Friday, March 06, 2020

Comments from a 2010 Jihad Watch thread on the Problem of Muslims vis-a-vis the Problem of Islam

60 Comments


Forgive him and expose his secular Education in India.
We in India are taught a fraud history which is written by the First education Minister of India Maulana Abul Kalam Azad.
Mulana Azad made sure that History of India was twisted and only due to internet more and more people of India learning about Islam.
We need to Ask Mishra what is taught in India--Fraud History of India and why?



Don't confuse this Pankaj Mishra with facts.


In a saner time and place in human history, Spencer would be offered the chairmanships of Middle East Studies Depts of the most prestigious universities the world over, alas we all now what the deal on those campuses is today.
This amazing analysis, the equivalent of an intellectual 'full-force gale', demonstrates why the author of this effete New Yorker piece, along with legions who denounce and defame anyone critical of Islam, will never agree to open debate on the issue.
They would be blown out of the water.
Thanks for continuing to help the masses understand what's going on.

"...if she hadn't had such terrible personal experiences with Islam, she wouldn't regard it with such a gimlet eye today."
But then, why did Hirsi Ali have such terrible personal experiences with Islam?

"In other words, someone who kills his child incurs no legal penalty under Islamic law."
That's straight out of the Qur'an. And you cannot alter the Qur'an, a fact too obvious for dhimmi Pankaj Mishra.

Congratulations Robert. I think this is one of the best rebuttals I have read in a long time.

..."although one will get two different answers depending on whether one is searching for what Muhammad actually said and did, or for what Muslims believe he said and did, as they are not the same thing." -- headline
What muhammad "said and did" of course ...
The Evil Truth About Prophet Muhammad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb3dqeeC0Us

Oh my, this guy Pankaj Mishra is a true moron. With his Indian Hindu origin, it is shameful he doesn't know or is ignorant of the true history of Mughals in India. With his ancestors brutalized, murdered and converted under the threat of beheading, he doesn't know that Islam is a vile cult and its leader Mo/allah was a caravan raider, killer, murderer, pedophile, incest practioner, rapist, genocider, ..etc. With more people like Mishra in India, I see no hope for India's salvation. Just like Europe, India would be Islamicized in next 50 years or so unless the Hindus wake up and control mohammadan stronghold of India's politics.
Shame on Mishra for forgetting his on past and siding with the criminals of the world who have killed more than 300 million non-Muslims thtroughout the world, including 80 to 100 million Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs in India alone!!!

What came first, for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, (and for so many others) the sheer hatred of muhammad or the mind-boggling love of Jesus?
It's the proverbial chicken and egg story, repeated over and over.

Interesting that Pankaj Mishra tries to use Voltaire against Ayann Hirshi Ali:
"In denouncing Islam unreservedly, she has claimed a precedent in Voltaire - though the eighteenth-century scourge of the Catholic Church might have been perplexed by her proposal that Muslims embrace the "Christianity of love and tolerance." In another respect, however, the invocation of Voltaire is more apt than Hirsi Ali seems to realize. Voltaire despised the faith and identity of Europe's religious minority: the Jews, who, he declared, "are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts," who had "surpassed all nations in impertinent fables, in bad conduct and in barbarism," and who "deserve to be punished."
Voltaire despised all organized religions and religious fanatism, but unfortunately shared the prevailing but unfounded belief of his time about the dreadful fanatical Judaism and Jews.
However, for a time Voltaire saw Islam as a rather rational religion without priests and miracles. He, and Gibbon, got this faulty impression of Islam from Pierre Bayle (dead 1706) who formulated the myth about Islamic tolerance in such a fascinating way that it lives on to this day, in spite of the fact that Bayle practically knew nothing about Islam and its history.
Another influence was Henri de Boulanviellers who wrote a biography about Muhammad in 1730. Without any knowledge of the Arabic language and no access to primary sources he also portraited Islam as infused with reason and without mysteries, and Muhammad as a great statesman and legislator of a kind nobody in the classical Europe could be compared with. The book was a hidden attack on Christianity in general and specifically against the priesthood.
When Voltaire described Christianity as the most rediculous, absurd and blody religion the world had ever seen, and praised Islam he used the established tradition and poor knowledge about Islam as a mean to fight Christianity.
Later in life Voltarire realised that Islam was far from the ideal he imagined. His play "LE FANATISME, OU MAHOMET LE PROPHÈTE from 1741, which portrayed the founder of Islam as an intriguer and fanatic greedy for power, was denounced by Catholic clergymen. They had no doubts that the true target was Christian fanaticism. However, Pope Benedict XIV, whom Voltaire dedicated the work, replied by saying that he read it with great pleasure.
Voltaire did not support the dogmatic theology of institutional religions, his religiosity was anticlerical. With his brother Armand, who was a fundamentalist Catholic, Voltaire did not get on as well as with his sister. Atheism Voltaire considered not as baleful as fanaticism, but nearly always fatal to virtue. The doctrines about the Trinity or the Incarnation he dismissed as nonsense. As a humanist, Voltaire advocated religious and social tolerance, but not necessarily in a direct way.
Hirshi Ali is right to claim a precedent in Voltaire as far as the fight against religious intolerance and fanatism is conserned. Voltaire was not without faults and blind spots but we should honor his valueable contributions to Enlightentment and the efforts to create the foundation for a democratic secular state where religion and politics are seperated. The only type of state that can guarantee religious freedom. That can guarantee Hirshi Ali is free to denaunce Islam in good strong words - as long as it last!


Hirsi Ali, who renounced Islam in her thirties, speaks from experience of bigotry and intolerance among her former co-religionists: she was genitally mutilated as a child in Somalia, briefly radicalized by a preacher of jihad in Kenya, nearly forced into a marriage, threatened with death in the Netherlands by the Muslim assassin of her collaborator, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, and is still hounded by murderous fanatics in her new home, America....
........................
One of the salient points about Ayaan Hirsi Ali—which Pankaj Mishra touches on above, even while attempting to debunk it—is that Ali has run into the same horrific aspects of Islam in so many very different parts of the world.
Some few of the specifics vary, certainly, by country or region. It is, for instance, less likely that she would have endured the horrors of FGM—including infibulation—in some other parts of Dar-al-Islam.
But what is more common are *the similarities*. She was born in Somalia and spent her earliest years there, was a grammar school girl in Saudi Arabia, a high-school girl in Kenya, was almost forced into an unwanted marriage in Canada, was a young adult in the Netherlands, and now makes her home in the United States.
In all these places she has encountered the violence and barbarity of Islam—oppression of women, punishment of those considered "un-Islamic" or "insufficiently Islamic", hatred of Jews, endless calls for Jihad. Even FGM, which might seem a discretely African phenomenon, is now found in Kurdistan, in Indonesia—and in Europe.
And the threats against her extend even to the United States, the heart of the West. The threat may be somewhat less dire here, due to the (comparatively) small Muslim population and a somewhat lower profile than she has in Europe—but the threat is still there.
I had the great good fortune to attend her appearance in San Francisco last month—even here, security was tight, and she has to retain bodyguards at all times.
Pankaj Mishra is hardly the only one trying to discredit Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
She can't, it is true, credibly be considered "a racist". But she is attacked for not being the right sort of feminist; for supposedly being too "conservative"; for her sympathy towards Christianity—which even her atheism is not a sufficient counter, in some quarters—but most of all, she is attacked for telling the "inconvenient truth" about Islam, which is too frightening for many, especially liberals, to face.
It is much easier to attack the messenger.

As fine a decimation of an article as I have read in some time. I mean we're talking dissection here by Spencer of Mishra's futile effort to whitewash Islam and subtly smear Hirsi Ali. I would be interested in a response by Mishra but I think he wouldn't dare. If he says anything he'll probably pull out one or two of those seven or eight words that liberals use so that they don't have to engage in an exchange of ideas. Words like "Islamophobe," "bigot," "right-winger," "ideologue," "hater" and the like.

The New York Time should be ashamed to have such a shallow, cursory writer on its staff. The apologists know no bounds.

Read the Quran and know your enemy

http://godofreason.com/new-page-170.htm
The Koran is a Declaration of Open-Ended War against the Kafirs
http://newstime.co.nz/quran-8-39-islam-will-dominate-the-world.html
Behind the Veil of Islam: The Grand Jihad
“If you know your enemy and yourself, you will win a hundred battles; if you know neither your enemies nor yourself, you will lose every battle.” Sun Tzu – The Art of War
“Both (Antichrist & Islam) Both Desire World Domination” 430 KB
“Turkey As The Antichrist Nation” 582 KB
Eurabia: The Planned Islamization of Europe” 425 KB

Pankaj was born in a small place called Jhansi in 1969. He went to Allahabad for B.A. & then was picked up by marxists caders of Jawahar Lal University (JNU)of Delhi in scouting. JNU & Allahabad are both dens of Torts of Marxism & Radical Islamism. JNU is a bogus institution set up & created to promote Tort Marxism , a close sister of Islamism.
Pankaj Mishra is an typical example of fraudulent intellectualism cultivated in sources where he got his early education combined with lack of first hand expereince & knowledge of critically important events of India that happened either before he was born or was too young (6 years of age) to appreciate. They are the 1).1948 war of India of J&K; 2). 1962 war of Indo China 3.) war of 1965 of India-Pakistan 4). war of 1971 for Bangladesh.5). The Inglorious Emergency of 1975 , crafted by Tort Leftists in Congress infiltration. Whatever he has learned is through distorted historical texts & in an inabreation of Utopian Dreams . Alas they only bring forth miseries . Mishra needs to understand & learn himself first .

Pankaj Mishra is a young writer and Hindu, but a Hindu who is on the make in the West, and therefore he is quick to distance himself from anything smacking of what he calls "communalism" and that means, as those from India can testify, only one thing: Hindus ostentatiously denouncing anything smacking of what they see, quite wrongly, as BJP-connected dislike of Islam. But the most advanced, liberal, and interesting of people. These include Oriana Fallaci (who spent part of her life reporting on, and denouncing, the Vietnam venture and those known collectively as "the Greek colonels" and began her study of Islam by meeting with, spending long hours with, Khomeini, Arafat, and Qaddafy (and even coming under Israeli fire when she was spending time with the PLO); unable to deal with this, as he is unable to deal with the phenomenon of Ayaan Hirsi Ali (surely Islam's worst nightmare), Pankaj Mishra denounces Hirsi Ali, by associtation, for being impressed with Oriana Fallaci's "The Rage and the Pride" (which made such an impression, and had such an influence, in Italy) for a single phrase she used about Muslmis "breeding like rats."
It includes Magdi Allam, whose life-story, from Egypt to Italy, from Islam -- which he only reluctantly abandoned, when he understood, he testifies, to what Islam ineluctably was, for he was tied by filial piety to his humble, kind, nominally Muslim Egyptian parents. who had allowed him not only to attend a Christian school, but even to befriend one of the last remaining Jews, a girl his age, in Cairo.
It includes Wafa Sultan, who has nothing to gain, and everything to lose, including her life, by her penetrating analysis of Islam in "The God That Hates" and in her appearances on Al-Jazeera that now require her to live in hiding.
It includes Ibn Warraq, and Nonie Darwish, and many many others, who contrary to what the thrusting careerist Pankaj Mishra -- who because he has travelled and seen some of the obvious outward and visible differences among Muslims, and noticed that they are not all foaming at the mouth -- whoever thoought otherwise? certainly not Ayaan Hirsi Ali? -- thinks he has become an expert on world Islam, and does not have to read either the great scholars (Schacht, Snouck Hurgronje, Jeffrey, Lammens, Tisdall, Zwemer, or many dozens of others), and can afford to ignore the testimony not only of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but of all the other articulate apostates whose lives, and works, have been made possible only because they now enjoy the mental freedom, and physical security (such as it is), in the West.
Pankaj Mishra may be winning points, so he may think, by his determination to be an apologist for Islam, but he lacks the keen perception of V. S. Naipaul -- and curiously, Mishra has written introductions to two collections by Naipaul, but not of course to "Among the Believers" or "Beyond Belief."
Ayaan Hirsi Ali can certainly handle herself. But a little psychobiography of Pankaj Mishra -- Indians in India and America should feel free to join in -- may be useful, in identifying the promptings that led him to such an outrageous, offensive, and in the end silly, missing-the-point review.

quote from the new yorker :
"Nomad" is unlikely to earn Hirsi Ali many Muslim admirers.
Can I say then 'Mr Churchill's remarks are unlikely to earn him many Nazi admirers '
Any comments I might make here would not earn me many muslim admirers but I'm not trying to flatter or please them , none of us are - we'd like them to face the truth about their ideology and join the civilised world

...as the new saying goes, "Muslims are the new Jews." There is just one problem with this ghastly equation, which trivializes the mass-murders of Jews in Europe and defames Hirsi Ali: Jews never carried out terrorist attacks in Europe, and never boasted about how they were one day going to take over...
Implicit in this elementary fact which PC MC ignores is a principle which I hope those in the Anti-Islam Movement support: namely, that if any group -- no matter how large or small, no matter how ostensibly religious or not, no matter how ethnic or not -- were to do and say what Muslims are doing and saying (and have been doing and saying for centuries), we in the Anti-Islam Movement would feel the same about them.
Let's use more direct language to bring that principle into acute clarity:
If, for example, Jews were doing and saying what Muslims are doing and saying, we would now have an Anti-Jewish Movement. Or, if Christians were doing and saying what Muslims are doing and saying, we would now have an Anti-Christian Movement. Or, if Hindus were doing and saying what Muslims are doing and saying, we would now have an Anti-Hindu Movement. There should be no group in the world immune from this principle.
I.e., the reason we are not Anti-Jewish (or Anti-Christian, etc.) is not because of some abstract axiom we hold that could never be contravened by evidence, but by our adherence to concrete facts. Simply put, Jews (or Christians, etc.) are not doing and saying what Muslims are doing and saying -- and, importantly, show no signs either in their behavior or in their subcultures of ever doing and saying what Muslims are doing and saying.
Some of us may wish to comfort ourselves with the conviction that this fact about Jews (or Christians, etc.) reflects an immutable abstract axiom, but that conviction should not be erected over against the principle I have articulated and advocate, for the flip side of my argument is that this principle demonstrates that we are not against Muslims simply because they are Muslims, or out of some abstract animus of bigotry or irrational hatred, or (alas) out of some eschatological blueprint -- but simply because of what they are concretely saying and doing (and have been doing and saying for centuries).
Now, it could be further argued that what Muslims are saying and doing (and have been doing and saying for centuries) reflects a strange and unique essence -- psychologically, sociologically and spiritually -- that could, and will, never change; but that would be an ontological question, which should be carefully distinguished from the pragmatic problem of simply attending, and responding, to the concrete behaviors and expressions of Muslims.
As the West reawakens to the problem of Islam in the decades of this new 21st century, we may well find that our pragmatic responses to what Muslims are saying and doing would, practically speaking, resemble a response to an ontological essence; but again, that should never distract us from our attention to the data, and we should never let our actions be primarily guided by some abstract axiom. Indeed, PC MC today represents precisely an abstract axiom -- but one which is preventing the West from attending to the data of Muslims in a rational way.

There is no open-ended, universal imperative in Jewish Scripture calling upon Jews to wage war against non-Jews and subjugate them under their rule (and the verses from Deuteronomy and Joshua that are always invoked to claim that there is such an imperative have never been understood that way by Jewish or Christian exegetes).
The problems here are twofold:
1) The mainstreamers have been fed such a steady diet of bullshit since the ex-hippies took over about 40 yrs ago that they must detest Judo-Christianity, the very basis for Western Civilization, and assume the worst of its scriptures, tenets and teachings.
2) The mainstreamers are so racist -- in the manner of nouveau racisme, the good racism, of course -- that they must love Islam and assume only the very best of its scriptures, tenets and teachings. (The vast majority of Moslems are non-white).
And don't kid yourselves: the mainstreamers own the narrative and the dialog from the ground up, from kindergarten through grad school, the law schools and the courts, the newspapers and networks, the government offices, the legislatures, the corporate HR departments, the board rooms, the philanthropic funds, everything. Hell, they've even gone deep into the militaries at this point.
*** 92:8 ***
The fact that one can imbibe a taste of good old fashioned antisemitism in the act only makes it more fun for them.

Whenever I see such discussions there it comes always to my mind a very serious, I think, issue... the issue of reforming Islam. I have seen Robert in many places saying that such a thing may be possible as in the cases of the Mormons in America and Shinto in after WW2 Japan. To be honest, to me such a thing seems impossible. Concepts as the division of World to 'dar'ul Harb' and 'dar-ul Islam', that of 'jihad', of 'dhimmitude' , of 'jizya', of the whole rules of 'sharia' etc are interrelated in a quite 'organic' way to what in Islam is believed as 'revelation'. That's to say if you detach them from Islam, there remains no Islam anymore.
How can a passage of Koran which says 'kill the unbelievers unless they accept to live as some kind of inferior beings and slaves' can be explained, for example, in a reformed way? By interpreting it as symbolical? Is it something so possible when Muhammad itself was a warrior chief? Or how you can present a passage which says 'beat your wives whenever it is needed', so that it can be considered 'reformed'? And let not forget: how to feel free to 'play' with such passages given that they are perceived as God's word uttered through angel Gabriel himself? Which Muslim could dare such a thing?
Really, if you detach all those concepts from Islam there remains not even a single reason for its being a different religion. The thing remaining is an Old Testament kind monotheism. So what reason it could have for existing, in such a case?
I think this question is the core question about Islam... which it leads to another immediately appearing question too, about how could Islam's case may be managed in the coming years of history.
Just this is the reason that sometimes this question leads to logical conclusions which makes a near future apocalyptic, as to its dimensions, clash look as inevitable. Of course, it is not something any sane human being can wish but, nevertheless, it is a thought which is persistent in mind as an equation's logical outcome, somehow.
I would like to hear some possible alternatives to this 'equation's solution... if there exist, of course, any such alternatives in some peoples' minds.

It baffles me why a Hindu Brahmin will become an apologist for Islam. During Mughal time, the brutalization and beheadings of Brahmins and priests(who were Brahmins) were their primary objective. To see one of their own would defend Islam is incomprehensible. The seculaist modern India has totally lost touch with her Hindu heritage and Pankaj Mishra is an obvious product. Another name that competes with Mishra is that of Dinesh D'Souza who is a christian( I am guessing his religion by his last name, D'Souza). So it doesn't make much difference whether one is a Hindu or a Christian when brain washing occurs from an early age!!!

Of course Berman is right [and Pankaj Mishra silly in his attack on Berman, in his attempt to blacken the name, and limit the influence of the book, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali]\. Buruma has now gotten his wish, his ardent desire, his safe-haven of tenure, in the safe-haven of the United States of America, a sinecure he no doubt owes to Leon Botstein (or was it George Soros, whose wife helps finance some kind of arts stuff at Bard?), and now that he's safely taken care of for the rest of his life he might begin to rethink what he has written about Tariq Ramadan, and his whole attitude -- and understanding -- of Islam. But I doubt if he will.
Meanwhile, Timothy Garton Ash, Ian Buruma's good friend, made his name, and his entire career, from his reporting in the Balkans. And there his experience provided an almost unique example of a case where Muslims were, or at least seemed to the superficial to be, the victims and the Serbs seemed, to some (but not all, not to Peter Handke, not to a certain Canadian general), the villains. In fact it was much more complicated and the main thing to understand was the historical context: the great fear that Izetbegovic, in calling for the imposition of Shari'a in Bosnia, created among the Serbs, who had been the victims of the Ottoman Turks, and of the devshirme, and general cultural degringolade, for centuries, and who were so frightened Serbs that some -- too many -- were temporarily willing to be led by the likes of Milosevic.
And the other source for Timothy Garton Ash's understanding of Islam was that provided by the apologists at St. Antony's College (founded with money left to Oxford by a Jewish trader from Aden, Anton Besse), the ones in the Middle East wing of the two-winged place, with Timothy
Garton Ash in the East European, far more acceptable wing. It wasn't just the likes of the late Albert Hourani (who has been replaced by the non-Muslim apologist for Islam Rogan), but also such people as Avi Shlaim, who know nothing about Islam but talk a good anti-Israel game. And then there arrived, first as a lean lecturer until the Arabs could buy him a professorship, none other than Tariq Ramadan, and Timothy Garton Ash thought he was just swell.
I note that Ian Buruma, originally scheduled to be among those who would offer soft-balls to Tariq Ramadan on his recent royal progress - not quite, I'm glad to say, quite as royal as he expected -- through the academic archipelago, appears to have backed out.
I wonder if that was indeed the case.
If he had appeared, and had performed his usual role as apologist, then the things said by his friend Timothy Gartaon Ash at a certain debate in London a few years ago, when at a certain opint, according to eyewitnesses, in the heat of the whole thing, though Timothy Garton Ash had taken upon himself to be an apologist for Islam, he "lost it" and admitted all kinds of unpleasant things about Muhammad. And then, just afterwards, he realized what he had done and, quivering with fear, went up to everyone he could and begged, or demanded, that all videotapes and audiotapes of what he had said be destroyed, for fear of what might happen to him. That incident shows that he perfectly understands the nightmarish ability of Muslims to intimidate Westerners -- for he, Timothy Garton Ash, is among them.
I'm still waiting for Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Buruma to discuss that incident, and in detail. I'm waiting for Ian Buruma to demonstrate that he has begun to study Islam, and to think about its texts, tenets, attitudes, atmospherics, and about what the great Western scholars of Islam (not the espositos, but Joseph Schacht, and Snouck Hurgronje and Arthur Jeffrey and Henri Lammens and dozens of others) and the most articulate defectors from the Army of Islam, such as Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Magdi Allam, Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Magdi Allam, have written. He owes this to the people, including himself, who have been misled.
But will he do it?
J'en doute.
The hypocrisy of these people astounds.

Continuing my earlier comments:
Pankaj Mishra's attitude is in line with what the present Prime Minister of India, Man Mohan Singh also thinks of Islam and Muslims. A few yeras back he proclaimed that Muslims of India have first right over country's resources - the comments being made when he was pushing for quota system for Muslims for bank loans, scholarships, college admissions etc.
He is another fine India who has forgotten that Mughal emperors, Jehangir and Aurangjeb beheaded two of the revered Gurus of Sikhism, Guru Arjundev and Guru Teg Bahadur. The main Gurudwara(Sikh Temple) in Delhi is known as Gurudwara Shish Ganj where the beheading of Teg bahadur occured and his head was mounted and publicly displayed(shish meaning head). It is after this incidence, Guru Teg Bahadur's son Guru Gobindsingh started the present Khalsa division to drive out the Muslim invaders from India.
Alas, the memories are short lived - even the Sikh Prime Minister of India has lost touch with History. When such is the case with the Prime Minister of India, Mishra and D'souza are only small fries in comparison - who cares for them!!

Taken from www.jihadspin.org, one among thousands of websites (run by both Muslims and non-Muslims), where the doctrine of Jihad, the very essence of Islam, the essence that escapes Pankaj Mishra in his travels "through Muslim Asia" (yes, an ideology, its texts and tenets, and their effects on the minds of adherents, is hard to see if all you see is what is standing before you) is discussed:
Here is the celebrated Iraqi scholar Majid Khadduri, in his 1955 treatise on “War and Peace in Islam”:
Thus the Jihad may be regarded as Islam's instrument for carrying out its ultimate objective by turning all people into believers, if not in the prophethood of Muhammad (as in the case of the dhimmis), at least in the belief of God. The Prophet Muhammad is reported to have declared "some of my people will continue to fight victoriously for the sake of the truth until the last one of them will combat the anti-Christ." Until that moment is reached the Jihad, in one form or another will remain as a permanent obligation upon the entire Muslim community. It follows that the existence of a dar al-harb is ultimately outlawed under the Islamic jural order; that the dar al-Islam (Islamic community) are permanently under Jihad obligation until the dar al-harb is reduced to non-existence; and that any community accepting certain disabilities- must submit to Islamic rule and reside in the dar al-Islam or be bound as clients to the Muslim community. The universality of Islam, in its all embracing creed, is imposed on the believers as a continuous process of warfare, psychological and political if not strictly military.
And in 1996, the Syrian-German scholar Bassam Tibi wrote this:
At its core, Islam is a religious mission to all humanity. Muslims are religiously obliged to disseminate the Islamic faith throughout the world. "We have not sent thee but as a universal (Messenger) to men, giving them glad tidings, and warning them (against sin), but most men understand not." Qur'an [[34:28]. If non-Muslims submit to conversion or subjugation, this call (da'wa) can be pursued peacefully. If they do not, Muslims are obliged to wage war against them. In Islam, peace requires that non-Muslims submit to the call of Islam, either by converting or by accepting the status of a religious minority (dhimmi) and paying the imposed poll tax, jizya. World peace, the final stage of the da'wa, is reached only with the conversion or submission of all mankind to Islam…Muslims believe that expansion through war is not aggression but a fulfillment of the Qur'anic command to spread Islam as a way to peace. The resort to force to disseminate Islam is not war (harb), a word that is used only to describe the use of force by non-Muslims. Islamic wars are not hurub (the plural of harb) but rather futuhat, acts of "opening" the world to Islam and expressing Islamic Jihad. Relations between dar al-Islam, the home of peace, and dar al-harb, the world of unbelievers, nevertheless take place in a state of war, according to the Qur'an and to the authoritative commentaries of Islamic jurists. Unbelievers who stand in the way, creating obstacles for the da'wa, are blamed for this state of war, for the da'wa can be pursued peacefully if others submit to it. In other words, those who resist Islam cause wars and are responsible for them. Only when Muslim power is weak is 'temporary truce' (hudna) allowed (Islamic jurists differ on the definition of 'temporary').

Spencer writes:
...neither Ayaan Hirsi Ali nor anyone else is talking about rounding up Muslims and gassing them to death, or deporting them wholesale, or any such. It is a peculiar leap of logic to say that because one group was falsely accused of supremacist designs and was persecuted as a result, therefore any other group accused of supremacist designs must be falsely accused, with the accusers nursing genocidal aspirations.
The logic of PC MC in this regard is not really peculiar, nor is it a leap.
The fact is, when we explicitly or implicitly condemn Islam, we are by logical extension condemning all Muslims. We may hem and haw and try to assure those who connect this particular dot that we are not doing this, but the dot-connection is a reasonable inference -- for a Muslim is precisely a person who supports, and derives inspiration and existential identity from, Islam. And if we condemn the latter, how are we not condemning the former?
Whenever this issue becomes forced into explicit response, the Anti-Islam analysts usually try to do an end-run around it, by hypothesizing that many (or most?) Muslims "don't really know their Islam", or are "lax Muslims who don't really practice it", or indeed may be "reformists" of one stripe or another. These hypotheses (with no solid grounding in fact) serve two functions:
1) they attempt to placate the PC MCs, who control the sociopolitical discussion about Islam in the West, and convince them that we are not "against all Muslims"
and
2) they reflect a sincerely liberal (or Christian, or often, both) attitude that is anxiously disinclined to condemn a whole People.
Sometimes, a given Anti-Islam analyst's use of those hypotheses may reflect #1 and not #2; sometimes vice versa; or sometimes an incoherent mixture of the two. But it must be asked: Is it not rather illogical (if not comically preposterous) to suppose that there exist viably massive numbers of Muslims out there who do not support Islam?
So we see that within the Anti-Islam Movement itself, there is lurking the same logic that leads the PC MCs "to say that because one group was falsely accused of supremacist designs and was persecuted as a result, therefore any other group accused of supremacist designs must be falsely accused, with the accusers nursing genocidal aspirations." What differentiates us from the PC MCs is that the latter hold tenaciously to an abstract axiom that forever forbids us from condemning Muslims, no matter how massive is the mountain of data that damns them and their Islam. On our side, however, we have Anti-Islam analysts who with similar tenacity resist the logical consequence of that mountain of data which we are able to notice and digest. That logical consequence is the condemnation of all Muslims. The problem is not the condemnation, but what we do about it. We will not "round them up" nor "genocide" them. But we will have to do something, to protect our societies from them.
And let us not forget that the PC MCs are exceedingly hypersensitive about this issue. Any negative criticism of Islam or by extension of Muslims is deemed to be perilously close to the slippery slope that leads to "rounding up Muslims and gassing them to death, or deporting them wholesale, or any such." This too is logical: PC MCs know that if there is a potential eventuality that is horrible, the best way to prevent it is to stop it at its source -- and the source of this horrible potential they envision, "another Holocaust" this time against poor Muslims, is precisely the thought crimes of saying too many negative things about Islam and by extension about the Muslims who support Islam (and how many Muslims don't support Islam?)
The specific reasons for this logic are many, but the two most important are:
1) we are implicitly condemning not merely a "group", but an entire People who hail from over 50 countries around the world, who have a rich culture that goes back 1,400 years, and whose culture is massively deemed to be a "world religion"
2) this entire People we are implicitly condemning are perceived to be an ethnic people (or a wonderfully diverse rainbow of ethnic peoples), and thus immediately and irrevocably the hot buttons of Reverse Racism are pushed -- for in the PC MC climate, which is dominant and mainstream throughout the West, one cannot say anything negative about designated ethnic peoples (or if you do say anything negative, please say it in exceedingly gingerly terms, say it fleetingly, do not press the issue, and desist politely -- and we may still allow you to have your career).

Hugh quotes Khadduri and Tibi as modern Muslims who advocate violent supremacist jihad.
Another name may be added, the Indian scholar and political activist al-Mashriqi, born in 1888, and quite active into the 20th century. He founded the Khaksar Movement, an Indian Muslim separatist movement.
In one of his writings, al-Mashriqi expressed designs that go far beyond a mere regional concern in northern India:
“...we [Muslims] have again to dominate the whole world. We have to become its conqueror and its rulers.”
And in a pamphlet titled Islam ki Askari Zindagi he stated:
“The Koran has proclaimed in unequivocal words to the world that the Prophet was sent with the true religion and definite instruction that he should make all other religions subservient to this religion [Islam]...”
Al-Mashriqi also wrote a book called Tazkira which, as Andrew Bostom described it, “produced a quintessential message of Islam enshrining the ideals of militaristic nation-building” I.e., it promulgated and highlighted the supremacist expansionism through militant means that is essential to Islamic doctrine and Islamic history.
Incidentally, al-Mashriqi met Adolf Hitler in 1926. In his own account of this meeting, al-Mashriqi wrote:
“I was astounded when he [Hitler] told me that he knew about my Tazkirah. The news flabbergasted me. . . I found him very congenial and piercing. He discussed Islamic Jihad with me in details. In 1930 I sent him my Isharat concerning the Khaksar movement with a picture of a spade-bearer Khaksar at the end of that book. In 1933 he started his Spade Movement. ”
Hat tip to our former friend Andrew Bostom:
http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=32831
Also see:
http://hesperado.blogspot.com/2008/10/hitler-and-islam_28.html


=Hugh quotes Khadduri and Tibi as modern Muslims who advocate violent supremacist jihad."
No, I do not.
I quote Khadduri and Tibi as authorities on the doctrine of Jihad in Islam, not as "modern Muslims who advocate violent supremacist Jihad."
And I would never use the phrase "violent supremacist Jihad" -- the piling on of adjectives, including the unnecessary "supremacist," is not something I would ever do.

I haven't yet read Ali's book, but I will. More power to her.

"Who now remembers the murder of the Armenians?" Hitler asked as he launched his invasion of Poland the the genocide against the Jews.
The link between Nazism and violent Islam is well known.
We remember, Adolf, we remember.

@Hesperado
I really don't get your response and I don't agree with you. Islam is an ideology, i.e. a set of beliefs. I reject Islam because of its beliefs. Islam is incompatible with universal human rights, it is incompatible with every persons right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness irrespective of race, gender and religion. Therefore I reject Islam.
I am not condemning an "entire people" or an "ethnic people". Islam is no ethnicity or race. I am not condemning each and every muslim. I do not even know each and every muslim. Many muslims do not know how to read and write. They have very little knowledge of their own religion. Many supposed muslims are only muslims by name, since they would be killed by their fellow muslims if they left their faith.
But I do condemn those muslims who preach hatred and jihad against non-believers. Why do I condemn them? Because they do not tolerate me. There is a limit to tolerance. I do not tolerate murder, I do not tolerate theft, I do not tolerate torture, I do not tolerate rape, I do not tolerate violence and I do not tolerate any people who incite fellow muslims to murder and violence against non-muslims. This is merely a matter of self respect and my will to survive.
Regards,
KilianKlaiber

Brilliant article, with the distinct look of unanswerability to it (speaking under correction - I am not an expert on the subject).
I have to say, though, that there is always some frustration entailed on reading this kind of thing. Why isn't THIS in The New Yorker?
I'd love to see an attempt at an answer, but the Pankaj Mishras need never try that on. Just ignoring what they can't answer is preferable, and all too easily done.

Very few Jews have are obsessed with a hatred of Arabs, but 300 million Arabs hate Jews mainly because they are Jewish. Because of the holocaust Jews have escaped to a tiny part of an enormous Arab land, unfortunately many Arabs were dispossessed. But Arabs were responsible for slaughtering hundreds of thousands in Sudan/Darfur and Nigeria, let them not cast the first stone at Israel. There is cruelty in every part of the world, but the guilt should be distributed evenly.

"There is cruelty in every part of the world, but the guilt should be distributed evenly."
No it should be distributed justly, not evenly!


I quote Khadduri and Tibi as authorities on the doctrine of Jihad in Islam, not as "modern Muslims who advocate violent supremacist Jihad."
It may be redundant to you, but pedagogically a little redundancy never hurts -- particularly in a sociopolitical climate illterate about jihad.
And I would never use the phrase "violent supremacist Jihad" -- the piling on of adjectives, including the unnecessary "supremacist," is not something I would ever do.
Actually, I would pile on another adjective: expansionist.
Each of the three adjectives performs a distinct function:
violent refers to the necessary element of violence in the doctrine of jihad, symbiotically and inextricably linked with the other ostensibly non-violent ways in which Muslims pursue it, and making those other non-violent ways a problem where no problem would exist were the violence forever non-existent.
supremacist refers to the premise that guides Muslims to their conclusion: The premise being that they are the best of all peoples, because the true God has made them custodians of the absolute truth and of the way to avoid eternal damnation and win eternal paradise.
expansionist, consequently, refers to the conclusion: that Muslims must make Islam dominant throughout the world.
Any one of these without the other two would not pose a great problem for the world:
For example, a group that was violent, but not supremacist or expansionist, would pose only criminal problems, not a problem of warfare.
A group that is supremacist, but not violent or expansionist, may express pernicious ideas, but if they never harm anyone in the furtherance of their ideas, and if the surrounding society is relatively healthy, they will be largely ignored when not roundly refuted and will certainly not persuade anyone but a tiny minority of unhealthy souls.
Finally, a group that is expansionist, but not violent or supremacist, may or may not be bad for society. If, for example, the 4-H Club were expansionist, there would be little to object about. Or if an expansionist group did propose pernicious ideas, they would be impotent to persuade the body politic in any healthy society -- unless they used violence.
Which brings me to another important adjective to pile on to jihad: anti-liberal -- or, for those who recoil at the L word: unjust -- or, for those who require more beef in their diet: sociopathic.


Respectfully, I would argue that virtually any claim of unethical or illegitimate Arab dispossession of land is entirely mythical. The Jews, beginning as far back as the last decades of the nineteenth century, bought the land from Arab and Turkish landlords, and ordinarily at exorbitant prices. Other land was won in warfare by the Jews in 1948 when the Arab Muslim world left no doubt that it would accept no Jewish state at all. None of this adds up to illegitimate dispossesion.
Moreover, the Arabs for centuries had done little with the land which I will here call "Palestine." Nor had they made any significant attempt to free themselves of their Ottoman Turkish masters. Only because the Ottoman Empire aligned with the losing side in WWI did the Arabs finally get their own independent nations, ones which almost certainly would not have come into existence but for the Allies in WWI beating the Central Powers and all of which Arab states to this day remain nations where true freedom is non-existent.
Sorry if I don't feel any sympathy for the Arabs. They deserve the fate they now experience because they are quite clearly the single most dysfunctional major people on earth. Pretty damn brutal too, with others and with each other, though this is regularly glossed over by the Western elites.

You are barking up the wrong tree. Read "Krieg der Civilizationen", 1995, by Bassam Tibi. He point out the necessity for Muslims to demand liberation from the rigors of Sharia and acceptance of seperation of religion and politics. What more could you ask for from a critical and reflective cultural Muslim?



The untested assumption that jihad terrorism was caused by poverty, and that draining the poverty swamp would cause terrorism to wither, is another beauty, along with "Islam is a religion of peace", due to George W and his administration's response to 9/11. It was obvious on that day that the main actors involved in the hijackings were from privileged backgrounds and it is people from those backgrounds who would be the ones able to see themselves as rightful leaders and wielders of power in Islamic countries, and beyond, and therefore seek to do so, a necessary, although admittedly not sufficient, requirement.
The loony left in the media and in politics can be expected to indulge in intellectual sleight of hand along these lines. It has been the failure of those on the conservative side of politics to speak the truth, and instead sprout rubbish that enabled these falsities to be accpted wisdom, that is the terrible disappointment.

But it is worth noting that, by 1941, when the mufti sidled up to Hitler and, soon afterward, began to air his anti-Semitic rants on the radio, reactionary pan-Islamists like him had to contend with overlapping groups of liberal Westernizers, Marxists, and secular Arab nationalists; far from being representative of the larger Arab world, the mufti was a fast-diminishing figure even in his own small sphere of influence
Right, the Egyptian monarchists, Nasser's socialists and Sadddam's Bathists wanted nothing but peaceful coexistence with the Jews!
I remember from reading John Roy Carlson that even those more enlightened Egyptians--the socialists, the Marxists, the Westernizers, the secularists--all were determined that the Jews must be stopped from having a state in the Middle East. Their Arab honor, the health of the Arab nation, the fact that a successful Jewish state would demoralize and set back the Arabs or some similar ideas were always expressed.
As for all the competing ideologies, in "The Closed Circle," Pryce-Jones talks about how the same group of elites basically ran the Arab countries and just took turns in power depending on whether they want to court the West or the Soviet block countries. One person would call himself the anti-communist while another would call himself the socialist. In reality, they were both similar autocratic elites out to get the best deal for themselves from which ever foreign power was handing out money and weapons.

Ahh, the New Yorker. Back in the 1980's, I got a gift subscription to the mag. It was full of "My Incredibly Oppressive Irish Catholic Girlhood" sorts of articles, which all made me think that the magazine was charging full speed ahead into the year 1968. Even the cartoons were rather flat and uninteresting.
The prestige print media in America, I propose, is ossified. Its editors and major writers all seem to be a vast, thundering herd of [predictably Lefitsh] independent minds who will go plunging over a cliff rather than open their eyes. This and the quotes from Bawer elsewhere on JW underscore the need for a newer, more awake journalism run by others.

Haha
I searched the page immediately for Hugh's comments. I knew he would enlighten us. As an Indian I can attest to the accuracy of his statement. Pankaj Mishra is firmly in the tradition of a West-facing intellectual who pretends to denounce the West while adopting its WORST ideas (Marxism, socialism). He has disparaged India's economic growth with usual socialist arguments, arguing for Nehru. He regularly denounces any support for Hinduism or opposition to Islam or jihad.
The usual. YAWN. Only difference is that hes on the up in the West. So he feels emboldened to continue on this trajectory.

Kilian,
You responded to my argument with a complex bundle difficult to disentangle, but I'll do my best, by piecing out and numerating your points:
1) "I am not condemning an "entire people" "
You may very well not be in your conscious mind intending to condemn an entire people. But if you condemn Islam, the problem opens up, as I already argued above.
2) :"...or an "ethnic people". Islam is no ethnicity or race."
I didn't say it was. I said our dominant and mainstream sociopolitical culture, PC MC, perceives Muslims to be an ethnic people, or a diverse collection of ethnic peoples. And they have some reason to do so, since the vast majority of Muslims are in fact, an ethnic people of one sort or another, and only a tiny minority are whites.
3) "Many muslims do not know how to read and write. They have very little knowledge of their own religion."
Being illiterate does not prevent a person from being brainwashed. In fact, Islamic culture is not a reading culture -- it is an oral culture, where most Muslims listen to sermons or public harangues or the discussions of smaller circles of "learned men" among them -- not to mention they also assimilate much of their Islamic worldview through their families as they grow up. The basics of the Islamic worldview that are causing problems in the world -- hatred of the other; a feeling of superiority; a feeling of a right or obligation to take what belongs to others because they are inferior; a victimization sense of being constantly wounded and attacked because the world is not Islamic; a gangster mentality that admires violent action in order redress grievances; etc: all these attitudes can be, and are, instilled in multitudes of Muslims without those Muslims reading hardly anything. If you think Muslims have to actually read texts to become dangerously Islamic, you have a naively limited view of Islamic culture.
4) " Many supposed muslims are only muslims by name"
I see you are pulling out all the hypotheses to explain how it oculd be that we are not condemning all Muslims -- "most Muslims are illiterate", now "many Muslims are not really Muslims". There are many more similar hypotheses -- all desperate attempts by sincere-minded non-Muslims to try to save the Entire People of Islam from our condemnation. One problem with these hypotheses is: how can you tell which Muslims are which? How do you discern that a Muslim ia a "Muslim by name only"? Just because he tells you he likes music and he wears blue jeans and he says he doesn't like the "Wahhabis" or the "Salafis"? I'm not going to risk the lives of my fellow citizens on flimsy tests like these.
5) "since they would be killed by their fellow muslims if they left their faith."
Muslims have been killing Muslims for centuries. A Muslim marked for death by fellow Muslims is not a reliable indicator of that Muslim's trustworthiness.

Ipso Facto wrote:
"You are barking up the wrong tree. Read "Krieg der Civilizationen", 1995, by Bassam Tibi. He point out the necessity for Muslims to demand liberation from the rigors of Sharia and acceptance of seperation of religion and politics. What more could you ask for from a critical and reflective cultural Muslim?"
Is that the same Bassam Tibi who wrote:
At its core, Islam is a religious mission to all humanity... If non-Muslims submit to conversion or subjugation, this call (da'wa) can be pursued peacefully. If they do not, Muslims are obliged to wage war against them.
?
If he wrote both statements, obviously the one I quoted cancels out the one you quoted.
Check.

But a little psychobiography of Pankaj Mishra -- Indians in India and America should feel free to join in -- may be useful
First things first, this is a JNU product. JNU is the strongest left-wing bastion in all major Indian universities.
In general, Indian history taught in high schools is cleansed of Islamic atrocities. In case, the atrocities are mentioned, the connection with Islamic ideology is never made.

"I have to say, though, that there is always some frustration entailed on reading this kind of thing. Why isn't THIS in The New Yorker?"
As a longtime NY subscriber, I couldn't agree more. Robert or Hugh, if you are reading these comments, why not submit such rebuttals (or briefer versions, in the form of letters to the editor) to the NY, NYT, etc?

Very well spoken in both your posts, Hesperado,
but we are told, by Muslims and Islam-defenders again and again that: There is great diversion and division among Muslims. And indeed, in effect, assured that there are diverse, indeed many versions of Islam.
So what we need is:
- knowledge, information about the most prominent Islam-versions.
- knowledge as far as possible about the declared or hidden real unity, loyalty of the vast majority of Muslims behind the Ummah, in which are hiding definitely Islam-versions that are anti-democratic. These must be discarded by Muslims in favor of our constitutions and laws when in contradiction with Islamic Divine laws by Muslims in order for our society to trust them.

"Is that the same Bassam Tibi who wrote:
"At its core, Islam is a religious mission to all humanity... If non-Muslims submit to conversion or subjugation, this call (da'wa) can be pursued peacefully. If they do not, Muslims are obliged to wage war against them."
?
If he wrote both statements, obviously the one I quoted cancels out the one you quoted.
Check."
I think you have to apply the principle of abrogation here. He could have written both statements years apart and then the latest cancels out the former. Even Allah allowed to correct himself, unfortunately to the worse, but Tibi seems to be moving in the opposite direction.
The latest article I could find from Tibi is from March 2007. This quote seems relevant to our discussion:
"Tariq Ramadan presents Orthodox Islam as Euro-Islam presumably with the intent to deceive. But I say there can be no Europeanising of Islam unless Salafist concepts like Sharia and Jihad are abandoned through cultural-religious reforms, and this goes too for the vision of Islamisation through Da'awa and Hidjra. Only an Islam that is in tune with the fundamentals of cultural modernity (democracy, individual human rights, civil society) and embraces pluralism deserves to be defined as Euro-Islam. And furthermore, the concept of Euro-Islam applies only to Europe, in other words unlike the earlier universal vision of Westernising the world - the world of Islam included – it is not universalism."
Tibi seems here to reject the spread of Islam by any violent means.
On the other hand I am a bit worried about his narrow level of tolerance when it comes to an atheist apostate like Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Quoted from the same article:
"Despite this call to de-personalisation, I'll allow myself two comments on Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Tariq Ramadan, around whom this debate is revolving, to its detriment. What Hirsi Ali says about Islam is an affront to Muslims and to anyone who knows anything about Islam. When, for instance, she claims that our prophet and our holy book, the Koran, are a fiction, she insults all Muslims and puts a smirk on the faces of all historians of Islam. Of course, Hirsi Ali has every right to turn her back on Islam in the name of religious freedom and this is what she has done. But she should not abuse the religion just to score points cheaply for herself."
Rejecting all religions and their Holy Scriptures as fiction is not an insult and not an abuse of the religion or the believers. It is quite simply the legitimate positions of atheists and agnostics and in the name of freedom of religion such positions should be respected or ignored and not cause irrational ad hominum attacks.
Tibi has a lot to learn about tolerance, he is clearly unable to control his emotions and be rational when Islam is rejected as a fiction. Most of the Christians have learned to be tolerant but it took several hundred years of hard fighting by the rationalist and humanists to get that far. For hundred of years critique or rejection of the Christian dogmas was a risky and often deadly enterprise, and it still is in Islam. Tibi is not helpful in making Islam more tolerant and open to critique - and that he may be criticised for.
Tibi is attempting the impossible: To clean Islam of all the barbaric, aggressive, supremacist, racist and nasty stuff, and still claim what is left is Islam. ;-)
Link to article by Bassam Tibi:
http://www.signandsight.com/features/1258.html


In Sanskrit Mishra's first name Pankaj means a lotus. In fact, the word's literal meaning is "mud-born". It is clear that Mr. Mishra is still stuck with his head in the mud and has deliberately chosen to stay there. In doing so he will not gain the respect of muslims as he might have hoped. To them, he remains a filthy kafir after all. To us kafirs, he is just plain stupid.

Re: Bassam Tibi
I think it is quite possible that Bassam Tibi wrote both. He is a forthright critique of traditional Islam. "If non-Muslims submit to conversion or subjugation, this call (da'wa) can be pursued peacefully. If they do not, Muslims are obliged to wage war against them.". This is not something he advocates. It is something he describes and criticises as orthodox Islam.
On the other hand Bassam Tibi is someone who really wants to reform Islam. So here is what he wishes: "Only an Islam that is in tune with the fundamentals of cultural modernity (democracy, individual human rights, civil society) and embraces pluralism deserves to be defined as Euro-Islam."
Bassam Tibi is one of those very few muslims who really do want to change Islam and make it compatible to western values. He is in fact an ally and not a foe just like Irshad Manji.

"The fact is, when we explicitly or implicitly condemn Islam, we are by logical extension condemning all Muslims..."
"1) "I am not condemning an "entire people" "
You may very well not be in your conscious mind intending to condemn an entire people. But if you condemn Islam, the problem opens up, as I already argued above."
No I am not condemning a people. I am talking about a set of ideas, an ideology. I am not condemning a nation, race, people...
" 2) :"...or an "ethnic people". Islam is no ethnicity or race."
I didn't say it was. I said our dominant and mainstream sociopolitical culture, PC MC, perceives Muslims to be an ethnic people, or a diverse collection of ethnic peoples. And they have some reason to do so, since the vast majority of Muslims are in fact, an ethnic people of one sort or another, and only a tiny minority are whites."
Oh yes you did say this and you repeat it again. The vast majority of muslims are an ethnic people? Oh, yes, so muslim Persians, Pakistanis, Turks, Arabs, Indians, Indonesians all have a common language and heritage? Please check the facts. A muslim is someone who believes: "There is no god but Allah, Mohammed is his messenger." That's it. This has nothing to do with ethnicity.
"3) "Many muslims do not know how to read and write. They have very little knowledge of their own religion."
... If you think Muslims have to actually read texts to become dangerously Islamic, you have a naively limited view of Islamic culture."
Why do you put words in my mouth? I never said such a thing. I said that many people are born muslims and have very little knowledge of their religion. They have not read the quran or hadith because they are illiterate. I know a "muslim indonesian" who is married to a German! She apparently doesn't know her religion, because Shariah forbids women to marry non-muslims. There are many muslims who are not well educated and they have no sound understanding of their religion. This is just a statement of fact. Just like there are many many catholics who do not know the doctrines of their church or reject some of these doctrines, like the prohibition of premarital sex or homosexual sex. I do not condemn these people. Why should I?
"4) " Many supposed muslims are only muslims by name"
I see you are pulling out all the hypotheses to explain how it oculd be that we are not condemning all Muslims -- "most Muslims are illiterate", now "many Muslims are not really Muslims". "
Again putting words into my mouth. I didn't say "most muslims are illiterate", I said many muslims are illiterate. Check the facts, illiteracy in muslim countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, ... is in high.
You may not know many muslims. But, here in Germany, we have lots of them. Many of them do not follow the commandments of their prophet. They drink alcohol, they have premarital sex, they do not pray five times a day, they eat pork, they reject warfare for Islam, yes and some muslims disguise their true disbelief, because they are killed by fellow muslims, if they leave the faith.
I don't reject these people. I reject the ideology called islam. Bassam Tibi calls himself a muslim. Why should I reject Bassam Tibi? I don't reject him but he is a muslim. This proves that I do not reject each and every muslim.
You conclusion that if you reject Islam you must reject each and every muslim is thereby proven wrong.


"You conclusion that if you reject Islam you must reject each and every muslim is thereby proven wrong."
I agree completely with your conclusion and reject the claim made by Hesperado as inconsistent.
Hesperato makes the classical mistake not to distinguish between the metaphysical level and the empirical level - between the theoretical and practical level.
The word "Islam" is not unambiguous and the word "Muslim" even less so and to a certain degree an unknown.
I agree with Robert Spencer who explains his position in this simple way:
"Islam is not a monolith, and never have I said or written anything that characterizes all Muslims as terrorist or given to violence. To call attention to the roots and goals of jihad violence within Islamic texts and teachings, and to show how jihadists use those texts and teachings, says nothing at all about what any given Muslim believes or how he acts."
The historian Bat Ye´or explains in this interview the core problem in Islam:
Question: Daniel Pipes' slogan is "Fundamentalist Islam is the enemy; moderate Islam is the solution." But do you think there is hope for change?

Answer: I know moderate and brilliant Muslims, but I do not know of a school of thought, represented by teaching and publications, followed by millions of Muslims, called "moderate Islam."

Everyone hopes for a change, including Muslims. I never say "never."

But I think that changes will emerge if we start discussing these issues instead of hiding them under the carpet, and if we take measures to protect ourselves and become aware of language manipulation, like, for instance, pretending that jihad means peace and justice.

We should also support secular and modernist Muslims who are also targeted and hope desperately for our help and encouragement."
(Quoted from article in Dallas Morning News 'Time of jihad', June 18, 2005).
Case closed!




Well fisked, sir! :)

Your education minister is a Muslim? It's not just the West that has gone bonkers then!

Pankaj Mishra is, as noted above, a young and thrusting careerist. After an undistinguished education in India, this arriviste arrived in the West (he now "divides his time" between India and London, or is it London, New York, and India? I forget) and along the way, upthrustingly married the daughter of a former editor of the TLS, Ferdinand Mount. He kept trying to be published, kept being turned down, and then finally managed -- self-prommotion and aggressive agents are wonderful, aren't they? -- to wangle a large advance for the long and unreadable "The Romantics" (lots of supposedly colorful crowd scenes at train stations, so I'm told). His outstanding characteristic is a complete humorlessness, which belies the smiling photo of himself that you can find on-line. Let's leave it at that.

OMG he is Ferdinand Mount's son in law? I didn't know that. No wonder he spends some of his time in London then.

Kilian Klaiber quoted my comment in which I quoted him and responded --
Me: "The fact is, when we explicitly or implicitly condemn Islam, we are by logical extension condemning all Muslims..."
Klaiber: "1) "I am not condemning an "entire people" "
Me: You may very well not be in your conscious mind intending to condemn an entire people. But if you condemn Islam, the problem opens up, as I already argued above."
-- then responded:
"No I am not condemning a people. I am talking about a set of ideas, an ideology. I am not condemning a nation, race, people..."
This is an obtuse response by Klaiber. In the quote of mine he himself reproduced, I already explained that I assume he may very well not be condemning an entire People:
Me: You may very well not be in your conscious mind intending to condemn an entire people.
I then went on to clarify that what a person thinks they are doing is one thing, but sometimes the logical consequence of their related positions lead to the conclusion they claim to disavow -- they lead there, that is, if the person wants to maintain coherence:
"But if you condemn Islam, the problem opens up, as I already argued above."
The problem opens up, because Islam is the cherished culture and self-identity of an entire People -- Muslims. The phrase "an entire People" does not necessarily designate an "ethnic" People: it simply designates a collective who are unified by a culture -- in this case, by Islam. After we acknowledge this elementary fact, we can get into the wondrous diversity of Islam that would somehow militate against considering them to be one "entire People". Aside from the fact that the "diversity of Islam" is a premise (and conclusion) often used by the defenders of Islam, it also needs to be cogently argued to be persuasive in its function as a way to save some? many? most? Muslims from our condemnation. (However many Muslims get conceptually saved through this argument, one gets the sense that it has to be enough of a large number to assuage the anxiety of people like Klaiber and comfort them with the thought that they are not condemning an entire People: one wonders how many is enough to fulfill that function of assuaging that anxiety?).
Klaiber goes on to demonstrate his obtuse reading skills. Again he quotes an excerpt from my comment where I quote him then myself:
Klaiber: " 2) :"...or an "ethnic people". Islam is no ethnicity or race."
Me: I didn't say it was. I said our dominant and mainstream sociopolitical culture, PC MC, perceives Muslims to be an ethnic people, or a diverse collection of ethnic peoples. And they have some reason to do so, since the vast majority of Muslims are in fact, an ethnic people of one sort or another, and only a tiny minority are whites."
Klaiber responds:
"Oh yes you did say this and you repeat it again. The vast majority of muslims are an ethnic people?
Oh, yes, so muslim Persians, Pakistanis, Turks, Arabs, Indians, Indonesians all have a common language and heritage?"
Klaiber needs to read more carefully. 1) I didn't say "a common language and heritage"; and 2) I said "an ethnic people of one sort or another", not a unified block of one ethnic people. Muslims represent a worldwide community of people unified by Islam, and most of whom are "ethnic" of one sort or another in the sense that PC MC designates. That's the fact I was referring to.
Klaiber adds:
"Please check the facts. A muslim is someone who believes: "There is no god but Allah, Mohammed is his messenger." That's it. This has nothing to do with ethnicity."
We are discussing two distinct things here. Surely Klaiber can pat his head and rub his stomach at the same time; surely he can entertain two distinct notions about one entity at the same time? Here are the two:
1) Muslims are unified by the ideology of Islam.
2) Muslims are represented by a worldwide diversity of ethnic peoples.
What happens because of these two facts, given our PC MC culture in the West, is that the perniciousness of #1 is obfuscated and whitewashed, because #2 makes the PC MC anxious to avoid condemnation, since it is a commandment in PC MC never to condemn, or even criticize, what they designate as "ethnic people". It is, in fact, the PC MCs who confuse the two points above. And I see that Klaiber does so as well -- as do many I have been noticing in the Anti-Islam Movement. Yet another indication that the wall between Those Who Have Woken Up to the Problem of Islam and the PC MCs is not necessarily an impermeable barrier.
Next example of Klaiber's obtuseness:
Again, he quotes an excerpt from my comment:
Klaiber: "3) "Many muslims do not know how to read and write. They have very little knowledge of their own religion."
Me: ... If you think Muslims have to actually read texts to become dangerously Islamic, you have a naively limited view of Islamic culture."
Klaiber responds:
"Why do you put words in my mouth? I never said such a thing."
Then immediately he goes on to say such a thing again!
" I said that many people are born muslims and have very little knowledge of their religion. They have not read the quran or hadith because they are illiterate."
I precisely said in the quote of mine which Klaiber reproduced above that not reading the Islamic texts does not preclude the Islamic brainwashed mindset. And Klaiber goes on to speak of not reading -- i.e., illiteracy -- as somehow precluding the Islamic brainwashed mindset.

Klaiber goes on to offer anecdotal evidence:
"I know a "muslim indonesian" who is married to a German! She apparently doesn't know her religion, because Shariah forbids women to marry non-muslims. There are many muslims who are not well educated and they have no sound understanding of their religion."
His Muslim Indonesian acquaintance may not know that Sharia forbids Muslim women from marrying non-Muslim men, but that doesn't mean she hasn't imbibed and assimilated into her brain numerous other aspects of the Islamic mindset of various facets of fanaticism and irrationality. (Secondly, is he sure this "German" is a non-Muslim?)
Klaiber then goes on to state the mantra of the superimposition of Western culture onto Islamic culture:
"Just like there are many many catholics who do not know the doctrines of their church or reject some of these doctrines, like the prohibition of premarital sex or homosexual sex."
No, Muslims are not "just like" Catholics in this regard. The degree and nature of the erosion of belief and the secularization of Catholics (and Christians in general) in the West over the past 300 years is a thousand times more advanced and profound than what goes on in the Muslim world. The Muslim world has not experienced even one-thousandth of what the modern West has undergone in terms of a break down of the past, of religion, of pre-modern mores. For Klaiber to glibly compare the two as equivalent demonstrates an ignorance of massive proportions.
Our next quote from Klaiber illuminates my parenthetical rhetorical from somewhere above, when I wrote --
(However many Muslims get conceptually saved through this argument, one gets the sense that it has to be enough of a large number to assuage the anxiety of people like Klaiber and comfort them with the thought that they are not condemning an entire People: one wonders how many is enough to fulfill that function of assuaging that anxiety?)
Klaiber:
"Again putting words into my mouth. I didn't say "most muslims are illiterate", I said many muslims are illiterate."
Ah, so it's not "most", it's only "many". The point is, Klaiber is using that quantity -- whatever it represents -- as a number sufficiently large to save those Muslims from his condemnation.
But as I argued, illiteracy by itself does not save Muslims from being fanatical supporters of the Islamic agenda in one way or another. And that deserves to be identified, condemned, and quarantined to protect our societies from it.
Klaiber goes on to invoke another of the Hypotheses of the Saving Diversity of Muslims -- the Hypothesis of the Lax Muslims:
"But, here in Germany, we have lots of them [Muslims]. Many of them do not follow the commandments of their prophet. They drink alcohol, they have premarital sex, they do not pray five times a day, they eat pork, they reject warfare for Islam..."
Two problems with this particular Hypothesis:
1) Again, a Muslim who is lax is not necessarily free of the mental baggage of Islamic supremacism and fanaticism in other regards dangerous to us. Indeed, if you scratch beneath the surface of these seemingly lax Muslims, you will more often than not find the intolerant hateful mental baggage -- but you have to ask them the right questions, and you have to do it cleverly and catch them unawares, so they let down their guard. Or, sometimes provoking them in fits of anger also helps to unmask the "inner Muslim" beneath the Westernized appearance.
2) We can't discern with sufficient reliability whether any given Muslim who appears lax is really not a covert operative for terrorism. The Al Qaeda Manual specifically advises its agents to pretend to be Westernized. And just as Klaiber notes that there are some Muslims who "disguise their true disbelief, because they are killed by fellow muslims, if they leave the faith" -- so too there are Muslims who disguise their more fanatical Islamic convictions when they are in a social milieu surrounded by stronger Infidels. The point is, we cannot tell which seemingly lax (and therefore harmless, theoretically) Muslim is really harmless, and which is not, with sufficient reliability in terms of the numbers of Muslims in our midst. The risks from the dangerous Muslims (and their more or less passive collaborators -- like Muslims who will never pick up a gun but who refuse to tell the police information about their cousin Rasheed's late night meetings, etc.) is simply too high for our society for us to be playing Muslim Roulette and simply assume that a blue-jeans-wearing ipod-listening beer-drinking Muslim must ipso facto be harmless. I will not jeopardize the safety of my society on such flimsy argumentation.

si tacuisses philosophus mansisses

H "divides his time" between "London and India" or "New York and London and India" or "New York and India." What's next? A casa colonica in Umbria? A mas in Mougins? Oh, there's no stopping thrusting young sammy-glicks when they are on the make. We can only observe, but not, alas, stop them.

Thanks for being my dumbbell. I needed the intellectual workout.

I have followed this discussion between Hesperado and Kilian Klaiber with keen interest. To be honest being confounded and struggling to understand and decide what my own position is going to be.
Hesperado said earlier:
"The fact is, when we explicitly or implicitly condemn Islam, we are by logical extension condemning all Muslims. We may hem and haw and try to assure those who connect this particular dot that we are not doing this, but the dot-connection is a reasonable inference -- for a Muslim is precisely a person who supports, and derives inspiration and existential identity from, Islam. And if we condemn the latter, how are we not condemning the former?"
I understood this position of Hesperado all along, but stuck to the strategy of my country-man Geert Wilders to be against Islam and not against Muslims, or maybe not against "all Muslims" because in a PCMC-climate it is quite acceptable to be against the extremists; the Taliban (which NATO fights), the Ayatollahs (suppressing popular resentment cruelly in Iran), and more and more the Saudi Wahhabi's.
And there you have it, as I tried to say before; the whole discussion is relevant to a few important considerations.
- There is no doubt that a part of self-confessed Muslims is "bad", anti-democratic, hostile, totally untrustworthy, with low credibility; the know "bad Muslims", acknowledged even by other Muslims and PCMC Islam-defenders themselves.
- But these Muslims and PCMC's then go on to "explain" that Islam is a multi-interpretable religion, and indeed is interpreted in many different ways. They often then go over the top by stating arrogantly that the interpretation of the "bad Muslims" is wrong and the peaceful interpretation is the right one. Many other people, as we saw in the discussion, hold that many Muslims interpret Islam rather loosely, rather ignorant, "liberal if you will".
The perplexing problem I see is the use of the word Islam as presenting a monolithic faith or a faith of many diverse interpretations. It seems the vast majority of people believes the latter.
I think we must establish first what Islam is and what Islam is not, if need be in terms of several presented versions of Islam. We can accept for now that Islam is a collective name for many different versions, but keep open the notion that it still in it's essences may be a single coherent totalitarian ideology.
After getting highly knowledgeable about what Islam is and is not, we could try to understand first how much unity or division under ALL muslims in relation to ALL non-Muslims there is. And this pertains very much to their first and foremost loyalties. When their cherished unchangeable "Divine" laws conflict with Democracies improvable human laws, what do the Muslim masses choose?
And this in turn pertains to their trustworthyness to Non-Muslims. Because if danger in Islamic intentions and unity is perceived (and logically so) how can Muslims (who chose Islam, as opposed to not choosing their ethnic race) be trusted not to be part of that danger?
I argue for a mild form of Hesperado's: Consider Muslims guilty until proven innocent. This is because they already admitted adhering to an ideology that at least in part can be considered hostile and dangerous to our tolerant society.
(and in viruscontrol that dangerous part has to be taken well care of).
Although I am fully aware that Muslims could en masse practice taqqiya, deceit, I still am in favor of asking them to declare, then provide evidence of, their first and foremost loyalties; to manmade laws and values or "divine" laws and values when the 2 contradict.
I would like to make it difficult for Muslims to have it both ways;
first, in effect being unified in opposition to all non-Muslims, sometimes stating this explicitly and often demonstrating this through their behavior, especially in their protesting behavior. And striving for Islamic supremacy together and therewith in effect presenting a danger, and a real blockade to democracy and a real oppression of religious minorities in Islamic countries.
And second, at the same time, when non-Muslims try to hold Muslims accountable for what other Muslims SAY AND DO (Hesperado's words), often justifying it in the name of Islam, denying unity, solidarity, hence accountability. Instead, very convincingly to Western Democratic citizens, reverting to a divers, divided multi-interpreted Islam.
I think we must get ever clearer first about what Islam entails or could entail, AND WHAT NOT.
Then proceed vigorously with the unity-loyalty-question for Muslims and control thereof.
And for security's sake evolve to Hesperado's attitude of Muslims begin guilty until proven innocent. All the while logically explaining why. And providing reasonable alternatives to Muslims too. In the hope a part of the ignorant masses of Democratic citizens sees the good logic for this and is swayed to vote for it.

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