The Islam thread

[stew]

I think of the youngest of the big 3 desert religions, huge numbers of deluded followers, and a vocal rump of violent jihadists who take their teachings a little too literally for my liking. On the other hand I think of the positive contributions made to maths and science, the cosmopolitan cities with their libraries and universities that were thriving when Dark Age Europeans were living in mud huts, and I lament how far that culture has fallen since then.

Maybe at the next funeral you attend you will change your mind and come to believe in God.

Your flowery rhetoric on math and science mask the fact you are a hater!

[Absent]

First things first: Kevin Myers is a plonker, a pompous ass, and the only times he's right is in the same way that a stopped clock is right twice a day. His world view of dictated by his ideology, not facts.  I've noticed that factual accuracy isn't always his strong point.  Sometimes his ideology lines up with reality, and it mostly does in the article below but he misses a few key points.

For example he omits the fact that the "outrage" over that stupid youtube video is manufactured outrage, the result of a few politicians whipping up hatred to shore up their base.  Salman Rusdhie was talking about this the other week.  Cities like Beirut and Damascus and Tehran were cosmopolitan open societies not so long ago.  This radicalisation of Islam is a fairly recent phenomenon and is a side-effect of internal power struggles in those countries. I heard that the authorities in Pakistan even called a public holiday to encourage people to go out and protest.  There's still a substantial proportion of the Islamic world (probably most of it) that doesn't give a toss about a stupid youtube clip. Pan the camera away from the angry mob at the embassy and the view is of ordinary streets full of people going about their daily business.

But one thing that does get on my wick is the western media's recent infatuation with seeking "balance" even to the point of manufacturing it where it doesn't exist.  Fact: as bad as the christian fundamentalist wing of the American Republican party or the DUP are, there is no Christian equivalent of the Taliban or Al Queda.  Christians do not generally fly planes into buildings or ignite half the world in riots and deadly violence every time their religion is insulted. The worst you can expect is the population of Tunbrige Wells sharpening their pencils in disgust and preparing another broadside via the Letters to the Editor.

Fact: Islam is different.  Christianity went through its violent adolescent years around the time of the inquisition.  Judaism, the oldest of the desert religions, got that nonsense out of its system so long ago that the documented accounts of it are in the old testament.

And one other thing that Myers is missing here, in his usual "tar all pinko liberal leftists with the same brush" mantra, is that there are quite a few people on the left who are every bit as wary of Islam as those on the right.  The late Christopher Hitchens (on the left? maybe not, but he was no fan of the current GOP), Sam Harris, Bill Maher, these are people who have spoken up quite vocally about the fact that Islam is different and a lot more dangerous than other religions.

But anyway. I hope this thread stays on the topic of Islam and not Kevin Myers. I think we all know where we stand on him.

Kevin Myers: All sides are not equal in religious violence
Tuesday September 18 2012

AN interview on RTE Radio One last week between Pat Kenny and Robert Fisk proved to be a perfect distillation of the moral equivalence and factual imprecision favoured by the liberal left whenever Muslims start behaving irrationally.

The context, of course, was the homicidal hysteria which once again is sweeping the Islamic world over the childishly inept video that is supposedly about Mohammed, but really could be about anything. Early in the interview, Fisk referred to the "Christian version of al-Qa'ida", by which he meant the provocative idiots who deliberately insulted Muslims. But insulting people is not quite the same as flying planes into crowded skyscrapers, or beheading non-believers, or blowing up Shia mosques, or slowly scalding people to death, or cutting their throats, which is what al-Qa'ida regularly did to its victims in Iraq, and its affiliates still do in Afghanistan.

Referring to the murder of the US ambassador in Libya, he described the makers of the "rubbish video" as "two looneys" who had managed to "stir up otherwise quite reasonable people into besieging embassies in Cairo and Benghazi", leading to "deaths". So there we have it: the people who made the video are lunatics; but the people who murdered the US ambassador are usually reasonable people.

But how reasonable could they possibly be if a single video, of quite astounding banality, is able to transform them into a murderous mob? Pat Kenny did not ask that question. But he did ask about the freedom of expression that we in the West cherish. Robert Fisk replied that in many western countries, Ireland included, Jesus Christ, the holy family and the Christian church were still a no-go area. It wasn't so long ago, he continued, that a film was produced showing Jesus Christ making love to a woman. A cinema showing the film in Paris was burnt down, the culprit was a Christian, and a Christian was killed in the fire. "So it's not as if violence is solely and exclusively the territory of one religion."

The only possible incident that fits this description, and which is apparently the evidence that violence is not exclusively the territory of one religion, was an arson attack on a cinema showing Martin Scorsese's 'The Last Temptation of Christ'. Nobody was killed. A dozen were injured, most of them firemen. One "spectator" received serious burns. The attack was roundly condemned by the archbishop of Paris. And far from it being "not so long ago", it happened in 1988: namely 24 years ago, about as much time as occurred between the Easter Rising and the Fall of France.

Moreover, anyone can find on the internet a pornographic cartoon of Jesus, Moses, Buddha and the Hindu god Ganesha engaged in a complex sexual congress. No one anywhere has been killed because of it. No one will be killed. So, far from Robert Fisk's unchallenged assertion that violence is "not solely and exclusively the territory of one religion" being correct, the opposite is true: internationally, almost all religious violence is by Muslims, often for the most frivolous and opportunistic of reasons. Indeed, one can only conclude that many Muslims are fretfully and obsessively searching for a reason to be insulted. Once they have found it, people will be murdered, and violence extolled. And not just in Muslim countries. In Australia, for example, last weekend Muslim protesters rioted in Sydney and at a rally, a little boy held up the placard 'Behead all those who insult the Prophet'.

We're not talking metaphors here: we know from hideous experience that beheading is precisely the fate that al-Qa'ida reserves for its "enemies", from the US journalist Daniel Pearl, to hundreds of unfortunates in Iraq, to the party of men and women recently decapitated in Afghanistan.

Yet the western media continue to indulge the intellectually inane and factually incorrect fantasy that one side is as bad as another in this endless saga of Islamic violence. It was typical of the adolescent level of this self-loathing that Robert Fisk referred to Mitt Romney's recent address in Jerusalem, in which, said Fisk, the US republican candidate "made the extraordinary racist comment that the Israelis were ahead of the Palestinians, i.e, the Palestinians were an uncivilised people, presumably because they had brown eyes and weren't Christian".

But this final absurd extrapolation (as if Israelis were blue-eyed Anglicans) is all the work of Robert Fisk. Moreover, it is not "racist" to say that one society is ahead of another. Is it racist to say that Renaissance Florence was ahead of 16th century Ireland? Or that 21st century Ireland is ahead of modern Malawi? Of course, Kenny did not dispute Fisk's many ludicrous and fantastical observations.

The unassailable fact is that almost every single Muslim society is behind Christian/ secular/Jewish countries; which is why Muslims migrate to them, and not vice-versa, but then, quite remarkably, often complain about the values they find there. But it is these very values -- the tolerance of free speech, artistic expression and intellectual enquiry -- which underlie the success of non-Muslim societies. Why are our media so reluctant to proclaim and defend this most obvious of truths?

Go Atheism!

[stew]

First things first: Kevin Myers is a plonker, a pompous ass, and the only times he's right is in the same way that a stopped clock is right twice a day. His world view of dictated by his ideology, not facts.  I've noticed that factual accuracy isn't always his strong point.  Sometimes his ideology lines up with reality, and it mostly does in the article below but he misses a few key points.

For example he omits the fact that the "outrage" over that stupid youtube video is manufactured outrage, the result of a few politicians whipping up hatred to shore up their base.  Salman Rusdhie was talking about this the other week.  Cities like Beirut and Damascus and Tehran were cosmopolitan open societies not so long ago.  This radicalisation of Islam is a fairly recent phenomenon and is a side-effect of internal power struggles in those countries. I heard that the authorities in Pakistan even called a public holiday to encourage people to go out and protest.  There's still a substantial proportion of the Islamic world (probably most of it) that doesn't give a toss about a stupid youtube clip. Pan the camera away from the angry mob at the embassy and the view is of ordinary streets full of people going about their daily business.

But one thing that does get on my wick is the western media's recent infatuation with seeking "balance" even to the point of manufacturing it where it doesn't exist.  Fact: as bad as the christian fundamentalist wing of the American Republican party or the DUP are, there is no Christian equivalent of the Taliban or Al Queda.  Christians do not generally fly planes into buildings or ignite half the world in riots and deadly violence every time their religion is insulted. The worst you can expect is the population of Tunbrige Wells sharpening their pencils in disgust and preparing another broadside via the Letters to the Editor.

Fact: Islam is different.  Christianity went through its violent adolescent years around the time of the inquisition.  Judaism, the oldest of the desert religions, got that nonsense out of its system so long ago that the documented accounts of it are in the old testament.

And one other thing that Myers is missing here, in his usual "tar all pinko liberal leftists with the same brush" mantra, is that there are quite a few people on the left who are every bit as wary of Islam as those on the right.  The late Christopher Hitchens (on the left? maybe not, but he was no fan of the current GOP), Sam Harris, Bill Maher, these are people who have spoken up quite vocally about the fact that Islam is different and a lot more dangerous than other religions.

But anyway. I hope this thread stays on the topic of Islam and not Kevin Myers. I think we all know where we stand on him.

Kevin Myers: All sides are not equal in religious violence
Tuesday September 18 2012

AN interview on RTE Radio One last week between Pat Kenny and Robert Fisk proved to be a perfect distillation of the moral equivalence and factual imprecision favoured by the liberal left whenever Muslims start behaving irrationally.

The context, of course, was the homicidal hysteria which once again is sweeping the Islamic world over the childishly inept video that is supposedly about Mohammed, but really could be about anything. Early in the interview, Fisk referred to the "Christian version of al-Qa'ida", by which he meant the provocative idiots who deliberately insulted Muslims. But insulting people is not quite the same as flying planes into crowded skyscrapers, or beheading non-believers, or blowing up Shia mosques, or slowly scalding people to death, or cutting their throats, which is what al-Qa'ida regularly did to its victims in Iraq, and its affiliates still do in Afghanistan.

Referring to the murder of the US ambassador in Libya, he described the makers of the "rubbish video" as "two looneys" who had managed to "stir up otherwise quite reasonable people into besieging embassies in Cairo and Benghazi", leading to "deaths". So there we have it: the people who made the video are lunatics; but the people who murdered the US ambassador are usually reasonable people.

But how reasonable could they possibly be if a single video, of quite astounding banality, is able to transform them into a murderous mob? Pat Kenny did not ask that question. But he did ask about the freedom of expression that we in the West cherish. Robert Fisk replied that in many western countries, Ireland included, Jesus Christ, the holy family and the Christian church were still a no-go area. It wasn't so long ago, he continued, that a film was produced showing Jesus Christ making love to a woman. A cinema showing the film in Paris was burnt down, the culprit was a Christian, and a Christian was killed in the fire. "So it's not as if violence is solely and exclusively the territory of one religion."

The only possible incident that fits this description, and which is apparently the evidence that violence is not exclusively the territory of one religion, was an arson attack on a cinema showing Martin Scorsese's 'The Last Temptation of Christ'. Nobody was killed. A dozen were injured, most of them firemen. One "spectator" received serious burns. The attack was roundly condemned by the archbishop of Paris. And far from it being "not so long ago", it happened in 1988: namely 24 years ago, about as much time as occurred between the Easter Rising and the Fall of France.

Moreover, anyone can find on the internet a pornographic cartoon of Jesus, Moses, Buddha and the Hindu god Ganesha engaged in a complex sexual congress. No one anywhere has been killed because of it. No one will be killed. So, far from Robert Fisk's unchallenged assertion that violence is "not solely and exclusively the territory of one religion" being correct, the opposite is true: internationally, almost all religious violence is by Muslims, often for the most frivolous and opportunistic of reasons. Indeed, one can only conclude that many Muslims are fretfully and obsessively searching for a reason to be insulted. Once they have found it, people will be murdered, and violence extolled. And not just in Muslim countries. In Australia, for example, last weekend Muslim protesters rioted in Sydney and at a rally, a little boy held up the placard 'Behead all those who insult the Prophet'.

We're not talking metaphors here: we know from hideous experience that beheading is precisely the fate that al-Qa'ida reserves for its "enemies", from the US journalist Daniel Pearl, to hundreds of unfortunates in Iraq, to the party of men and women recently decapitated in Afghanistan.

Yet the western media continue to indulge the intellectually inane and factually incorrect fantasy that one side is as bad as another in this endless saga of Islamic violence. It was typical of the adolescent level of this self-loathing that Robert Fisk referred to Mitt Romney's recent address in Jerusalem, in which, said Fisk, the US republican candidate "made the extraordinary racist comment that the Israelis were ahead of the Palestinians, i.e, the Palestinians were an uncivilised people, presumably because they had brown eyes and weren't Christian".

But this final absurd extrapolation (as if Israelis were blue-eyed Anglicans) is all the work of Robert Fisk. Moreover, it is not "racist" to say that one society is ahead of another. Is it racist to say that Renaissance Florence was ahead of 16th century Ireland? Or that 21st century Ireland is ahead of modern Malawi? Of course, Kenny did not dispute Fisk's many ludicrous and fantastical observations.

The unassailable fact is that almost every single Muslim society is behind Christian/ secular/Jewish countries; which is why Muslims migrate to them, and not vice-versa, but then, quite remarkably, often complain about the values they find there. But it is these very values -- the tolerance of free speech, artistic expression and intellectual enquiry -- which underlie the success of non-Muslim societies. Why are our media so reluctant to proclaim and defend this most obvious of truths?

Go Atheism!

Good for you newbie..................................I hope it goes away too.

[Absent]

I think of the youngest of the big 3 desert religions, huge numbers of deluded followers, and a vocal rump of violent jihadists who take their teachings a little too literally for my liking. On the other hand I think of the positive contributions made to maths and science, the cosmopolitan cities with their libraries and universities that were thriving when Dark Age Europeans were living in mud huts, and I lament how far that culture has fallen since then.

Maybe at the next funeral you attend you will change your mind and come to believe in God.

Your flowery rhetoric on math and science mask the fact you are a hater!

Man invented god,not the other way round,think about it!

[Absent]

I think of the youngest of the big 3 desert religions, huge numbers of deluded followers, and a vocal rump of violent jihadists who take their teachings a little too literally for my liking. On the other hand I think of the positive contributions made to maths and science, the cosmopolitan cities with their libraries and universities that were thriving when Dark Age Europeans were living in mud huts, and I lament how far that culture has fallen since then.

Well said,sound out.

[seafoid]

I think of the youngest of the big 3 desert religions, huge numbers of deluded followers, and a vocal rump of violent jihadists who take their teachings a little too literally for my liking. On the other hand I think of the positive contributions made to maths and science, the cosmopolitan cities with their libraries and universities that were thriving when Dark Age Europeans were living in mud huts, and I lament how far that culture has fallen since then.

Well said,sound out.

I don't know about deluded. Is it rational for anyone in their 30s now to think the Irish government will pay the social welfare pension when they retire? 

[give her dixie]

The war that the United States is waging — a war, let it be noted, that the United States is waging purely at the behest of its president, who is currently standing for re-election, and a war for which the consent of the governed was never sought — claimed six more people the other day in Pakistan. One of them was a "senior al-Qaeda figure," whatever that means, and we do not know what it means because the president who is waging the war would rather we not know what it means anymore. I am not here to discuss him. I am here to discuss The Others.

According to that story, which is sourced by McClatchy to an anonymous "intelligence official," there were five Others. The stories also calls them "Islamist insurgents," but they have no names that are important enough for the intelligence official to leak, so there is no good reason for a properly skeptical citizen of a self-governing republic to believe that part of the story. They remain The Others.

What if the anonymous official is lying? What if the anonymous official is just, you know, wrong? What if one of the Others was a date farmer, or a cab driver, or someone on his way to prayer? Then we must ask ourselves questions about these Others on whom we are making war, even if we are making war on them accidentally, as if that matters when you've been roasted alive by modern ordnance dropped on you by a flying robot.

Do the Others have parents? Do they have grandparents? Do the Others have siblings, who now watch the clear blue skies in terror every day, the way New Yorkers did for a few months after 9/11? Do the Others have spouses who miss them? Do the Others have children who wonder why the Others haven't come home from work yet? Do the Others have circles of friends who talk about the hole that is left in their daily lives, who talk about corny old jokes the Others used to tell, or stories about when one of the Others tripped on a rock or fell in a creek, or offer prayers for the souls of the Others every day? The bell, one presumes, tolls for the Others as much as it tolls for me, or thee, or anybody else anywhere.

What do the people who knew the Others think about their deaths? They were not the Others to the people who knew them. They were fathers and sons, and uncles and aunts, and nephews and nieces. They were the nice guy with the date stand, or the woman who smiled when she sold you some flowers, or the old gentleman who always stopped by the little cafe for tea and conversation. They were the guy who gave you the ride to the airport, or the young man who wanted to be a doctor, or someone who just happened to be going east on the road when the Hellfire came down the road going west.

They are the people whose businesses are blasted to rubble, whose lives and homes are shattered, and who have to somehow cobble together the money that it  costs to heal the wounds inflicted by modern ordinance. The Others don't know that what we really meant to do was kill the "senior al-Qaeda figure" who was standing at the fruit stand. They don't care, either, because we killed the Others, too, who were only standing around waiting to buy oranges. The fact that you weren't targeted to be killed doesn't make you any less dead. It doesn't salve the grief of your family or placate the rage of your neighbors. Or vice versa, for all that. What do the Others think about us? Because, from their perspective, we are the Others, and the Others are sending machines to kill them.

On Tuesday, a brilliant report, about the effect of the war that we are waging purely at the behest of the president, was released the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic of Stanford Law School and the Global Justice Clinic at the New York University School of Law. You should download it and read it. It is the testimony of the people on whom we are currently waging a war, a war of choice, as much as the war in Iraq was, and a war as unilateral as any we have ever fought, and a war that is more the result of one man's decisions than any other in our history. It doesn't matter a damn what we say we're doing. If we're firing modern ordnance from robot vehicles into villages, it doesn't matter how good we say our targeting is — and history tells us there's always reason to take boasts about that with a couple of tons of salt — because we are still blowing up villages, and the people in them. We are making war on those people because we are firing weapons of war into their midst. We are destroying their local economies, unravelling the fabric of their local societies, engendering existential dread until it becomes a fact of daily living. We are making war upon them because, as the report makes clear, they think we're making war on them, and that makes all the difference:

A drone struck my home.... I [was at] work at that time, so there was nobody in my home and no one killed.... Nothing else was destroyed other than my house. I went back to see the home, but there was nothing to do-I just saw my home wrecked.... I was extremely sad, because normally a house costs around 10 lakh, or 1,000,000 rupees [US $10,593], and I don't even have 5,000 rupees now [US $53]. I spent my whole life in that house... my father had lived there as well. There is a big difference between having your own home and living on rent or mortgage.... belong to a poor family and my home has been destroyed . . . [and] I'm just hoping that I somehow recover financially."

Nothing was destroyed except his house. And all the material elements of the life this man built for himself. War was made on this man, because he lived where he lived. He was an Other. He is not alone.

As it happens, I am at the moment reading Embers of War, Frederik Logevall's brilliant history of how the French colonial war to hang onto its colonies in Indochina became what the Vietnamese now call "the American war." There's a lot to the book, and I'm not sure how much of it translates into what I'm trying to talk about here, but one thing that does translate well is the futility of making war while pretending that you're not, the empty and destructive vaudeville excuses about democracy and pluralism while you're blowing the hell out of the landscape and killing Others, as though your good intentions sanctify what you've done to them. The problem is that nobody realizes how foolish this is until long after it is too late, and the pretense of making war for any other reason than killing a lot of people has fallen away.

Kindly Doc Maddow did a segment at the end of Tuesday night's show in which she expressed a kind of shock at the fact that the rain of anonymous death that the president, acting on his own initiative, has unleashed in southwest Asia is not more a part of our national dialogue. She is right to be concerned. What we are doing strikes at the very heart of constitutional self-government, let alone simple humanity. Thomas Jefferson once said of slavery that, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just," but he kept his slaves anyway. I am reassured constantly by this president, and by his military advisors, that we are waging a clean, precise war against an easily defined enemy. For myself, I fear for my country when the Others decide that they have had enough, that there are too many empty seats at prayer, and too many people who will never come to town any more to buy fruit in the marketplace.


Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/drone-strike-civilian-deaths-13081341#ixzz27r6uEe00