Kirbmarc wrote:Steersman wrote:
Wonder if you ever looked at that MEMRI TV video clip from a woman Saudi journalist who kind of knocked into a cocked hat the idea that "moderates" aren't culpable, to a not insignificant degree, for the depredations of the "extremists":
Nadine Al-Budair: Whenever terrorism massacres peaceful civilians, the smart alecks and the hypocrites vie with one another in saying that these people do not represent Islam or the Muslims. Perhaps one of them could tell us who does represent Islam and the Muslims. ....
http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/5436.htm
http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/5436.htm
Delenda est
Listen closely. Read again. She's arguing against the idiots who say that "terrorism has nothing to do with Islam" and that "ISIS aren't real Muslims". Which is idiocy indeed. Terrorism has
a lot to do with Islam: it's inspired by literal readings of the Quran.
And you don't seem to get the idea that most if not almost all Muslims read the Quran literally. Shadi Hamid in a
Slate article:
Christianity without Christ loses its meaning; you can be culturally Christian or nominally Christian, but the theological content isn’t really there. It’s the same thing with Islam, and that leads to the other factor that I talk about in the book in regards to exceptionalism: Muslims don’t just believe that the Quran is the word of God; they believe it is God’s actual speech. That might sound like a semantic difference, but I think it’s actually really important.
And our very own Islamic godbot, jimhabegger, insists that the Quran is "the words of God Himself". And many other observers and ex-Muslims have emphasized and reiterated the same point - hardly something I'm pulling out of my nether regions.
And it is that fundamental commonality that justifies the argument that those "moderates" - those who only peddle the barbarisms and savagery of Islam, and all its odious trappings in rituals and accoutrements, without actually acting on them - who are also culpable, to some degree, for those who do so. You said that "what [Nadine Al-Budair is] saying is that Muslims need to acknowledge the many issues with Islam and stop blaming the West, which is exactly right". Which is true but simply "acknowledging" that is hardly sufficient - words are cheap; if wishes were horses then beggars would ride - something which she at least alludes to:
After the abominable Brussels bombings, it's time for us to feel shame and to stop acting as if the terrorists are a rarity. We must admit that they are present everywhere, that their nationality is Arab, and that they adhere to the religion of Islam. We must acknowledge that we are the ones who gave birth to them, and who have made them memorize the teachings of all the Salafi books. We must admit that it is the schools and universities that we established that told them the others are infidels.
We must admit that we all - our different sects and faiths, the Sunnis and the Shia - adhere to one school and one school only: the "freezing of the mind" school. Don't ask! Don't think! Don't resist orders! Welcome to the Arab Mashriq.
Tall order as to the specifics of what can be done about unfreezing a collective mind still locked in the 7th century, but the burkini issue seems to be one of the problematic points where the rubber meets the road. You said later:
Kirbmarc wrote:I don't see what her argument has to do with your support for anti-burkini laws, unless you think that going after women in burkinis is somehow going to make Muslims acknowledge the issues within Islam...
But you apparently don't see that connection because you seem to insist on ignoring the pretext. Consider this from an article that Matt Cavanaugh linked to recently:
The burkini is a toxic ideology, not a dress choice
By Hala Arafa, contributor
Civilized nations worked very hard for centuries to achieve the freedoms we enjoy today. The clothes worn by Muslim fundamentalist women are based on seventh century beliefs. They say that a woman’s honor is directly tied to her clothes and a man is not responsible for his actions if he is tempted by a woman. This is an ideology that absolves men from any responsibility of committing the crime of rape and blames the victim for not protecting her honor by covering up.
This old ideology was revived in the early 1980s by the introduction of hijab, a seemingly innocuous piece of cloth, under the guise of modesty and piety. It revived ideas of women’s servitude, promoted a rape culture and led to the political and social instability we witness today.
The hijab ideology is why young Muslims today think they have the right to sexually assault uncovered women. This was demonstrated by Muslim immigrants gang assaults in Cologne, Germany, last January. Similar attacks happened in March in Sweden and other European countries that took in Muslim immigrants.
To say the burkini ban stifles cultural diversity is to focus on the superficial garment, not the rape ideology it promotes. That also ignores the deterioration in every aspect of social & political life in the Muslim world since the introduction of this extremist ideology. This isn’t a choice of dress. This is a choice of a very specific ideology that has proven harmful to society. ....
The burkini ban is an act of a socially conscious, morally courageous and responsible government with extreme prudence and futuristic foresight.
To allow an egregious manifestation of the odious imposition of "seventh century beliefs" is to be complicit in all of the attendent barbarisms from FGM to Sharia to child-marriage to husbands having the right to "lightly beat" their wives:
You really think that allowing all that under your vaunted "principles of liberal democracy" is acceptable? That the only reasonable response isn't to ban the entire religion and close the borders to its besotted devotees?
But impressing upon the Muslim community that those beliefs have no credence, no level of acceptance, in a civilized and secular society is the only way, short of deporting the whole fucking lot of them or more draconian solutions, that they're ever going actually address the consequences and implications of those beliefs, the only way they're ever going to embark on that "unfreezing of the mind" that Al-Budair referred to.
Moot point though whether that is even possible. Vicky Caramel said something rather cogent, to the point, and I think generally quite accurate on that:
VickyCaramel wrote:We cannot rely on Islam having an reformation, we have to teach the west to hate Islam and to be completely intolerant of it. The trick is to be like America of the 1950s and not like Germany of the 1930s.
Indeed.
Delenda est as
T.H. Huxley said relative to "bibliolatry" and "the pretension to infallibility", the hallmarks of both Christianity and Islam. But Hamid, among many others, also alludes to that same impossibility of Islam ever having that reformation: it's kind of like a molecule of "
Buckminsterfullerene" in being locked into a hermetic structure that's virtually impervious to outside influences. Hamid again from an
Atlantic article:
Animating the caliphate—the historical political entity governed by Islamic law and tradition—was the idea that, in the words of the historian Reza Pankhurst, the “spiritual unity of the Muslim community requires political expression.” For the better part of 13 centuries, there had been a continuous lineage of widely accepted “Islamic” politics.
And from the Slate article again:
I’m essentially arguing that Islam is fundamentally different from other religions in a very specific way: its relationship to law and politics and governance. I wanted to use “exceptionalism” because I felt, at least for me, that it was value-neutral: It can be either good or bad depending on the context. I also wanted to challenge the assumption—very common in the bastions of Northeastern liberal elitism—that religion playing a role in public life is always or necessarily a bad thing. That’s the idea of the title, and what that means in practice is that Islam has proven to be resistant to secularism, and I would argue will continue to be resistant to secularism and secularization really for the rest of our lives.
Christianity accepts, more or less - as Hamid argues, the separation of church and state - a foundational principle of your "liberal democracy" and of
laïcité. But in Islam they're an indivisible whole, and one underwritten by the bedrock belief that the Quran is "God’s actual speech". 'Rots of 'ruck trying to thaw that "frozen mind". That’s theocracy, a particularly odious and barbarian totalitarianism, that’s intrinsically antithetical to every last element of your “principles of liberal democracy”. Hard not to be completely "intolerant" of it and every last one of its manifestations including mosques and madrasas - and uniforms like the burkini:
Delenda est.