves, so there is a lot of speculation that nothing is tried in Bangkok for fear of innocent Muslims being whacked. That’s the theory anyway. Myself, I have no doubt there’s some excellent behind-the-scenes police work at play, from our rather ruthless force.
No, this is no doubt the result of a romantic entanglement gone bad – Hell really hath no fury like a Thai woman scorned – or even some Mafia-related activity.
There’s a more detailed photo of the head in the Thai-language media. I’ll disable the link below, because while it’s not too gory, it may still be disturbing and NOT SAFE FOR WORK. You could definitely recognize the guy if you knew him:
Your point here is totally unclear. You have refused to deal with the issue of the violence inherent in Islam, based on looking at “What Would Mohammed Do”. Instead, you want to point out the fact that there are Christian idiots out there … as if that was in doubt. Still, I don’t see Pat Robertson or the others calling for stoning women to death. In fact, I recall there’s something about throwing the first stone in the Bible …
Sure, like I predicted, you want to say that the Muslim violence in 624 or whenever was totally justified. You did note my pointing out that neither Jesus nor Buddha took up arms against the men who plotted their overthrow, didn’t you? And yet all you do is repeat that Mohammed was justified, without touching the central issue – how does Mohammed’s violence shape Islam to this day?
I’m very tired of people pointing to the Inquisition and the foundation of Judaism and saying “yeah, well they did it then, and the Muslims do it now, so it’s all the same”. That’s crap. This is the 21st Century. Christians gave up stoning people to death centuries ago, so did the Jews. Your claim of moral equivalence is unfortunately exact – the Muslims in the 21st century are as civilized as the Jews and Christians were 500 years ago … which changes absolutely nothing, and which doesn’t excuse their behaviour.
Umm … I think you might be mistaking someone esle for me. I have no need to drum up hatred, nor do I hate Muslims. I hate violence, and you on the other hand go out of your way to “mix and match epochs and events and cultures” to justify it. According to you it’s bad, but it’s not from religion, it’s just an unfortunate “retrograde cultural norm”, nobody’s to blame, move along, nothing to see here …
Oh, I see, the stoning to death for adultery is just an understandable excess not really due to Islam, because the Koran only prescribes whipping … and so the stoning is not really related to Islam, just to “retrograde cultural norms” in the Middle East … right.
You say there’s a “total of five countries” that recently stoned people to death for adultery, and they’re all in Middle Eastern countries? Check your source. A few minutes on Google says people have been stoned to death for adultery in Nigeria, Somalia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, Pakistan and the UAE … not just five, not just Middle Eastern, but by some amazing coincidence, all Muslim …
As far as I know, there is no nation currently sentencing people in their judicial system to death by stoning except Islamic nations. Now you want to claim that’s just a coincidence, Islam has nothing to do with it, because other Muslim countries don’t practice it. Of course, the fact that those countries are the ones with strong Sharia law, and most other Muslim countries don’t have Sharia law, is just a coincidence.
And its also only coincidental that a number of the countries that have adopted Sharia law have also adopted stonings for adultery. And it’s only a coincidence that in many Muslim countries without Sharia law, there’s a push for the adoption of Sharia law. And in enlightened Muslim countries like say Indonesia, they’re not at all barbaric, they just whip someone with a cane until their backs are cut to shreds for adultery, but heck, the Koran says that’s OK, so we can’t hold that against them.
Then there’s the recent Reuters poll showing that a third of the people in Indonesia want to bring back stoning for adultery … care to explain how that’s just Middle Eastern “retrograde cultural norms” at work … in Asia? Care to point to us any non-Muslim country where a third of the people say they want to stone adulterers to death?
Next, you say stoning is not in the Koran so it’s not really part of Islam … as if there were no Sunnah or Hadiths or other authority in Islam. “Islam Online”, which claims to be written by Muslims for Muslims, says:
So you might think stoning adulterers is not part of Islam … but there’s plenty of Muslims who disagree to the point where they say it’s “not debatable”. I’ll take their word for it, thanks. Plus which, the Prophet ordered it himself … so if you ask “WWMD”, the clear answer is “stone them”. We don’t even have to guess what his answer might be, the Hadiths tell us:
On the other hand, if you ask “WWJD”, the clear answer is “don’t stone them”. Again, we don’t have to ask, both he and Mohammed answered the question directly in their lifetimes. Which is what I was trying to point out above, but you evaded neatly by some fancy footwork. The religions are not equivalent, it’s not just Christianity with curious hats. Islam is a religion which was founded on violence and which preaches and practices violence to this day.
Tomndebb, you strike me as a nice guy who is willing to stand up for what you believe in, and you are more than willing to believe the best of your fellow man. While these are wonderful traits, I fear that all too often our fellow men are not the best you believe them to be. In fact, all too often they are the folks who are happy to throw the first stone at some poor woman buried up to her neck. To sum up:
Stoning people for adultery has been practiced in the Islamic religion from the beginning right up until today.
We have a number of witnesses to attest that Mohammed ordered it done and condoned it. It is mentioned in a number of the Hadiths.
No non-Muslim nation has stoning as a part of their judicial system.
All the nations practicing this barbaric action are Islamic.
A number of those nations are not in the Middle East, and are of different cultures.
Now, you can say that the logical conclusion from all of that is that it has nothing to do with Islam.
Dutchman, thanks for the figures from Saudi Arabia. I see the use of beheadings by the terrorists as an attempt to add a pretense of authority to their criminal actions. Beheading is a traditional form of official governmental or tribal executions in many parts of the world, including the Middle East. The terrorist murderer’s claim is that they are not simply killing people. Oh, no. These are people who have duly been found guilty of crimes against the community and the state and the religion. (But I repeat myself, as in Islam they are one.) These poor bastards are not being murdered, you see. They are being executed for their crimes against society.
Tomndebb, I’d say blaming the Russians for head-lopping in the Middle East, whether it’s done by warlords, governments, terrorists, tribal leaders, or individuals, is out, not just by years, but by millennia. The whole world has been lopping off heads as a means of official execution for a long, long time.
The Western world seems to have used beheading as a fairily common form of execution up until the French Revolution. Then it was every day, more baskets full of heads, more smell of rotting meat, more puddles of drying blood, more flies, more headless bodies. It went on and on, day after day, month after month, until they started devouring their own, and even those in favor of the Revolution were sickened. Seems like at some point people had had enough. In any case, the guillotine never really caught on around the world, and was gradually replaced (1949 in W. Germany, 1977 in France) by other equally lethal methods of official execution, or by no executions at all. It has remained in favor in other parts of the world. I make no value judgement here. If societies choose to execute people, they have to choose a method.
The claim by terrorist murderers to have equal judicial weight with the authorities of the day, through the use of sham “trials” and publicly pronounced “death sentences” and so-called “official executions”, has a long and full history both inside and outside the Middle East. It was quite common among the various revolutionary groups of the 1970’s, for example. I see the use of beheading by the current crop of terrorist murderers as just another similar, failed attempt to justify wanton killing by giving it an official flavor. Probably has some traction in the Arab street. Doesn’t work for me.
Tomndebb, I got to thinking about your statement that:
I wondered first, which five countries are you talking about? I figured it was probably Somalia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the UAE. Nigeria got left out in the cold. Maybe Afghanistan in place of UAE. I don’t know, maybe Sudan instead.
What I got to wondering was, what “retrograde cultural norms” are common to those countries that don’t have to do with religion? I mean, other than religion, those countries don’t have a whole lot in common. They don’t speak the same language. They aren’t all Arabs, it’s a great insult to call an Iranian an Arab. Iranians are Persians, empire builders and noblemen and women from the ancient times. The Iranians think the Saudis are tent dwelling desert barbarians who happened to strike oil, nothing like their ancient culture of cities and libraries and learning. The Pakistanis are a whole other tribe entirely, different language, different history, different roots. Somalis are kinda like Arabs, but a different breed, lineage, customs and culture. Sudan is more like Egyptians, again not Arabs, again with their own history.
So I’m very curious, Tomndebb. What “retrograde cultural norms” do, for example, the Saudis and the Iranians have in common except their religion’s retrograde cultural norms?
I found this on Islam Watch (arguably biased): Abul Kasem
His argument boils down to that because she violated an Islamic command to follow the wishes of her husband and went outside the faith to get a divorce, she was subject to a harsher punishment than if she had just committed adultery.
Uzi, those arguments would be more convincing if Hassan hadn’t already divorced his previous wife without beheading her.
Has there been any talk about Aasiya committing adultery? I haven’t read any such thing in any article yet.
There is no stigma to divorce in Islam. The Koran goes into some detail about how divorces should be carried out, and the point is that the woman should not be reduced to penury because of the divorce.
Anyone know the Islamic reason this guy beheaded a woman at Virginia Tech in January? How about the Islamic reason this guy beheaded a passenger on a bus last year?
I guess it depends on who divorced who and the circumstances, doesn’t it? Or, I could divorce a hundred women and beheading one of them wouldn’t enter my mind at all.
Which religious group contains more beheaders in modern times than any other?
If someone has been beheaded you can rest assured that the beheader was Muslim 99% of the time, if not even higher. They’re fucking savages when they don’t get their way. Yeah most of them aren’t savage, but the ones that chop heads sure as fuck are!
Why is it so hard for some people to generalize when the generalization holds true? If you find a burning cross in someones yard I’ll bet you 99.99% of the time a whitey put it there. Now, all whities aren’t burning crosses, but whities are the only ones who DO burn crosses. Same holds true for the savage acts of Islam. Sure there are going to be a few isolated cases where some wacko whitey or Baptist does something like that, but I’d bet my paycheck every time that it’s a Muslim doing it and I’d win far more often than not.
It would help if you would respond to what I posted and not to what you want me to have posted. I do not justify any of the violence. I noted that if it was reasonable to claim that Islam is inherently violent–even today–because it got off to a violent start, then why would it not be equally reasonable to make the same observation regarding Judaism, particularly when Judaism has incidents in its history that are even more babaric than does Islam.
It probably is crap, but it is your argument, not mine. The issue was not that one group did it then and another does it now. The issue is that you want to claim that Islam is tainted by its origins while denying the same taint regarding Judaism. Don’t try to make the “born in violence” claim to rationalize current hatred and you won’t get “born in violence” thrown back at you. I am sure you are tired of it. As long as you rely on bad claims, you’re just going to have to be tired of it.
No. Your claim that it is Islam that is responsible for stonings when there are relatively few Muslim groups who engage in that practice–limited to a specific geographic/cultural region–reduces your attempts at moral equivalence to cherry picking…
Why do you resort to lying that I condone it? I have no problem with condemning the people who engage in those behaviors. On the other hand, you wish to condemn a billion or a billion and a half people for the actions of the nutjobs who run fewer than a half dozen countries with fewer than 140 million people. You claim to hate violence, but you are willing to talk up hatred that could well lead to violence at some point as your attitudes infect other people who might be less restrained than you are.
You might want to read the articles once you’ve pulled them off Google. All of the countries named are in the Middle East with the exception of Nigeria. Nigeria has yet to actually carry out a sentence of stoning. The UAE has not actually carried out a sentence of stoning. The only stoning carriedout in Pakistan was by Taliban invaders from Afghanistan. And the Somali incident appears to have been a deliberate murder to cover up something else that went on. Now, you see a link by way of Islam. I notice that with the exception of Iran, all the places where it has sprung up have been under the control of nomadic societies with a fair amount of interconnected cultural ties. (Even the Nigerian situation arose through Saharan nomads exerting control in the North of the country.) Given all the Muslim countries that have not jumped on the stoning bandwagon, (including those that have explicitly outlawed it), along with the fairly long list of Muslim theologians who condemn it, it looks to me as though you are grasping at any straw to continue to make it an issue of “Islam.”
Nope. I see that as an Iranian-like appeal by Fundamentalist Islamicists to impose their particular brand of Islam on the world. Maybe if Pahlavi and Suharto, (and Hussein), had not practiced the violent suppression of Islam, they would not have created the backlash that gave popular power to the worst elements in those countries.
True. They are also liable to be the sort of people who are willing to go out and condemn large groups of people based on faulty evidence, thus stirring up the very passions they claim to abhor.
We seem to enjoy demonizing large groups rather than addressing the real problems associated with specific smaller movements within those groups. With the fall of the Soviet bloc, we can’t run around screaming “communism” to get our adrenaline going, so now we are runing around screaming “Islam.” And just as we made huge mistakes leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths by opposing a communism that never really existed, (when we should have been targeting specific threats by the Soviets or Chinese or whoever), it seems to me that we are going to do the same thing all over again regading Islam.
How about we adjusted Cubsfan’s analogy to make it a little more parallel with what we’re talking about. Nobody in this thread (IIRC) has said that Arabs or Indonesians or whoever were particularly violent – just that the ones that believe in Islam tended to be. So instead of “whities”, what about just those whities who adopt the beliefs of the Ku Klux Klan? I believe you can substitute “Klansman” for “Whitie” wherever it occurs in Cubsfan’s post and make it a stronger analogy.
I have no problem decrying Klansman savages. What say ye now?
tom, you got your ass kicked in this thread, intellectually, rhetorically, and factually. And everybody reading it knows that, including you, but you won’t cop to it.
I learned a lot from this thread.
You are good, dude, but you ain’t fucking perfect.
Tomndebb, thanks for your reply. If I understand you correctly, you think that “born in violence” should apply to the Jews as well as the Muslims? As it happens I agree.
Judaism was certainly born in violence. But unlike Islam, the Jews got over it. Stoning is a good example. It is condoned in the Torah. But over time it was surrounded by so many restrictions that it was very difficult for a rabbinical court to pass the sentence. I don’t have a reference handy for the last time it was so ordered by a rabbinical court, but my money is on centuries. And Jesus, of course, condemned it entirely.
The problem with Islam is not just that the religion was born in violence. The problem is that they never got over it. Quite the opposite. Baptists rarely load up a truck with bombs covered with watermelons, drive to a Methodist village, wait 'til the women and children are gathered round to buy melons, and set off the bomb. But here in the 21st century Sunnis and Shiites blow each other up with abandon, while their respective mullahs and imams cheer them on in the name of Allah. Fortunately, they do it more to each other than to Jews and Crusaders. But it is cruel, personal, religion-driven senseless violence in either case.
You are right, Tomndebb, that this is not all Muslims, it’s only a tiny minority. But it is big enough that Islamic suicide murderers feature on the news all the time. Week after week. Year in, year out. They are so common we never even hear about most of them, particularly since the majority are Muslim vs. Muslim, and thats of less interest to the Western press.
The other problem with Islamic violence is that the Prophet did it, and specifically condoned it. Call me crazy, but I don’t want the Prophet as anyone’s role model. I don’t want people acting like the Prophet. I don’t want people doing what the Prophet did. I don’t want him held up as some paragon of propriety, someone for young men to idolize. He was a violent man who proposed violent solutions to non-problems.
For example, he prescribed cutting off a hand and a foot on alternate sides of the body for someone who leaves the religion and speaks out against Allah and the Prophet. Chop people up for leaving the religion … say what? A violent solution to a non-problem. And there are to this day lots of Muslims who would agree with the Prophet. The Prophet said it, it must be right. Wherever there are stonings, there’s a bunch of people throwing stones, and plenty more cheering them on. A small percentage of Muslims believe in suicide murders and stonings and the like, to be sure … call it 1% to be on the safe side, that’s only ten million or so worldwide. But wait … I forgot about much of the population of Iran, and Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, and the like, they believe in amputations and stonings. Still, not a majority of Muslims, I’d say.
But for many, many more Muslims, for a daughter to leave the religion would be cause for immediate persecution, beating, and even death. Someone above gave an example of that above, with the woman fearing for her life. And all for the “crime” of wanting to change religions in the 21st century … sometimes, I despair of humankind.
Do 1% of Catholics think that lapsed Catholics should be maimed for life by cutting off their right hand and left foot? Does a Baptist girl who decides to become a Buddhist generally have to be afraid that her uncles and brothers will beat her severely for that crime?
Is the violent side of Islam still around, still practiced and believed by millions? Of course it is. Islam is split down the middle into the violent and peaceful parts, just like the Koran is split. When Mohammed lived in Mecca, he was powerless. He spoke of love and peace and the like, and the Koran reflects that. But when he moved to Medina, and became powerful, and had armed warriors at his command, he spoke of war and killing and chopping off opposite hands and feet. Both threads have been in Islam from the start.
You keep trying to claim that I am opposed to Islam, or to Muslims. I am not. I have Muslim friends. I don’t serve pork chops when they come over for dinner, or eat with my left hand. I have worked in Muslim countries. I’m not talking theory here.
I am not opposed to Islam. I am opposed to the violence in Islam. Islam desperately needs a Reformation. It needs for someone young and fiery and full of the spirit, a good islamic boy, a holy man, someone to come along and say “Hey, some of this stuff in the Koran is so 7th century! Some of what the Prophet said is good, and some sucks. Let’s move forwards and keep the good stuff.” Jews used to stone people. They changed, they stopped. Fijians were cannibals two centuries ago, and are now some of the nicest folks around. It can be done. Entrenched beliefs can change. On the other hand, Baha’ullah tried to reform Islam from the inside with a message of peace and tolerance, and all he did was to get himself and his followers (Baha’is) denounced as heretics and persecuted and executed by Muslims to this day …
But until they do change and reform in the Islamic community, I’ll wager that the next stoning we hear about will be done by Muslims. Doesn’t mean all Muslims want to stone people. Doesn’t mean a majority of Muslims support stoning people. They don’t. My Muslim friends don’t, they’re as horrified by it as you and I are.
But only a fool would bet that the next group to stone someone to death would be the Amish …
Finally, I would be interested in an answer to my question above, if you have time.
PS - I love the way you say there’s never been a stoning in Nigeria, as if that makes the issue disappear. Patience, my friend, patience … I do read the articles I Google.
From Reuters Africa, six days ago:
Oooh, cool, we get six stonings plus forty-six, count’em, forty-six bonus amputations for theft! Care to guess how many non-Islamic societies currently practice the … what did you call it? … oh, yeah, the “retrograde cultural norm” of chopping off people’s hands? But I digress …
Yes, I counted those as stonings when I made up my list, but you are 100% correct, they’ve only been condemned to death by stoning. My bad. Don’t know why they waited, Islamic justice is usually swift. They’re probably stockpiling stones and checking the rules, first time for everything I guess, don’t want to use the wrong kind of stones, or something. The Iranians recommend small stones so the people don’t die right away, so you get to hear them scream as their faces are smashed to pulp. And since none of the condemned in Nigeria is a young pregnant woman who will rouse world opinion against the sentences, I’ll still lay you good odds that it’s not going to be the Amish who win the bet on the next stoning …
What I want to know is, what do guys do after the stoning? Go sit around and drink tea (no alcohol) and talk it over with their friends? Do they laugh about it, do they give each other shit because the other guy’s rock missed the poor helpless terrified woman buried in the ground up to her neck, do they mimic her screams? Do they boast about it when it’s just the guys? Are they even a little ashamed? And more to the point, what kind of bizarre twisted bond is forged between the participants in the ritual public killing of a helpless young woman by a group of men? What does that do to the soul of a community?
“Retrograde cultural norms”, my ass. That’s sick culture-destroying perverted heart-crushing cruel misogynistic anti-human barbarism in my book. To call it animal behavior would be a grave insult to the animals. We agree that all those who are Muslims don’t do that or condone it. What you seem to have a hard time coming to grips with is that all those who do that or condone it are Muslims … which should give you a clue about a fundamental, basic, and very important difference between Islam and other religions.
As I have already pointed out, all those who “do it” are from a specific region of the world with mutual associations–one of which happens to be the religion that is common to the much larger region in which those related cultures exist.
Aside from the ability to say “Nyah! Nyah! Our society is cooler thant their society.” I’m not sure what you think you’re going to take from your perspective. Are you planning to compel all the Muslims of Dearborn and the Twin Cities to become apostates to Islam so that they don’t get cooties on their neighbors? Are you planning to simply deport some percentage of all Muslims so that they do not “contaminate” the U.S.? Perhaps you’ld like to organize a crusade to eliminate Islam from the Northern Africa, Southwest Asia, and Southeast Asia?
I just don’t see much point in blanket condemnations of large groups of people. We already know how that works out when we apply it to race or political persuasion. We’ve even seen how well it works for religion considering the European/North American conflicts among Christians or between Christians and Jews. Basically, your broad brush condemnation is little more than a way to lay the groundwork for the next futile conflict in the world. We already have a small number of Islamists working to get that war going; why do you wish to support them in their efforts?
I already answered it, but OK. I have no idea why you would make the odd claim that Sudan is not Arab; the portion of the country that is currently Muslim-dominated is very much Arab. Somalia was a pastoral land under domination from Arab seafarers for years. Afghanistan contains a large nomadic society which has been supported and influenced by two separate waves of Arab immigrants. Nigeria’s northern states are dominated by Saharan nomadic groups with Arab antecedants. Even Iran has a significant Arab contingent. (The Iranians like to point to their Persian history, but that hardly removes the number of Arab incursions into that country’s pastoral regions.)
I doubt that there is anything inherently evil among Arabs or nomads, but I do suspect that a culture that was created in harsh conditions and which maintains social ties through traditions would be more likely to be naturally conservative, (i.e., less likely to give up older practices), while there would also be a reinforcing function among those groups with a shared cultural history. Arabs who moved into more populated regions–Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, the Mediterranean Coast–have undergone more moderating influences over the centuries.
Islamist terrorists have recently siezed on ancient practices as a way to exercise power in a chaotic world. Note that every region outside that belt of nomadic Arab influence that has seen outbreaks of beheadings have been in locations where civil authorities had made a concerted effort to suppress Islam. It is pretty common to find persecuted peoples looking back to their most ancient roots.
It seems to me that the better way to oppose Islamist terrorists in the long run is to refrain from alienating all Muslims by broad brush condemnations and concentrating on attacking the violent ones directly. Making sweeping condemnations of the religion simply encourages people who believe they are being attacked to look to the most forceful groups to defend them.