It is very instructional to see what happens when Islamic institutions are confronted directly with the barbaric realities of their faith. The Prince of Wales has been in discussions with leaders of the British Muslim community about the fact Islamic law demands death for any guilty of apostasy (i.e. when a person who was a Muslim converts to another faith). This is not an idle intellectual issue of interest only to the theologically inclined as in many Muslim countries around the world people are indeed executed every year for turning their back on Islam.
One expects enthusiastic support for violently imposed Islam from groups like Al-Muhajiroun (which has allegedly ‘closed down’, though ‘re-branded’ would probably be more a accurate description) but what of so-called moderate Muslim leaders? Judging from this article it appears that when faced directly with the realities of what is done in the name of their religion, these ‘moderates’ insist that moves to reform such barbaric laws must be a matter for internal discussion only and urge members of the faiths who are victims of Islam to maintain a respectful silence. And by this approach I would say that these ‘moderates’ prove that they are simply not worth talking to. I wonder what approach the advocates of a softly softly approach to Islam would take if the Scientologists or Moonies had openly stated policies to kill people who joined and then rejected their faiths? Would Prince Charles be talking to them about this distasteful little ‘problem’ or would they be proscribed organisations whose leaders were arrested on sight?
Islam is in serious need of the equivalent of a protestant reformation and until there is widespread ‘moderate’ support for uncompromising and overt rejection of Islam’s savage excesses, then ‘Islamophobia’ (literally ‘a fear of Islam’) is the only rational response to their religion by any who are not Muslims (or who wish to stop being a Muslim).
Taking a military approach to dealing with the political manifestations of their faith will increasingly be the response they get from the rest of the world given that there is clearly no serious mainstream internal desire to see Islam change in ways to make it compatible with a broader pluralistic secular society. They have no one to blame for that but themselves, though of course they will continue to blame everyone but themselves.
I’m afraid I don’t go along with the idea that “some Muslims are terrorists, therefore Islamophobia is justified”. It strikes me as irrational; given that libertarian ethics are founded on the notion of individuality, judging whole groups by the behaviour of a minority is wrong.
I know several people who are Muslims and I am in no fear that they are going to decide to kill me for not converting to their religion. I also know some Northern Irish Catholics and I don’t suspect them of being covert IRA members.
It’s easy to justify Islamophobia when talking in the abstract, using broad brush terms to refer to huge numbers of people as if it’s possible to reduce them down to a handful of stereotypes, but it simply isn’t. When you try to apply it to people you actually know, the idea falls apart.
I agree that Islamic terrorism must be confronted, but I believe that majority opinion amongst Muslims is already against terrorism – throughout the 1990s the radical jihadis consistently failed in their attempts to seize power in a string of Arab/Muslim countries. Iran remains the exception rather than the rule. Put another way, I think if the entire 1.3bn Muslims around the world were actually all committed to terrorism, they’d manage more than 208 acts of international terrorism between them.
I also agree that the primary impetus for change must come from Muslims themselves. However, your argument that Muslims need a “protestant reformation” of their own doesn’t stand more than a moment’s scrutiny. The protestant reformation in Europe was accompanied by violent persecutions of both sides, and provided the theological fuel for centuries of war, up to the present day in some cases (Northern Ireland). If that wasn’t the kind of reformation you had in mind, then I think you should have been a bit more careful in your off-hand use of the historical reference.
With a heavy sigh I await the inevitable responses declaring me to be some kind of Muslim apologist, Michael Moore sympathiser (OK, I admit I watched Fahrenheit 9/11 once) or just plain stupid. In a probably naive attempt to persuade anyone who reads this that I’m not some dhimmi dupe, I would point out in my defence that I deplore terrorism, think that all religion is stupid beyond words, and would personally fight to the death for my own liberty should I feel it to be threatened. I just don’t see the point in haranguing the entire Muslim population, many of whom live under oppressive governments (and shoukl, in my opinion, be approached as potential allies in the fight against such oppression rather than enemies).
Perry
I of course agree with everything important that you say in this post.
But I have an incidental disagreement with you. Having myself once (forget when) said that Islam needs its own equivalent of a “Protestant Reformation” and having been, I believe, correctly corrected, let me now recycle the point made by the critic whose argument I approximately remember but whose name I forget.
The point is, Osama Bin Laden and his ilk are the Islamic “Reformation”. They are puritanical fanatics just like our own puritanical fanatics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The difference is not their psychology. It is their theology, and their weapons (and what their weapons might be), that make them different from our old puritans.
But above all what makes this Islamic “Reformation” different is that whereas the Christian Reformation was aimed pretty much only at Christianity, Islam now yearns to Reform the entire world, and we are the enemy, as much as is backsliding and corrupted official Islam. And the points you make about the nature of that enmity are of course entirely right.
But “Reformation”, insofar as there is any meaningful parallel between this one and the original one, is the problem, not the solution.
Rob
As you can surely tell, my comment was concocted in ignorance of yours. And I dare say that this comment will coincide with other relevant ones that I am now ignoring.
What I think makes this argument so difficult is the contrast between the overwhelming decency of almost all Muslims personally (as you point out), and the barbarity of what they actually say, and apparently mean, or at any rate tell each other with great apparent earnestness that they mean. This keeps in constant motion a swirl of viciously nasty memes which, given a tiny number of lunatics willing to take these nasty memes seriously, causes havoc, again and again and again, century after century after century. How can the decent majority complain when the psychos merely do what the decent majority has been saying? No wonder they are struck dumb by things like 9/11.
What I think Perry’s post was about was not that all Muslims are aggressive psychos; they plainly aren’t. Hardly any of them are. But what all the Muslims say is something else again.
The Christian meme swirl (did I just make another meme?), although in my opinion several orders of magnitude more bizarre and irrational (sent his only son to be sacrificed … blah blah blah … makes the Moonies sound like Euclidian mathematicians by comparison) than anything I know of in the Koran, at least contains quite a lot of nice and civilised stuff in among all the excuses for crusading and witch burning and heretic killing (and above all for Jew slaughtering, but that’s another whole argument). Sorry, that was an unwieldy sentence. What I was trying to say is: Christianity is barking bonkers, but it is also quite nice. Islam, on the other hand, unless you submit to it …
I read Perry’s post as an attack on certain particularly nasty Islamic ideas, not on all of those who go through the motions of proclaiming them, in among living normal and decent and civilised lives. He wants these decent people to stop proclaiming these nasty memes, and explicitly to oppose such memes. Which is, in my opinion, entirely reasonable, and well worth saying to them no matter how uncomfortable angry it may make them feel.
He was attacking the sins, rather than the sinners. (Which by the way is a splendid example of one of the very good Christian memes.)
Rob: This issue is not about terrorism, but rather the issue of whether or not Islam is actually acceptable in a pluralistic society when the doctrine of killing apostates seems to be a non-issue amongst ‘moderate’ muslims. I have no problem with individual muslims and have shared a whiskey with several on occasion… and that is the point: if a person views being a ‘muslim’ as little more than a label they grew up with and hence not much of an impediment to having a whiskey with a secular agnostic such as myself, that clearly I have no cause to be threatened by the ‘muslim’ label of that person.
However if a person is steeped in Islam, in short, if they take the religion seriously, they I feel asking them to renounce the violent notions you find in the Koran is not an unreasonable thing to do if they expect me to treat them as anything less than a thing to be regarded with suspicion.
I would treat a Christian fundamentalist in much the same manner if they actually felt that murdering a wiccan neighbour of mine was perfectly ok because the Bible says “thou shalt not to suffer a witch to live”.
Yet the reality is that it is pretty damn hard to find Christians who actually think that or, more importantly, would tolerate other who might do it. The same cannot be said of muslims as such views are not all that far out of the mainstream and msulims willing to speak out against such views are distressingly rare and those who do are very prone to immediately follow their views with “but…”.
And thus unless a muslim makes it clear to me that they are essentially secular and modern in their views, it does not seem unreasonable to me to view a self described muslim as quite probably holding certain inimical beliefs given that such beliefs are far from rare. In much the same way I suppose I could be accused of being a bigot for just assuming a priori that a self-described fascist also holds racist views, I feel quite justified in doing so unless it is clearly demonstrated that in a given case that is not true.
Brian-
I think you are looking at the idea of the Protestant Reformation from an overly superficial viewpoint.
I see it as having been the popular manifestation of the same modernization that we normally associate with Bacon and Newton. Science, at the time, was a phenomena of a small elite. However much importance it later came to have (even Marx justified his religion as scientific i.e. newtonian), at the time it did not affect the thinking of the average man on the street.
I understand Gutenburg was originally involved in a scheme to mass produce indulgences to be sold at a pilgrimage. He got the date wrong and winding up in a pilgrimless spot two years after designing and building his automated indulgence manufacturing device decided to save something from the speculation by printing bibles, for which he suspected there might be a market.
Of such small things are revolutions sometimes made. What Gutenburg had done, was to give that same average man on the street the ability to check the beliefs that most mattered to him against reality -the Bible, rather than against authority – the church teachings. This is exactly analogous to Bacon’s and Newton’s admonitions to reason from experiment rather than from Aristotle. (Please don’t split hairs over the reality of the Bible. For the average man in the 16th century street – the one who matters in this discussion – it was reality)
Yes, there was a huge amount of resulting bloodletting. Yes, it continues to this day. Was that because there was a Reformation or was it because there were (and are) interests that are devoted to being the Authorities whose view of reality is not to be questioned, and opposing interests who, one hopes, are even more devoted to basing beliefs -so far as possible- on reality. When these two interests come into opposition reasoned discussion is sometimes necessary to settle the matter; othertimes more sanguinary measures are required.
I think Perry absolutely hit the nail on the head. I hope Bush/Rumsfield/Wolfowitz can see this as clearly. While all the talk of democracy and free societies is very nice, They are merely consequences. What we need for Islam, (if not what Islam needs for itself), is a cause: modernism -in exactly the fashion that the Protestant Reformation meant it. You think for yourself, you check for yourself and you tell the mullahs/priests to confine themselves to ceremonies and charity if they want to continue to be mullahs or priests. To think that this will happen without much bloodshed is naive. Liberty frequently requires blood.
The alternative is little liberty for them and much more blood shed by us, with -worst case- a dimunition of our liberty besides.
Doug
The disagreement between me and you seems to be about the nature of the Protestant Reformation. You regard it as a more “modern” thing than I do. Yes, it was all mixed up with the modernisation process, just as Bin Ladenism is now, but it was as much a reaction against modernity as modern itself. The Catholic Church of that time was full of people ready to share a whiskey with people like Perry, and that is what the Protestants often complained about so ferociously, again, just like Bin Laden.
I take your point about the revolutionary nature of letting people read the Bible for themselves, but this is hardly the same thing as people checking their beliefs against “reality”. I’m completely with Rob about that.
Again, this is what Bin Ladenism does. Both Protestantism and Bin Ladenism have in common that they are/were based on mass literacy (reading the sacred texts for yourself), and on reacting against many aspects of modernity.
Brian-
My central point is that modernism is a rejection of authority as a basis for one’s beliefs in favor of thinking for oneself. I made a parallel, which I believe a valid one, between the religious revolution and the scientific one. The first was a mass phenomena, the second was not.
If many people think for themselves, rejecting authority as a guide, it is to be expected that many of them will go wrong, perhaps only a few right. That is the main defense of Authority, after all: “Don’t try to think for yourself – too dangerous. Trust the experts who will decide for you based on the wisdom of the ages.” Without some other way of selecting between good and bad ideas, the authority folks are correct. Science is one good way of selecting between ideas, the free market -another modern phenomena- is another.
That many of the participants in the Protestant Reformation came up with crappy ideas shouldn’t be surprising, any more than that many products introduced into the free market are useless, silly or even dangerous. Nor is it surprising that some Protestants were and are puritanical or even anti-modern. Some socialists are not idiots, yet still can’t grasp the essence of the capitalist free market. They are appalled by the bad ideas and are without any understanding of the self correcting mechanism. They only see wastefulness and exploitation. Why should protestants, in the midst of the birthpangs of the modern age be expected to be any more perceptive than the more sophisticated people of our own time? What some protestants thought they were doing matters little to what the real effect of the Reformation turned out to be.
The Catholic Church of the time may well have been full of jovial fellows. It was also full of people like the Duke of Alva who, were he around today, might well sign up for Osama’s correspondence course. So too for that matter might John Calvin. It was a tough time with rough people. I think it might be a mistake to judge its meaning entirely by the behavior of its participants.
It seems very evident to me that Osama is for a very primitive traditional view of Islam. The Wahhabis go back to an 18th century bandit who justified himself by claiming his banditry was a reaction against the turning from the good old ways by the then current rulers of Arabia. Things haven’t changed much.
While some Protestants may have rejected modernity, most Catholics of the time surely did. Osama has more in common with Alva than he does with Huss or Wycliffe.
As far as checking the Bible for themselves versus reality, I reiterate what I said before. What it means to you doesn’t matter. What matters is what it meant to them. They did not yet have a scientific tradition. I’m not even sure Bacon had written yet , much less that any of the Protestants had read him.
This raises what I think is an interesting point. I understand the Koran is, for the faithful the world over, printed only in arabic because that is the language it was written in. Moreover I wonder how many moslems are illiterate even where arabic is the native language? It sounds a little like the Latin rite. If you can’t read it yourself, you can hardly question Osama or the Mullahs even were you are so inclined. I’ve never read the thing, but if the Islamofascists have picked and chosen to make their case, perhaps some short tracts might be distributed to raise some useful questions. It worked for Gutenburg.
I just finished my Western Religions final exam 23 hours ago and have been thinking about this, particularly in regard to the integration of Islam in Western society (i.e. democracy, human rights, secular government, etc.) and from I can see there’s a major problem.
The difficulty is that it has been standard doctrine for the past millennium that shariah law is one of the essential mandates of Islam. Shariah law is an all encompassing body that includes politics, economics and morality. As Nasr, a well-respected and moderate Muslim notes in Ideals and Realities of Islam(Link), “The function of the government is not to legislate laws but to execute God’s laws. The cardinal reality is the presence of Divine Law which should be administered in society.” Moreover he notes that “Some modernized Muslims… have tried simply to equate ijma with parliamentary ‘democracy.’ This, however, is not quite the case… giving direct opinion on problems of Law should be the function of the ulama who alone are well-versed in the science of the Law.”
Generally the most pluralistic Shariah law has gotten is to exclude non-Muslims from some of the stricter moral elements of the law in exchange for an additional tax and an understanding that they could not be influential members of society. Islamic courts have already gained some acceptance in Canada(Link).
Forget terrorism for the moment, as of now I’m not sure basic, moderate Islam can fully function in the West.
“Judging from this article it appears that when faced directly with the realities of what is done in the name of their religion, these ‘moderates’ insist that moves to reform such barbaric laws must be a matter for internal discussion only and urge members of the faiths who are victims of Islam to maintain a respectful silence. And by this approach I would say that these ‘moderates’ prove that they are simply not worth talking to. I wonder what approach the advocates of a softly softly approach to Islam would take if the Scientologists or Moonies had openly stated policies to kill people who joined and then rejected their faiths? Would Prince Charles be talking to them about this distasteful little ‘problem’ or would they be prescribed organisations whose leaders were arrested on sight?”
I’ve been posting stuff like this on this website for almost two years and people have been calling me a nutcase for at least that long. The ony people who ever believed me were Verity and I think G. Cooper. I’ve been reading evasive stuff about apostasy and other abominations for more than five years from “liberal” Muslims in the West and I think I feel (almost) as vindicated by Perry’s post right now as Churchill felt when Hitler invaded Poland.
NOW do you see what I am talking about? Zaki Badawi is about as “liberal” a Muslim scholar as you can get. Yet this is what we get from Zaki Badawi. . .I hate to let you in on what the CONSERVATIVE scholars sound like.
Prince Charles should at least get credit for trying to get Muslims to acknowledge the problems in their faith. It’s more than what any other public figure of note is doing right now in the UK == or the US for that matter. Certainly better than T. Blair who actually phones up Muslim leaders and apologizes when the Torygraph prints something “untoward” about Islam.
Also, major props to Charles Moore and the Torygraph — practically the only newspaper in the whole Western world willing to tackle these issues honestly.
Certain people in the allegedly “moderate” Muslim quarter have already obliquely threatened to do a Theo Van Gogh on Moore, btw. It’s really only a matter of time before Moore or some other vocal Islam-critic like Patrick Sookhedo gets wacked, IMHO.
Will Britain then act to save its long and honorable traditions of free speech, individual rights and rule of (Anglo-Saxon common) law? Or will it continue to sleepwalk to dhimmitude?
Brian – I think Steven Schwartz (who is a practicing Sufi Muslim) is who you’re channeling.
“Forget terrorism for the moment, as of now I’m not sure basic, moderate Islam can fully function in the West.”
Yup, you got it Bill. Whether they want to install sharia by the bullet or the ballot, it’s still sharia and it’s still an abomination to the average Westerner.
Stephen Schwartz is no better than Zaki Badawi. He, just as Badawi told Prince Charles, told Robert Spencer that it wasn’t a non-Muslim’s “place” to comment or have an opinion about Islam. He also constantly whitewashes the history of Islam especially that of the Ottomans. You’d never know that the Ottoman Empire was one of the largest slave-trading machine ever known to mankind from reading Schwartz’s schmaltzy paens to the “tolerant, pluralistic” Ottoman Empire.
Surely this requires Muslims to prove a negative? I’m not sure how Muslims could go about proving themselves to be “modern” other than by living in peace with their neighbours, something many of them do already but receive little (if any) credit for. I can see what you mean, and I agree that fundamentalism is incompatible with modern society, but I think this comes too close to applying different standards to Muslims than you would apply to everyone else. If individuals behave peacefully then I don’t see why they should have to prove anything beyond that.
How many Muslims do you personally know who actually want to introduce universal Sharia law on the rest of us? And do you think Western society is so weak that they could do it even if they wanted to?
Let’s be clear about this: Sharia law represents everything that Western society has been moving away from for centuries. The recent violence is a reaction to the weakening of the belief in Sharia law, not its growing strength – as I pointed out earlier, the radicals have had few gains since the revolution in Iran.
There are two distinct issues here: the continuation of liberal democratic government in the West, which I believe can be done simply by better integration and education, combined with greater commitments to the ideals of individual rights by our governments. The second issue is the Arab nations, and that must ultimately be decided by the Arabs themselves. Those that practice terrorism will have to face the consequences, those who move in directions we approve of should be rewarded. It might sound dull and boring, but it’s really the only way to deal with the situation, certainly better than trying to make specific claims about exactly how Islam needs to be reformed, as if all religions must proceed along the same path that Christianity did.
Im not able to match the erudite contributions on this subect but it does seem to me that adherents to Islam and Sharia law have no place in a Christian country – or a secular one, come to that.
Not at all. I apply the same standard to fascists, communists, some fundamentalist Christians and members of the KKK. If a person calls themselves ‘a muslim’, it does not seem unreasonable to not automatically give them the benefit of the doubt that they do not hold antithetical views such as a willingness to tolerate stoning women who have sex out of wedlock or execute apostates. Just because, in Britain, muslims do not have the political power to make such views the law of the land does not mean I should assume they would not do so if they had the opportunity… hence my view that ‘Islamophobia’, a fear of Islamic beliefs, is not just rational but mandatory for any who oppose barbarism. Christians no longer burn apostates and heretics and thus I am indifferent to Christianity. When support for death for apostasy/homosexuality/sexual behaviour becomes a feature of Islam confined to a tiny lunatic fringe, Islamophobia will no longer be appropriate. That is not yet the case.
Yes, but people’s descriptions of their own religious states often conflict with their observance of them. For example, the 2001 census showed that 37.3 million people in England and Wales describe themselves as “Christian” – a figure considerably at odds with rates of church attendance or other religious participation. I doubt all 37m of them hold the bible to be the absolute truth. If we accept the idea of “nominal” Christians, why not Muslims?
My personal experience of Muslims is that, whilst they tend to be stricter in their religious observances, they do not conform entirely to the stereotype of intolerance commonly put forward. The word “Christian” might have a much more elastic definition than “Muslim”, but there is still considerable room for variance between those categorised as such.
I think it already is confined to a tiny majority. The idea that there are mobs of Islamic fundamentalists roaming the streets of our cities killing non-Muslims is patently absurd (especially considering that, apparently, almost nobody was aware of this until a little over 3 years ago). There are over 1 million Muslims in Britain, and how many apostates have they killed? I haven’t noticed my Muslim work colleagues hatching any plans to stone my homosexual work colleagues to death recently either.
I don’t dispute the logic of your conclusions, but I do dispute the assumptions you use to derive those conclusions.
Then how do you explain the fact in several Muslim nations Sharia is the law of the land? You are clearly incorrect.
And who has claimed they have? Please cite. My point is that some muslims are indeed aiming for that to become possible and the so-called modrates are not exactly forming angry mobs to denounce those people.
Quite a few actually. Several times a year in the west we hear of so called ‘honour killings’ where (usually female) adolecents or young adults are murdered by their own families for ‘unislamic’ behaviour, which usually means marrying or having sex with a non-muslim. It is not that uncommon.
Susan writes:
“I’ve been posting stuff like this on this website for almost two years and people have been calling me a nutcase for at least that long. The ony people who ever believed me were Verity and I think G. Cooper”
I know that feeling and, yes, I very much agree with what you have been saying. Seven or eight years ago I nudged myself a good deal closer to the nuthouse in the eyes of my friends by predicting that the next world war would be between American Christian fundamentalists and fundamentalist Moslems. It seems I wasn’t so far out.
Leaving aside the comments of people like Rob (who, I can only conclude, must have scant knowledge of the reality of towns like Bradford, Leicester, Birmingham and other Midlands and Northern British cities), it seems we are faced with a terrible dilemma in the UK. Having been sabotaged by successive British governments which operated an “open house” immigration policy and having been silenced from protest by the liberal Mafia which controls the media, politics and education, it seems the UK now has a problem which, with respect, the USA does not (yet) suffer: a very considerable number of culturally and religiously alien citizens who despise the country they are in and want to change it to resemble that from which their parents came. Less a cuckoo in the nest, than a viper.
How we respond to that challenge will, I believe, be the biggest question we have to face over the next 20 or 30 years. And it will, without doubt, be fought against the backdrop of international conflict between Islam and the entire non-Islamic world.
Islam already had a reformation a very long time ago and it backfired. (Can’t tell you the exact dates because I lent the book that has the specifics to someone.) In reaction Islam became more reactionary, not less.
Now we’ve got the supposedly enlightened and tolerant Sikhs acting up in Brum, trying to get a play closed down and punching policemen.
Ah, but diversity is our greatest strength. Think how “boring” it was in the 1950s.
The importance of the reformation was not what its main players were trying to do ( become more fundementalist) but what it ended up creating ( diversity of thought).
When there is no monopoly on the truth, tolerance has to follow. Until then, stoning those who disagree with you is standard.
They were trying to get a play cancelled because it (allegedly) portrayed their religion in a bad light. I haven’t seen the play so I can’t comment directly, but this intolerance is not limited to religions which appeared here after 1959.
You’re using double standards, believing that just because the law says one thing, that everyone living under it agrees with it. Of all people, you should know that’s not true. We have many laws here which both you and I disagree with, and we would not like others to judge us by those laws. A nation’s laws do not define the character of its people, particularly when those laws are made by undemocratic or dictatorial regimes. There are, also, a number of states with majority Muslim populations which do not have sharia law. I can’t find any hard statistics on it, but I’d guess that the number of Muslims living under strict Sharia law is much lower than those not. (and of those that do, I would question how many do so by choice)
“Several” times a year, in “the West” (population 1bn+). I’m no statistician, but I’d hazard a guess that this makes up a fairly small proportion of homicides, even just amongst Muslims. Of course it’s wrong, but the question is whether this is a minority activity, and I remain quite sure that it is.
I was being a little too vivd in my reading of your implications there; You suggested that support for religiously-inspired killing was not a minority belief, I took that to mean that you believed a large number of Muslims would therefore be in support of such killing or active in carrying it out. My characterisation of this as fundamentalist mobs roaming the streets was probably taking it a bit too far, and I apologise.
“Some Muslims” still isn’t getting anywhere near the kind of accurate definition needed when trying to decide which group is in the majority – not that I have any better statistics, it’s something that’s almost impossible to know for certain. There are, however, also some Muslims who are in favour of a much more liberal attitude, but they seem to receive much less attention. Wikipedia also provides some useful reading material on the subject.
If we really want to establish conversations with the Islamic world, leading to greater liberty for Muslims, the ideas expressed here should give us some good clues as to how. We gain nothing by haranguing ordinary Muslims, but now more than ever we have the power to reach out and talk to them in ways that didn’t even exist 15 years ago. As we’re at the forefront of internet communication technology, this might actually be the way we can make a difference.
I wonder if you apply the same logic to racists and people who presecute gays? haranguing and abominating gay-bashers and racists is exactly how those things were opposed and so why should barbaric Sharia and the whole muslim tradition of female subjugation be treated with any less forceful contempt and hostility? You can wish it were otherwise but time and time again I have discussed terrorism/sharia/burquas and all the other less savoury aspect of Islam with oh so westernised muslims only to hear a faint condemnation of those things followed by the word “…BUT…”
Until large numbers of muslims clearly oppose (or at the very least are obviously not willing to passively acquiesce to) those things, I will treat them the same way I would a person who described themselves as a Communist… i.e. a person who possibly would, if they had the political power to do so, impose tyranny. Anything else is just pious mealy mouthed fudging of the reality of things.
Agree with Perry, who was quoting James Lileks if I’m not mistaken? You can get apparently modern well-dressed Muslim professional men appearing on TV panels, or just over lunch or in the office, who will nod urbane agreement that religion is a matter of individual conscience and you can’t kill someone just because they don’t believe in your particular religion, that young people should be allowed to fall in love with and marry whomeve they like, that women should be equal partners in a marriage and equal under the law, and that blowing up buildings full of innocent people is wrong — all very reassuring and civilised until, as Perry points out, comes the inevitable appearance of that one word: but…
Perry, terrific and bluntly honest post. And Susan, you are no nutter, that is for sure.
G Cooper – I’m a practical person and I judge people by their actions far more than their words. I don’t “get” that the culturally and religiously alien citizens to whom you refer despise the country they are in and want to change it to resemble the country from which their parents originate. If that is really the case, then why bother hanging around? Why not grab the next cheap fare ticket to whatever Islamic paradise they are dreaming of and toddle off? Certainly, no one in England would stop them.
Surely the situation is that they, like most of us, are considerable hypocrites. Whatever their complaints, they rather enjoy the English personal freedom and creature comforts lacking in their country of origin. There is probably, in their irrational rant against the country which allows them to rant, unscathed, an element of attempting to assuage some personal guilt for openly rejecting the culture of their fathers.
I once read a comment from an Asian immigrant to the States to the effect of, “the irony of immigration is that you betray your parents by obeying them.” He was referring to the process of “becoming American”, which, to some extent, means rejecting whatever you were before.
If immigrants to England have indeed lived in the country for generations, without assimilation, then England needs to look at why they are allowed to get away with doing so. I had a heck of a time getting into England, when I lived there. Is the open house immigration policy still in effect? If so, why? You haven’t been silenced from protest by the liberal Mafia, you have allowed yourself to be silenced.
You say that America does not yet have this problem. Darn tootin’, and we aren’t likely to, because of the way that America deals with immigrants. The tacit deal is that, in order to live here successfully, immigrants will “become American”, which means doing their best to make a buck independently as quickly as they can (most don’t seem to need a push in this regard), being polite in public, being charitable, keeping their front gardens clean, learning English as best they can, waving the flag – in other words, displaying the community spirit that (IMO) Socialism is doing its best to destroy in England.
If “what it is to be English” is displayed by immigrants to that country as going on the dole and sneering at anything Western, where is that coming from?
It’s your country, Mr C. You are about as traditionally English as they come. You know what it means to be English, which includes being patriotic.
When I lived there, I made a conscious effort to change my ways to fit in. I stopped wearing the bright colours of my beloved CA and adopted the 24/7 funereal garb of London. I was quiet in public, because the English people I respected (and loved) were. I didn’t make a fuss unnecessarily about physical discomfort (which I would have done and do, back in the States), because they didn’t. I became much more adept at handling the endless hassles of life (which are replete in London), because I was taught that life is not convenient and that everyone is dealing with it and that my personal “state of gruntlement” (as my ex used to call it) is not the most important thing in life, by the English. I still carry that forebearance, which I never used to have before I moved over there, with me, to this day.
If the immigrants living in English cities are creating a separate world to such a degree, and displaying such a lack of respect for the culture of a country to which they freely chose to immigrate, then England should have no compunction about showing them the door. The fact that so few of them would go through it is the basis on which indigenous English people should say, “Fine, but if you’re staying, here are the rules.”
Nancy, we do too have the same problems as England and Europe with non-assimilating Muslim immigrants. Also, our traditional melting pot approach to immigrants is under serious assault from the same “progressive” multi-culti loons who turned Holland into a violence-ridden shit-hole. We’re not the same country we were 50 years ago. . .Our Islamic immigrants are merely less bold now because they know they are seriously outnumbered. . .unlike in Europe where they have reached the demographic parity to start throwing their weight around. Islam actually teaches its adherents to “lie low” when their numbers are weak but to become more aggressive when their numbers are strong. This is a time-honored Islamic doctrine.
Rob:
–60 percent of UK Muslims told a Guardian poll they wanted sharia in the UK. That doesn’t sound like a “tiny minority” to me.
–I regularly correspond with several ex-Muslims living in the UK who are apostates. They are scared shitless. One is leaving for Australia; another one doesn’t want to be “outed” as an apostate, even to his own family members. They don’t seem to think its only a “tiny number of extremists” they have to fear from. . .do you feel good about living in a country where certain people can’t openly express their religious beliefs (or lack thereof) for fear of their lives? I wouldn’t. But that’s what your country has become.
–Robert Kilroy-Silk has already been attacked; Charles Moore has been threatened. Britain’s own Theo Van Gogh is just around the corner. Mark my words.
Nancy – G Cooper is more than able to defend himself, but a couple of quick comments anyway.
I will leave aside that you appear to want a medal for fitting in to London when you lived there. I fitted in the US when I lived there, too. As millions upon millions of people who have gone to live in a foreign land have routinely done before us. This is normal behaviour.
Regardless of what you “get”, the Islamics in Britain and Europe see themselves as settlers in the great jihad to Islamicise the world. They cannot believe how lucky they are, because not only do we give them free everything, including medical care and interpreters to access it, and instructions written in Urdu or whateverhell language they are speaking instead of learning English, but if they murder people, we will not impose the death penalty. At worst, they will have to go to the gym and watch TV in prison instead of on the outside.
If you wish to judge them by their actions, how do you judge the (minimum proven) 1200 young Muslim men who have been to Pakistan to train for jihad?
I’m sorry, Nancy, but your lofty attitude bespeaks deep ignorance, regardless of your exquisite sensitivity in adopting sombre shades of dress in London.
Verity – Well, that’s me told.
Actually, I wasn’t on the offensive with GC. I like him very much. I can’t imagine why he would feel the need to “defend” himself.
I wasn’t praising myself. I was praising what I learned from living with Brits.
“The Islamics in Britain and Europe see themselves as settlers in the great jihad to Islamicise the world” is a broad statement. I doubt that most Islamic immigrants to Europe see themselves on some sort of a mission for anything other than a more affable lfe. The goodies are there, which I alluded to, and which you also point out.
Do you know whether the proven 1200 young men who have gone to Pakistan to train for jihad were let back into the UK? My judgment of their actions is that they pose a clear and present danger and should be treated as enemies of Britain. Brandish your sanctimonious sword elsewhere.
Susan – I believe that you have some personal reasons for your strong feelings and you obviously have a great deal of knowledge. With all respect, I don’t see America as being anything like the UK and Europe in its attitude to the assimilation of immigrants, Islamic or otherwise. Yes, we aren’t the country we were 50 years ago, and there is obviously good and bad to that. But our history of incessant, successful immigration has given us experience and a common sense approach (which is one of the reasons why Islamic people are not here in huge numbers) that the PC brigade cannot seriously alter.
Nancy, I do agree with you that the European welfare state and socialism puts them in a worse position than ours. And our history of immigration does give us a leg up on them as well.
But we’ve still got our work cut out for us anyways with this particular type of immigrant. Pretending differently is just foolish.
“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”
Nancy – “Do you know whether the proven 1200 young men who have gone to Pakistan to train for jihad were let back into the UK?”
Well, obviously. You can’t refuse admission to a citizen of the country.
“Brandish your sanctimonious sword elsewhere.”
This seems a little opaque. Does it mean that reasoned arguments, based on facts, which oppose your own point of view are empty flourishes of a sanctimonious sword (assuming swords have emotions)?
Or are you one of owners of this blog and thus in a position to direct people to leave the premises?
Nancy writes:
“I don’t “get” that the culturally and religiously alien citizens to whom you refer despise the country they are in and want to change it to resemble the country from which their parents originate. If that is really the case, then why bother hanging around? Why not grab the next cheap fare ticket to whatever Islamic paradise they are dreaming of and toddle off?”
Clearly, some do (the Jihadis who go abroad to fight, among them). But, as others have pointed out, that isn’t really the nature of the beast, is it? Islam is not a faith that preaches “If you don’t like where you are because it isn’t sufficiently Islamic, then go somewhere else”, rather it preaches “Convert the infidels – by force if necessary”.
The answer to the next part of your post lies within. Those very qualities which you say you like about the English, are the very same ones that have stopped us from rising up to do something about this – rather like the even more placid Dutch, who seem to be in a worse state than we are.
Meanwhile, I’m quite aware that we have “allowed ourselves to be silenced” and it galls, but hasn’t a similar process happened in the USA, where public mentions of Christmas are taboo in many schools, town halls and council buildings? That’s a not tit for tat, by the way – just a reminder that the PC Mafia is awfully effective at howling down common sense dissent, not least in the USA.
The tide may be turning, but even if it is, it’s damn late in the day and hard to see quite what we can do without an awful lot of unpleasantness. Not to say bloodshed.
Susan reminds us that:
“–60 percent of UK Muslims told a Guardian poll they wanted sharia in the UK. That doesn’t sound like a “tiny minority” to me. ”
Quite! And large numbers have also confessed to supporting bin Laden.
Having personally witnessed street demonstrations in London, with banners reading “Declare Sharia law – Now!”, I’m at a loss to know which I find the more disturbing: the Moslem fanatics (who, at a pinch could all be rounded-up and shipped elsewhere) or the complacent, bovine, morons whose heads are so firmly stuck in the sand that nothing short of seeing 16 year old girls being hanged from cranes (as in that that typically fun-loving home of the ‘religion of peace’ – Iran) seems capable of waking them up.
Susan reminds us that:
“–60 percent of UK Muslims told a Guardian poll they wanted sharia in the UK. That doesn’t sound like a “tiny minority” to me. ”
Quite! And large numbers have also confessed to supporting bin Laden.
Having personally witnessed street demonstrations in London, with banners reading “Declare Sharia law – Now!”, I’m at a loss to know which I find the more disturbing: the Moslem fanatics (who, at a pinch could all be rounded-up and shipped elsewhere) or the complacent, bovine, morons whose heads are so firmly stuck in the sand that nothing short of seeing 16 year old girls being hanged from cranes (as in that that typically fun-loving home of the ‘religion of peace’ – Iran) seems capable of waking them up.
Yes, G. Cooper, the US’s culture is being undermined by the PeeCee morons as well. Their assault on our culture is horrific, sustained and determined. Nancy just doesn’t realize it, because she doesn’t look for news of this sort. The ACLU has taken to suing cities in the Southwest who have a miniscule Christian cross on their city seals, usually on some sort of depiction of a church — symbols that are there not as an acknowledgement of Christianity, but as a nod to the Spanish settlement of many of those Southwestern towns (most of what the Spanish left in the US southwest was churches.)
Regarding the PeeCee morons in your own country: they are already ditching the mess they made in Holland, and will do the same with Britian, leaving folks like you to attempt to clean up their sh*t.
Susan, It’s even worse in the US. The Islamics have now wormed their way into the classroom under the guise of “teaching about” Islam. Last ramadan, there were many public schools, where no crosses are allowed and no mention of Jesus are allowed, that had classes in ramadan, including, in some, having children adopt an Islamic name and learn simple Islamic prayers in Arabic.
Where is the ACLU, as this is an utterly blinding transgression? Nowhere. Some schools in the US have taken pork off the canteen menus in order not to “offend” Muslim kids. This is a separation of church and state? Where is the ACLU? I have read that in some schools, Muslim kids are being allowed to pray five times a day, with a special prayer room set apart for them. And a teacher taken away from class to accompany the kids to and from their prayers.
Islam is an aggressive and very, very busy religion and they are working at it every minute.
Verity: Yes, I know all that. But the backlash against the ACLU is already starting, thank God. The anti-dhimmi movement in the US is also “getting busy.” And we don’t have “hate speech” laws to hold us down — a bit of an advantage, that (although I’m sure the ACLU would love to twist our federal courts into pushing that one on us too.)
PS — if they start that shit up in my other child’s school district, you can bet that I’ll start the mother of all protests over it.
Verity writes:
“Islam is an aggressive and very, very busy religion and they are working at it every minute.”
They certainly are! I’ve been quite shocked by the amount of UK-generated Islamobabble that turns up as a result of a simple web search on utterly unrelated matters. And pretty vile some of it is, too!
It’s good that Charles Moore and a few others are (at last) starting to speak out, but I fear we may have left it too late.
After all, what exactly can one do without descending into some form of barbaric authoritarianism, oneself?
If that became necessary, then so be it. But it’s hardly the sort of Britain one would wish to live in. The crime, of course, was commited by those liberal politicians who got us into this mess during the three crucial post-war decades. All they cared about was cheap labour to exploit. The “multi-culti” nonsense came later.
G Cooper – You say: The crime, of course, was commited by those liberal politicians who got us into this mess during the three crucial post-war decades. All they cared about was cheap labour to exploit. The “multi-culti” nonsense came later.
Are you sure? The ‘liberals’ were in the service of providing cheap labour for the capitalists?
Bat Ye’or and Orianna Fallacci have both uncovered evidence that the European countries were doing deals with the Arab League to let Islamics in in great numbers 50 years ago. Why, we don’t know. But Edward Heath and his ilk were planning mass immigration of Islamics into Britain long before it came to our notice. Why do you think it slotted in so smoothly and unnoticeably?
Yes, people noticed these old crones in their chadors, holding their hijab across their faces with their one remaining tooth, of course, but how was it that all that council housing was available for them when there were waiting lists for indigenes, and they were all slotted into the NHS without a noticable bump? And there were suddenly town halls staffed by Urdu speakers and notices began to appear in town halls in Urdu. Same in France, except slot in the words Algerian/Moroccan. And they all settled in instant ghettoes?
And, pan-advanced Europe, they all kept their Muslim identity with their pajamas and their chadors, and little by little, buildings began to be declared ‘mosques’.
And two generations later, they are producing suicide bombers (who, thankfully, failed in their mission of blowing up civilians in Israel) and young men, married with children, are taking up the mission to go train in Pakistan?
Are you absolutely certain, G Cooper, that the liberals didn’t realise what they were doing?
France, Britain, Holland, Germany (the krauts were the only ones who kept their heads and made them ‘guestworkers’ with no rights), Denmark … at the same time? From the pov of a ballet fan like myself, this was as unmistakably choreographed as the Dance of The Cygnets.
And now there’s a push to admit Turkey to what is already a failed union. Why?
Go. Now.
Verity writes:
“… European countries were doing deals with the Arab League to let Islamics in in great numbers 50 years ago. Why, we don’t know.”
It’s an interesting idea but, without a motive, hard to even begin to prove. I do recall, however, much blather about the need for cheap labour in a time of post-war full employment and, in the absence of a more convincing explanation, am inclined to go along with that as the establishment’s motivation – notably, as it was a succession of Conservative governments that kick-started and then maintained the process of mass immigration from the subcontinent.
Bear in mind that contemporaneously, we also had mass immigration from the West Indies and, later, from Africa. It’s hard to establish a pro-Moslem plot when that was also going on.
I’m quite willing to accept that (perhaps on some unconscious Gramscian auto-immune disease level) those responsible for this were motivated by a desire to destabilise a society they loathed, but on a more mundane level, I suspect their motivations were far more base. One side wanted cheap labour, the other was motivated by some inchoate “multi-culti” sense, which was just beginning in the 1960s.
Verity adds:
“Are you absolutely certain, G Cooper, that the liberals didn’t realise what they were doing?”
No, I am not. But I do suspect that to be the case. Otherwise, why also arrange a simultaneous transfusion of markedly Christian West Indians and Africans?
Verity finishes with:
“Go. Now.”
Mercifully, I have an exeat but I’m damned if I’ll be driven from my sett without a fight.
I’ve really got to start keeping track of URLs. Some time ago I read a very interesting article on the subject of an Islamic reformation by a religious scholar (who’s name I’ve forgotten). This person’s contention was that before Islam can have a reformation it first has to have a catholication, i.e. the unification of a large part of the Islamic world under a single church. In other words, whom Islam needs is not Martin Luther but Charlemagne.
I’m in no position to comment on the scholarly value of this opinion, but I think it’s interesting. If true, it suggests that an Islamic reformation is a long way off, and we’d probably better not count on it as a solution to our currect problems.
Tedd-
You have an interesting point. I don’t know if the Orthodox/Catholic split, that occurred, I think, under Justinian in the sixth century, is equivalent to the Shiite/Sunni split. Certainly the Crusaders did as much damage to Constantinople as any Wahhabis did to various Shiite holy places.
I tend to agree with Karl Popper, that there is no pattern to history. However I do think similar causes can have similar effects. As I argued much earlier in these comments, the salient feature of the Reformation was, like the Enlightenment, a rejection of Authority as a basis for “knowing” in favor of experience of some sort of reality/truth. For the scientist it was the experiment and the techniques of inductive logic that went with it, as opposed to the writings of Aristotle, Hippocrates, Avicenna et al. For the average Christian, be he soldier, lord, merchant or peasant it was the newly available Bible as opposed to the dictates of the local abbot or bishop. The important thing was not experiment or Bible, but the common element in both: a dislocating change in one’s worldview, from accepting Authority as the basis for one’s beliefs to rejecting it and finding something else.
Was the existance of the Catholic Church a necessary precondition for this to happen? They certainly institutionallized belief based on authority. That would make it more explict and less unconcious for most people. It is difficult to reject something you aren’t aware you are doing.
There was at the same time an opening of the West to the different cultures of the East- notably Islam. While a few priviledged earlier specialists like Aquinas (12th century) had access to things like Arabic translations of Aristotle’s works -essentially using Islam only as a conduit to study their own cultural roots- by the 16th and 17th centuries Islam itself was becoming of interest -not as a religion, but as a revelation that the old tried and true ways of doing things were not the only possibilities. (American Indians and Chinese merchants should also be noted – it wasn’t only Islamic examples shaking things up.)
History doesn’t have patterns, but it does have ironies. One would be if the West, in one of its purest forms: American culture -avowedly Adam Smith capitalist, hated by the feudal French- were to set off the Islamic rejection of a mental environment based on authority.
The next question is: To one based on — what? Would they follow our path? I expect so because I think our path is the correct one: it works. There are, and have been, many who did not think so. Most people of the Marxist persuasion are currently discredited. Their most complete experiment failed miserably. I doubt that will silence them for more than about a generation.
Doug Collins
“Would they follow our path? I expect so . . .”
I am sure that most of us would like to see Islam leapfrog “our path” of Inquisition, Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Wars of Religion &c and arrive at where we are today without the mayhem involved. But we have to start from where Islam is now and a Muslim, contemplating where “our path” has brought Christianity, attenuating its beliefs, undermining its morals and depleting its numbers, would be justified in having misgivings in giving it a try.
Just now, a Muslim in a Western, post-Christian society has the best of both worlds – our material goods and liberal values, which include our toleration of his contempt for the faults of our society and his refusal to accept its values, while taking advantage of them.
There is a real need for a robust debate in the media of every aspect of this contradiction, as well as a relentless questioning of the validity of the death penalty for converts, theoretical and actual, and any other aspect of Islam which contradicts our national laws.
It actually happened in the 11th century (1054 to be precise). The casus belli was that the western (catholic) church had perverted the ideals of the whole church by inventing new self-serving doctrines and placing the Pope in the position of facile princeps rather than primus inter pares – this was, as a matter of fact, contrary to the previous 1,000 years of church history. The original structure of the church can still be seen in the Orthodox hierarchy.
The Reformation was a western attempt to rid Christianity of these invented doctrines and to deal with corruption within the church. Lutheranism is not all that different from Roman Catholicism, but many of the subsequent Protestant churches are markedly different – and it is a point of view that they have also invented their own doctrines to justify the difference. Such is the way of organised religion.
I think the point is that the Reformation was an attempt to rediscover the purity of the Christian message, whilst of course not being free from secular political considerations. I agree that, as alluded to above, the rise of Wahhabism probably is the Moslem “reformation,” in that it seems to have happened for much the same reasons and with a similar effect. One should perhaps remember that the western Christian Reformation did result in all manner of horrors and persecution, but ultimately facilitated the rise of science and the open society – it is hard to imagine capitalism or liberal democracy arising in an unreformed Catholic society, for example.
It is perhaps possible that the Moslem world will undergo a reaction against the oppressive “purity” of the reformed Wahhabist doctrine, just as the west reacted against the corruption of the Catholic church by means of the Reformation, and then reacted against that ultra-conservatism by becoming somewhat more liberal and open-minded, and even within the Catholic world reacted with the Counter-Reformation. However, this process took a long time in the west, and resulted in many deaths and persecutions. Whether it will be as long and as bloody in the case of Islam remains to be seen, but I do think the process will in time happen.
EG
This is somewhat off topic, but I’m curious. Nancy posted an opinion regarding the effective assimilation of migrants in the States. Incidentally, I must concede that I’ve never travelled to the States before so I don’t know firsthand, however I have met many Americans and they tell a somewhat more nuanced story. Basically, I’ve been told that many Americans with even a (sometimes ridiculously) small amount of foreign blood will loudly proclaim that nationality first. Being American comes a distant second. This doesn’t sound wholly desirable to me, it points to cleavages in society that may widen if circumstances permit. Despite the fact that Americans are more overtly patriotic than we Australians, immigrants here are subjected to a great deal of societal pressure to be Australian first and foremost, and on the whole, they become so. In fact, an immigrant is much more patriotic than your average laconic Aussie. I cannot understand why similar expectations are not tacitly enforced by populations in Europe. The situation isn’t perfect in Australia; there is a degree of ethnic tension in this country, but it’s quite minor compared to many European nations.
I’m Suffering – No, they don’t ‘loudly proclaim’ their family’s original nationality first. Every last one of them is proud to be an American and proud of their parents/grandparents/great grandparents for having had the courage and fortitude to settle in a new country.
At the same time, they’re aware that their family didn’t spring from the soil of America. They know they have inherited some characteristics which may not have been born out of America – the Germans are proud of their engineering skills, for example, and their attention to detail and method – and they want to acknowledge that part of themselves, too. They are proud of who their ancestors were.
If you’re an Aussie, you probably feel very much the same.
I cannot see anything the least bit uncommitted or disloyal in this. Just consider for a moment the number of hyphenated Americans who died for liberty in two world wars and the Italian-Americans, Afro-Americans, Irish Americans and Hispanic Americans who are fighting (alongside us) today in a volunteer armed services to make the world safer by bringing democracy to the Middle East.
What would we think of someone would have said that after Kristallnacht:
“Nazism is in serious need of the equivalent of a protestant reformation and until there is widespread ‘moderate’ support for uncompromising and overt rejection of Nazism’s savage excesses, then ‘anti-Nazism’ is the only rational response to their belief-system by any who are not Nazis (or who wish to stop being a Nazi).”
But is “Mein Kampf” reformable? Better reject it and discredit it!
However emotionally appealing, it is not practicably possible to prevent a billion people holding a given religious point of view. Furthermore, discrediting religion does little to dissuade its adherents – Christianity in the west has been consistently and thoroughly discredited for the best part of two centuries, and there are still millions of practicing Christians, a significant number of whom are of the fundamentalist persuasion. Given the natural perversity of humanity, telling people their basic beliefs are wrong serves only to encourage them.
The real answer is probably closer to a repeal of all blasphemy and ‘hate-crime’ laws and the proper and impartial enforcement of what remains.
EG
Verity – I understand your point. I absolutely believe in the immigrant’s right to maintain their customs, assuming they don’t contradict our laws (simple) and the culture of our society (somewhat more intangible). And sure, adding the aforementioned customs to our society makes our culture richer. Admittedly, I’m pretty much spouting hearsay about American immigrants, having never visited the States. However, I’ve heard the same story from enough Americans independent of each other to believe there’s some truth in what I said earlier. So yes, I don’t doubt that you’re right in what you say. However, I also believe there are many people in the States calling themselves Irish/Chinese/Italian etc American. No! They should be Americans first. What’s wrong with being an American of Italian descent? Okay, that’s just a semantic example, however I do definitely think that many immigrants (or, more commonly, children and grandchildren of immigrants) put far too much stock in their origins. For example, we hear about the St Patricks Day celebrations in Chicago all the way over here – it gets a higher billing than the celebrations in Ireland! This kind of thing sits uneasily with me; I wonder where their loyalties lie. And like I said earlier, I believe that kind of origin-worship creates cleavages in society that can become malignant if certain circumstances arise; for example, when the interests of one’s adopted country diverges from those of one’s ancestral nation.
St. Patrick’s Day parades & celebrations have been adopted by most Americans regardless of ethnic background. They were started up at time when there were huge numbers of poor Irish living in ghettoes in the big cities. As the Irish moved up the economic ladder and moved out to the ‘burbs, they have been replaced by other immigrants, but the tradition remains.
It is common to see black, Chinese and Hispanic folks taking part in St. Patrick’s celebrations today.
Most Americans regard their ethnicity(Irish, Chinese etc.)as separate from their nationality (American.) Why wouldn’t they? There is no “ethnicity” that is American except Native American.
Since you in Europe tend to (historically) have the same ethnicity as nationality, you do not see the two things as separate as we do.
Nothing unusual or “dangerous” about it. A 100 percent American chap named Eisenhower had no problems bombing the crap out of the Third Reich.
Eisenhower … Excellently put, Susan!
I have never encountered an American who wasn’t very proud to be an American, but was also proud of his/her ethnicity. After all, their forebears had the optimism and the will to come to America and they helped to make it great. I have met Italian-Americans (and, Suffering For, they do not use these terms all the time — usually only on social occasions, when someone asks them) who will talk about how fiercely loyal the Italians are to their friends; and Irish-Americans who say, “It must be my Irish sense of humour!” – etc. Why are you so harsh?
Why should they not hark back to their roots? Everyone is proud of their ethnicity, but, as Susan illustrated so aptly above, I’ve never met a single one who would put his ethnicity over his Americanness.
For the record, as a foreigner, I do find it irritating at times. They hear an English accent and want to tell you their family’s from Wigan on their mother’s side and their father’s great grandfather was from a little village outside Munich and expect you to mime fascination. But they mean no harm, and they’re just trying to make a connection.
Also, the ones claiming to be “part” native American have soared in recent years.
Cleavages in society? Only Anna Nicole Smith.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1410634,00.html
Verity, to get back to the topic at hand, I know you’ll be just endlessly pleased to hear that Cherie Booth, QC, AKA The Giant Spider, has taken on the cause of that UK Muslim girl who wants to wear an enormous black tablecloth to her state-supported school, because the shalwar khameez and hijab uniform tolerated there now just isn’t Islamic enough.
Susan, ohmigoodness, was this the work of ol’ Cherie (I adore her trailer park trash name and only hope that her second name is Tiffany, or Britney or Chelsy or Lessee – or more likely Bouncee, and that’s just her ankles) whose husband rammed the EU Human Rights Act through Parliament without debate so they could be comfortable in their old age?
Euan,
The billion-people ‘argument’ does not abrogate the right of self-defence, and “discrediting religion” in a generic, disarrayed way blurrs the issue. (Additionally, even atheism is a belief. Atheists believe there is no Creator, but they can’t know it.)
I can imagine some of your problems with Christianity, but understand that fundamentalist Chrisitians don’t behead atheists, and they recognize the active prosecution of “infidels” as an evil practice.
Islamicism is not a religion in the “pietous”, humanist sense we tipically understand them, but a belief-system rooted in the instinctual part of man and the cult of death, serving as an alibi for a war institution–jihad— without moral restraint. That’s why Hitler, an atheist, liked it so much.
I don’t think that law enforcement is a sufficient condition for the survival of the West. Being tolerant with the intolerants is suicidal.
The last sentence would have been:
I don’t think that treating jihad merely as a “law enforcement” matter is a sufficient condition for the survival of the West. Being tolerant with the intolerants is suicidal.
The last sentence should have been:
I don’t think that treating jihad merely as a “law enforcement” matter is a sufficient condition for the survival of the West. Being tolerant with the intolerants is suicidal.
Susan, while taking a dig at Cherieeeee Blair with a pitchfork, above, I omitted to address your major point: the schoolgirl whose sense of couture runs to enormous black tablecloths. She sounds like a typical, represssive Muslim which a fierce desire to dictate to everyone else and get lots of attention for doing it.
Doubtless if she applies for a driver’s licence, she will turn up with a black pillowcase over her head.
I hope the judge decides this state school does not have to adhere the dictates of this kid’s religion and if shewishes to be an oddball, she can continue to do so, but not on school property. There is absolutely no point in her going to school in any case as her ignorant little mind is locked up tight and she is never going to be hired for a job anywhere. Her family will already be on welfare and she can just sign straight on and be a self-righteous taker all her life, disapproving of the taxpayers who are funding her vicious little life.
I think the day of mass repatriation grows ever closer.
I don’t have any problem with Christianity.
Atheism is a matter of faith just as much as any religion is, I agree & understand. There is no evidence one way or the other. Hitler, incidentally, was not an atheist – he was actually a Roman Catholic and spoke repeatedly of the fact.
I think you perhaps misunderstand the nature of religion. In much of the west, Christianity is a nebulous and watered-down faith, appearing in many cases to be little more than a moral justification for liberal socialist politics. This does not mean it was always thus, nor does it mean this is a ‘natural’ condition of religion.
Religion deals in moral absolutes, and is one way (not the only way) of finding a meaning or purpose in life. Religions, like states and nations, rise and fall. It might help you to compare the condition of Islam now with that of western Christianity around the time of the Reformation. You will probably see many parallels, I suspect.
Part of the problem we face is no doubt in the specific nature of the Moslem religion, which is fundamentally intolerant and violent. This is, I think, due in no small part to the fact that it is not just a religion, but was (in the earliest days) also the basic philosophy of an aggressive minority political outfit. This is markedly different from the origins of Christianity and, to a slightly lesser extent, Judaism.
Another part of the problem, I am quite sure, is the relative moral decline of much of the west. Atheism, whatever its defenders might say, is and has always been pretty much a minority sport. Many people define themselves as ‘Christian’ (but don’t go to church or really hold to much of Christian doctine) or ‘no specific religion’ (but acknowledge a spiritual and/or moral dimension to life). For people like this, quite possibly a majority in the west, some form of public morality is required. It does not need to be strict, ascetic religion, of course, but something needs to be there. People don’t mind a bit of hedonism, but they tend to expect a little asceticism to go along with it.
The atheist libertarian may not like this, but this is the way people really work. A secular morality simply does not work for any but a minority of people – perhaps one day this will be different, but right now it is not. The relative collapse of Christianity as a significant moral ethos has, therefore, left something of a vacuum in the west. Islam will quite likely fill this vacuum, however much people rail against it, because whatever else it may be it really does offer a specific and defined moral outlook and it really does inculcate these moral values. Nothing else in the west does this at present, so the next steps are somewhat predictable.
How to get around this is something of a problem. It is unlikely that the established western churches will discover that Christianity is not a creed for social workers but is actually a profoundly moral and ascetic philosophy. The eastern (Orthodox) churches understand this rather better, but are not well represented in general in the west. It is hard to see what moral code the west has to offer which can rival the firm and definite viewpoint of Islam. ‘Do what you will’ simply will not cut it, whatever its adherents may choose to think.
EG
Verity, I have been following this case rather closely and this girl is a tool of Hizbut Tahrir, a radical Islamist group that wants to establish a worldwide Islamic state. They are using this case as yet another crowbar to dismantle the secular authority of the West, and Mrs. Blair is helping them do it. Hizbut is banned in several European countries but not in the UK.
What makes me especially angry about this case is that there is already a uniform at the school for Muslim girls that is perfectly correct, Quranic-wise, consisting of a shalwar khameez and a hijab. The nasty little brat/tool of Hizbut said she didn’t want to wear it because “unbelievers” (i.e. Sikhs and Hindus) also wore the shalwar khameez.
This kind of intolerance should not be encouraged/pandered to by the British state school system, to say the least! Let alone by the wife of the Prime Minister.
When do the “religious hatred” rules start to apply to Muslims? Oh, I forgot — if it applied to Muslims half of the UK Muslim population would be in jail! Never mind then.
Euan. Perhaps I have misinterpreted your remarks; all this talk of Islam filling a moral vacuum in the West…are you suggesting an Islamic takeover in the Occidental world? I have to say, I can’t see any evidence of this. It seems to me that market reforms are (thankfully) a much more universally palatable phenomenon than Islam, and yes, I know we’re not comparing apples with apples here. However, fundamentalist Islam and the free market system seem to be incompatible. Most states have plumped for the latter. And who can blame them? Wealthy Islamic states find themselves thus due to accidents of geography, and the source of their wealth is on an – admittedly long-term – strategic decline. It’s also a remarkably fickle resource – witness Saudi Arabia’s brush with bankruptcy in 1998 due to low oil prices. In recent history, we have seen a few nations embracing Islamic reform and going dramatically backwards in areas most sane, freedom loving people would value. We have also seen (and are seeing) many states enact market reforms and succumbing to the inevitable liberalising pressure and positive – I hope I’m amongst friends here – societal change that accompanies such reform. The events of the past few years have hardened attitudes against Islam. Even the cultural apologists who attempt to bail out the most egregious excesses of Islam seem to covertly breath a sigh of relief that they don’t have to actually live under such conditions. To me, the international caliphate looks more and more like a non-starter than ever. Allah akbar.
Not at all. Although that could happen, I think it’s extremely unlikely – Islam simply doesn’t have the resources necessary.
What I’m suggesting is exactly what I said – no more. I think it quite possible, indeed likely given the way we are going, that Islam will become a mainstream accepted religion in the west, simply because the west is not offering any compelling alternative moral code. This has implications for the future of western civilisation, not all of them good.
Correct, but you can say the same thing about Christianity and Judaism. All three of the monotheistic religions have strictures against usury and the love of money.
You can’t be my friend if you gratuitously abuse the English language by using the non-word ‘societal.’ The word you are looking for is ‘social.’
However, to be serious – it is quite true that market capitalism results in greater social and political liberty. I suppose it is more correct to say that capitalism requires these things to work most efficiently, and it can of course work without them – just not so well. The flip side of that, however, is that it is not correct to assume that all societies necessarily want capitalism and liberty. Consider the former Warsaw Pact nations, for example: whilst the east European nations and those parts of the USSR that were long dominated by them have reverted fairly easily to a more liberal and capitalistic society, the southern republics of the USSR and to a lesser extent Russia itself have not. This is due in large part to their history.
A topical example would be Ukraine – the western part is largely Catholic and has historically been dominated by, amongst others, Poland. Indeed, large parts of what is now Ukraine used to be Poland. Eastern Ukraine has been dominated by Russia, which has never experienced democratic government before the 1990s. The Yushchenko/Yanukovich split in the recent elections is close the the Polish/Russian (or Catholic/Orthodox if you prefer) split, although there are other factors. Looking south, the Asian republics have never been capitalist or democratic, are not now and are not likely to be for some time. Russia herself was aggressively capitalist up to WW1, although not democratic – and look at Russia today. History has an effect.
Amongst many, but not all. It is also fair to say that, rightly or wrongly, Anglo-American activity in the Middle East has hardened attitudes there against the west – again, amongst many but not all.
I’m Suffering – Why did you write ‘allah akbar’ on a liberarian site? What, as they say, did you mean by that?
Susan – I didn’t know that. Well, this kid’s a willing tool and I hope the judge disposes of this attention-seeker by telling her she doesn’t need to go back to school. She’ll never work, anyway, she obviously disapproves of all art, as a Muslims, and music, and thinks history is misreported, so why waste the education?
I do not think any Muslim dress of any kind has any business on taxpayer funded property, and I think the French are absolutely correct in banning it in schools. If these kids’ families want them to wear Muslim gear (for Muslim boys and men, this always seems to consist, in the summer of shorts and t-shirts) then they can fork out for private religious schools. Otherwise, STFU.
Cherie Blair should not, of course, be defending people who are working against the British state, but she is a smug Gramscian who knows better than anyone else about absolutely everything else. In other words, a nasty slug who feeds off the state. It is Legal Aid who will be paying this little troublemaker’s legal fees, not her family. Besides, this is the only kind of work she can get. She earns around three hundred thousand pounds a year, chicken feed if she were really what she claims to be – ‘a high powered QC’. High powered, successful barristers don’t take chickenshit ‘human rights’ cases. They try the cases that bring a million or more PER CASE into their chambers. So Cherieeeee’s a bottom feeder.
But B. Liar and Cherie-Antoinette treat the United Kingdom as their private fiefdom and they think the citizenry are serfs to be moved around and directed at will. I will never forget Toneboy, who is not exactly the brightest light in the harbour, at one of his imitation-White House press conferences, telling highly intelligent, highly respected journalist Peter Hitchens, who was pressing a question, to “Sit down and stop being bad.” Sez it awl, reelly.
Rob – ‘A nation’s laws do not define the character of its people’,
I lived in a Middle Eastern country for fifteen years and I found that the converse was true. The character of the people was entirely governed by its laws, as the country in question used predominantly Sharia law as the basis for its legal system but had a parallel civic law to deal with such things as motoring offences.
and Doug ‘I understand the Koran is, for the faithful the world over, printed only in arabic …’ Indeed and very beautiful in appearance some are, too. They do reflect a significant part of Arabic art on which, as you are no doubt aware, there are significant restrictions.
Many of the people I lived with could obviously speak Arabic, but many could not read more than simple arabic and had limited spoken vocabularies. I believe that the Quran is not written in simple Arabic, indeed trhe script is often highly stylised, hence the matter of interpretation by scholars allowing room for ‘nuances’. But many could recite large parts of the book by rote having been educated (solely) at Quaranic schools. This is what we would describe as indoctrination or conditioning. The case is even more acute at the maddrasas in Pakistan where the pupils do not speak Arabic and so do not actually understand what they are reciting.
Dire isn’t it?
I can see a hint of a similar scheme being prepared under the guise of having UK schools receive Islamic ‘educational ‘ literature in the early years. However, in return, Islamic parents withdraw their children from classes delivering education on any other faiths.
Perhaps we are seeing Islamic double standards at work here?
Verity: Well, Mrs. Toneboy is at least more intelligent than the girl’s last lawyer, as I haven’t heard any mention of the “I can’t dress like the dirty kuffar” defense being waved about since Cherie took on the case. It’s horrible that this is all being financed by the taxpayer, who would also have pick up the tab, I presume, if the girl wins her case and then the giant tablecloth catches on fire at the Bunsen burner during science lab.
5050: “Perhaps we are seeing Islamic double standards at work here?”
No “perhaps” about it.
Susan – Well, Mrs. Toneboy is at least more intelligent than the girl’s last lawyer,
Oh, she’s sly. A life in back rooms plotting in committee meetings is her natural habitat. However, I am sure whoever bankrolled her chambers insisted that there be some genuine legal talent to back up the front woman. There will be intelligent younger barristers eager to put Cher’s chambers on their resumes when they move on to making real money.
‘Course, once the socialists have been thrown out in disgrace, it won’t look so good
Why did you write ‘allah akbar’ on a liberarian site? What, as they say, did you mean by that?
Verity – apologies, it was my feeble attempt at irony. I won’t explain, I’m sure you get it.
Euan – apologies for you too! I stand corrected on the ‘societal’ slipup. However, I might leave the rest of what you said untouched because I don’t want to go over old ground too much.
Why did you write ‘allah akbar’ on a liberarian site? What, as they say, did you mean by that?
Verity – apologies, it was my feeble attempt at irony. I won’t explain, I’m sure you get it.
Euan – apologies for you too! I stand corrected on the ‘societal’ slipup. However, I might leave the rest of what you said untouched because I don’t want to go over old ground too much.
EG: “[Hitler] was actually a Roman Catholic and spoke repeatedly of the fact.”
He maybe was nominally a Christian (indeed, I think Catholicism is the Christian offshoot closer to politheism/atheism).
The fact is that Hitler was strongly opposed to Christianism (and obviously its original source, Judaism), and praised the politheism/atheism of the ancient world and Islamism. In his own words:
Hitler praising atheism/paganism:
“The reason the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity. Christianity is a prototype of Bolshevism: the mobilization by the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society.” (October 19, 1941)
“As soon as the idea was introduced that all men are equal before God, (the ancient) world was bound to collapse.” (December 14, 1941)
Hitler praising Mahometanism:
“I can imagine being enthusiastic about the paradise of Mahomet, but as for the insipid paradise of the Christians! …Christianity is an invention of sick brains.” (December 13, 1941)
Euan, I don’t think I “misunderstand the nature of religion”, and hope we can agree that Hitler was an evil creature, the wicked expression of nihilistic madness.
I think Islamicism or atheism are not constructive alternatives to the Seven Noahide Laws, the core part of the Judeo-Christian Comandments, and of the 613 mitzvot of (Orthodox) Judaism. Judging from the point of human achievement, they work wonderfully.
(Quotes from the book:
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) “Hitler’s Table Talk; 1941-1944” translated by N. Cameron and R.H. Stevens, Enigma Books (1953)
Extracted from: jihadwatch.com : “Marines learn how to fight for Allah“, where you can find more Hitler’s assertions.)
To all – further apologies for my clickiness as evidenced above. Though not my clique-iness for hobnobbing with such erudite folk!
Suffering for writes: Verity – apologies, it was my feeble attempt at irony. I won’t explain, I’m sure you get it.
Nope. I don’t. I only get successful attempts at irony.
Well, Verity, may I refer you to an appropriate source. Here’s another if you don’t believe the first. You may think my joke was weak, however, it was a success semantically. Thank Christ!
G Cooper – Apologies for the late response. Not intentional. Too much work and too long desperately seeking a certain, elusive toy for a little one who is expecting it from Father Christmas.
I understand what you mean about the “English qualities” being a blessing and a curse. But isn’t there also the quality of being pushed to a certain point and then no further? If patient tolerance has degenerated into “anything for a quiet life”, then I agree that the situation is a ticking time bomb, but I find that hard to believe. There are too many people like you living there, and I mean that as a compliment.
Have you no faith left in MI5? They used to be regarded rather highly – as in, the best in the world. Considering that there have been generations of Islamic immigrants, some must have been recruited by now. Funding is surely monitored.
You are most assuredly correct about PC power being in force on both sides of the Atlantic, but at least there is talk radio and Fox News, be it ever so dire. There is a bit more of two sides to an argument. Fox has been addressing the incredible vanishing Christmas, and I have noticed grassroots groups around the country banding together to fight against what they regard as the attempt to turn Christmas into “the winter holiday”.
It’s the British top down government, their hand in glove with the media and the lack of local power and autonomous money that creates the helpless feeling. There are no “Vote No on Proposition 12” signs in front gardens, because Prop 12 doesn’t exist. Even with John Prescott’s considerable (boom boom) weight behind it, the Regional Assembly was squashed by voters, because they saw it for what it was and when they have the chance to speak out, they do.
Groups like La Raza in America seem to be similar types of immigrants. Indeed, scrolling down almost to the end of the piece in one of their tiresome newsletters reveals an interesting picture, circa 1980. http://www.aztlan.net/razapal.htm(Link) (I hope that worked. It probably didn’t). They are convinced that their relentless, huge numbers will so change the face and tenor of the American Southwest that they will be able to “reclaim” it for Mexico within 20 years. I agree with Susan that they must be watched, but I am also convinced that Americans of every stripe are not just going to sit by and let that happen.
Verity – I was referring both to the fact that you felt the need to leap in front of GCooper,who has always seemed quite sturdy, and to the fact that we don’t disagree on the attitude that should be taken to those Islamic immigrants who enter the UK solely to destroy it.
Susan – “But we’ve still got our work cut out for us anyways with this particular type of immigrant. Pretending differently is just foolish. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”
Can’t argue with a single word.
Nancy – Can’t recall your original post, but I’m sure I had a reason for writing whatever I wrote, whether it was a malentendu on my part, or whether I caught it correctly and you have stepped back post posting, so to speak.
On your later post, I do not think it is only Muslim immigrants intent on destroying the UK who should not be admitted. How many of them write under Purpose of Visit: Destruction of UK?
In addition, many of those wishing to convert the UK and Europe into some Islamic hell were actually born in Britain or Europe. I believe the time has come to admit that admitting large numbers of people from an alien, primitive society who adhere to a religion which is violent, intolerant and antithetical to our Christian roots and our enlightened societies was a terrible mistake.
Mass “repatriation” in the sense of shipping them back to the land of their fathers and the land where they go to find ignorant, obedient brides, will eventually get on the agenda.
The comparison with the Hispanics in the United States simply does not work. The Hispanics are, in many cases, the indigenes of N America. (This doesn’t mean to say I would like to see the US returned to them!!) The whites were the invaders – and they settled the country to the betterment of all. This is proved by the number of (non-US) N American indigenes who want to get in.
The British, French, Dutch etc are the indigenes of their own countries. The immigrants are here to destroy. We are more than capable of nipping this in the bud, obviously, but we need to get rid of the Gramscians first. Or maybe we could ship the Gramscians back along with the Pakistanis? It might be terribly unfair, as it would mean landing 40,000 BBC employees and their families on the Pakistani taxpayer but then, what goes around comes around.
Nits:
1.) “Societal” is indeed a word; the OED lists it with no note as to it being incorrect, archaic, or otherwise not current.
2.) Someone really messed up the behavior of the comment system in Mozilla; tab from the name field jumps to the sidebar, not the e-mail field. Ditto for the other fields.
After the terrorist attacks on London last Thursday I wonder what views some of the debatees here have now?