Andrew Sullivan, reminds me why I was a fan of his blog from the off and remain one:
Leave aside the issue of mob violence for a moment. No moderate Muslim or “sensitive” Westerner is defending that. What of the non-violent request: that one faith be granted its taboos, that Western culture must abide by them, that the law be reformed to protect religious faiths from blasphemy or offense? It seems to me that we should indeed avoid gratuitous insult of Islam, and Christianity, or any faith. But it is a complete delusion to believe that the major source of our problem today is something called “Islamophobia.” No: the problem is terrorism and tyranny propagated under the banner of Islam. Without that, no Danish cartoon could have been conceived of, let alone published. That is the real and far more blatant blasphemy. If 10,000 angry Muslims had marched in London after the bombing of a major mosque in Iraq, I’d be impressed. But they didn’t. Until they do, the West has nothing to apologize for. The Muslim world needs to take the beam out of its own eye, before it removes the speck from the West’s.
Right. Absolutely right. This is the point that gets forgotten in all of this. Western opponents of extending “hate speech” protection to pictures of the Big Mo are fixed with a quick label, but no one points the finger at the crowd that murders people it doesn’t like. Without a climate of fear created by muslim intolerance, there would have been no need for the cartoons in the first place. This point can never be stressed enough. Good quote.
Perhaps Andrew has seen which way the wall is falling
It seems to me that we should indeed avoid gratuitous insult of Islam, and Christianity, or any faith.
Correct. Gratuitous insults are bad manners, rude and thus rare in a civilised society – which is why we don’t need laws to deal with that sort of thing. The operative word here is “gratuitous” – as the quote points out, there is a strong argument that the cartoons were in fact not gratuitous – something the MSM and other namby-pambies have failed to address.
Otis – That’s not the point. You can’t legislate respect and you can’t legislate manners. You are correct when you write that the cartoons were not “gratuitous”, but it wouldn’t matter if they had been as far as the law is concerned.
I feel like I ought to be free to be as gratuitously offensive as I want, morning, noon, and night.
Firstly “avoid” does not mean it is “forbidden” or that there is any case to answer if it is done. This is how alcohol is regarded in Islam – it should be avoided according to the Koran but the beards make it “harram”/”forbidden”.
I would just like to say that maltreatment of Gays, Women or people of other faiths, extending to death of apostates is against my religion and is “offensive”.
Following the pattern of recent events, I would then feel justified in saying that the Koran is offensive to my religion and as such should not be made available, an apology given and the copyright be transfered to me forthwith.
Actually, TimC – I was about to comment on the left’s idolisation of people who are against the left’s favourite causes – gays and women, both of whom are routinely murdered and maimed by Islamics, for the crime of having been born. It’s very strange.
It’s very strange
Not so strange I think, those on the left who fawn over Qaradawi and his fellow islamists have simply found more effective support for their agenda, America hating homosexuals being somewhat harder to summon up on spec.
Noel Cooper – god (not addressed to you personally – no offence), but it’s all so skewed, isn’t it? Human beings used to just know what was right.
But apologise you eventually will
Ron Brick – Oh! Quelle surprise!
Did no one in Britain/Europe see this coming except the cultural editor of the Jyllands-Posten?
Everyone saw it coming but the only one out of around 400m Europeans and British had the balls to call it was Flemming Rose.
I hope they don’t play ‘Rule Britannia’ the Proms this year. “Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!” Don’t make me laugh.
How easy was it? And what are you going to do now? Nothing.
Three hundred and fifty thousand Brits scarpered from Britain last year. Interesting fact.
And around the same figure of illiterate, illegal “immigrants” slipped in and disappeared.
Cry, my beloved country! It breaks my heart.
There seems to be one very important element missing from all these discussions of Islamic sensitivity and that is the fact that Islamics murdered three thousand people on September 11, 2001 in the United States and just under one hundred in London in July of this year. This should never be forgotten nor forgiven and the Islamics who whine and complain about their treatment should be confronted with that fact daily. They murder in the most grotesque fashion – stoning and beheading – those who displease their alleged deeply religious sensibilities. The slaughtered innocents of the United States and London left behind families and friends who will grieve for the rest of the lives because of these horrendous crimes. We should honour the innocent dead by confronting Islamics whenever and wherever to let them know that we will never forgive nor forget.
The trouble with Shar’ia law is that, if you’re a 17 year old girl and you stab someone trying to rape you and a 16 year old relative, you can get hanged for it.
I hope chastity belts are legal in Iran. Or do they have clitoris removals instead?
Link for the above post, missed it.
Millie Woods – Indeed. It is not “just under a hundred dead” on London Transport on that horrendous day, but around 600 more maimed for life. Lost their sight forever; lost limbs, had something crash through their intestines so even after the best reconstructive surgery, they will never have a normal life again.
Six hundred who will never walk normally again, or run for a bus; who have lost their sight or their hearing forever; who will need colostomy bags for the rest of their lives. Whose legs were blown away at the ankles. And all who left their homes that morning expecting to go to work for another day and, on the London Underground escalator, heard the train coming and ran down the steps to catch it. … And who caught that bus.
And yes, Millie Woods, it’s not just those 700 individuals who were on the tube/bus that morning, but their parents and their children.
This religion is incompatible with enlightened Western values. Consider the escalation of the last five years. Unless checked with vigour, it will get much worse.
40% want sharia, 41% do not. Anyone care to do a gender breakdown of those numbers? Sharia law will lead to a separate judiciary which will then be pushed to have superiority over our law if anyone involved is Muslim, and we all know what happens to dhimmis under Sharia law…(lets await the need for non-muslims to ‘defer’ to muslims, even stepping aside in the street).
Soldiers beating rioters in Iraq “symptomatic of a wider problem”? Ok, Pakistani police beating cartoon jihadists a wider problem? police beating and shooting cartoon jihadists etc etc? The stink of blind hypocracy and irrationality is in the air.
Ignorance and arrogance and blame (oh my!), ignorance and arrogance and blame (oh my!)…
sorry the above is missing -insert country of choice- police beating…
…and maybe the infrastructure is being put in place as we speak…
Verity,
Take heart, some of us are still here. Some of us are free, proud and don’t read the Guardian. Or Al-Independant.
Some of us will never abandon “The Great Lands” (as they call it – and Europe must look rather nice to folks from a desert) to the Ayatollahs.
We have paid too much in blood and treasure for that.
No, 40% of poll respondents were stupid enough to admit wanting sharia; poll participants always underreport opinions they know society doesn’t approve of.
40% want sharia, 41% do not.
I think it is very hard to give much meaning to that isolated poll question, which was astonishingly badly worded:
“Would you support or oppose there being areas of Britain which are predominantly Muslim and in which sharia law is introduced?”
It is hard to give it a clear meaning, particularly as far as the last dangling relative clause goes. Does this imply sharia as sole jurisdiction or auxiliary law? Would the respondent necessarily take from it the application of sharia law, or its mere availability? (The London Beth Din will hear your case is you want it to, sitting as a court of arbitration – you don’t have to be Jewish.)
But the copula creates difficulties, too. If one says one opposes this, it appears one is not just opposing the use of sharia, one also objecting to areas of Britain being predominantly Muslim. If so it is hardly suprising that a significant proportion of Muslims don’t want to say that the existence of predominantly Muslim areas is objectionable. (I find it difficult to object to it myself. It is perfectly legitimate and understandable for people who share a culture to want to live close together.)
So the question as posed is both equivocal and poses a false dilemma. Add to that it is being asked of a representative sample of the population, most of whom are not well educated, and the balance between support and opposition shouldn’t be a shock. I submit it doesn’t tell us anything.
Some of the other questions, however, do – though I don’t feel alarmed by them, as Sadiq Khan MP says he is. As an MP in a populist government, it is after all his job to be alarmed: Government needs problems to do things about.) The most disturbing in my view is that 13% say it is “OK to exercise violence against those who are deemed by religious leaders to have insulted Islam.” Even that question is a bit clotted, though.
………and so it goes….on & on.
Tick, tick, tick……………
Well now, should the cartoons have been …..One must take sensitivites into account……yes but in Iraq….Bush…41% said…………
Tick, tick, tick………….
Hello, Abiola Lapite. Good point.
Guy Herbert says: “It is perfectly legitimate and understandable for people who share a culture to want to live close together.” Fine. But impose their own primitive laws within an advanced culture.
Second, if they want to live close together, there’s a whole country called Pakistan absolutely jammed with them. They could go and live there.
I take it folk are quoting the opinion poll in the front of the Sunday Telegraph today. I must admit that my draw dropped a bit. 40-odd percent of respondents want Sharia law in this country. Well, listen carefully, boys and girls: it is not going to happen. Think about it: beheadings, stonings, amputations…I mean, I think even Tone and WonderBoy might want to resist that.
Jonathan – No, they will present it as they did in Ontario where, thank god, it lost the vote. This being, “Oh, this would just be for civil cases for Muslims to settle amongst themselves along their traditional lines. No, no! We don’t want to change your criminal law! Perish the thought! Just in cases of spats about divorce, custody of children or inheritance rights and things like that, where they would feel more comfortable following their own civil laws.”
Needless to say, many lefties in Ontario thought this was perfectly reasonable, except … Muslim women didn’t think it was reasonable at all, and they are the ones who got it defeated.
There must be absolutely no compromises of our hard won, intelligently wrought civil law. Unfortunately, we live in the time of the Great Appeaser.
Areas which have unassimilated immigrants,with their own language,customs and living under their own laws have traditionally been called colonies.
May I point you to Zimbabwe,Northern Ireland,Cyprus in our own immediate experience.
Well, well, the excellent Patrick Sookhdeo is interviewed in The Telegraph today (Link) in which he says the government is already making appeasement noises regarding shariah law. Read it. It is truly horrifying.
At the risk of falling into the Delenda est Carthago mantra let me repeat.
We owe nothing to the Islamic world – nothing at all and it is they who should apologize till the end of time for their murderous activities against the whole of the non-Islamic world.
Meanwhile let’s do a bit of cost accountiing and look at how much of the treasure of the civilized world is being expended on this cancer in our midsts. Any reasonable assessment shows without argument that the costs to our communities of allowing these uncivilized hordes to live amongst us is astronomical.
If they added value to our societies there might be a point in permitting them to live here but since they are a liability and not an asset why are they tolerated and why does take their demands seriously?
Millie Woods – Bat Ye’or says that 50 years ago there was an agreement between the-then Common Market and some Muslim world council to let large numbers of them in. I haven’t read her book, so I don’t know what the reasoning, which will have been sneaky and opaque.
However, here we are into the third generation of this garbage – according to Sookhdoe the resistance to integration was part of the original plan – and it’s the third generation that bombing our civilisation.
I cannot think of a single benefit these primitives have brought with them and they ought to be served notice to quit, across the board. More immediately, Blair and his accomplices must be forced to stop.
From Verity’s link
“But isn’t it true that most Muslims who live in theocratic states want to get out of them as quickly as possible and live in a secular country such as Britain or America? And that most Muslims who come to Britain adopt the values of a liberal, democratic, tolerant society, rather than insisting on the inflexible rules of their religion?”
It never occurs to the questioner that they have seen what we have got and it is good,There are modern cities roads,water,health service,education,free money.
Compare with most third world countries and come up with another reason why they come other that secularism.
Verity: Thanks for the DT link. Well, could chilling be an understatement? If the UK doesn’t get its act together….and quickly….it’s almost certainly going to face the worst nightmare in its history; but the heads remain firmly embedded in the sands of cowardly appeasement. Tick, tick, tick….
In Alaska “tribal councils” are allowed to rule on the punishment to be handed out to Indian teenage thugs who beat a pizza delivery man nearly to death, not even on the reservation. And the US courts accepted it. I wouldn’t be surprised if Canadian courts allowed the same jurisdiction to their Indians and Eskimos. So all are not equal in the eyes of the law even now. And it’s just getting worse. With such precedents, is it any wonder Western jurists see nothing wrong with allowing Sharia law? Do Islamic states allow their minorities – Christians, Baha’i, Hindus – to live under their own law? Somehow I think not.
“Verity,
Take heart, some of us are still here. Some of us are free, proud and don’t read the Guardian. Or Al-Independant.
Some of us will never abandon “The Great Lands” (as they call it – and Europe must look rather nice to folks from a desert) to the Ayatollahs.
We have paid too much in blood and treasure for that. ”
I am (at least until the ID Bill passes) free, also inordinately proud – but I do read the Grauniad and the Indie (as often as the Telegraph or this blog, anyway). I don’t intend skidadalling either, and will support the right of Danish cartoonists or anyone else to poke fun at Islam, Christianity or indeed my own cherished beliefs – up to and including physical confrontation if necessary.
I don’t think it will come to that, but tolerance to other peoples’culture does NOT extend to feeling obliged to efface your own, should it offend them.
The Islamic extremists might use the same argument, of course, in which case it is either “get back to your own ‘country’ (culturally speaking)”, or get ready to fight to dominate this one.
In such a war, I would be on you side of the barricades, Samisdatistas…
It takes a lot to get me mad enough at Western Liberal Democracy to come over like a member of the Massachusetts Militia, but the issue of free speech is one of those things…
Robert Speirs, in case you weren’t aware of the fact apples are not oranges.
The last time I looked the aboriginal people of North America were here before those of us of European origin.
Equating them with a load of parasitic johnny come latelies who insist on having it their way regardless is not at all the same.
Robert Speirs: Goddamit, those pesky Inuit again! They beat a pizza deliveryman nearly to death (not a good thing!) That must have REALLY confounded Western jurists, eh? So, a tribal council boxed a frigid ear. I remember, in happier & more peaceful times, when the local bobby’s look was enough to scare the shit out of young offenders.
We live in far more interesting times & the “offenders” really DO want to beat us to death.
Tick, tick, tick………..
Projecting this issue a somewhat,there are not a few towns and cities in the UK with large Muslim populations,it we hypothesise Sharia law in those areas,who will have jurisdiction if an “offence” is committed by a non Muslim?
Perhaps someone walking around with an image of Mohammed,not an offence outside the area but a serious crime within it .Are we going to end up with the old concept of escaping over the county line?
I would love to see a link to this because I’m frankly having a little trouble believing it. Not in believing that tribal councils have jurisdiction over their own, mind you, but that such jurisdiction extends beyond the reservation.
However, it’s true that such a law essentially granting native Hawaiians (whoever they are…) a separate legal system was up for a vote recently. I haven’t heard much about it lately.
Canada very nearly approved a certain amount of sharia law for resolving muslim family disputes last year. Guess who ended up defeating the measure? That’s right – muslims themselves. The provincial (it was an Ontario measure) Liberal Party under Dalton McGuinty was ready to pass it, but largely muslim protests derailed it. No teacher like experience, I guess. (More info here.)
Verity,
Birds of a feather flocking together need not be anything to do with imposing on the wider community. It’s about mutual support and the availability of shared facilities. If someone starts a mosque, eventually Muslims are going to settle nearby; and where several Muslim families are in an area. Elective affinity. The same with kimchee and temples goes for Koreans in New Malden and Vietnamese in Hackney.
It need not be something as strong as religion or shopping. Are all your neighbours Mexican? Or are there several ex-pats of a similar class and disposition nearby?
It’s worrying that a dodgy poll gets spun off into fantasies of separatism and violence worthy of Hizb-ut-Tahrir by several comentators.
Even Jonathan appears to adopt a precis of the press interpretation: 40-odd percent of respondents want Sharia law in this country. That isn’t what the poll said. We can be sure of that, because that was not what was asked. The actual question was vague and difficult to answer: Garbage in; garbage out.
If you want ICM to ask Muslims clearly whether they want Sharia law in the UK, ICM will do it for you. It is surprisingly cheap.
Those reading the Sunday Times will have got a coherent presentation of an entirely different point of view from a British Muslim.
Guy, steady on a minute: Are you suggesting the headline in the Sunday T. was a fabrication? If a headline in such a paper says “X % want a certain law,” I tend to assume that is what the story says, as opposed to something else, such as Chelsea beat Colchester 2-1 or water found on Mars, etc.
I
I’m suggesting that the newspaper was sensationalising the most equivocal result in their poll, and placing an interpretation on the facts that the facts won’t bear. It happens all the time, even in respectable papers like the Telegraph.
Look at all the reports attributing X (virtual) deaths a year to passive smoking on the basis of shaky extrapolations of misinterpreted epidemiology.
Guy Herbert: The Telegraph never attributes deaths to “passive smoking”. It always says something ironic like, “XYZ claim that passive smoking causes …”.
My neighbours are all Mexican, yes. There is an expat couple at the bottom of my street but I have no idea of their nationality as we have never spoken.
A good posting.
As for the attitudes of Muslims.
Well one must be careful of opinion polls, but they are worth considering.
According the study done for the Sunday Telegraph 40% of Muslims in Britain say they wish to see Islamic law imposed (as opposed to 40% who say they do not – and about 1 in 5 who will not say or do not know).
Many of the leaders of the “Islamic community” in Britian (including some of the so called “moderate” leaders) also support Islamic law being imposed.
This is unfortunate for the prospects of future peaceful conexistance.
It has been a long time since the State of Connectiut tried to make “the Bible” it’s law (I know that Islamic law is not just the Koran – but the sayings of the prophet of the Muslims and the early rulings of the judges before the law became fixed are hardly very nice either).
I also rather doubt that most “fundementalist Chrisitians” in the United States would like to have the Bible as their law. Partly because the only real law codes to be found in the Bible are to be found in the Old Testiment and include such things as not eating pork.
Most Christians hold that Jesus upheld the sprit of the law (what it was for) not the letter of the law as codified in the key books of the Old Testiment.
And most Jews do not support the laws of Old Testiment (the Talmud, the thoughts of many thinkers, long ago transformed the meaning of the Torah for most Jews).
Such thinking is still opposed by most (although not all) Islamic scholars.
When the Koran (and the sayings of the H…. and the early judgements) are no longer considered the word of God – but rather the words of human beings trying (imperfectly as all people are imperfect) to understand what God would want – then there will be hope.