On being a patriotic and faithful Muslim American

PART II

What the Al-Qaida is today doing are some classic CIA techniques. The CIA used propganda videos of Soviet brutality to get recruits (They even made a Hollywood Movie, Remeber Rambo?) Al-Qaida today makes brilliant propaganda movies to gain recruits. There are so many other examples of their traits that can be tracked back to their Soviet days training. But there's isnt enough time to list all those.

I wouldn't quite agree to the charge "manifestation in Islam the support of violence as response to past wrongs or future dreams" Even though it does appear that muslims are locked in more conflicts then any other faith based denomination. But if you do take an unbiased view, whether it is Palestine or Chechneya or Kashmir or Sinkiang or Kososvo/Bosnia or Philipines it is the Muslims who are the aggrieved party. And most of these movements have only recently turned violent (after the Afghan Jihad). Before that they were mostly political/Nationalist movements. And really Justin, most resistance movements do tend to be violent. So to say somehow that this violence is inherent to Islam or that only Islamic movements are violent, I would disagree. It goes back to our action/reaction theory! Violence begetting violence and certainly not one sided violence as your posts suggests.

Well.....Im looking forward to hearing your views on Israel/Palestine. You said you are going to see your son before he leaves and I am assuming he is in the Army, is that true? Do you also have a Military background? You dont have to answer if you dont want to but I guess this will make this conversation even more fascinating if it were true~!

Have a good time Justin

Peace to you my friend~!

Yasser

Hello Justin,

Thanks for your honest reply. Btw, Please dont read much into my responses to FarnazMansouri. We got this going for a while. Most of it is just some non-serious blabber with both going at each other but yeah I do believe in reactions to all actions. But who gets to decide which one's the action and which is the reaction? Whether Americans attacking Afghanistan was a reaction or those 19 Arabs attacking America a reaction.

You said,

"The Taliban were extreme enough that allowing bin Laden and al-Qaida safe harbor was congruent with their religious and moral views, but it was not that different than what happens in other Islamic majority nations, no?"

I think its important to take into consideration between the Taliban and Al-Qaida, because in all 50+ muslim countries of the world no one but Afghanistan would give them shelter. Osama bin Laden was a mythical figure among the Afghanis. Some of this hype was built up by Osama's initial handlers, the CIA. Osama was their poster boy. Here's an Arab Billionaire, living the life of a modern day Prince, leaving all his luxuries behind, coming to fight with their Afghan brothers in this Global Jihad, the brainchild of no other than the CIA! I dont know if I've discussed it with you, the concept of Holy war was pretty alien to muslims before the CIA made it fashionable. You could look at all the struggles of muslims had against colonials, the Algerians against the French etc., Palestinians fighting against Israelis (they called it intifada!), Our several wars with India, none of them were ever called Jihad. They were all Nationalist struggles/wars. It was the CIA that re-invented this concept of Global Jihad because it had to recruit Arab mercenaries in thousands to take on the "Godless Soviets" (atleast thats what the Mujahideens were told). Coming back to Al-Qaida it could be likened to the Genie that wont go back to where it came from. Those battle hardened Arabs were now a misfit in their societies back home. Most of them didnt wanna go back. The ones that did were persecuted by their governments. Osama's Saudi Nationality was revoked. Thats when he formed Al-Qaida and all those Muslim fighters recruited from Morroco to Indonesia came under his tent. Osama's men helped the Taliban overcome their opposing Warlords and the Taliban thanks to their tribal customs as well as indebtedness to these Arabs, allowed them a safe haven. Thats how it all basically unraveled. just wanted to provide that bit of context to this story. We were gullible enough and probably more responsible in unleashing this Frankenstien, but we weren't alone in it. Its your baby too!

(Continues above~!)

Hello Yasseryousufi,

I have been quite busy so have not been able to spend much time here.

"Frankly this incessant demand of "Muslim need to do more" is a turn off and we have to question whether those people mocking us all the time are really on our side in this fight or not."

Yet the need for a domestic or internal answer to this problem certainly is what is needed. America applied overt military force after 9/11 for obvious reasons. The example of Taliban Afghanistan was clearly an extreme one when viewing Islamic majority nations, but it also exemplified a trend of Islam in relation to itself and to the world, in particular the western world. The Taliban were extreme enough that allowing bin Laden and al-Qaida safe harbor was congruent with their religious and moral views, but it was not that different than what happens in other Islamic majority nations, no? Many of the more powerful Arabian region countries overtly or covertly support extremist or fringe groups or 'terrorist' organization internally or outside the state, and many have an spoken or silent support for expansionism of Islam throughout the world, often manifesting in violence.

When any organization feeds and gives harbor, (allows, accepts, embraces), the internal growth of beliefs leading to actions that negatively affect external organizations, it is at that time if not before the external organizations react. You did quote to Farnaz: "Theres a reaction to every action!"

It is not an uncommon manifestation in Islam the support of violence as response to past wrongs or future dreams. Both of these have weight with the extremist movements in Islam. Common extremist movements. The point is that these are internally devised and originated. Fed by more than a fringe, and manifest as violence and intolerance all over the globe. Internally sourced. Of course the cure is internal as well, don't you think?

It may be one reason that the Pakistani military incursion into Swat is more effective than some Occidental attempt, eh? And part of it IS that the fighting is closer to home and between 'kin'. It makes for a very different dynamic.

I have plenty to say on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, but do not have the time in the moment. Perhaps in a day or two, or we can take it up again soon. I am in a crush to complete some important things, and am looking forward to going to see my son for a few days before he leaves, and there is yet much to do between now and then.

I enjoy chatting with you Yasser.

The name is Justin.

Salaam, peace and santihom, to you and your world.

yasseryousufi,

YOu need not bother replying to my post since nothing can erase what you have said justifying the assaults on innocent people.

You have revealed yourself for what you are. Nothing more need be said.

yasseryousufi,

Indeed, you are a funny little screeching man, a little student of Remedial Propaganda 090.

Not only do you endlessly (and poorly) imitate my posts, but in your abysmal ignorance, ou have repeatedly unmasked yourself for the racist that you are.

AND here, you leave no doubt:

"So what if European Jews are assaulted? European Muslims are also assaulted everyday. Maybe those Jews would be better off if they dont bring out processions in support of IDF while its killing Palestinian babies, women and elderly in UN safe houses, schools and hospitals! Its human nature Farnaz! Theres a reaction to every action!"

The French, German, Austrian, English Jews whom your co-racist islamists are assaulting, are little girls, boys, adolescents, men, and women, the elderly, who have as much to do with Israel as they do with Antarctica. Some have one view of Israel, some another. Some have no view at all. Some observe Judaism; some do not.

They are innocent people, not Israeli army officers, not Israeli government officials, not even Israeli citizens, many of whom are also innocent people.

YOU may object to certain Israeli policies, just as anyone else may. You may demonstrate in a free country, just as anyone else may. THAT is where it ends.

On Assaults against Muslims: It is true that some Muslims have been assaulted but not by Jews and not in such numbers.

BUT JEWS, take note of this yasseryousufi's thinking. We are not randomly assaulting, beating, etc., Muslims because three million of us have been exiled from our homelands.

We are not beating them at all, not bothering them, in fact, befriending them. We have protected them!

EVEN though: They shoot little girls in the forehead at point-blank range, after murdering her parents in front of them.

They attacked innocent Israeli Jews, Christians, Muslims, etc., on beaches, school buses, in the middle of Tel Aviv.

They have bombed Synagogues.

They slaughtered at Sbarro's and they slaughtered at UJ.

STILL, JEWS, we have not attacked random Muslim children, adults, the elderly.

BUT, LOOK: Yasseryousufi provides a rationale for such behavior.

Now, let us follow the reasoning of yasser's mentally challenged self. Perhaps, if the various Muslim clerics in the news did not spew anti-European and anti-American filth, praise the beheadings of some, 9/11, the acts of Hasan, perhaps, then there would be fewer assaults on Muslims in Europe and in the US.

NOw, I'd tell you to shriek, caw, crow, and raise up your feathers, but, of course, you cannot since I have merely followed your reasoning.

In fact, should any Muslims be assaulted during the 9/11 trials in New York, or for the trial of Hassan, those who support the assaults on Muslims, and I would expect you to be among them given your deranged thought processes, the offending need only post your silly post, and that will be that.

Screech on, illiterate, if you must.

FarnazMansouri!

You're a funny woman. You just rephrase my posts and childishly throw my words back at me. Try bringing some originality to your posts FarnazMansouri! Its about time.

So what if European Jews are assaulted? European Muslims are also assaulted everyday. Maybe those Jews would be better off if they dont bring out processions in support of IDF while its killing Palestinian babies, women and elderly in UN safe houses, schools and hospitals! Its human nature Farnaz! Theres a reaction to every action! Now you can get all touchy about it and shriek your racist bigot cries, the fact remains that the # 1 threat to world peace including peace for Jews around the world remains the diabolical state of Israel. Why dont you take our processions for the solution of this crises like other honest well meaning people of Europe do?

Part II

On the Israel-Palestinian issue, im obviously not as well versed in the American Politics as you would be, and USA is a vital cog in this whole crises. Do you honestly believe any US President can ever broker honestly in this crisis, considering how AIPAC and other lobbies hold the Congress by their balls? Obama has been firmly put into his place by the lobby and unless he gets re-elected I cannot foresee another bold move or even a declaration of a move from his side. And even if gets re-elected, "The Establishment" in USA have tied their destiny with that of Israel. They are willing to take whatever Political, Moral and Material loss that his friendship costs them. So yea.....that Alexander mode of attack, even if its possible, cannot get realised in the current scenario.

Justtillthennow!

Thankyou for your response,

I wish there was a first name to respond to these posts~! anyways these forums I agree are a great avenue for learning from the experience of other knowledgeable people of all backgrounds and test the strength of your own opinions.

On this moderates standing up against the extremists, I have heard that.....I can almost call it a demand now, many times mostly in a sneering sort of a tone (although Im sure your's is not the one), as if we are expected to catch these extremists from the scruff of their necks and throw them out. If we were capable of that we wouldnt be moderates would we? Our way to deal with them would be like the difference I told you about Western medications and the alternate medications. We can challenge their ideology and expose it as hatefilled and not constructive towards the society, resulting in turning the public opinion against these people. The governments would then be obliged to respond to the call of people. And fighting against your own is always a tough fight. Im sure you have your own experience of the civil war, so unless the people stand fully behind the government this menace can never be overcomed. And all this is happening. You dont have to take my word, the Media who is not a friend of ours, reports the everyday the fights thats going on in Northern Areas of Pakistan to root out the Talibans. We are loosing our brave soldiers in hundreds and taking them down in thousands. Did you know the entire population of Swat left their homes (3 million people) to provide the army the opportunity to cleanup this whole mess. Thats happening right in the center of Pashtun areas, their supposed stronghold. Even their own people are abandoning them. Can you imagine the burden of housing and feeding these 3 million people for a 3rd world country like Pakistan, if the government isn't serious with all this. All you need to do is compare the efforts of the 42 Nation super duper alliance of NATO countries fighting in Afghanistan for 8 years, with the achievements of the Pakistan army. Infact the NATO generals are taking lessons from the Military campaign of Pakistan and modeling their strategies based on our success stories. I really cant see of any other way of convincing people that we are up for this fight. Frankly this incessant demand of "Muslim need to do more" is a turn off and we have to question whether those people mocking us all the time are really on our side in this fight or not.

(continues above~!)

Hello Yasseryousufi,

Thank you for your reply.

I understand the strangeness of the addiction, and rue the hours spent with what often seems as little good or effect, but it is also a stimulus and a form of interaction that is fulfilling at the same time. And hearing and reading others opinions, and learning from these different perspectives while adding my own is something that I enjoy.

You have said some interesting things on your view of the many facets of Islam and the process that it is going through. I am not living in a predominantly Muslim society, so the daily experience is foreign to me and I have to understand by other than direct relationship. I do believe that the majority of Muslims are moderate and peace loving, and that certainly has been the case with Muslims that I know or have had as friends.

But much has gone on in the last decade, and loyalties shift. I do not know if the power or ratio of 'radicalized' has grown or shrunk. Media would suggest that it is as potent as ever, though I do not know that I trust that.

I am clear that if the moderate majority stood up, (clearly in certain areas at great risk!), that it would counter the momentum of factions in the Islamic spectrum that are angry and want to do something about it.

Israel Palestine is clearly central, but as often is the case, sometime one needs to start unraveling the knot at the outside and work into the locked up center. There are plenty of areas to work at with this problem, and if it is done with an intent toward a mutually beneficial solution for all, (perhaps the real obstacle!), then it will grow goodwill and some essential trust.

Of course, Alexander, (not the most virtuous of leaders!), had another answer to a challenging knot. If one had the momentum, a damn good sword, and high level of leadership, perhaps the Israeli-Palestinian issue can be resolved yet. It is a reasonable assumption that much would unravel in inter religious and cultural conflicts with resolution in Israel of this old sore. But then, it is an assumption!

FarnazMansouri,

I can see you've thrown the towel once again. I've already responded to your 3 million Jews exiled comment. cant keep repeating like you do.

There's never anything new in your posts. Youre such a carbon copy of CCNL with just 3 or 4 points to play with, which is sad realy coz you did show more promise than CCNL, atleast initially. Take a goodlook at your posts. They're oozing with racism and bigotry just like your brother's~!

yasseryousufi,

No need to expose your lies, you've just done so. Further, you've also exposed your bigotry, not once but one hundred times, once again, in this, your last post. Re-read it, or get someone to interpret it for you.

With the other three million Jews exiled from the MIddle East, for those tortured and dead, I see little hope for you and your fellow racist islamists.

FarnazMansouri,

Nope! Never read Protocols of whatever. I'm sure I told you that before. You keep forgeting a lot of stuff. Getting on with age 'eh?

My comments weren't as transparent to you for a while I can remember. Now.....Im not saying your mental level's below a 6th grader.....but thats kinda what it implies~!

I can take on all your lies (as long as they are not in form of links to 300 page propaganda pieces). Lets see if you got the guts to walk the walk. This name calling buisness im never comfortable with. But seems like its THE way to go for you when you cannot win the argument with reason~!

Lets hope you wont chicken out this time as well. Lets hear about Dhimmitude. Lets hear about the atrocities muslims perpetrated on Jews prior to Israel~!

FarnazMansouri,

I have no intention of bothering educated people on this blog. But I will continue to be a nemesis to ignorant racists like yourself who spew hatred through their mostly false comments and zionist propaganda techniques. Be rest assured on that. The response to your blathering on the Blumberg thread has been posted~!
-------------------------
yasseryousufi:

I have no intention of troubling the literate with missives to your islamist self who spew racism culled from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (your posted endorsement available upon request). Your propaganda techniques exposed, like the remedial debater you are, you have no choice but to accuse your challenger of the nonsense in which you have indulged.

Rest assured that your dishonest comments, disingenuous assertions are transparent to anyone with a sixth-grade reading level.

Rest assured that I have replied to your "Protocols of the Elders" style comment on Blumberg's thread.

If you wish to read it, you will have to removed your gaze from the mirror, where your bloviating self is want to fixate.

FarnazMansouri,

I have no intention of bothering educated people on this blog. But I will continue to be a nemesis to ignorant racists like yourself who spew hatred through their mostly false comments and zionist propaganda techniques. Be rest assured on that. The response to your blathering on the Blumberg thread has been posted~!

yasseryousufi:

Sorry for the brief reply to your racist shrieking on Blumberg's thread, regarding Dr. Wishtrich's well-documented PDF, link posted below.

Rest assured that your screeching has now been given the attention it deserves.

Kindly spare educated people your illiterate caws in future.

Hello Justilltehnnow!

As always, its a treat to read anything you write. Yes Walter is my new pal on this blog. We're throwing around stuff at each other. But its good fun. My mom's gettin worried about the long hours im spending at the computer though~!

Thanks for appreciating my posts! Really this addiction to WaPo is hard to understand even for myself. Its a strange relationship. I prolly have no buisness here blogging on newspaper stories of another country. But honestly I have learnt so much, I no longer read articles or stories on WaPo I go straight to the comments section and it tells me all about the story and loads of background info to boot.

Ok i'll admit, this estimation on Iraqi death count is now getting embarrasing. I dont know where I got that 1 Million figure in my head. I think it must have been some local news talk show. They are just as unreliable and sensationalist as any other place. But yea the fault is mine. I should've fact checked it. The problem with the death count of Iraqi's that no one ever tried to count their dead. The Lancet people did a study by reducing the normal death rate of Iraqis from the actual number of deaths during occupation and came up with a figure of around 600,000. But even that is debateable and others have pointed out some discrepancies in their work. So as it stands there's no 'widely agreed' estimate of death counts in Iraq and I stand corrected. But I guess we do agree that even if its 100,000 thats just too many innocent dead people.

I will share your optimism on Iraq. Perhaps God too has a plan for them. They have certainly gone through the worst part and better things are to follow. A lot of people would be surprised that the country hasn't actually broken up, considering the extremity of emotions on all sides. Maybe after all this venting the Shia's, Sunni's and Kurds would realise that they are strongest by being together. And they havent quite fallen into the lap of Iranians like many of us feared. They have remained quite independent. So yea......maybe thats how it was meant to be. Lets hope for their sake that the things keep getting better.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is THE issue to deal with. And admittedly its the most difficult bit of International Diplomacy for anyone to take for the simple reason that the odds are stacked up in favor of one side in such an unbalanced form, I just cant imagine how anyone can wriggle themselves out of this. But as always history will take its course and decide this issue as well, and I believe time is Palestinians friend on this occaision.

Sufism is the soul of Islam. Detach Sufism from Islam and you take away all its beauty. You dont even have to be a muslim, the sufi's will take you anyway~!

Salaam.....my friend~!

Yasser~!

yasser,
thanks for the reply. i'll read through and comment as warranted - when possible. might be on that other thread you listed. i'll check here and there when i get back.
"see" ya.

Hello Yasseryousufi,

Thank you for your reply. I have been held up from posting for a down internet service and lifes issues calling. And hands that just cannot type very well these days. I regret that I cannot spend much time.

It seems that you have been busy with Walter. In fact, you run the risk of being judged a novel writer, for the last work that I see you have done here. Sorry that I missed it.

I enjoy reading your posts and your perspective. You appear proud of your Islamic faith, or at least invested in it and holding it as a deep value to you, while also recognizing and admitting to the obvious challenges that Islam is in the middle of. I like the honesty and addressing in a straight forward way weakness and failings. It speaks to someone receptive and truthful, which is hard to find on these blogs or indeed in the anonymous world.

"I was infact referring to the widely agreed estimate of 1 million dead Iraqi's since the US occupation and it is indeed heart wrenching to think that those 1 million people would be happily spending their lives with their families had the war hysteria and vengence not gripped America and resulted in attack on a totally innocent nation."

I continue to seriously doubt these numbers and would like to know who "widely agreed" on them. Outside of that, the numbers are doubtless far beyond anything that should be acceptable. It is far outside of most Americans thought, I believe, conceptualizing in any real way the toll that has been taken by Iraq and by Iraqis as a result of this war. I think that the American leadership were playing a nice game of war, somehow, like an extension of the childhood that they never got over, and adopted a preemptive regime change strategy as if it were some tactic available in the game of Risk. As I said, I am ashamed and pained for the outcome, to this point, of this folly and violence.

That said, Iraq was hardly an "totally innocent nation". Which one is? But that one was not.

Perhaps good comes out of it, in the end. Iraq, shaped by retiring colonial powers seeking their own benefit and lacking serious knowledge of the centuries of historic tribal sentiments and politics of the area, (or rejecting it!), arbitrarily chopped up regions into countries. These sentiments sprout right up into conflict the moment there is a power vacuum. Saddam's brutality had purpose, if only to keep together for minority benefit this odd mixing of tribes and sects.

You have stated in other posts that you believe that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the central issue in strained relations between religions and governments in the world. Yet, if so, these types of dynamics were fully instrumental and functionally supportive in polarizing the playing field and illuminating the players. Yes?

Salaam, Yasser the Sufi.

Nice choice, by the way. If I had to make a choice in Islam it would surely be as a Sufi.

Ok Walter, there's a new thread thats just appeared and sounds interesting. I havent commented on yet but i've bookmarked it and will do in a while. Here's the link

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2009/11/what_the_islamists_and_islamaphobes_dont_want_you_to_know.html

Yasser~!

Hey Walter, can you confirm you see these posts?

Yasser~!

(PART IX, FINAL)

***saudi arabia/iran:

"don’t you think? they are sort of the “flagship” sunni and shia states"

Nope I dont think so. The Saudi's follow the Wahabbi form of Islam. The overwhelming
majority of muslims are niether Wahabbi's nor Shias. I dont know about them being "worst human rights-wise", coming from you I gotta be doubly carefull. But I can tell you this that Iran probably would have been a democratic country today had your CIA not toppled the widely
popular Democratic Government of Muhammed Mossadegh and installed a puppet king so that they can controll all the oil resources of Iran. The Biggest supporters of the Saudi Regime were initially the British who propped them up and ever since they found oil Americans have been their bosom buddies. So you can forget about them being democratic for while. Democracy is not America's friend in these parts. They know it pretty well. All these Shiekhs and Mubarak's and King Hasan's etc are the people America wants in these parts. Infact america is the biggest enemy of democracy in these parts.

Whew......I thought it would never end~! Really I would appreciate if you were to keep your posts a bit more precise. These long posts take away a lot of fun. No one but us would read them. As they say brevity is the essence of wit. I hope I've answered all your questions. Im open to more clarifications if they be needed but Ill prefer one issue at a time.

Thanks for reading all this~!

Yasser~!

(PART VIII)

On the Danish Cartoons thing, its regeretable that all those deaths occured (Most of them occured in one country, Nigeria!). But i've said it before on these blogs, it was an astutely timed provocation. Right when European and American armies were perpetrating carnage in 2 muslim countries. Right when we were hearing horrible stories from Abu Gharaib, Guantanamo and Bagram, Falluja, Haditha, Baghdad, came this ultimate provocation that literaly broke the camels back. The protests you saw wasn't just because you poked fun at our prophet by painting him as a terrorist among other things. It was the culmination of all these atrocities combined. And to top it off all the European countries printed those cartoons again and again really making it feel like its a fight between Islam and Christianity by mocking the most revered religous symbols. You keep referring to that Cairo Declaration, as if all hell broke loose? Whats wrong with demanding no more mass burnings of the Quran, No more desecration of Holy figures? Whats wrong with that? Wouldn't the world be a better place if we learnt to respect each other's culture? And btw on this Islam's rule applying to non-muslims, if I go to Austria or Germany or UK and exercise my right of free speech by making a thundering speech and declaring that holocaust story is a sham (ofcourse wrong, just like Prophet Muhammad the terrorist cartoon) would I be exempted from being hailed because Im not a European?

***literalism/6000 yr-old universe:

'i also asked what percentage of muslims world-wide do you think share those views?'

The reason I ignored this question first time round was because I have no way of knowing that I thought that would be obvious to you. Your views regarding Literalism are your views and you absolutely have the right to make your choices. I am here to only discuss the facts and not some rhetorical discussion (thats impossible anyway since you put forward so many points).

(PART VII)

***islamabused women:

"I referred to this when speaking of edhi. “islamabused” women would be victims of “scourging” (koran 4:34) and other misogynistic verses, practices and rituals"
Walter.....you're a strange man! you have these make believe stories that you put on one Islamic country after another without bothering to confirm the veracity of your claims. You said Scourging?? in Pakistan?? I though you had been to Pakistan? Ask your dad if you were too young to remember. When was the last time a woman was whiplashed in Pakistan? We dont give such punishments dude!~ You're wrong here as well just as with everyother thing.

***danish cartoons:

Walter, I know you probably dont take your religion seriously. Thats your choice. We respect that. You can burn your bibles all you like, denigrate Jesus and Mary all you want, we dont like it, but we wont fight you for that. We as muslims have been told by our Prophet to revere Jesus, Moses, Abraham, Solomon, Elija, Zachary, Mary like we would revere Prophet Muhammad himself. Have you ever seen a Muslim insult any of your prophets? Or burned a bible or something? The peeing on Quran, tearing its pages and flushing it down the flush has been a tactic thats widely been reported by a number of inmates from Guantanamo and Abu Gharaib. It goes with other sadistic measures CIA developed to 'break down' the suspects. Really do you expect the scums of the earth you have in your army who pose gleefully pointing towards the genitals of naked prisoners to be respectful of our holy book? The burning of the Quran's was probably a lesser provocation. There have been worse. I got some links to those pictures from Abu Gharaib which I can send you if you like.

(PART VI)

*** ”secular” Islamic countries:

Again Walter, I wont defend the indefensible. The Sudanese were really stupid on this occaision as well as on the occaision where they tried to impose there misguided Shariah on a British woman who named a teddy bear Muhammad. But once again you've only heard half the story. No lashes were given to Lubna Hussain for wearing pants. She was forgiven after a
reprimand. Same with that British woman. I didnt get a reference to your claim " but, its majority muslim population has instituted the “ Public Order Act” - a set of islamic laws imposed on EVERYONE in society " in the link you provided. Shariah cannot be imposed on non muslims as it is on muslims anyway. If its true, its wrong. Just as wrong as the Christian
Majority French Nation's decree that any girl who covers her head wont be allowed to study in French educational Institutions (isn't that extremism of the other end??).

***islamic scripture’s role in politics:

I never said that Islam doesn't play a role in governing of majority islamic countries. I responded to your misconception of Turkey being the best we can get. and the fact that just 2 countries have actually imposed Shariah (one of which has also accepted democracy!) Can you say Christianity plays absolutely no role in governing in predominantly Christian countries? The separation of Church and state is a fancy word. The progenitor of your constitutions and your laws is indeed the Bible.

***democracy/voting:

I didn't Chide you for the "Phoney Elections" in Afghanistan. I corrected you on your calling Afghanistan a Shariah Government. And yes Karzai is your baby. No one in Afghanistan knew him before you guys brougt him forward. He was a fringe warlord and a drug baron. He has no say in Afghanistan beyond Kabul. His brother (an employee of CIA), is probably the biggest drug baron in the world thanks to his brother's uninterrupted rule. There's isn't much difference between Karzai and that other imposter from Iraq Challabi. They both charmed your gullible Congress with their congenial personalities and scratchless english and you took them hook line and sinker. Small wonder that they both turned out to be corrupted to the core decievers. Only Karzai being more lucky because you havent got any choice in Afghanistan. All hell would have broken loose if you had given the Presidency to that non-pashtun Tajik guy Abdullah Abdullah. So yea go ahead and call Afghanistan an Islamic Government and their Government Islamic corruption. Ill be just as unreasonable as you and call it an american government and american corruption (How do we know NATO generals themselves aren't helping themselves with this billions of drug money??)

(PART V)

*** islamic governments:

"there are about 20 countries that consider islam as the “state religion”

Yes! and there are atleast 20 that consider themselves Secular. Pretty much evens things up doesn't it Walter? Cant we see the glass half full?

" almost by definition, religious freedom for the 600,000,000+ people in these countries is impossible. i say “almost” because there are examples of “christian countries” with religious freedom and excellent human rights records. "

Impossibel? Huh? How did you endup with that Statistic? Can you back it up with actual proof? You're pretty lax with these absolute words you use Walter. You wont win many arguments unless you really watch what you're saying even though you may some good points. I suggest you take a trip to Indonesia and malaysia some time. There are Hindus, Christians and Chinese hundreds of thousands of them who are actually practicing their religion. Come
to Pakistan (you haven't been here for a while I can assume) there are churches in every city, however big or small, in Pakistan. Im sure you'd know how Christians in Europe specially in smaller cities freakout when there's a talk Muslims making a mosque. Muslims usually pray in warehouses or abandoned churches. Minorities have a quota wrt their population in the Parliament. There's a job quota for them too. They do suffer some hardships too but so does every Pakistani. Dhimmitude is another fancy word you must have heard from your hate preachers. No dhimmitudism around the world these days. Why do you yourself bring up ancient practices if you dont like me citing them? But fyi let me explain you the theory of Dhimmi or Zimmi as we call it. Zimmies used to be people not belonging to muslim faith in ancient Islamic kingdoms. They had to pay a special protection tax to the government for the protection of their life and property. In those days minorities weren't asked to join the miltary and the armies used to be all volunteer with no monthly pay. So they actually got protection without putting their own lives in danger. Muslims on the other hand had to pay the zakat tax (which the minorities didnt need to pay) which was infact around the same if not more amount that the minorities paid.

Yes the OIC has demanded their version of UDHR. Whats wrong with that? In any democratic dispensation you have the right to demand what you believe is correct with justifiable means. If theirs ever a voting on that the OIC would probably lose considering only fifth of the countries are muslim. I am sure they'll move on after that! There's nothing wrong in demanding though is it? The current UDHR is based upon Judeo-Christian priniciples. Im sure you know that most of these laws we have actually evolved from religous texts. thats another topic we can delve into in detail. but thats for another day.

(PART IV)

"after the initial celebrating, iraqis went all "anarchist". naively, we didn't prepare for it, and sadly, we did nothing about it, but iraqis didn't have to loot, pillage and plunder their own country. sunnis and shias didn't have to split along sectarian (i.e. RELIGIOUS)lines and start killing each other."

Walter, I know you dont like me bringing up the Colonial mindset reference but the fact is that it exists and is displayed everytime the Colonials make a blunder its somehow got to be the locals fault. In india, the Britishers regularly opened fire on peaceful demonstrations and then blamed the locals for the carnage. Do you remember that the first things Americans
did after they invaded Iraq was disbanding all Baath Party Administration officials, Police Force and Army! Can you imagine their utter hieght of idiocy? They truly believed they would be garlanded in Baghadad after their "shock and awe" takeover. Rumsfeld dismissed calls for
going with a bigger to take control of the country under the same illusion. I have an
anology for you to understand the situation better. Lets take New York city (Although Belfast at the height of one of those Orange Marches would be more pertinent). Lets take away all the Police and other law enforcement out of there. Then start spreading rumors in Harlem about White people killing black children, and likewise black people raping white
women. Im sure you know how these things can spiral out of control even during peace time, let alone during height of war. And Iraq has been one hell of a Powder Keg all through its History. Its the place where Prophet Muhammad's Grandson died at the hands of a Sunni army, forever dividing the Muslims into 2 parts. So this enmity goes back generations. Thats too much history education to expect from those americans who planned this attack i guess.

(PART III)

***ancient history:

"i'm interested in a terrorist-free world TODAY"

I am interested in listening to your definition of terrorism!

"seems like the bad, intentionally cruel stuff comes largely from muslims... i suppose this could be “western media bias”, but i’ve NEVER seen anyone but a muslim behead anyone, throw acid in the face of an “adultress”, rape a woman for being on a date then punish her for being raped, stone someone to death for apostasy and on and on and on.... these things just
don’t happen in the “western world”. it’s truly medieval and barbaric (to me)."

You got the Western Media bias part right. I doubt if you heard about the Genocide in Rwanda where Rival Christian tribes of Hutu's and Tutsi's killed 800,000 to 1 Million people on both sides (Majority Tutsi's). The Catholic church was also a part of this conflict and some of the bishops were found guilty in this carnage. The Machete Wielding warriors of both sides regularly chopped off Hands, legs and heads of their rivals. Then there's the genocide in Bosnia perpetrated by the Orthodox Christian Serbs against the nominaly islamic Bosnians (Most Bosnians didn't even know how to and when to pray before the war). I remember reading one story in the Newsweek Magzine how the Serb soldiers forced one Bosnian boy to have sex with his dead mothers who they had just shot after raping her in front of the boy. The mostly catholic, drug cartels of South America regularly chop off body parts of their rivals or people they accuse of spying for the police.

Do you even know that there are more rapes in USA than any other Islamic country. And most teenaged rape victims are lured in by their supposed bf's who then gangrapes her with his friends. I think there was a similar big scandal just last week. And pray tell when was the last stoning to death for apostacy that happened in any country? I know you like keeping these newspaper clippings. Im sure you got one on that and aren't just shooting from the hip!

(PART II)

***afghanistan/iraq:

It is debateable whether this war is actually against Islam. Whether NATO needed a reason to exist to keep its monpoly over the world after the fall of Communism. Whether all this Military Indsutrial Complex needed a new reason for making even more billion of dollars. But
really the proof is in the pudding. There are two Islamic countries under a brutal
occupation. There is a third war against Iran very much on the cards. In the meanwhile we've seen North Korea test its Nuclear Weapons and get away with that, and Mugabe committing similar excesses on his people that Saddam was accused of doing. Then you said,

"now, if we were at war with islam, we could easily destroy mecca, and all the muslims in the 57 majority-muslim countries"

Really Walter, you usually seem like a congenial, knowledgeable man until you come with these gems that are right out of your "Twilight Zone" Reverend's mouth. How easy is it to kill 1.2 billion people and destroy 57 countries? Do you even understand the amount of Atomic Bombs and Nuclear Arsenal it would take? What would be left of the world after it. Wouldn't the 1.2 Billion people wanna strike back? What would happen to your beloved Israel?
So really its impossible to attack and kill off all the Muslims, even if america wished it. There were some nuts in the US congress who suggested that America should attack Mecca and Medina in response to 9/11. But even George Bush, as idiotic as he was, could see the stupidity in that argument. America would cease to exist the way you're used to if you try to do that buddy! Forget about your half a million soldiers and dozens of your Military posts in this region. Forget about any oil going from these parts to you guys. And a mother of all wars to boot. If you're ready to risk the existence of this world, try doing that!

(PART I)

Walter Hello! again!

This is gonna take some while! Let me take your post point by point. You wrote;

i found a newspaper....i also read "saudi judge sentences pregnant gang-rape victim to 100 lashes for committing adultery."

The people in the big city, they sold you a dummy mate! The newspaper is almost 9 months old. But seriously I have said it many times before. The Islamic world isn't perfect. We make mistakes like everyone else does. That also includes misinterpreting the word of Allah.

So really I wont defend the indefensible, but I would say this the Saudi's implement the strictest possible form of Islam and even in cases where Islam provides the benefit of doubt to the victim/accused, the Wahhabis aren't willing to give that. But I did follow previous such cases of lashing for women and sometimes these western newspapers deliberately hide some of the details from the case to make the story more sensational. The fact is she isn't just being punished for being raped. There is a law in Saudi that an adult woman shouldn't go out without a male consort. So this woman not only broke that law but was also found guilty of hitch-hiking and going to an unknown persons home. Now its debateable whether its the correct interpretation of the Islamic law but what isn't debateable is that this law is known to most Saudis. But the most important thing to remember about these punishments is they usually get waived off at the last moment by the King. That was certainly the case with the other woman I referred to who made into headlines too. The purpose of punishment is not just to punish the perpetrator but to stave off others from commiting the crimes. Thats why even USA still keeps the death penalty. And btw this story fails to metion this but her male accomplice would also have been punished.

yasser,
one qualification: i said,
"i bet you could take an amnesty international map of human rights violations happening today and superimpose that map of “57 islamic majority countries” and see a pretty good match."

i stand by that statement, but the one "oddball" in the equation would be china...some bad stuff going on there...

but rather than get defensive with me about the muslim/human rights violation correlation, you should get MAD - at your militant bretheren. i daresay most of those human rights violations are "muslim on muslim". and they're giving you moderates a bad name. in fact, they're drowning you out.

and please, it's not the "american media". they'd LOVE to report on muslim civil rights marches a la martin luther king. we'd eat that up! you moderates have got to get up off you **ses and march on mecca demanding your rights!

hhmmm... march on mecca...has a nice sound. can you imagine...1,000,000 hajj pilgrims carrying incendiary signs like "allah wants women to drive", chanting "muhammad misunderstood verse 4:34!" and "down with dhimmitude!"? if you can't make it to mecca, organize protests at your local mosque. i'm totally serious. it would be great.
____________________________

i am going away (not blogging) tomorrow through the 29th or 30th. i would like to read and respond to your hopefully upcoming comments, but this thread will likely "time out" around the 27th. perhaps you could post a link here indicating another blog where i can find you?

WEBMASTER
i wish these blogs were posted with newest at the bottom, so posts like that multi-part one i did could be read top to bottom. also it would make it easier to follow a sequence of posts.
thanks.

yasser,
thanks for reading all of it... looking forward to your comments.

oops.....Walter, the last post was addressed to you~!

Yasser~!

"whew...i think that's it for now..."

I Think that would be the mother of all understatements. You've given me a major headache buddy, I wont feel better unless I've answered every point in your post. But its taken me almost an hour to read your whole post (I usualy read it trice before responding to the post) So I'll think over it tonite (1:30 pm here) and prolly post my reply tommorow. I do appreciate your taking out time though. Its a really healthy debate. Im sure ill learn something from it at the end of it. Till then.......Take Care~!

jttn,
i've never seen any of the ugly "isms" in your posts.

yasser,
***literalism/6000 yr-old universe:
i take it, then, 1)that you are a literalist, and 2)that you think scientists are totally wrong about evolution.

i also asked what percentage of muslims world-wide do you think share those views?

i consider this a measure of one’s commitment to rationally and empirical evidence. but, i’m not, here, interested in discussing evolution, but literalism. i consider literalism extremely dangerous because ancient (and middle aged...) scripture says some literally horrible (and false) things. and absolute certainty in absolute rules from an absolute god can make people do absolutely horrible things. in a way, i’m glad to hear that you’re a literalist (as i suspect almost all muslims are(is this true?)), and that you’re not a crazy jihadist. so it is possible!

***saudi arabia/iran:
it’s true that saudi arabia and iran are only two countries, but they’re kind of important countries, don’t you think? they are sort of the “flagship” sunni and shia states – and they’ve got to be two of the worst human rights-wise. there are no analogous christian examples. saudi arabia and iran provide perfect examples of religion/morals/government being fully entangled.

thanks to our oil money Saudi Arabia has the wherewithal to export that “ginned-up” “noble koran” – an extra-horrible version of the unalterable koran - and fund jihad schools all over the world. at least saudi arabia makes no pretence of elections. you can write these off as “bad examples” of islamic countries, but millions of poor ordinary muslims suffer them their entire lives. half the population, women, are undeniably deprived of basic (enlightened) human rights.

whew...i think that's it for now...

yasser,
***democracy/voting:
you chided me about the “phony election” that happened “right under our noses” in afghanistan. why are fraudulent elections america’s fault? do you think america manipulated votes in Afghanistan? why is it under our “noses”? why do these election always seem to be plagued by fraud? fraud in american elections is a matter of a few precincts here and there. karzai just had 20or 30% (!!!) of his votes taken away... my dad called it “baksheesh”. i call it kleptocracy. to get your building permit, you’ve got to bribe the plan reviewer. that’s just business. it’s expected. it’s probably insulting to the reviewer if you DON’T offer him a bribe..... today we just learned of an afghan minister taking a $30,000,000 bribe. i know there is corruption in american politics, but it’s not so widespread and institutional as it seems to be in “islamic politics”.

***islamabused women:
i referred to this when speaking of edhi. “islamabused” women would be victims of “scourging” (koran 4:34) and other misogynistic verses, practices and rituals. i’m sure you know the koran (and old testament) has gender-biased verses about inheritance, witnesses, subservience, sassing a husband, praying and so on. do i really have to enumerate the gender inequities in islam? i will if necessary, but there are so many and we hear of them so often it’s almost cliche.

***danish cartoons:
how silly were many muslims’ reactions to the danish cartoons? that must have been embarrassing for you. and how ‘bout the reaction to the (possibly fake) flushing of a koran down the toilet (must have been an industrial strength toilet...). the muslim reaction was funny/sad – and literally tragic. people DIED in RIOTS over cartoons!

when was the last time we saw a Christian riot?! with machine guns?! about something so trivial? salman rushdie has to live in hiding. these events reveal something VERY DANGEROUS (and unenlightened) about islam: the rules apply to EVERYONE – even me., and i’m not muslim. the OIC trying to get that “cairo declaration” into the U.N. is an example. note that the cartoonist and the koran-flusher are not muslim. so this isn’t a matter of a muslim breaking some kind of covenant with allah.

islam’s rules apply to non-muslims.... furthermore, even if the cartoonist were muslim, would that justify killing, harming or even bothering him at all? on the enlightened “western” world, if a priest (or layman) writes a book critical of the bible or christianity, he has no need to fear for his life.

yasser,
*** ”secular” Islamic countries:
there are many “secular” countries like sudan , which is not constitutionally an “islamic state” nor does it have a “state religion”. but, its majority muslim population has instituted the “Public Order Act” - a set of islamic laws imposed on EVERYONE in society - not just muslims. they have “islamic gestapo” who enforce this in society:

“they were...all declared guilty and immediately lashed including a 16-year-old girl.”

- for WEARING PANTS! it’s just stupid. i can’t think of the last time a western government gave a public “lashing” for a fashion violation. what’s next stoning? amputation? probably already happened. you said something about how few countries impose sharia (officially). that may or may not be the case, but we both know there’s a gulf btwn official big-city policy and actual practice out here in the vilages, the so-called “tribal areas”, where justice is a meted out by tribal elders according to islamic law.
http://africanpress.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/sudanese-human-right-activists-seeking-support/

***islamic scripture’s role in politics:
come on, yasser, it’s preposterous to say that islam doesn’t play a HUGE role in governing muslim-majority societies. and it’s also preposterous to deny the scriptural foundations for islamic laws being applied to society at large. arab, persian, pashtun (whatever division you want to make) societies are MUCH more dominated by islam than western societies are by christianity. for muslims, religion seems more all-consuming. they take every little thing so seriously...all the time. i guess we have little “fringe groups” like the amish and hassidic jews who “take things really seriously”, but we think they’re kind of weird – harmless, but weird. and they don’t seek to make us live by amish rules.

the western equivalent of the sudanese “Public Order Act” would be if christian gestapos went around enforcing paul’s requirement that women wear hats (or be “shorn”) in church (1cor11). it’s in there. paul literally says “hats or shaved heads for women”. he also says women may not speak in church (1cor14:34). nonetheless, westerners generally let women talk in church without hats on.... another analogy would be if we gave lashings to catholics for idolatry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_aspects_of_Islam

yasser,
*** islamic governments:
there are about 20 countries that consider islam as the “state religion” and 6 other countries which are “islamic” – like the islamic republic of pakistan. almost by definition, religious freedom for the 600,000,000+ people in these countries is impossible. i say “almost” because there are examples of “christian countries” with religious freedom and excellent human rights records. none are muslim. for instance iceland is lutheran. so what? nobody has to be lutheran. for them, “lutheran” is just a holdover from their pre-enlightenment days. nobody cares about lutheran laws. there is no dhimminitude for non-lutherans. governing is done by truly secular truly elected bodies. i bet you could take an amnesty internation map of human rights violations happening today and superimpose that map of “57 islamic majority countries” and see a pretty good match.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Muslim_majority_countries

the muslim-majority 57 countries in the “organisation of the islamic conference” have drafted their own version of the UDHR.... they call it the “Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam”. it has some nice things in it, but then it says,

”All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shari'ah."

and

”The Islamic Shari'ah is the only source of reference for the explanation or clarification of any of the articles of this Declaration."

oh brother....that changes everything. and they have the gall to present this to the u.n. for adoption – like it should be international law.... sharia, no matter how “enlightened” its application, is not freedom of religion – especially if applied to NON-MUSLIMS...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisation_of_the_Islamic_Conference

that’s the problem right there. the muslim presumtion that we are participants in their god’s plan. it’s one thing for muslims to concentually chop adult off co-religionists’ hands because they think allah wants that, but it’s another to apply those religious rules to society at large.

yasser,
before you make too many comments about my provinciality, consider that i spent the first 10 years of my life overseas. my father was a USAID diplomat (you might say “colonialist”) from the 50s to 70s in iraq, iran, pakistan and afghanistan. my mom grew up in iran, speaks arabic, farsi, turkish, russian and english. she met my dad while he was stationed in tabriz. when we were stationed in kabul we regularly visited friends in pakistan via those 15 or so tunnels in the kyber pass. we traveled – pretty freely, i think – all over the area, though i do remember a “brown out” in pakistan. i remember buskashi and kite fights. i remember visiting those blue blue lakes (in bandimir?) and seeing those huge buddha sculptures (now reduced to rubble by idol-cleansing muslims...). granted i was only 10, but i don’t think afghans saw it as colonialism. i think they liked having us there. ah...those were the days when america wasn’t so hated. anyway, my point is, i am somewhat first-hand aware of the “feel” of the area, have positive memories of the area and the people, and have followed things there with special interest.

***ancient history:
we've talked about "historical" things as recent as 1945. i'm not interested, for the purposes of this discussion, about who's done what to who in the past. i'm interested in a terrorist-free world TODAY.

when i look around the world today, i see all kinds of good and bad. seems like the bad, intentionally cruel stuff comes largely from muslims... i suppose this could be “western media bias”, but i’ve NEVER seen anyone but a muslim behead anyone, throw acid in the face of an “adultress”, rape a woman for being on a date then punish her for being raped, stone someone to death for apostasy and on and on and on.... these things just don’t happen in the “western world”. it’s truly medieval and barbaric (to me).

here, i imagine you'll reference hiroshima or the 1,000,000 dead in iraq, and blame america. like i’ve said, Iraq was/is a horrible disaster, but i'll bet if you look closely at those numbers you'll find most are muslims killed by muslims. when our “smart bomb” kill civilians, it’s a horrible tragedy, whereas “suicide” bombers do it on purpose. after the (incredibly poorly planned) fall of baghdad, what did we see? after the initial celebrating, iraqis went all "anarchist". naively, we didn't prepare for it, and sadly, we did nothing about it, but iraqis didn't have to loot, pillage and plunder their own country. sunnis and shias didn't have to split along sectarian (i.e. RELIGIOUS) lines and start killing each other. it kills me how Iraq, even though incredibly misguided – never should have happened - still could have turned out so much better.

yasser,
had to take a big detour around pat robertson-controlled tribal areas so i had a long walk, and i had a lot of time to think about what you’ve said. i’ll just ramble on about things we’ve discussed.

i said,
"...america is not interested in having islamic colonial states."

and you said,

"Again, go read a newspaper if you can find one in the village you live. Try to look for news concerning two muslim countries Iraq and Afghanistan!"

i found a newspaper...it turns out you're right! there ARE wars in afghanistan and iraq...who knew?! i also read "saudi judge sentences pregnant gang-rape victim to 100 lashes for committing adultery."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1141267/Saudi-judge-sentences-pregnant-gang-rape-victim-100-lashes-committing-adultery.html?ITO=1490#ixzz0XGe2NC7i

***afghanistan/iraq:
i did some checking into those wars and it turns out they are not colonialism. we want out of there – at least in terms of having any administrative control. and iraq/afghanistan are not christian vs. muslim. they are not even "america vs. islam". in one case rightly, and in one case wrongly, america, the country, went to war. now, if we were at war with islam, we could easily destroy mecca, and all the muslims in the 57 majority-muslim countries. but we didn't. we went after certain muslims, the bad ones - the ones who attacked us – and they hide out amongst regular muslims all over the world. OBL declared war on 9/11 (earlier, actually, but we weren't even paying attention). our intentions in afghanistan and now pakistan to “get” OBL , al qaeda and the taliban are justified – that’s not colonialism.

iraq was/is a total disaster on almost every level. as an american i am sorry and ashamed we attacked saddam/iraq. i apologize to you a 1000 times. we lost the moral high ground there. it was morally unjustified, was/is horribly executed, a "p.r." disaster, and a distraction from our war on terror. (omg...there...i said it...just like a right-wing crazy person.) as an american, i am also ashamed that OBL is still "out there".

Farnaz Mansouri wrote,

"Sad to say, I actually believed this silly gasbag went to college!"

I remember how you kept harping that you were an "Academic Scholar" working for UNICEF. Really if such goofballs pass for "Academic Scholars" at UNICEF no wonder UN is such a worthless white elephant~!

Why, by the way, do you not invoke Schaums name? And why, when you paste his posts all over the threads, do you delete parts, particularly where he names himself as Battalion Commander?

It is clear that you take on internet lovers easily, and scorn others as easily. Your trust is valueless.

Posted by: justillthennow | November 18, 2009 12:52 AM
Report Offensive Comment
---------------------------
You are truly delusional. You are a bigot as God knows how many other bloggers have noted. I long ago joined the ranks of those who asked you not to post to them, but you just cannot stop your verbose self.

I did not post the article Schaum originally pasted on Jacoby's thread anywhere but here, at least, as far as I recall. Since you spend every waking hour spilling on blogs, kindly identify where else "all over" I pasted it.

Schaum identified himself as battalion commander?

Easy up on the rubbing alcohol and glue. You'll destroy your remaining brain cell.

If you are suffering from your usual compulsive need to have the last word, having, as always, had the first, go right ahead.

Next time, if you post to me again, you'll have all the words.

Navin1,

Case in point (Propaganda 101)

Name-calling and ad hominem attacks.

Sad to say, I actually believed this silly gasbag went to college!

Regards,
Farnaz

Farnaz, I am not interested in writing pen pictures of fellow bloggers here. I dont take this blogging seriously enough. So I'll ignore this talking to me through someone I am ignoring on purpose.

But its nice to see you've found your match in another bigoted windbag~! Both of you can now indulge in your favorite pastime (you know what that is).

Goodluck~!

Navin1

And Yasser prove it again.

If I believe I have the right faith I am a bigot. If he believe islam is the best that is not bigotry.

That is exactly my point. These guys have been telling people crap that they are peaceful and abuse anyone who disagrees with them. Then if someone stands up and points out history, obviously theirs is a more evolved position, an the others are bigots.

So intellectual cowards keep telling us to believe them and then can't decide what they are talking about. I've seen this from christians, but yasser's got to be the most verbal muslim I've seen so blatantly two faced. (most of my friends that are muslims would be understand history more than this) He should have his own Fox tv show.

hariaum

Posted by: Navin1
-------------------
Navin1,

I don't know if he is two-faced. I do know that he habitually uses a host of propaganda techniques, easily identifiable, one by one.

It isn't that I necessarily agree with you in your arguments, which I have not closely followed. However, as is always the case, very few of the several points raised in this instance have been honestly addressed by Yasseryousufi.

Propaganda stratagems exist to deflect and avoid. Lawyers, advertisers, politicians, the media use them all the time, as you know....

Problems arise when people see through them.
Exposing them isn't always effective, however....

People do other things.

Walter,

:o) I'll pray fer ya mate!

yasser,
i'm walking from my village to the big city to buy a newspaper...hopefully the christian taliban won't kill me on the way.

(continued from previous post~!)

"christians, hindus, buddhists and jews around the would might disagree with you. again, see saudi arabia, iran etc... what if my religion allows my wife to drive? or, god forbid, walk unattended in public?"

Saudi Arabia is just one country. Its their wish whatever laws they make. I dont speak for them. I dont agree with all the laws americans make either. Not letting a woman drive has got nothing to do with Islam. The Wahabis are a tribal lot anyway. but I think even they are coming around. The change is slow but it is surely in the right direction.

"please, don't flatter yourself. america is not interested in having islamic colonial states."

Again, go read a newspaper if you can find one in the village you live. Try to look for news concerning two muslim countries Iraq and Afghanistan!

Response to Walter-IFC who wrote,

"of course there are various muslims (why can't they all be sufis?). and there certainly are good muslims - like that pakistani edhi, who cleans up after muslim beheadings and takes in islam-abused women."

I wish all the muslims could be Sufi's. That would be just wonderful. Likewise I wish all Christians could be Amish and minded their own buisness, not poking in the eye of all other people and certainly stopped killing and invading thats become a regular feature of their ideology. But we dont get everything we wish for do we. You once again show your hatred by writing Islam-Abused women. Whatever that meant. I can only respond if you speak more elaborately.

"consider saudi arabia, iran, afghanistan. i mean, is turkey the best we can possibly hope for?" Saudi Arabia and Iran (Iran is an Islamic Republic btw) are just 2 muslim countries out of 55 that impose Shariah. No shariah in Afghanistan. They just had a phoney election right under the nose of USA. I dont think you've read newspapers for a while. And no Turkey isn't the only democratic muslim country. The Biggest 3 muslim countries where almost half a billion muslims live are all democracies. Indonesia, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Bangladesh is peculiar because it also shatters the pre-concieved notions of Islamo-phobes about women by clinging to two women for the past 12-13 years electing them one after another. And besides Turkey there are atleast 20 pre-dominantly muslim countries that are secular states including Indonesia the biggest muslim country with around 200 million muslims.

"are you a literalist? do you believe the universe is 6000 yrs old? what percentage of muslims worldwide would you estimate are literalists?"

I believe God created this Universe and everything living thing in it. Do you believe an algae can transform into a Dinosaur just because Darwin says so?

"ancient history. seems like muslims are always referring to some injustice committed against them 500 years ago...."

Well Zebra had a fairly logical explanation that you failed to understand. Ancient History, Semi Ancient History, Past year History you can look anywhere you like, there are plenty of references of injustices committed against muslims if you're willing to read history with an open mind.

(continues above~!)

Hello Justillthennow,

I finally get the chance to sit down and reply to your earlier post!

Yes that "Millions" indeed was an error. I was infact referring to the widely agreed estimate of 1 million dead Iraqi's since the US occupation and it is indeed heart wrenching to think that those 1 million people would be happily spending their lives with their families had the war hysteria and vengence not gripped America and resulted in attack on a totally innocent nation. The wounds of Iraq will take a while to heal in the Muslim psyche. The sadism and humiliation of Abu Gharaib, the butchery at Falluja and Haditha, the looting and plunder of Iraq's precious archaeological possesions. Maybe all that pentup anger was one of the reasons of hassan's crime too. Not condoning it by any means. Just trying to think of his motives. America has stepped in the right direction by electing Obama. But even Obama should understand that talk is cheap and he cant be taken seriously for long if he keeps dithering.

The radicalism is more of a threat to us than anyone else for the simple reason that its we who live among these people and its we who are considered the first hurdle by these people. The more enlightened among us realised this trend when the suicide bombing first became a norm in Israel, targeting innocent women and children instead of legitimate military targets. We could foresee the sanctioning of this unislamic act by reactionary mullahs would one day rebound on us. Sadly our calls weren't heeded and we are reaping the rewards of this hatefilled response. There are no more suicide bombings in Israel but everyday either in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan a suicide bomber takes along a dozen people on average to their eternal abode. I wish I could go back 10 years into my University days and show a glimpse of the future to my fellows who supported these suicide bombings.

But the good news is that the mood is indeed shifting. All thw anger these people supposedly fighting against western imperialism had, has consumed them from inside. They see anyone not inline with their philosophy as an enemy and are willing to kill them while getting killed. Its gonna take a while to end in totality, but this violent rennaissance of militant islam of the 90's is reaching its logical conclusion. I'll give them probably 5 more years. They never had the power to conquer the whole of Islam anyway. Now that they have exposed their real face they have hardly got any support left. They are dieing in hundreds in the army operation in Waziristan. We'll see flickers of this dieing ideology in form of these suicide bombs but believe me they aren't expanding in any way. They're dieing~!

Ah, Farnaz,

Feel free to not reply to this post.

I would rather not hear from you, as it is at least a bit disturbing.

Usually I respond to what another poster says. In this case, because you are just SO special, I will comment on what I said originally to said poster.

You take this all FAR too seriously, Farnaz. You need a drink, or several, just to get a hint of humor into you. Seriously, (really!), you are just too friggin' locked up on some of these issues.

Farnaz, I have met no blogger on these boards that is as racist and bigoted as you and that at the same time presents the face of being unaware of it. Now, I do not believe for a moment that you are unaware, as I am clear you are sharp and astute, with great mental awareness.

So why such buried but vibrant bigotry?

Ahhh... there is an interesting question.

Ok, back to it. Get the drink, but masturbation is a great remedy for frustrated "issues". Seriously. If you are not getting 'fulfillment' in other ways, it becomes more clear why you spend SO MANY HOURS on this blog.

It is not me that is receiving little sexual gratification, just by doing the mathematics of time spent facing a computer...

Farnaz,

You are invested in your hatred of those that have hurt you, and that you think may continue to.

You are not interested in the healing process, for yourself or your 'enemies', that would bring about POSITIVE CHANGE. You are invested in maintaining this adversarial relationship, this is altogether clear.

You have no interest in putting down your hatred.

You are the bigot. Not that others are not. But you are.

Look at YOUR posts, dear farnaz.

By the way, when you post neurotically, it neither looks good nor is of value. Seriously, who reads 500 lines of opinion or paste? Do we read CCNL? Who reads all of Daniel12's novellas? Or these autobots that spew? You entered their realm, Farnaz. And I care enough to warn you.

Why, by the way, do you not invoke Schaums name? And why, when you paste his posts all over the threads, do you delete parts, particularly where he names himself as Battalion Commander?

It is clear that you take on internet lovers easily, and scorn others as easily. Your trust is valueless.

Zebra4,

"I like you, Farnaz."

Yeah, well. I kinda like you, too.

WalterIFC:
hasan met aulaqi when aulaqi was at dar al-hijrah mosque in FALLS CHURCH...in the early 2000s. aulaqi moved to yemen and hasan has been corresponding with him.
----
Walter, I know. But the interview places him now in Yemen. The link I posted contains information not in the original article. It was taken from the reporter's notes.

At all events, if the Falls Church mosque is still in business, I hope it boasts a more peaceable imam.

Btw., if you do go to Yemen, let me know. I have a friend there who is one of the world's most gracious hosts.

zebra4,
"ancient history" is an expression for "old news" or "not relevant anymore" - not a reference to a specific historical period...

hasan met aulaqi when aulaqi was at dar al-hijrah mosque in FALLS CHURCH...in the early 2000s. aulaqi moved to yemen and hasan has been corresponding with him.

Hi Walter,
Two miles from your house? But Aulaqi, the subject of the article, is in Yemen.
Posted by: Farnaz1Mansouri1

*****************************************************

That was hillarious! I like you, Farnaz. And you too, Walter.

I am still chuckling!

Hi Walter,

Two miles from your house? But Aulaqi, the subject of the article, is in Yemen.

Walter-in-Falls-Church:

Historians donot use the word "ancient" for Middle Ages.

farnaz,
thanks. i did read that article. that mosque he went to is about 2 miles from my house...

Farnaz:

If you read my post below about what Israeli peace activist and former knesset member, Uri Avnery had to say about Muslims and how they tried to protect Jews for 50 generations, you should be able to find the answer to your question..

Posted by: zebra4
--------------------
You have answered my question eloquently. The endless verbal, physical, textual, and cinematic assaults by Muslim racists worldwide has generated no criticism, let alone a "firestorm" in any Muslim Media anywhere on earth.

Neither has the violent dispossession of Jews from Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Iran, etc., generated a peep from the Muslim media.

Offhand, I can't recall any appreciation expressed by Muslim media for the outrage expressed by German Jews against persecution of German Muslims, who also attack Jews.

Meanwhile, one book, which does not say what your article claimed, generated a "firestorm in the Israeli media" (I quote your article) that is still going on.

Meanwhile, perhaps stupidly, yours truly posted on Jacoby's thread an article on the Christianist agenda, one that documents it in Iran and Afghanistan, an agenda shared by prominents in the Bush administration.

Hillel wrote, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?"

If I am for myself alone, WHAT am I?"

I suggest you meditate on those words.

Walter,

Whoops!

Here's the link on Hasan:

http://ragingbull.quote.com/mboard/boards.cgi?board=FED&read=100934

WalterIFC,

Perhaps, of interest, since on topic. This is a follow-up from Wapo's Foreign Service desk to Hasan's alleged ties to a radical Yemeni cleric. If you didn't see the NOvember 15th WaPo article, I'll post the link, if you're interested.

Regards,
Farnaz :0

zebra4,
yasser said to me,
"(also if you can try reading what the Europeans did to muslims in their re-conquesita, might tell you a bit about the 'enlightenment' of the followers of these two religions~!)."

so i said,
"ancient history. seems like muslims are always referring to some injustice committed against them 500 years ago...."

and you said,
"False, Walter!. The French used aeroplanes to bomb cities in Algeria in 1945 and killed thousands of Algerians. Check it out in Wickepedia. Is that ancient history?
Do you have any sense of the word, "ancient"?"

WTF?! we were talking about "the requiesta" - ANCIENT HISTORY.... and you bring up WW2 algeria?!

check it out in wikipedia...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconquista

Farnaz:

If you read my post below about what Israeli peace activist and former knesset member, Uri Avnery had to say about Muslims and how they tried to protect Jews for 50 generations, you should be able to find the answer to your question..

Walter-in-Falls-Church:

I never try to make conversation personal. But I do practice one thing: I do not try to venture into giving comments on a subject I know little about. For example, I would never comment on astronomy.

Unfortunately, you leave the impression that you have opinions without trying to get at least some knowledge about the subject.

For long you were writing that the Koran had good things to say about Christianity and Judaism initially but later on they were retracted, until you were told the hitorical context in which each and every verse should be read.

Then you were hung up on "Muslims should have come on the street to protest". Now examples, have been given here that there have been events that people of other religions and nations never came out to protest.

Now, you are saying that Muslims are complaining about things that happened 500 years ago or during "ancient times.

I havw no interest in insulting you. You seem to be a congenial person (without knowing you personally), but get carried away in your writing based on perceptions that turn out to be unfounded.

If I were you, I would read about Islam first before writing things about Islam. There are many credible and well known scholars like Karen Armstrong or John Esposito (both panelists here) who have written about monotheistic religions and Islam. This is not an attempt to preach. To me spirituality is personal and voluntary.

Regards!

Walter-in-Falls-Church wrote:

"yes, i've heard of islam's golden age. thanks for preserving those ancient greek works. thanks for algebra too! and, btw, i love islamic architecture - those mosques are beautiful."\

*************************************************************
Try reading Prof. Maria Rosa Menocal's (Yale U.) book, THE ORNAMENT OF THE WORLD: How Muslims, Christian, and Jews created a culture of tolerance in medieval Spain.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
"ancient history. seems like muslims are always referring to some injustice committed against them 500 years ago...."

***********************************************
False, Walter!. The French used aeroplanes to bomb cities in Algeria in 1945 and killed thousands of Algerians. Check it out in Wickepedia. Is that ancient history?
Do you have any sense of the word, "ancient"?

Europeans invented terrorism.

Don't you think that this whole diatribe "Who did what to who?" is meaningless unless we condemn colonialism and occupation?

Zebra4,

I still have not seen from you a simple answer to a profoundly simple question.

In which Muslim media, anywhere in the world, has there been a "firestorm" of controversy over the worldwide attacks against Jews of differing nationalities that are occuring even as I write.

I posted both an article and a PDF by a world renowned scholar, may I repeat, and you still have not answered.

The article you posted on the objectionable Israeli text noted that it engendered a "firestorm in the Israeli media," and, indeed, it did. Many, many Israeli Jews have condemned it and continue to.

Meanwhile, as I mentioned, I now have the book, and it does not quite say what the article claims.

HOWEVER, THAT IS NEITHER HERE NOR THERE.

AGAIN, FOR THE FIFTH TIME: WHERE IN THE MUSLIM MEDIA HAS THERE BEEN AN OUTCRY AGAINST RACIST MUSLIM ATTACKS ON INNOCENT JEWS, THESE OCCURRRING WORLD-WIDE?

Nore: I have not asked about Islamic media condemnations of Imam authored books and articles calling for the death of Jewish men, women, and chilren.

IF THERE HAS BEEN NO MEDIA CONDEMNATION OF THESE WORLD WIDE RACIST ATTACKS AGAINST JEWISH MEN, WOMEN, LITTLE GIRLS AND BOYS, AS DOCUMENTED IN THE PDF, THEN SAY SO.

YOU ALREADY HAVE, YOU KNOW. ANYMORE EVASION WILL MAKE YOU LOOK FOOLISH.

Farnaz,

Are you mental? Chill on the neurosis, and just get a drink, or masturbate, or something. You are worse than CCNL these days. Who actually reads this load of PR?

Get a heart, or go back under the rock. You are not helping, if you actually want positive change to occur from your HOURS of attention to this blog.

IF you actually have a daughter, do you spend ANY time with her? You seem OBSESSED, and that cannot be health.

And is not. Chill a bit, please.

Posted by: justillthennow | November 17, 2009 3:12 AM
-------------------
Along with I-don't-know-how-many-others I have asked your obscene, witless self not to post to me.

lET me reprise another blogger's question to you: Do you understand why no one takes you seriously? Read your posts.

I'm sorry you receive so little sexual gratification that you feel you must relieve yourself on these boards. Sorry, too, that like your co-bigot, CCNL1, your primary focus is on your genitals.

However, that does not excuse your verbal spillage. Kindly, find someone to instruct you in (a) the English language, (b) appropriate and inappropriate language.

Do not take this as an invitation to blog with me.

I will not reply.

Yasseryousufi,

Continued:

. I'VE NEVER SEEN YOU CONDEMN THE RACIST MUSLIM ATTACKS AGAINST JEWS OF EUROPE AND WORLDWIDE.

2. I HAVE YET TO SEE YOU COMMENT ON THE ARTICLE I PASTED BELOW, WHICH ANOTHER BLOGGER HAD COPIED FROM ANOTHER THREAD.

Lieutenant Colonel Allen B West (US Army, Ret)
Posted by: Farnaz1Mansouri1 | November 16, 2009 9:40 PM

Farnaz I would prefer if you wouldnt lump me together with anyone else. I doubt if would like me lumping you together with all Jewish people on the blog as if you're all the same. With regards to my saying anything about Anti-Semitism, I havent seen it happen much certainly not on the scale of anti-islamism. There have been only isolated incidents of anti-semitism that get reported and they need to be condemned but staying on this topic I condemn acts of terrorism perpetrated by muslims, Ive done that forcefully and a number of times. I've never seen you condemn the barbarity of IDF forces in Israel. Why its ok for some Jewish farmer from Moldova to leave his home one day and steal the land and olive gardens of a poor defenseless Palestinian? Why are you silent on these crimes committed in the name of Judaism?
----------------
The antisemitism on this blog is endless. So serious has it been that Sally Quinn addressed it on national television. If you haven't seen it, then the problem speaks volumes of you.

As for the IDF, I've never seen you condemn those Muslim terrorists who gave false information to eighteen year old boys that there were children in a home filled with weapons, throwing out grenades at those boys, who are now either dead or scarred for life.

They are the famous "burned boys," visible throughout Israel.

I've never seen you condemn the shooting at point blank range of a little girl, shot in the head, and the Syrian national celebration welcoming the mass murderer home.

I've never seen you condemn the blowing up of schools, school buses, explosions in mass transit facilities, on the streets, at the beaches.

I did not see you condemn the luring of a little boy to a cave, the destroying of that child's body, his remains plastered on the walls.

I've never seen you condemn the ETHNIC CLEANSING of Jews of Yemen, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Iraq, Iran, etc.

I've never seen you condemn the one out of every three murders among Palestinian Muslims that is an honor killing.

I've never seen you condemn the bribery and corruption of the Abbas regime.

I've never seen you condemn the torture and slaughter, the returning of men in body bags to their families conducted by Hamas.

I've never seen you condemn the persecution of Palestinian Christians, which has all but depleted the Palestinian population of members of that religion.

I"ve never seen you wonder how it is that Palestinian Christians flee into Israel.

I've never seen you condemn Egypt for the brutalization of 70,000 CHRISTIANS.

I've never seen you condemn the SHOOTING IN THE BACK OF SUDANESE REFUGEES BY EGYPTION MUSLAMS, THOSE SUDANESE FLEEING TO ISRAEL.

And Yasser prove it again.

If I believe I have the right faith I am a bigot. If he believe islam is the best that is not bigotry.

That is exactly my point. These guys have been telling people crap that they are peaceful and abuse anyone who disagrees with them. Then if someone stands up and points out history, obviously theirs is a more evolved position, an the others are bigots.

So intellectual cowards keep telling us to believe them and then can't decide what they are talking about. I've seen this from christians, but yasser's got to be the most verbal muslim I've seen so blatantly two faced. (most of my friends that are muslims would be understand history more than this) He should have his own Fox tv show.

hariaum

yasser, part 2.
you said,
"Try finding one [a history book] on the 800 year Muslim Rule in Spain. Never before had Euope witnessed the kind of religous tolerance that existed in Al-Andalus"

yes, i've heard of islam's golden age. thanks for preserving those ancient greek works. thanks for algebra too! and, btw, i love islamic architecture - those mosques are beautiful.

you said,
"(also if you can try reading what the Europeans did to muslims in their re-conquesita, might tell you a bit about the 'enlightenment' of the followers of these two religions~!)."

ancient history. seems like muslims are always referring to some injustice committed against them 500 years ago....

you said,
"Today Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews live throughout the Islamic world. Free to follow their religion."

christians, hindus, buddhists and jews around the would might disagree with you. again, see saudi arabia, iran etc... what if my religion allows my wife to drive? or, god forbid, walk unattended in public?

you said,
"And I know you have your quotes from the various sites of occaisional incidents of violence. That happens everywhere. Name me a country in Western World where there aren't anti-islamic sentiments prevalent in the society."

ha! here i was reading and assumed you'd end with "name me a country where there aren't "occasional incidents of CHRISTIAN violence" - that would have been the proper comparison. the fact is there are many more countries where there are many more acts of muslim violence than christian violence.

you said,
"Im sorry the problem with you and your friend jttn are that you arent ready to come out of your colonial mindsets....No more slave culture around here anymore. You gotta be prepared to take if you are willing to throw at someone~!"

please, don't flatter yourself. america is not interested in having islamic colonial states.

yasser, part 1
1)enlightenment
you said,
"To answer your first point I think its rather ignorant and disingenuous to ask if the Islamic world needs "enlightenment" as if you're talking about a single entity."

of course there are various muslims (why can't they all be sufis?). and there certainly are good muslims - like that pakistani edhi, who cleans up after muslim beheadings and takes in islam-abused women. he said, "i am a muslim, but my true religion is human rights." that's awesome. dispite its diversity, there IS such a thing as the "muslim community". and as a whole, they are behind the curve on the "freedom of religion" (and equal rights of the sexes).

2.separation of mosque and state and
3.islamic governments
you said,
" Again its a rather ignorant comment from someone who im now believing just wants to have a go at Islam without doing any background research. There's no Mosque-State relationship inbuilt in Islam. Thats a Christian concept you've tried to thrust on Islam. Mosque is just a place of worship. The Imam has no special status in Islam. No Popes here~!"

how can you say this? what is sharia? i wasn't even asking if there is currently an entanglement of mosque and state - that's a given. consider saudi arabia, iran, afghanistan. i mean, is turkey the best we can possibly hope for?

here is a quote from pretty moderate islamic website:
"The system of government under Islam is based upon the Quran and the Sunna or Traditions of the Prophet Muhammad...Legislation contained in the Quran becomes the basic law of the state....The government must make decisions on the basis of what God has revealed. If it does not, according to the Quran, it is not Islamic, for those who make decisions on other than what God has revealed are unbelievers (Surah 5 Verse 44)."

you said,
"The Holy Quran comes directly from God. ...repeated verbatim by the Prophet Muhammad and secured by Allah for the generations to come. No worldly power however much strong can alter even a single dot in it~!"

are you a literalist? do you believe the universe is 6000 yrs old? what percentage of muslims worldwide would you estimate are literalists? (i can't seem to "google" that info.)

Hello Justillthennow,

Its good to hear from you again. I wouldn't profess credentials as an expert on Islamic Theology but what I can tell you is that I believe Islam is somewhat an evolution of the previous Abrahamic religions. The reason those two faiths strayed from the true according to us was because they allowed the original word of God to be altererd. Hence when Christianity reached the idol worshiping Byzantines, they made Jesus son of God rather than just a Prophet of God. With regards to Prophet Muhammad, I think if you look at the literal meaning of Prophet, it says "a person who speaks for God or a deity, or by divine inspiration.". So Muhammad being both a messenger and a Prophet of Allah did only what was willed of him by Allah. The Shariah Prophet Muhammad proposed wasn't His but Allah's. So what you said about Prophet Muhammad 'creating' laws isn't an Islamic point of view. And yes there are may be 2 or 3 Islamic countries out of 54 that follow Sharia.

Again, its a misconception regarding Prophet Muhammad's message. He wasn't the pinnacle of Islam. He was a human being although superior to us, but nevertheless, a creation of Allah like all of us. It was Allah's words he spoke delivered to him through Angel Gabriel, like all other Prophets and Messengers before him.

I agree with you regarding state and religion being joined. One of the reasons why I believe Islam is an evolution of the previous Abrahamic faiths is because it covers the bases that Jesus and before him other prophets left uncovered. So in essence you can seek guidance to every aspect of your life from Islam.

With regards to your earlier response, I am in agreement with it almost totally, except for that myth about the dirty bomb. I am no expert at the topic but I have talked to people who are and believe me its impossible that you can have a suicide waist jacket made of nuclear arsenal. Its a lot different to handle than your usual TNT. Maybe we can talk more on that later. this would be my last post for today~! Ill happy to talk further tommorow!

Hello again Yasser,

I am weighing in on the discussion that you are having with Walter on Islam/State relations. Now, I am not too well schooled in some of these affairs, but it is my belief that there is a great deal of inherent, (as in inherited), intertwining of Islamic theology and governance. I am sure you will tell me if I am wrong.

The Prophet WAS the Government, after he conquered and initiated the first Muslim state. He created Laws that were not already ascribed by Allah, and this was the origin of Sharia. It has gone through an evolution, perhaps, and certainly interpretation as to how it is followed and which punishments for various crimes are to be performed. But this has it's origin from the guidance given by the Prophet, yes? Currently many regimes or factions have implemented Sharia, or are clamoring for it's implementation.

Walter had a point, which is that Muhammad was the head of state and implemented Muslim rule and law in governmental form. "Mosque" and state WERE one, from a single source and leader, who was the pinnacle of both.

Jesus on the other hand did not perform any governmental powers and the marriage of "Church" and state took some centuries before those twain met. And then for centuries there was a marriage of some form of Christian Church and "western" states, up until, effectively, America was founded. With the provision freedom of religion and no state sanctioned Church affiliation.

That last part is not actually valid, as some of the new founded states did for some while have an official state church, although there was none at the Federal level.

I believe there is a history in Islam of religion and government being joined and joint, as that is effectively how it was initiated. No?

The ultimate bigot is an intellectual coward.

Apply objective rules to assess a condition. The idea that my groups does not do as much harm as the other guy is a bunch of bull unless you use objective rules.

Black and white thinking: everybody does it. all religions are guilty. you're no better than us. you're the bigots..

Objective rules. But a coward will not apply objective rules. Using objective rules, the coward knows, will find that his/her ideas are false (unless they are open enough to say that their idea of objective rules is what they say is true).

Rules:

# of killings in which a person says they did it for their religion/ # of people in that religion

# of verses that condemn humanity by god/ # of verses in the scripture

# of people that believe killing someone for leaving the religion is justifiable/ # of people in the religion

I am open to any other objective criteria.

but a cowardly bigot will not want to do the analysis. The christo-islamic tradition and communism and Aztecs will lose. So they go on saying, don't condemn me you bigots, don't blame me for the hatred you sowed in my heart, don't blame me for the fact that I can't stand up and speak out against islamic hate in taliban or saudi country. Don't blame me, I am good, you are the bigoted fundamentalist that ruined everything.

If you worship truth, you have to do it with an open heart. If in that search you find that you were wrong, give up the wrongness. If you don't worship truth, then worship your demigod and stop killing other people.

hariaum

Hello Yasseryousufi,

part one:

I am sure that it was I that failed to communicate effectively. I am no supporter of the American choices that led to this "war on terror", or many of the policies that have been self serving for American interests and have been abrasive to other peoples around the world, not least being the common Muslim.

I detest that American policymakers and the politicians that vote on policy did a nice skip in double time to allowing war powers to the Executive, at that time run by an Evangelical neo-con. No good has come from it, though much that is dark has.

I do not go so far as your Millions of dead in these invasions. Nowhere near that many have died. Regardless, it is far too many and these deaths were not required, I think, as answer to 'terrorist' threat. I am ashamed of the outcome of this vile response, and heartbroken as well.

In terms of the fundamentalist threat, in Islam as well as in Christianity, I am aware that change is required and suggested that as change occurs fundamentalism rises. We certainly have a problem, in my view, with fundamentalism, and it is far too close to home for my tastes. Fundamentalism has been on the rise in America for some time. Mostly, it is a power that seeks to dominate in social issues, but was no small part of the rise to war that the previous Bush Administration got all lathered up over. Couldn't wait, it seems. Understandable of course, though not laudable from my view, the desire to crush the bin Laden/al Qaida threat after 9/11. But then again, no good is apparent in this continuing war.

Yasseryousufi,

part two:

"All those hate preachers of Christianity like Limbaugh, Buchanan, Robertson, Hannity etc. (they are mushrooming like rats~!) do they not have an impact on americans being indifferent to the killing fields of Iraq and Afghanistan?"

Doubtless true, as well as foaming up fear and loathing of all things Islamic. These types have no interest in peace or anything approaching mutually beneficial policy, and are unwilling to make any concessions from their privileged American lifestyles. Protectionists, but assuming that mid east oil, for instance, is owned by the world, not a country. For that gets it closer to the tanks of their own SUV's.

But then, radical Islamic clerics are as viral and more so than their Christian counterparts, and are more of a threat to the world as well as their own Muslim neighbors. To this I was responding. We need no more research than what we know. They are a threat, and do not seem to be shrinking, and not just to the "infidels". They are a cancer that sends brainwashed bombers into their own markets to blow apart Muslim families and children, their own neighbors. While terrorist money awaits, excited and nervous, for whoever is willing to sell them their first nuclear warhead.

A Christian fundamentalist nutjob would not press the button on a nuke in another country, or any market place or foreign capital. But I bet there is a line of "the willing" jihadists that would be delighted and 'honored' to light one off. They are lining up for explosive vests. For a nuke? Are you kidding?

American leadership of the past decade and more has been inept at curtailing the growing tide of violent extremism in Islamic countries, while Islamic clerics have been frothing up hatred and violence. It IS time for moderate Islam, in it's hundreds of millions of voices, to change the tide.

Or be swept up in it, and so a part of it...

W-I-FC,

To answer your first point I think its rather ignorant and disingenuous to ask if the Islamic world needs "enlightenment" as if you're talking about a single entity. Islamic world is a motley crowd of Arabs, Asians, Europeans, Africans, highly educated, mildly educated, uneducated, urban, rural dwellers belonging to all stratas of the society! There's a Shia Islam, Sunni Islam, Sufi Islam, Wahhabi Islam. They are all as enlightened and as unenlightened as you are.

2. Again its a rather ignorant comment from someone who im now believing just wants to have a go at Islam without doing any background research. There's no Mosque-State relationship inbuilt in Islam. Thats a Christian concept you've tried to thrust on Islam. Mosque is just a place of worship. The Imam has no special status in Islam. No Popes here~! The Holy Quran comes directly from God. Now you can either believe it or not believe it, that doesn't make any difference to us. You keep believing what you want we believe it is indeed the word of God, repeated verbatim by the Prophet Muhammad and secured by Allah for the generations to come. No worldly power however much strong can alter even a single dot in it~!

3. Im really getting bored hearing this incessant ignorant blather now. Hello! There are no Caliphates around here. Which planet have you been on lately? With regards to the true freedom of religion I suggest you spend less time reading hate posts on ON FAITH and read some real history books. Try finding one on the 800 year Muslim Rule in Spain. Never before had Euope witnessed the kind of religous tolerance that existed in Al-Andalus (also if you can try reading what the Europeans did to muslims in their re-conquesita, might tell you a bit about the 'enlightenment' of the followers of these two religions~!). Today Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews live throughout the Islamic world. Free to follow their religion. And I know you have your quotes from the various sites of occaisional incidents of violence. That happens everywhere. Name me a country in Western World where there aren't anti-islamic sentiments prevalent in the society.

Im sorry the problem with you and your friend jttn are that you arent ready to come out of your colonial mindsets. You believe in only blaming one side. A bit of reality check would do you guys no harm. No more slave culture around here anymore. You gotta be prepared to take if you are willing to throw at someone~!

asizk, you asked,
"Was timothy Mcveigh's worse crime in Oklohoma city motivated by his xtianity?"

no. he was christian, but he was some kind of government-conspiracy-theory wacko, NOT a religious wacko. he did not yell any "in jesus' name" when he set of the bomb. we have lots of info on mcveigh, and he was crazy, but not religious-crazy. a much better example of a religious wacko in america would be an abortion clinic bomber. that's really the only parallel i can think of. abortion clinic bombers happen, rarely, in america, but religious "suicide" bombings are DAILY occurence in the "islamic world".

"Was GWB's destructive war of choice on iraq motivated by xtianity?"

hhmmm....this one's a little harder... hhmmm...it's possible there was some of that crazy "god wants me to do this" mentality in gwb. scary time, his presidency....

"Like most Americans and the whole world,Hasan objected to the wars on Afghanistan and esepcially on Iraq."

i think most americans supported afghanistan - which gwb perfunctorially invaded before getting on with his crazy iraq obsession. most american, given the "info" we were even supported iraq. i supported afghanistan, but my initial reaction to iraq was "wtf, iraq"? but, when colin powell told me all that stuff at the u.n., well, i came to believe that they had WMD and were therefore somewhat of a threat. certainly NOT an imminent threat. infact iraq was extremely well-contained.... i feel like i was tricked by my government on iraq, and that it is a totally stupid distraction from killing OBL et. al. in afghanistan.

Why is "anti-semitisim" forced upon every discussion?

Why not,instead,discuess and expose farther jewish crimes inflicted upon Gaza civilian refugees? or the horrendous jewish apartheid rehime and brutal occupation imposed on a whole people,the Palestinian People,for over sixty yeras? Or the six million Palestinian refugees/exile explled and ethnically cleansed by jewish terror groups in 1947/8 and after???

Why...why and why?

yasser,
so,
1)do you agree with any of that? that the "islamic world" needs an enlightenment?

2)is separation of mosque and state even possible in islam? i don't know if you've read (or remembered...) my earlier posts about this, but i think "entanglement of mosque and state" is BUILT IN to islam because it's scripture was written by "the state". jesus was in no position to make laws for all of society, but muhammad and islam's "early church fathers" were.

3) isn't the islamic ideal for society a religious hierarchy of leaders and judges maintaining maintaining and enforcing religious laws? is there any validity to the idea of a "caliphate"? even in islamic countries (can there be true freedom of religion in a country that names itself "the islamic whatever of whatever"?) with "elections", the candidates are religiously vetted, and the parties have names like "islamic brotherhood" or "allah's soldiers" or whatever. there probably are a few fringe political parties in the u.s. called "christian something", but nobody votes for them. we think they're kooks. even if elected, they could never institute anything like "christian sharia" - we have "sacred" (constitutional) protection against that.

yasser,
i share jttn's sentiments from his recent post - the one which "disappointed" you. i think our sentiments are those of many mainstream rational americans - not just your pat robertsons and glen becks. in fact, i find myself in a surreal twilight zone reality in agreeing with pat roberson on anything...

jttn, i think, and i feel like what the hell is going on here? how can anybody, under any circumstances, CELEBRATE what hasan did? it doesn't matter if he was teased, or if he was conflicted about going to fight muslims (as a back-lines doctor, not a muslim-killing soldier). in the west, hasan's actions are NEVER acceptable. so, when we see muslims celebrate this, we think WTF?! something is seriously wrong with their moral compass.

***let me interrupt myself here and say when i say "west" it is not to exclude enlightened people in the "east". i mean people whose morals were transformed by the renaissance/enlightenment/age-of-reason philosophers and politicians of say 1400 to 1800 europe and america. this is when we elevated man (or demoted god). jefferson cleverly attributed "inalienable" rights to god, but in this paradigm, (anyone's particular) god can't take them away. one inalienable right is "freedom of religion". and here's the crucial part - if there is really freedom of religion there MUST be separation of church and state. (this is where farnaz is going with "freedom from religion".) westerners, christians in particular, might deny they've demoted god, but the god they're think of is filtered through, demoted by, the enlightenment. or, you could say individual human lives became sacred. after the enlightenment, it is now jefferson's inalienable rights god, not the jihad god of joshua, the crusades and the inquision.***

anyway, when westerners see palestinians using human shields to protect rocket launchers, we think "WTF?!" when our "smart bombs" accidentally hit civilians, well, it's a horrible accident. hamas bombs schools and stores ON PURPOSE! wtf?...

Thou Hasan's crime is horrendous as it is deploarble,it is an isolated case.It would be simplistic and misleading to blame every thing and whole sale on Islam.

Was timothy Mcveigh's worse crime in Oklohoma city motivated by his xtianity?

Was GWB's destructive war of choice on iraq motivated by xtianity?

Like most Americans and the whole world,Hasan objected to the wars on Afghanistan and esepcially on Iraq.

While it might wear a religous garb,His crime is politically motivated:Palestine, the biggest of all grievances he had-after all, his parents migrated to America as exiles to escape the unbearble situation of the now over sixty years of brutal jewish military and apartheid occupation of all of his homeland and the jewish tight grib and control over US foreign policy towards the Palestine issue especially the US congress.

It justs smells political:The early death of both his struggling parents and the relative lonliness he seems to have lived with as an umarried person together with the political grievances,complet and explain the picture.

No where in the Quran does it sanction the murder of the innocent and the Quran is unequivocal about the resepct for and of human life.

In short it seems that political grievances and personal troubles teamed up to create his mind set to commit the FT Hood crime.

Farnaz:

In an article titled, "Muhammad's Sword" written by Uri Avnery, an Israeli peace activist and a former member of the Knesset in Sept 2006 wrote:

"THERE IS no evidence whatsoever of any attempt to impose Islam on the Jews. As is well known, under Muslim rule the Jews of Spain enjoyed a bloom the like of which the Jews did not enjoy anywhere else until almost our time. Poets like Yehuda Halevy wrote in Arabic, as did the great Maimonides. In Muslim Spain, Jews were ministers, poets, scientists. In Muslim Toledo, Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars worked together and translated the ancient Greek philosophical and scientific texts. That was, indeed, the Golden Age. How would this have been possible, had the Prophet decreed the "spreading of the faith by the sword"?
What happened afterwards is even more telling. When the Catholics re-conquered Spain from the Muslims, they instituted a reign of religious terror. The Jews and the Muslims were presented with a cruel choice: to become Christians, to be massacred or to leave. And where did the hundreds of thousand of Jews, who refused to abandon their faith, escape? Almost all of them were received with open arms in the Muslim countries. The Sephardi ("Spanish") Jews settled all over the Muslim world, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, from Bulgaria (then part of the Ottoman Empire ) in the north to Sudan in the south. Nowhere were they persecuted. They knew nothing like the tortures of the Inquisition, the flames of the auto-da-fe, the pogroms, the terrible mass-expulsions that took place in almost all Christian countries, up to the Holocaust.
WHY? Because Islam expressly prohibited any persecution of the "peoples of the book." In Islamic society, a special place was reserved for Jews and Christians. They did not enjoy completely equal rights, but almost. They had to pay a special poll-tax, but were exempted from military service--a trade-off that was quite welcome to many Jews. It has been said that Muslim rulers frowned upon any attempt to convert Jews to Islam even by gentle persuasion--because it entailed the loss of taxes.
Every honest Jew who knows the history of his people cannot but feel a deep sense of gratitude to Islam, which has protected the Jews for 50 generations, while the Christian world persecuted the Jews and tried many times "by the sword" to get them to abandon their faith. "

HOW DO YOU WANT US TO BELIEVE RAMPANT ANTI-SEMITISM in M.E.? Is it because the Muslims were rewarded with the expulsion of 2 million Palestinians, their properties and homes taken away without compensation?

Pearls from an Idiot who never knows what he is talking about~!

*May peace be upon you* (it is said to deceased persons,not alive ones)

Halozcel, you remind me of those masochists who enjoy being insulted! May peace be upon you is the English translation of muslim greeting, Assalam o Alaikum~!

FarnazMansouri wrote,

"The only "cancer" is in the racist MIddle EAst nations that ethnically purged themselves of Jews, of the Muslim racists who have attacked innocent Jews in Europe and in the United STates."

Read my post again Farnaz! The Jews lived peacefully all over the Arab World before Jewish Haganah and Irgun terrorists started driving out Palestinians from their homes and lay down the foundations of this Diabolical State. Ever since its establsihment Israel has been the cause of instability around the world. All those people you talk of were only compelled to leave their homes after muslim reacted hearing stories of the repeat of Crusader days like carnage in Palestine. Its reprehensible, but one shouldn't ignore what instigated it.

"If, post 9/11, and subsequent attacks, we, in the US did not hold to this truth, I doubt you'd find any more Muslims here than you would Jews in the Middle East."

Yes try telling those stories of american compassion to the Iraqis and Afghanis. 9/11 was nothing compared to the atrocities America meted out to the innocent people of these countries. And dont tell me Muslims didnt suffer from hate crimes all over US and Europe. Wasn't the rampant racism around for everyone to see during the odious republican campaign to discredit Barack Obama by calling him a muslim as if its the ultimate crime!

Farnaz I would prefer if you wouldnt lump me together with anyone else. I doubt if would like me lumping you together with all Jewish people on the blog as if you're all the same. With regards to my saying anything about Anti-Semitism, I havent seen it happen much certainly not on the scale of anti-islamism. There have been only isolated incidents of anti-semitism that get reported and they need to be condemned but staying on this topic I condemn acts of terrorism perpetrated by muslims, Ive done that forcefully and a number of times. I've never seen you condemn the barbarity of IDF forces in Israel. Why its ok for some Jewish farmer from Moldova to leave his home one day and steal the land and olive gardens of a poor defenseless Palestinian? Why are you silent on these crimes committed in the name of Judaism?

With regards to the topic on the thread I have already let my views known. Anyone can scroll down to read it. I just response to posts as they come. It never intentional to divert away from the subject from my side.

PS: I posted my response to your query regarding the accuracy of the figures I qouted on that article by Daniel Brumberg~!

Yasser~!

Pearls from The Posters;

*fall back into the hole you came from* (it is impossible)
*HUMAN RIGHTS must be recognized and enforced* (who will enforce?)
*Just get a drink,or masturbate* (how do you know she doesnt drink J&B)
*May peace be upon you* (it is said to deceased persons,not alive ones)

justillthennow,

Seems like I havent done a good job of explaining the things in perspective. The typical American bombastic response you're suggesting for taking on the Fundamentalist has been tried by the Americans for the past 8 years~! Yes there needs to be a study of cause and effect principle. You cannot just bomb these people into submission. They will multiply into even more fundamentalists. And Yes we are trying to take them on, but it would help if you stop providing them fodder by invading muslim countries and killing millions along the way. Yes MILLIONS!! It isnt just a statistic. Those millions would have had even more millions of relatives and loved ones. If even a fraction of them becomes a fundamentalist we're losing this war.

I am curious to know why you see fundamentalists of Islam in isolation? doesn't christianity has its problems with fundamentalism? Hasn't world suffered even more due to Christian Fundos?? All those hate preachers of Christianity like Limbaugh, Buchanan, Robertson, Hannity etc. (they are mushrooming like rats~!) do they not have an impact on americans being indifferent to the killing fields of Iraq and Afghanistan? Im sorry to say im disappointed by your last post! Its so different from your previous ones. All this weight throwing around one place and not owning up to your mistakes has resulted in where we are. We are ready to own up to our mistakes and are infact doing something about it. When will you act?

Farnaz,

Are you mental? Chill on the neurosis, and just get a drink, or masturbate, or something. You are worse than CCNL these days. Who actually reads this load of PR?

Get a heart, or go back under the rock. You are not helping, if you actually want positive change to occur from your HOURS of attention to this blog.

IF you actually have a daughter, do you spend ANY time with her? You seem OBSESSED, and that cannot be health.

And is not. Chill a bit, please.

Yasseryousufi,

"That its wrong to just label a whole religion as evil, without looking at the various dimensions of the issue."

THIS I am in full agreement with.

"But I do believe that there so much more research that needs to be done before taking on this menace of fundametalism."

NO! There is no "research" that we need to wait upon before "taking on" your fundamentalists. They are destroying YOUR religion, Jackson, and YOU and your RELATIONS are paying a price. The longer you wait to "research" what needs none while whacking off the longer pain will continue.

"research" is a bulls**t ruse to deflect and avoid, and so continue down the same road. We MUST change the world for the better, and for the purpose and point that our religions preach toward. A better world. Difference is, it is not manifest by the ascendency of one over another. It is realized by the recognition of a basic and fundamental truth presented by all religions.... We are one family, one within Creation, of the same form and force, and relations. No war necessary.

Ok. Now that I have stated that beautiful thought...

This is not a beauty pageant, and if it was one you would be losing. And not particularly for a lack of moral standing, though I cannot say yours have done the best in that department, either.

Islam looks like s**t right now, viewed both from extra-Islamic perspectives and from moderate intra-Islamic perspectives. It is in your court to change world view on your morality and spiritual validity. Honestly you look like people that are just fine with suicide as a spiritual practice, and killing indiscriminately anyone, even your own kind, for personal over communal gain, (claim on virgins in paradise have a load of currency, with the pious!). Your preferred choice of bombing innocents into their next soulular existence because you guys are a bit pissed about current events does not gain much buoyancy if you ask me. Me and a boatload of other 'observers'.

Forgive me if I am a bit callous or caustic, but it is earned.

I look forward to actual progression. We have a good chance at that, with enough momentum and desire for change to occur. I hope that you are interested.

Salaam, Yasser.

(Last Part~!)

The 80's saw the sowing of seeds of islamic fundamentalism, for the past two decade we've been reaping its fruits. My study of history tells me that this movement will eventually exhaust itself and die down because of the lack of public support. Not for any noble reasons associated with struggle of muslims against fundamentalism but just because its the way history takes its course and its an eventuality thats bound to happen. The counter reaction to the fundamentalists has already started. Pakistan was the biggest nursery of the Wahhabi movement with thousands of Saudi financed Madarassah all over the country. Today 99% of Pakistan stands behind the Army conducting opration against these modern day Takfiri's. More soldiers have died in this war on terror than during all our full on wars with India combined. Slowly the oxygen is being sucked out of this movement, their last resort being the western occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. The day these two occupations end, it will be the endgame of this movement.

Well I dont know if I have coherently put all that I wanted to say into perspective. But I do believe that there so much more research that needs to be done before taking on this menace of fundametalism. That its wrong to just label a whole religion as evil, without looking at the various dimensions of the issue. The Whambam approach of americans is precisely what these people thrive upon. But yea.....thanks for providing me the opportunity to vent out something thats been building up for a while.

May peace be upon you!

Yasser

(continued from below~!)

The last two of these four were Usman and Ali, both of them being sons in law of the Prophet apart from being unrivalled in their piety and commitment to the faith. Both of them met violent deaths at the hands of these so-called reformist muslims who had the gall to declare these pillars of Islam infidels. In case of Usman specially, even his dead body wasn't allowed to be taken out of his home in Medina for several days inspite of the fact that his caliphate stretched from Egypt all the way to Iran and Uzbekistan such was the fear and terror tactics employed by these early fanatics. Im surprised no one in the Islamic world sees this connection with these modern day fanatics.

To cut the long story short, the takfiri/Kharji movement, as it was called back then continued to cause nuisance for a few more decades before it eventually died down as a loss of public support. But throughout its history, the Islamic world has been blighted by these so called reformists who have appeared in forms of various movements. The last influential reformer to appear on the scene was Muhammad bin Abdul Wahab, who along with a tribal warlord by the name Saud founded Kngdom of Saudi Arabia (I wonder why we muslim never protest against that name, who the hell gave him the right to call Arabia of Prophet Muhammad by his name). The Saudi's throughout their history have had very good relations with the west. They were helped by the British (remember that movie, Lawrence of Arabia) to overthrow the Ottomans from Arabia. Since the discovery of oil they've formed a legendary friendship with the americans. Its a long story really and I could go on forever but let me end with saying that Saudi's have been the biggest proponents of the Wahhabi Islam that is adhered to by Al-Qaeda, the Talibans and all other fanatic muslims. They have confronted and seriously harmed the more widely practiced Islam of tolerance and universal brotherhood preached by the Sufi's. There brand of Islam was spread in places like Pakistan and Afghanistan during the war with USSR in the 80's with the support of the CIA. The Saudis provided the money and CIA provided the brains and together they reinvented the long forgotted muslim concept of Jihad (wrongly translated as holy war).

(continues....)

Justillthennow,

Thank you for your post~! I wish I could write as eloquently as you do. The chain of actions and reactions we are witnessing today is a product of our misunderstanding of each others pespectives, bigotry, unjust wars and plenty of other things. As always the present is rooted in the past. You cannot avoid discussing the root causes if you are serious in reaching a solution to the problems. I liken it to the analogy of western medication and the alternate herbal medication. The Western Medications would provide you instant relief from your ailments but it is temporary because it never deals with roots of the disease, whereas with alternate medicine it takes a lot more time to cure the disease but the remedy is long lasting.

So when USA gets attacked by a bunch of terrorists who chose to violently expose the laundry list of complains muslims had against USA and by extention the imperialistic west, the americans took the easier, instant relief path of attacking two muslim countries with overwhelming force killing approximately twice the number of people that died in 9/11, in one night of shock and awe in Baghdad. As a result we are where we are today. That instant relief via anti-biotic of more wars has ensured that Islamic fundamentalism would be alive and kicking for several decades to come. The longer lasting option of taking a measured response, trying to analyze the threat level, taking along the overwhelming outporing of sympathy from around the world, including the muslim world (even Iranians were having candle light vigils for those who died) wans't even considered.

Having said that, the impact of Islamic terrorism has been minimal on the western societies. Its the muslim countries who have borne the brunt of this twisted, evil ideology. There has always been an under current of hardline fundamentalism in Islam. I dont know if Islamic history is of any interest to you, but if you've read it you'll know that the 4 most influential companions of Prophet Muhammad bacame Caliphs one after another after his death.

(continues above)

Alles:

The article below was posted by another blogger on a different thread. I'd be interested in knowing anyone's thoughts on this.

For me, the single most important question remains the same. Why was Hasan not stopped before the fact? What procedural changes, along with additional training and resources need to be provided to servicemen, those living around military bases to prevent a recurrence of this kind of tragedy?

Lieutenant Colonel Allen B West (US Army, Ret)

This past Thursday 13 American Soldiers were killed and another 30 wounded at a horrific mass shooting at US Army installation, Ft Hood Texas. As I watched in horror and then anger I recalled my two years of final service in the Army as a Battalion Commander at Ft Hood, 2002-2004.

My wife and two daughters were stunned at the incident having lived on the post in family housing.

A military installation, whether it is Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine, or Coast Guard, is supposed to be a safe sanctuary for our Warriors and their families. It is intended to provide a home whereby our “Band of Brothers and Sisters” can find solace and bond beyond just the foxhole but as family units.

A military installation is supposed to be a place where our Warriors train for war, to serve and protect our Nation. On Thursday, 5 November 2009 Ft Hood became a part of the battlefield in the war against Islamic totalitarianism and state sponsored terrorism.

There may be those who feel threatened by my words and would even recommend they not be uttered. To those individuals I say step aside because now is not the time for cowardice. Our Country has become so paralyzed by political correctness that we have allowed a vile and determined enemy to breach what should be the safest place in America, an Army post.

We have become so politically correct that our media is more concerned about the stress of the shooter, Major Nidal Malik Hasan. The misplaced benevolence intending to portray him as a victim is despicable. The fact that there are some who have now created an entire new classification called; “pre-virtual vicarious Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)” is unconscionable.

This is not a “man caused disaster”. It is what it is, an Islamic jihadist attack.

We have seen this before in 2003 when a SGT Hasan of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) threw hand grenades and opened fire into his Commanding Officer’s tent in Kuwait. We have seen the foiled attempt of Albanian Muslims who sought to attack Ft Dix, NJ. Recently we saw a young convert to Islam named Carlos Bledsoe travel to Yemen, receive terrorist training, and return to gun down two US Soldiers at a Little Rock, Arkansas Army recruiting station. We thwarted another Islamic terrorist plot in North Carolina which had US Marine Corps Base, Quantico as a target.

What have we done with all these prevalent trends? Nothing.

What we see are recalcitrant leaders who are refusing to confront the issue, Islamic terrorist infiltration into America, and possibly further into our Armed Services. Instead we have a multiculturalism and diversity syndrome on steroids.
Major Hasan should have never been transferred to Ft Hood, matter of fact he should have been Chaptered from the Army. His previous statements, poor evaluation reports, and the fact that the FBI had him under investigation for jihadist website posting should have been proof positive.

However, what we have is a typical liberal approach to find a victim, not the 13 and 30 Soldiers and Civilian, but rather the poor shooter. A shooter who we are told was a great American, who loved the Army and serving his Nation and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) stating that his actions had nothing to do with religious belief.

We know that Major Hasan deliberately planned this episode; he did give away his possessions. He stood atop a table in the confined space of the Soldier Readiness Center shouting “Allahu Akhbar”, same chant as the 9-11 terrorists and those we fight against overseas in the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters of operation.

No one in leadership seems willing to sound the alarm for the American people; they are therefore complicit in any future attacks. Our Congress should suspend the insidious action to vote on a preposterous and unconstitutional healthcare bill and resolve the issue of “protecting the American people”.

The recent incidents in Dearborn Michigan, Boston Massachusetts, Dallas Texas, and Chicago Illinois should bear witness to the fact that we have an Islamic terrorism issue in America. And don’t have CAIR call me and try to issue a vanilla press statement; they are an illegitimate terrorist associated organization which should be disbanded.

WalterIFC

--Why didn't you condemn the Rabbi who thinks that Jewish Law allows Jews to kill children?"

i don't know anything about this case. he should be condemned.
-------------
Walter,

This is not quite what he said. I now have the book. The article Zebra4 posted regarding the book explicitly stated that it created a "firestorm in the Israeli...media."

All I've been asking the blogger is for one "firestorm" anywhere in the world's Muslim media regarding the worldwide assaults on Jews by Muslims.

I've pasted an article and a PDF by a world-famous scholar that only tells part of the story of Muslim verbal, written, and physical assaults against Jews. No word of any firestorm thus far from Zebra4.
---------
Frankly, I am not surprised, and I am less concerned with this than by Zebra4's attempt along with Yasser's to shift the discussion away from Hasan.

Will post on him soon, or, perhaps, post an article on him.

Hope we can get back on topic.

YasserYousufi:

This post should have been addressed to you, so here it is again.
______________

FarnazMansouri,

I read all your posts. It kinds reinforces my belief even more forcefully that the cancer that ails all of us, Muslims, Christians and Jews is the state of Israel in its current for and shape.
---------------
The only "cancer" is in the racist MIddle EAst nations that ethnically purged themselves of Jews, of the Muslim racists who have attacked innocent Jews in Europe and in the United STates. There was the cancer, too, of Chairman Pedophile ARafat (see Wikipedia on his pedophilia), well known to the reporters and throughout the MIddle East.

There was the cancer of blowing up children in school buses, Sbarro's, UJ cafeteria, shooting little girls at point blank range (murderer was given a hero's welcome in Syria), etc.

There is the cancer that one out of every three Palestinian murders is an "honor killing." There is the cancer that men are still being returned to their families in body bags.
-----------------
As for the Muslims who are persecuting Jews in Europe and the US, with violent speech and physical force, their racism says NOTHING about the targets, everything about the racists.

Know this, if you know nothing else, and know it very, very well. Racism says nothing about the victims, everything about the racists.

If, post 9/11, and subsequent attacks, we, in the US did not hold to this truth, I doubt you'd find any more Muslims here than you would Jews in the Middle East.

I would suggest you also access the PDF. Seems there's always any exucse, isn't there?

Err...no.

Posted by: Farnaz1Mansouri1 | November 16, 2009 9:08 PM

Zebra4, Yasser,

Zebra4 knows quite well that I have frequently taken on bloggers who attempt to denigrate either Islam or Muslims. Right now, on Susan Jacoby's thread, I posted an article revealing some of the Christianist elements among some responsible for the Iraq, Afghanistan horror.

Zebra4 has seen the same sort of postings by me on other threads on WAPO, as has Yasser.

NOw, why is it I have never seen the like from either of these two when it comes to Jews or any one other than Muslims?

What is right for you is right for everyone.
Or it isn't right for anyone.

Now, if I'm not mistaken, this essay concerns Hasan the murderer and Islam.

Zebra4,

Here is your problem. You made an effort to switch the topic from Hasan to Israel by posting an article about a reprehensible book by one (1) Israeli author.

However, the article rightly noted that the book created a "firestorm in the Israeli media."

When called on your post with the simple request for Arab "media firestorms" on the loathesome, racist assaults on Jews in different countries, loathsome books, articles, etc., you had nothing to say.
------------------
Well, then, how about telling us of the Muslim "media firestorms" about the persecution of Christians? Let us begin with Egypt.
---------------
6/26/09: USCIRF Expresses Concern over Reported Attacks on Coptic Orthodox Christians in Egypt

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 26, 2009

WASHINGTON, DC - The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) is concerned at reports of attacks targeting Coptic Orthodox Christians in the small Egyptian village of Ezbet Boshra-East.
USCIRF has learned that Egyptian authorities reportedly have released from custody all those suspects who were originally arrested earlier this week. Local authorities reportedly are conducting an ongoing investigation even though persons involved in the violence appear to be free.

“This latest incident is another example of the upsurge of violence against Coptic Christians we have seen in the past few years,” said Felice D. Gaer, chair of the Commission. “The Commission has long expressed concern that the Egyptian government does not do enough to protect Christians and their property in Egypt, nor does the government adequately bring perpetrators of such violence to justice.”

On June 21, Muslim villagers looted and attacked private homes and a building used for Christian gatherings and religious services in Ezbet Boshra-East. According to reports, a group of Christians from Cairo were visiting a pastor who lives in the building. This apparently caught the attention of local residents, particularly Muslims. Soon after, it is alleged that a group of Muslims began looting. Several Christians and Muslims sustained injuries and some of the homes and the building were damaged. In addition, crops were uprooted by Muslim rioters on property owned by Christian farmers. A curfew reportedly is in place, although most Christians remain in their homes for fear of additional attacks.

Initial reports say that state security services did little to prevent the violence from occurring. This repeats the established pattern that security services do not adequately protect Christian citizens in many localities.
For all Christians in Egypt, government permission is required to build a new church or repair an existing one, and the approval process for church construction is time-consuming and inflexible. Even some permits that have been approved cannot be acted upon because of interference by the state security services at both the local and national levels.

“The Commission recommends that the Egyptian government implement procedures to ensure that all places of worship are subject to the same transparent, non-discriminatory, and efficient regulations regarding construction and maintenance,” said Ms. Gaer. “If the Egyptian government would pass and implement such a law, it may help in stemming some of the violence targeting Christians who are forced to convert private homes and buildings into churches because they cannot get permission to build an appropriate place of worship.”

Egypt has been cited by the USCIRF “Watch List” as a country with serious religious freedom violations, including widespread problems of discrimination, intolerance, and other human rights violations against members of religious minorities, as well as non-conforming Muslims.

USCIRF is an independent, bipartisan U.S. federal government commission. USCIRF Commissioners are appointed by the President and the leadership of both political parties in the Senate and the House of Representatives. USCIRF’s principal responsibilities are to review the facts and circumstances of violations of religious freedom internationally and to make policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State and Congress.

FarnazMansouri,

I read all your posts. It kinds reinforces my belief even more forcefully that the cancer that ails all of us, Muslims, Christians and Jews is the state of Israel in its current for and shape.
---------------
The only "cancer" is in the racist MIddle EAst nations that ethnically purged themselves of Jews, of the Muslim racists who have attacked innocent Jews in Europe and in the United STates. There was the cancer, too, of Chairman Pedophile ARafat (see Wikipedia on his pedophilia), well known to the reporters and throughout the MIddle East.

There was the cancer of blowing up children in school buses, Sbarro's, UJ cafeteria, shooting little girls at point blank range (murderer was given a hero's welcome in Syria), etc.

There is the cancer that one out of every three Palestinian murders is an "honor killing." There is the cancer that men are still being returned to their families in body bags.
-----------------
As for the Muslims who are persecuting Jews in Europe and the US, with violent speech and physical force, their racism says NOTHING about the targets, everything about the racists.

Know this, if you know nothing else, and know it very, very well. Racism says nothing about the victims, everything about the racists.

If, post 9/11, and subsequent attacks, we, in the US did not hold to this truth, I doubt you'd find any more Muslims here than you would Jews in the Middle East.

I would suggest you also access the PDF. Seems there's always any exucse, isn't there?

Err...no.

Zebra4:

Perhaps, Muslims did not protest on the street for the same reason you and people of other faiths did not protest on the street in all the 7 points (and more) above.

Anyone who picks and chooses has no credibility, in my opinion.

Anyone who picks and chooses has no credibility, in my opinion.
------------------------
Another ineffective response. Evidently, you simply have no adequate reply to make.
After having taken the time to post a full article, provided a PDF by a stellar academic, I asked you to answer one question.

The book you wrote created a "firestorm in the Israeli media."

In which Muslim media, anywhere in the world, has there been a firestorm over the verbal and physical violence perpetrated on Jews by Christians?

Where is the firestorm over the SEVENTY THOUSAND Christians in Egypt who are ruthlessly persecuted almost daily?
-----------------
As for your irrelevant question on your "seven points," if by "your people," you mean Jews, they are actively protesting throughout, occasionally serving as leaders, even going to jail for their views.

And YOUR people?

Yasser

the next time your in your mosque and the imam gets up and says god hates the idolators, I hope you get up and say, "cut down on the I hate Hindus thing and we can talk."

hariaum

As to bubbles,

1) all human beings are made by the divine
2) all human beings are made by the perfect will of the divine
3) if you hate a human being, you hate the creation of the perfect divine
4) an ideology is a set of ideas by a group
5) if your name for the idea is more valuable than the idea itself, you are a fool
6) your foolishness is created by an ideology that says to protect the name more than the truth.

A solution to foolishness: everywhere you have the word pagan, infidel, non-believer in your scripture, write down the word muslim, christian, hindu... whatever group you belong to. Then see if you still agree with the teaching.

As to selection bias of quotes:

Each of us selects parts of a scripture to quote. Some of us have read the whole koran, the whole new testament, the whole Torah, the whole Gita, the whole Ramayana, the whole Dhammapada, the whole Tao Te Ching, the Aman Cara, the Egyptian book of the Dead, the Mainstalk, the Book of the Hopi... We can put selections in perspective. The person who had read only one or two of the world's scriptures is happy in their bias. They need to break their bubbles (and study history)

hariaum

Walter-in-Falls-Church:

Time is a relative thing.

But I appreciate your honesty--finding no justification for atrocities.

I have never disagreed with you that Muslims need reform. Reform is essential for progress. HUMAN RIGHTS must be recognized and enforced.

Well it seems that I have been not allowed to respond to the charge of bigotry.

So be it.

Open debate is only useful to the one's in power.

I use history to find what is a good ideology. If that makes me a bigot, so be it. If recognizing that groups affect people's behavior is bigotry, so be it.

I asked for proof, a quotation, and got none. so be it.

I asked for reason, how does one say one is different from Aztecs and Nazis, I got none.

Yet I am the bigot.

humbug. Rhetoric does not make truth. And that is what the statement that islam is the religion of peace - rhetoric. The proof is in the history.

hariuam

yasser, you said,
"How can there logically be a Palestinian State with those settlements dotted strategically all over West Bank. All those illegal settlements have to be dismantled, that goes without saying."

yeah, i totally agree. that's what i mean by "contiguous". israel can't have all these little "dots" within palestine - they've got to dismantle the settlements.

Hello Yasseryousufi,

part one,

Sorry for not getting back to you sooner. Thank you for your post and for your honesty in it.

I believe that I understand your position and appreciate that you seem to see it in a clearheaded sort of way. There is far too much blame being flung in all directions but at ourselves, and too much deflection of incoming blame that the various sides just play a game of avoidance of fault and blame of other, while pursuing some form of revenge.

Progression that is mutually beneficial, (the only kind that works in the long run!), requires not only a clear awareness of the problems that are obstacles to evolution but an eyes open awareness of the state of self that is functioning counter to that movement.

It is the same whether we are talking about an individual or a country, in family disputes or countries or religions squaring off on a battlefield. No side is blameless going into that battle, and longterm growth and advancement does not occur on a battlefield. It occurs where cooperation and harmonious intercourse occur.

A look at the posts on this blog, even this thread, illustrate that point. One may fire salvos of putrid hate and blame at the target of ones distaste, and they may fire back, (and fire and fire and fire and fire.....in some cases!). It may come to little but a voiding of the daily bile that, tomorrow, is loaded and ready to aim at the evildoers.

"If you believe that I think muslims can do no wrong, thats not my position. We have let down ourselves in terms of education, eradication of poverty, corruption and above all the rise of fundamentalism."

Yes I understand that and it is clear that Islam is going through a process of self-evaluation aiming, (one hopes!), at positive transformation. That is good and is as it should be. It also is not the easiest process, and fundamentalism will always rise it's head and beady little eyes when "Change" is afoot.

Yasseryousufi,

part two,

I am no fan of Americas self centered and arrogant attitudes and foreign policies that have dominated the last century. And I am aware that choices that America and other world powers have made are no small part of the imbalances that may be percieved and experienced by Muslims the world over. Christian religions and Judaism have been dominant in the cultures of the most powerful cultures and countries of the last several centuries, and neither religion have been big friends with Islam. And likewise Islam has not been a big friend of either of those.

Oil wealth has been one dynamic that has pushed Islam to a more central position in the world, compared to one hundred years ago. And American capitalism and foreign policy worked hard to assure the benefits of mid east oil filled their own pockets faster than the pockets of the common man in the middle east.

Well, we could go on about this. The point of my post to Zebra, and to you, is that moderate and peace loving Islam MUST take control, or larger share of control, of responsibility for actions that define "Islamic" in order to have a more constructive and positive future.

There is no doubt, in my mind at least, that the West and Christian and Jewish affiliated governments and cultures need to change as well. But I have more optimism that they will embrace required change, with a partner that seeks mutual benefit.

Radical Islam, clearly the one with momentum here, and it's right hand the suicide bomber or other such Paradise focused and motivated self-immolators, are not partners seeking mutual benefit.

It may not even be radical Islam, but potentially just basic tenets of Islam that give rise and credibility to what we call radicalized versions of the Faith. But then this is part of the house cleaning that Muslims may be doing, voluntarily or otherwise.

Salaam, Yassaryousufi.

WIFS,

My sense of humour is rather dry~! But I hope you're not joking about Israel keeping its settlement in the West Bank. Even the Israeli's have have gone past that. How can there logically be a Palestinian State with those settlements dotted strategically all over West Bank. All those illegal settlements have to be dismantled, that goes without saying. It is also the position of USA, Israel's staunchest ally. Im curious to know how seriously you have followed all this Middle-East issue and whether you are cognizant of even the basic facts on the ground.

The Arab states counseled the Palestinians not to compromise with the Jews of Palestine. This is because the Muslim countries of which Pakistan was the loudest counseled the Arabs not to compromise and promised unspecified aid and left it for the Arabs to fantasize about that “aid”. When it was time to act every one of them slipped into his hole and left the Palestinians to face the music. All what the Palestinians get is “advice” and more talk and nothing more.
What is even more immoral is that every one of those countries that was in one way or other responsible for the Palestinian tragedy have benefited financially and diplomatically from this catastrophe. They use the Palestinian situation as a beggar uses a dying child to entreat an alms.

yasser, you said,
"The solution you suggest seems impractical to me and would complicate the situation further instead of solving it."

i was just being (apparently not very) funny with the temple thing. that would never happen. seeing as how they've got possession now, muslims don't want any new temple-building going on anywhere near that stupid rock.

re contiguousness:
are you suggesting palestinians would accept/respect israeli settlements?

zebra4, continued,

"6.How many street protests did we see after Catholic nuns and priests hacked 900,000 Tutsis to death with machettes in Rwanda?"

this is horrible. no defense here.

"7.How many street protests did we see when 2 million human beings were slaughtered in Cambodia?"

?

"Perhaps, Muslims did not protest on the street for the same reason you and people of other faiths did not protest on the street in all the 7 points (and more) above."

my point is islam has a serious p.r. problem. lots of it is based on real atrocities being committed today, daily. and lot's of it with scriptural justification. there's no scriptural justification for catholics murdering tutsis, but hasan can easily find things in the koran that justify his actions. we can argue about whether hasan has it right, but his case is MUCH easier to make than the catholics' case.

and there are NO catholics who greeted the revelation of the tutsi murders with street CELEBRATIONS and labelling of the murderers as "heroes". had there been christian celebrations of the catholics' murdering, you better believe there would have been protestors to counter the celebrations.

yet when the muslim "fringe" (seems like a huge fringe...) celebrates hasan's murders, we don't hear much from "moderate" muslims.

zebra4,
"1--Why didn't you condemn the Rabbi who thinks that Jewish Law allows Jews to kill children?"

i don't know anything about this case. he should be condemned. i'm sure the percentage of jews who agree with him is less than the percentage muslims who agree with hasan's imam's views about jihad.

"2.How many street protests did we see when Rev Jones murdered Congressman Ryan and hundreds of his followers to suicide?"

oh my gosh, this is so long ago. it also was crazy christians just being crazy christians. the congressman and press just got caught up in jones' craziness. as for the kool-aid drinkers, they killed themselves - a true suicide "bombing" - unlike when a crazy muslim "spills kool aid" all over a bazaar or train station. and, i think jones was roundly criticised by christians - i don't know about street protests, though.

"3.How many street protests did we see when Eric Rudolph and the Army of God fanatics bombed numerous abortion clinics in America?"

i don't know. this is a good example of crazy christians being bad members of society. abortion clinic bombings ARE recent christian version of jihad. when was the last abortion clinic bombing? when was the last muslim "suicide" bombing?

"4.How many street protests did we see after Timothy McVeigh bombed federal building in Oklahoma City?"

timothy mcveigh was nominally christian. i am atheist and would love to "pin" his craziness on his religion, but it wouldn't be justified. we have lots of info on mcveigh's motivations and they weren't religious.

"5.How many street protests did we see when Catholics and Protestants were terrorising one another for 400 years?"

lots. and this is a huge "black eye" for christianity. they're behaving much better now.

walter-in-fallschurch wrote,

"perfect! why the hell hasn't that happened?! that's basically been on the table since, well, as long as i can remember. it seems SO obvious to "disinterested" observers."

Well the most obvious reason why that hasn't happened is because the side that has to make concessions i.e. giveup lands it holds as war booty even after 40 years happens to be 100 times more influential in terms of military might, political clout and having friends in high places as compared to the other side. This suggestion was given to Israel in 2002. Its considered the boldest step so far to come from the Arab states. yet Israel hasn't even given an official response to it so far. So I guess that explains your "why the hell it hasn't happened yet".

"just go with those borders or something close to that. the countries must be contiguous. you can't have little israeli settlements within palestine or vice versa - everybody knows that's just crazy. and, of course, since everbody involved thinks (supposedly the same) god promised them jerusalem...they have to share jerusalem."

I think you're wrong here. The countries dont really have to be contigous. The most pertinent example I can cite is of my own country which used to be East Pakistan and West Pakistan till 1971. The two parts were separated by an even bigger stretch of land of enemy territory. It was a fully functioning country for 25 years. The reason of its breakup were entirely different and not because they were thousands of kilometers apart. We can have air links to join Gaza and West Bank. We could even have an elevated expressway between the two territories. You know where there's a will......!

Jerusalem has to be divided for any just solution. No side can take all of it. Palestinians should get East Jerusalem where Arabs are in clear majority. The solution you suggest seems impractical to me and would complicate the situation further instead of solving it. So there you have it! Its just me thinking from the top of my head. If people really want to resolve this and if those that have perpetrated excesses are willing to resolve the matter and sit down seriously, no problems are insurmountable.

Zebra asks:
“How many street protests did we see after Catholic nuns and priests hacked 900,000 Tutsis to death with machettes in Rwanda?”

This is a blatantly false and therefore criminal allegation. I lived many years in Africa and know for a fact that Catholic priests and nuns do not take part in massacres. They serve the local populations by building hospitals and schools for those where no one else could or would. A case in point is when the Muslims of Northern Sudan wanted to punish the non-Muslims of Southern Sudan, the first thing they did in 1969 was expel those priests and nuns and thus deprived the local population of the little education and health care they received. This in turn backfired and led to an open warfare that shall soon lead to the independence of the southern half of Sudan from the dominance and subjugation of the Islamists of the North.

yasser, you said,
"...acceptance o Israel by all Arab countries and by extension all muslim countries in exchange for Isreal's return to its '67 borders. Sounds like the most plausible solution to me. What do you say?"

perfect! why the hell hasn't that happened?! that's basically been on the table since, well, as long as i can remember. it seems SO obvious to "disinterested" observers.

just go with those borders or something close to that. the countries must be contiguous. you can't have little israeli settlements within palestine or vice versa - everybody knows that's just crazy. and, of course, since everbody involved thinks (supposedly the same) god promised them jerusalem...they have to share jerusalem.

in that spirit, i have a proposal for a new tripartite temple in jerusalem, with "abraham's magic rock" at the center, housed in a round revolving-walls room. the temple itself would be round, centered on the rock, and be divided into three 120 degree wedges. the walls housing the magic rock could rotate to align an opening towards the muslim third on friday, the jewish third on saturday and the christian third on sunday.

christians may not really want their third, but who knows, i guess in fairness, they should be offered it. i believe this proposal would also satisfy many peoples' notions about who's supposed to have a temple on the magic rock when the apocalypse finally gets here. of course ushering the apocalypse may or may not be a good thing, depending on your relationship with (hopefully the right) god.

Farnaz and Walter-in-Falls-Church:

1--Why didn't you condemn the Rabbi who thinks that Jewish Law allows Jews to kill children?

2.How many street protests did we see when Rev Jones murdered Congressman Ryan and hundreds of his followers to suicide?

3.How many street protests did we see when Eric Rudolph and the Army of God fanatics bombed numerous abortion clinics in America?
4.How many street protests did we see after Timothy McVeigh bombed federal building in Oklahoma City?
5.How many street protests did we see when Catholics and Protestants were terrorising one another for 400 years?

6.How many street protests did we see after Catholic nuns and priests hacked 900,000 Tutsis to death with machettes in Rwanda?
7.How many street protests did we see when 2 million human beings were slaughtered in Cambodia?

Perhaps, Muslims did not protest on the street for the same reason you and people of other faiths did not protest on the street in all the 7 points (and more) above.

Anyone who picks and chooses has no credibility, in my opinion.

walter-in-fallschurch,

Whatever solution I propose is meaningless, but the people who matter in the region have suggested acceptance o Israel by all Arab countries and by extension all muslim countries in exchange for Isreal's return to its '67 borders. Sounds like the most plausible solution to me. What do you say?

yasser, you said,
"So for the anti-semitism to end and alongwith peace to develop in the world there needs to be a resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli crisis."

is the incredibly-obvious-to-the-rest-of-us "two-state solution" acceptable to muslims? or when you say "resolution" do you mean "elimination of israel"?

FarnazMansouri,

I read all your posts. It kinds reinforces my belief even more forcefully that the cancer that ails all of us, Muslims, Christians and Jews is the state of Israel in its current for and shape.

Its the # 1 reason for the anti-semitism that is rampant according to you in Europe. Its a major reason behind the current war on terror. It will be a major reason if US again falls into the trap of AIPAC and its cronies and attacks Irans throwing the world into a depression it would never have seen before. Israel also happens to be the number # 1 rule breaker in the world. No country has ever broken more UN rules than Israel. That also results in diminishing the impact of UN, ICJ etc.

So for the anti-semitism to end and alongwith peace to develop in the world there needs to be a resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli crisis. There are no two ways about it. Israel will keep running way from it because it has the power to do and US to support it.

Navin,

The name's Yasser btw. If you aren't doing it on purpose, kindly correct it the next time you address me. A bigot is a kind of a religous supermacist who denigrates everyone else's religion while saying only his religion is perfect and peaceful and whatever. You yourself, along with your fellow Hindu friends on this blog Matahari and ClearThinking perfectly fit into this description. You guys always have these petty issues with some parts of the Quran you've read on the internet which are taken out of context and you then post them verbatim without providing the context and pose as some scholar on Islam. I've repeated it countless times now. Islam is against the killing of all innocents of all faiths. Period.

I dont know what to make of your idiotic suggestion that to prove we are peacefull people muslims should have celebrated Hindu fanatics desecrating and destroying a centuries old mosque and killing more than a thousand muslims along the way? Huh? What is it that you're smoking? And FYI Muslims never celebrated MF Husain's sculpting of Hindu Gods. Got any proof of that? Sculpting is unislamic anyway. I do remember however, that he had to go into hiding because he recieved death threats from Hindu fanatics of Shiv Sena.

I bet you madeup that Sufi story as well. You arent much bothered about the credibility of what you write are you? Thats another trait familiar with all bigots. Anyways.....I wish I could say it was fun talking to you. I'll respond if you write anything worth responding to. But I doubt it because you only have these Quranic parts to quote and base your arguments upon. You got no understanding of the wider scheme of things. So if you're willing to come out of your bubble, cut down on that I hate Islam thing. Ill be willing to talk with you. Otherwise I wont be missing much ignoring you in the future.

Zebra4,

Fundamentally, WalterIFC and I are asking the same questions. A lot of people are.

Zebra4,

Perhaps, of interest. The link will take you to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.

There, you may read about the godless nightmare visited upon the Christians of Egypt, roughly numbering 70,000.

I have not seem any protests, let alone "media firestorms" on this. Would you please let us know where we might find appropriate outrage in Islamic media anywhere in the world, i.e., not necessarily in Muslim nations? (I'm trying to offer as much lattitude as possible.)

As is the case with Jew hatred, hatred of Christians by Muslims is as irrelevant as the article you posted. Except for this: Violent speech breeds violence. It is that to which I respond, and I always will.

http://www.uscirf.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2555&Itemid=1

Zebra4

"Your anger is misdirected. You should have condemned the Rabbi who justified killing of innocent children or should have complained about the author of the article as to why he reported it. I simply posted it without comment."

Your defense is ineffective. This post has nothing to do with Israel, nor does it have to do with the Middle East purge of three million Jews, I among them.

However, according to the article you posted, the book in question created a "firestorm in the Israeli media."

I merely requested that you read the PDF, posted again for your convenience, that documents anti-Jewish racism in Muslim nations, and inform us which national media in Muslim nations condemned this racism.

If you prefer, tell us in which Islamic media, ANYWHERE, a "firestorm" has been created over either persecution of Jews or of Christians, more on whom later.

Below, I have taken the time to paste a two-year-old survey of Muslim anti-Jewish violence in Europe. (Things have gotten worse, but I'm having trouble with my scanner, and cannot get you more recent information.) Please let us know when and where a "firestorm" occurred in Muslim media, anywhere in the known world.

I will say this. Hate speech creates violence. We see this in the case of Hasan, the murderer, and in all the cases documented below. We see it in the miserable existence of the Christians in Muslim nations.

I await your reply concerning Islamic media "firestorms."

http://www.engageonline.org.uk/journal/index.php?journal_id=14&article_id=60

---------------------
http://www.ajc.org/atf/cf/%7B42D75369-D582-4380-8395-D25925B85EAF%7D/WistrichAntisemitism.pdf

Here is a link to Wikipedia's bio on Prof. Robert Wistrich, a stellar academic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_S._Wistrich
------------------------

February 2007
Anti-semitism: Muslim Judeophobia in Europe - Avram Hein

Since the time of Mohammed, disputes have been recorded between Jews and Muslims. For thousands of years, Jews (and Christians) living in the Muslim world have been treated as inferiors with a status known as dhimmi. While discriminatory, dhimmi is not antisemitic. Muslim antisemitism is a relatively recent phenomenon. According to Bernard Lewis, “For most of the fourteen hundred years or so of the Arab Jewish encounter, the Arabs have not in fact been anti-Semitic as that word is used in the West . . . because for the most part they are not Christians” (Lewis 1986:117). As Lewis points out, antisemitism is a relatively recent introduction in the Middle East and an import from Christian Europe. According to Lewis, “Another European contribution to this debate is anti-Semitism, and blaming ‘the Jews’ for all that goes wrong. Jews in traditional Islamic societies experienced the normal constraints and occasional hazards of minority status. In most significant respects, they were better off under Muslim than under Christian rule, until the rise and spread of Western tolerance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” (Lewis 2002: 171). According to Daniel Pipes, Muslim antisemitism has mostly replaced Christian antisemitism as a concern since Christian antisemitism is on the decline while Muslim antisemitism increases. According to Pipes, “if trends in Christian society are going in one direction, in Muslim societies around the globe they are going in the opposite direction” (Pipes 1999: 35-36). This new phenomenon of Muslim antisemitism is of significant interest.
European Judeophobia, a cross between Muslim antisemitism and traditional European Christian antisemitism, was not found in Europe until the late twentieth-century, after the waves of Muslim immigration into Europe. Its most recent incarnation is a phenomenon of young second and third generation Muslim immigrants targeted toward their peers: young Jews (McClintock and Sunderland 2004). This antisemitism contains a mix of Muslim and Christian antisemitism, but is heavily influenced by and legitimized by contemporary Christian European antisemitism. This new European Muslim antisemitism has risen up, in part, in reaction to Europe’s identity crises stemming from Europe’s self-reevaluation in the wake of European integration.

While their American coreligionists are among the most economically and academically advanced members of the population, the opposite is true of Europe’s Muslim population. A study conducted in the 1970s found that 75 percent of the American mosque-goers interviewed held graduate degrees, a ratio much higher than the general American population (Haddad 2002:35). While subsequent immigration has meant that a lower percentage of American Muslims hold graduate degrees – the figure is now said to be 52 percent of American Muslims – it is still true that American Muslims are disproportionately better educated and earn a higher median salary, mostly in professional jobs – with an average income of $69,000 in 2000 – than the general population (Pipes 2000). European Muslims, however, are among the poorest and least educated members of the European population. According to the 2001 British census, 31 percent of United Kingdom Muslims had no educational qualifications. Muslim and Sikh men were least likely to be managers or professionals. Muslim women were also the least likely to be in the workforce compared to their Christian counterparts (Carvel 2004).

The Western Europe “economic miracle” of the 1950s and 1960s resulted in large-scale Muslim immigration to Europe. These new immigrants, from Europe’s former colonies in North Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean, arrived as temporary migrant workers. Many of them, while intending to leave, have remained in Europe even as their jobs disappeared and they have had European children and grandchildren. These immigrants, primarily young men, either singles or who left their family behind, were seen by their host countries as guests or temporary workers. Four to five decades later many are still seen as such (Masci 2004:5).
Many of the Muslim immigrants who did not arrive in Europe as migrant workers but instead arrived as refugees from the Islamic world. Nearly 100,000 of these refugees were Algerian Muslims fleeing to France - Algeria’s former colonizer. The rate of immigration slowed in the early 1970s, with most of the remaining Muslim immigrants coming to Europe in order to reunite with their family already there (ibid).

The rise in antisemitic behaviour among Europe’s Muslim population is not seen from these immigrants but rather from their European-born children. The Muslim birth rate in Europe is three times that of non-Muslims (Savage 2004:28). The immigrants, while not engaged in overt antisemitism, did import to Europe forms of Muslim antisemitism (Bensoussan:22). According to Majib Cherfi, the lead singer of the Toulouse (French) group Zebda, “When I was young, we didn’t like the Jews. My parents were antisemitic, as people are in the Maghreb. The word ‘Jew’ in Berber is an insult. It has nothing to do with Palestine, or with politics, that’s just how it was” (ibid). Yet the immigrant generation did not actualize their antisemitic feelings into concrete action. While arriving from an array of countries and holding a host of ethnic identities, the immigrant generation was focused on their employment and attempting to integrate into a resistant European society (Masci 2004: 6).

The phenomenon of European antisemitism is ultimately a phenomenon of the second and third generation. These native-born Muslims, unlike their parents, do not believe that they will be going back to Tunisia, Algeria, or Morocco. The failed attempts to fully integrate all of the Muslim population, particularly during the past decade as European integration forces Europe to reassess its identity, paves the way for identity politics and post-colonial memory. The first manifestation of this post-colonial memory may be attacks on “the other minority” - the Jews - many of whom are also of Maghreb origin (Suzan and Dreyfus 2004:2; Bensoussan: 5-6). According to a report of antisemitic incidents by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (Conseil Représentaitif des Institutions Juives de France, crif) fifty-percent of all 2003 incidents were directed against Jewish youth and in police reports, the attackers are generally described as groups of young people (McClintock and Sunderland: 4).

Their failure to assimilate has bolstered post-colonial memory. According to Dr. Georges Bensoussan, the decline in the status of the father “fuelled the revolt of the sons. Added to this was the heritage of the colonial memory transmitted from generation to generation, and the memory of an often violent decolonization. This memory would certainly have dimmed with time had most of them been successful. They were not” (Bensoussan 36). The decolonization process has encouraged Europe, “with its permanent feelings of guilt about the Third World” to allow its recent Muslim immigrants, previously its colonized, and “the entire Muslim-Arab world to present itself as victims” (Ibid., 26).

This has served to bolster a sense of Islamic identity among the youth. Muslim youth’s primary identification is increasingly as Islamic and not with either their countries of origin or the European country in which they reside and in which many of them were born (Savage 30). Mirroring a global return to religious fundamentalism, a 2001 Le Monde poll showed that French Muslims were attending mosque and praying more frequently than in 1994. According to Chris Soper, a professor of political science at Pepperdine University, “In Europe 30 years ago, Muslims concealed their religious practices because, in the traditional immigrant way, they wanted to fit in. But today, especially among second and third generation Muslims, you see much greater interest in religion” (Masci 6). It is not clear if this increase in religious identity is due to genuine religious sentiment. According to Jonathon Laurence, a visiting fellow at The Brookings Institution, “There’s certainly an increase in symbolic religion, like fasting on Ramadan and things like that. But whether that means that people are becoming more pious is an open question” (Ibid). It appears that the young generation’s return to Islamic symbolism is an assertion of their Muslim identity in an increasingly secular Europe as they struggle to integrate into European society. Young Muslims interviewed by the French newspaper L’Express were not found to have any particular interest in Islam. This disinterest in Islam was also verified by French police. Instead, a return to the mosque and anti-Jewish violence is seen as a way of exerting their Islamic identity, according to one young man interviewed who stated “we want to show that we’re Muslims here too” (Rosenthal 2003:24).

This growing interest in Islam, even if symbolic, is posing challenges to Europe. Some school students refuse to visit churches or, especially, synagogues as part of field trips (Bensoussan 7). .At their mosques, they are often encountering radical Muslim preachers, often new immigrants, who are preaching the same hatred and jihad against America and against the Jews that is heard in mosques throughout the Muslim world. Only this time, they are preaching it to native-born European Muslims.

England is becoming a very important center for these radical immigrant preachers, attracted by Britain’s liberal asylum laws. Opposition groups have set up in London, setting up dissident newspapers agitating against their home countries, often non-fundamentalist nationalist Arab states. Many of these Islamic fundamentalists, operating from Europe, call for jihad against rulers in the Middle East (Israeli 2000: 161). Young people go to these mosques in a quest for identity. According to one European Muslim, these imams “continually repeat to young people that the French do not like the Arabs, that they detest Islam” (Bensoussan 25). One such preacher, Syrian-born Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad is the founder of the London branch of several Islamist organizations and he purports to be the spokesman of Osama bin Laden’s International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders. According to Bakri the organization fund-raises for Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and has contacts with Hizbullah. Despite this radical history, Bakri is a naturalized British citizen and one of his aides, Makbool Javid, was appointed to the Race Relations Forum by Jack Straw, Home Secretary in Tony Blair’s government. Bakri also admits to living off welfare provided by the British government. According to Bakri, “I’m fully eligible. It is very difficult for me to get a job. Anyway, most of the leadership of the Islamic movement is on [state] benefits” (Feldner 2001).
Sheikh Bakri spends part of his time sending Muslims to fight in paramilitary groups, in places such as Kashmir, Afghanistan and Chechnya. He also recruits volunteers to fight Israel in the West Bank. Many of these volunteers are provided paramilitary training in the United States. His recruits are Muslims raised in Europe or America. According to Bakri, the recruits have “different backgrounds - some British, some American, Arab, or Asian - but all of them have European or American citizenship. There is no need for visas” (Ibid). While there is a tendency among some observers to separate radical Muslim terrorism and antisemitism, the two phenomenons are directly related. For example, there is evidence that the perpetrators of the March 2004 Madrid train bombings had earlier considered bombing a Jewish community center instead of the Madrid train station (McClintock and Sunderland 3).

European Islamic antisemitism is a Europe-wide phenomenon. While most noticed in France, with the highest Muslim and Jewish population in Europe, it is more prevalent in Germany. The number of anti-Jewish attacks in Germany may even be higher than reports as German authorities are reluctant to classify some attacks as antisemitic even when the evidence suggests antisemitic motivations (Rosenthal 19-20).
While most European Muslim youth do not go abroad to fight, many are engaged in anti-Israel activity at home, which serves as license for Europe’s Christian majority to ignore or justify Muslim discontent instead of facing up to challenges that Europe’s Muslim population poses to a transnational secular Europe. Incidences of antisemitism increase during times of Israeli-Palestinian violence (Taspinar 2003). One of the first measurable increases in antisemitic violence in France occurred immediately after French television showed the images of the 12-year-old Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Dura being shot, an incident in which credible doubt was later raised about Israel’s culpability (Rosenthal 23). While the Israel-Palestinian conflict is only one dimension of European Islamic Judeophobia, it allows European Christian society to ignore Muslim antisemitism in making the excuse that anti-Zionism, a common belief among European elites, is not antisemitism. Since many French Jews have origins in North Africa, but fled to France after the Maghreb countries gained independence and French colonial rule ended, and most of the European Muslims have origins in the same parts of the Middle East and North Africa, many Europeans see the problem of Islamic antisemitism as “not really a European one anyway” (Ibid: 19) but rather one “imported into Europe along with Muslim immigration” (Ibid). Colonization and the decolonization process can not, however, be blamed for European antisemitism. Given Europe’s overwhelming sympathy towards the Palestinians, there is a tendency to forgive Muslim youth’s behaviour towards French Jews, given Israel’s “heavy-handed” treatment of the Palestinians (Rosenthal 19). According to a report by the NGO, the Human Rights Foundation:

The argument that antisemitism is in some way an inevitable side-effect of the Middle East conflict and opposition to actions by the government of Israel has, in some cases, been seized upon by European governments to justify not outrage but inaction. The involvement of European Muslims and immigrants in many incidents, in turn, has been highlighted by some monitors of antisemitism who tend to identify both the problem and the needed remedy in terms of European attitudes and policies towards the Middle East conflict (McClintock and Sunderland 29).

While the Muslim youth may have legitimate feelings of animosity towards Israel, their proxy war is antisemitic. Their behaviour, and European excuses of it, ignores the fact that French Jews are not Israeli soldiers. Many, particularly the older generation, share Europe’s general disdain for Israeli policies and, particularly prior to Israel’s unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005, dislike Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, sympathizing with the Palestinians (Ibid 3). The images of the Arab-Israeli conflict on European television and Arab satellite television fuels an identity crisis and serves as a shadow to the real issues of identity and assimilation faced by these Muslim youth.

Failed integration leads some Muslims
to exert conspiracy theories about Jews. Conspiracy theories are a common form of classical Christian Judeophobia. Akim, a 22-year-old French-born mechanic from Sarcelles, thinks that “The Jews control everything in this town – the shops, the banks, the police, even the buses.” According to Akim, “If someone gets assaulted around here, you’ll never see a police officer. The only time we see them is when they come round to give us parking fines. But if even the slightest thing happens to a Jew, there’ll be a whole squad of them. They’re outside the Jewish schools and synagogues all the time... The Jews never get a parking ticket. They park their cars in the middle of the road when they take their children to school, and the police do nothing, even though our bus is always delayed because of these cars” (Sage 2002:13). Akim fails to understand the economic and social factors for the phenomenon he mentions. In certain Muslim enclaves in Europe, police do not dare enter out of fear of local hostility (Masci 10). The police are at the Jewish schools and synagogues to protect the Jews from violent antisemitism and, of course, Jews do get parking tickets if they park illegally.

The failure of some Muslims to integrate provides an attraction to the Islamist ideology. Akim has espoused radical Islamist ideology, calling Osama bin Laden “a great man.” He lives surrounded by graffiti glorifying bin Laden and stating “Screw America” and “The state manipulates us like objects” (Sage 14). According to Akim, “I’m a foreigner everywhere. In France I’m a foreigner and in Morocco I’m a foreigner” (Ibid). French Muslims watch antisemitic programs on Arab satellite television, surf Islamist websites, some of which are produced in Europe (Eberstadt 2004:51), and are otherwise exposed to anti-Jewish media both in Europe and the Arab world.

According to one analysis, “The effects of some Islamic groups to profit from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to gain influence on young Muslims can be seen in numerous public institutions, including the universities. In this context, anti-Israeli, and even anti-Semitic, rhetoric can be quite useful in motivating Muslim youth that have little intrinsic interest in Muslim orthodoxy but for whom the Israeli-Palestinian conflict generates a sense of anger and identity” (Suzan and Dreyfus 4).. According to one immigrant Muslim women, fundamentalist importation into France transformed the way French Muslims view Jews. She said, “After the Iranian revolution, suddenly radical Islam arrived in France.” They entered through the construction of mosques by foreign governments, particularly by Saudi Arabia. European Muslims are also manipulated by Muslim countries within Europe. According to a Brookings Institute analysis:

The majority of the anti-Semitic violence in France has been committed by young North Africans who have been influenced by images of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seen on national television and on Arab satellite channels as well as by the sermons of radical imans. But looking at the issue more deeply, the violence perpetrated by Muslims in France is more an expression of the general and unfocused discontent present in the French Muslim community. That discontent stems not essentially from concerns over Palestinian suffering but rather from the difficult process of political, social, and economic integration into French society.

While legitimate criticism of Israel is not antisemitic, the veil of anti-Zionism provides a veneer of European acceptability to these Muslim youth. The Arab-Israeli conflict’s manifestation in Muslim-Jewish violence in Europe serves as a cover for French uncertainty of how to deal with the failed integration of North African Muslims. The European Muslim proxy-war is a way to connect both with European leftist society and with the Muslim world. According to Bernard Lewis, in the Muslim world, “in much of the literature produced by the Islamic organizations, the enemy is no longer defined as the Israeli or the Zionist; he is simply the Jew, and his evil is innate and genetic, going back to remote antiquity.” Jealousy over perceived Jewish power, which manifests itself in criticism of the Jewish state, may be one cause for anti-Israel criticism. One twenty-two year old student from Angouleme in France said, “The Jews are like gods. No one can touch them.” In response to an assignment in her French school about the Holocaust, one Muslim student wrote that “... whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger; the Nazi regime did not succeed in wiping out this people, who nevertheless built a state called Israel; and today the state of Israel is not nothing.”

Demonization of the Jew and antisemitic reactions to Israeli behaviour serves as an answer to the Muslim psyche, scarred by the establishment of Israel. According to Lewis, “As some writers at the time observed, it was bad enough to be defeated by the great imperial powers of the West; to suffer the same fate at the hands of a contemptible gang of Jews was an intolerable humiliation. Anti-Semitism and its demonized picture of the Jew as a scheming evil monster provided a soothing answer.”
According to Professor Yehuda Bauer, while anti-Zionism does not have to be antisemitic, it often is. An anti-Zionism that does not believe in Israel’s right to exist, while supporting the right of every other state to exist is antisemitic. According to Bauer:
The Arab-Israeli conflict, and now the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation, provide ample material for an antisemitism that sees itself as anti-Zionist, and not anti-Jewish. Indeed, one can be, in theory at least, anti-Zionist without being antisemitic, but only if one says that all national movements are evil, and all national states should be abolished. But if one says that the Fijians have a right to independence, and so do the Malays or the Bolivians, but the Jews have no such right, then one is anti-Jewish, and as one singles out the Jews for nationalistic reasons, one is antisemitic, with an attendant strong suspicion of being racist.

According to Bernard Lewis, Arabs in the Muslim world attacking Israel or equivocating Israeli leaders with Hitler or comparing Israeli actions to Nazi actions may not be antisemitic, rather merely emulating the intense rhetoric common in Middle Eastern discourse. He notes that
Not so many years ago young Americans with a sufficient level of education to be admitted to major universities were likening the campus police to the Nazi Gestapo and comparing American politicians and academicians to the obscene tyrannies that devastated Europe, inflamed the world, and brought death to countless millions. If American students could not see the difference between the flaws of democracy and the essential evils of fascism, young Arabs, having no direct acquaintance with either form of government, could hardly be expected to do any better.

Hence, according to Lewis’s analysis, the Muslim immigrants to Europe, whether the parents of today’s younger generation, responsible for much of Europe’s antisemitism, or the radical Muslim immigrant imams preaching in European mosques may not be engaging in antisemitic behaviour when they denigrate Zionism. The same can not be said, however, of the native-born European Muslims, who study in European state schools and have absorbed the values and norms of the society around them. Nazi imagery and comparisons of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to Hitler have increasingly been found in European anti-Israel rallies. These rallies, attended by Muslims and European Christians, can be said to be antisemitic according to Lewis’s analysis. According to Lewis, “The use of the term Nazi to describe Israel, in Western and more especially in Eastern Europe, from which the Arabs first learned the practice, is a very different matter. The Europeans, unlike most Arabs or Americans, know at first hand what Nazism was, and what Nazis did to Jews. Knowing this, they must also be aware of the absurdity of such comparisons. In making them, they raise profound and disquieting questions concerning their own attitudes and motives.” Hence, when European-born Muslims learn to call Sharon “Hitler” from European Christians, who have lived in Europe for generations, they are engaging in antisemitic acts, whereas their parents or grandparents, immigrants from the Arab world, making the same comparison may not be.

If they learn in their French school that the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks are justified, then it follows that French teachers explaining that Arab terrorist attacks against Israel “are legitimate,” then they are merely echoing the sentiments of French society. When one French Jewish parent complained to her daughter’s teacher about antisemitic remarks made at school, the teacher responded, “Of course it’s because of Sharon. I’m surprised your daughter takes it so personally.” This is true, even when they are exposed to anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hate speech through Middle Eastern websites, increasingly an important component of European Muslim antisemitism. The French academic Georges Bensoussan notes that it would be antisemitic to justify European antisemitism on Israel’s actions. He writes:

Are we to believe those who rush to assure us that the antisemitic flames are being fanned by the ‘policies of General Sharon’? We would then have to forget that anti-Jewish violence increased tenfold between October 2000 and February 2001, a period when Labour Prime Minister Ehud Barak headed an Israeli government engaged in a peace negotiation (meeting in the Egyptian town of Taba in January 2001). Furthermore, are the Jews of France Israeli citizens that they should answer for the actions of the Israeli government? Are the synagogues and Jewish schools consular premises of the state of Israel, so that the aggression inflicted on French citizens in their own country can be interpreted as a legitimate consequence of Israeli government policy?
Ben Cohen notes that in the United Kingdom “Jews are confronted with a rigid Islamist standpoint which concedes no legitimacy to the State of Israel and which justifies terrorist violence against Jews in the name of Palestine, regardless of whether the victims carry Israeli passports.” Militant Islamists may also foster contacts with Europe’s far-right. The banned German Islamist organization Hizb ut-Tahrir (HuT) maintained ties with the neo-Nazi National Party of Germany.

Despite the failure of a small minority of European Muslims to integrate, research shows that most European Muslims are well integrated and hold views similar to the rest of the European public. According to one study, 91% of the almost two-million Maghreb women in France say that they feel well integrated in France. Other studies claim that the North African community share similar attitudes to the general population on issues such as divorce, family size, contraception and abortion. Economically, while perhaps less-so than the American Muslim population, a sizable percentage of French Muslims are members of the middle class. French researcher Olivier Roy noted that the sociological background of Europe’s militant Islamists fits a pattern common to the western European radical leftists of the 1970s and 1980s.

In fact, some of the Muslim antisemitism can be seen of as mimicking European society and reflective of European antisemitism. According

zebra4, you said,
"You are something else!"

hey, thanks!

"Do you expect Muslims were waiting to come out on the street for things like this to happen and come out on the street to protest?"

well, yes, especially given the DAILY murders carried out in allah's (pbuh...) name. muslims should have a standing army of peace protesters. given islam's p.r. crisis and recent record of human rights violations, muslims should be protesting the saudis, egyptians and all the oppressive islamic governments around the world. moderate muslims should be stationed at these countries' embassies holding round-the-clock vigils for all the dissidents jailed in muslims societies. they should do these protests not just for p.r. purposes but because they should be truly outraged by muslim oppression of muslims.

islam is in serious need of a reformation. this can only happen if moderate muslims get off their moderate *sses and take it to the streets.

imagine a world-wide islamic peace movement. a young cleric nails his 95 theses to the mosque door. 16-year old mujahadin throw down their arms, don tie-die shirts, flash the peace sign, and march on tehran, damascus and beirut for sit-ins. they drink tea, sing joan baez songs and discuss peace, love and understanding (what’s so funny?). their fundamentalist parents would be aghast.

to John Rosenthal:
The outbreak of anti-Semitic violence in France has clearly been linked to this groundswell of support for the Second Intifada. For leftist commentators like Peter Beaumont [of the British weekly Observer], this is to be expected: It is only natural that France’s North African immigrants would feel solidarity with their Muslim brethren in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and apparently also natural that they would seek to express this solidarity by way of attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions. The then-foreign minister of France, the Socialist Hubert Védrine, himself suggested as much in a January 2002 interview when, in dismissing Israeli warnings of rising anti-Semitism, he remarked: ‘One shouldn’t necessarily be surprised that young French people from immigrant families feel compassion for the Palestinians and get agitated when they see what is happening.’ But this standard ‘leftist’ account is fact a highly deceptive foreshortening and tells us more about the biases and preconceptions of its purveyors than about the actual attitudes of France’s North African immigrants (which, as the case tends to be among individuals, are various).

One reason why European antisemitism is primarily a youth phenomenon may relate to the struggles of European integration. The process of integration has led to a gradual “ethnicization” of discourse in European Union countries. Hence, a second-generation French Muslim with North African heritage will be seen of as North African instead of French despite being born and raised in France. The same is true for a Jew, whose family may have lived in Europe for generations. In this new “ethnicization” of Europe, only a white Christian European is a true European. This may explain why younger Muslims are resisting assimilation into secular Europe much more than the older generation. Studies in France and Germany find that second and third generation Muslims are less integrated into European society than their parents and grandparents. This exacerbates identity politics in Europe and allows Europe to essentially view Muslim antisemitism as tribal. According to Rosenthal:

On May 12 of last year [2002], as a group of 15 young beurs assaulted five Jewish teenagers on a soccer field in the Val de Marne near Paris, they are reported to have shouted the following insults: ‘Dirty Jews! Go back to your country! You’re not in your land!’ Apparently unconsciously, the North African youth expressed what is becoming a most European point of view.
France’s tradition of state secularism impedes this process of ethnicization. When the Swiss Muslim philosopher Tariq Ramadan posted a polemic on a popular French Muslim website accusing several French Jewish intellectuals of betraying their commitment to universalism and the “universal” ideas of the French Republic on the mantel of a narrow sectarianism – code words for Zionism – French readers were shocked. It was not the content of Ramadan’s polemic that shocked mainstream France but rather that he chose to identify these philosophers as Jewish. That tactic stood in violation of French cultural norms prohibiting racial or ethnic profiling. These cultural norms, in which “differences” are not to be manifested in public discourse, are being challenged by this new resurgence of Islamic identity among Europe’s Muslim youth. Rosenthal claims that European Muslim antisemitism merely mimics the themes around Europe. According to Rosenthal, “anti-Semitic incidents in Germany have been a regular feature of everyday life since reunification.”

Antisemitic motifs are becoming more common in mainstream Europe. Rosenthal notes that “no one who has spent significant time in continental Europe recently - or at least no one for whom anti-Semitism has not yet taken on the air of normalcy - can fail to have noticed the frequency with which apparently well-educated Europeans will refer, without the slightest hint of self-consciousness, to ‘powerful Jewish interests’ or to a putative ‘Jewish lobby’ in order to explain world or local events in which they disapprove.” Rosenthal claims that “far from reflecting some deep-rooted and organic hatred of Jews and Israel amidst France’s population of North African extraction, it would seem, then, that the anti-Semitic attacks are just the pursuit by other means of the latest cause célèbre of Parisian intellectuals and students, with disaffected and déclassé North African teenagers happily assuming the role of ‘shock troops’ for their more privileged comrades au centre ville.” According to Rosenthal:

All of this is not to deny that anti-Jewish stereotypes and prejudices have currency in certain North African immigrant milieus in France. But it is to say that they do not necessarily have more currency there than in other social milieus and, in any case, that the responses of the French left and the French media to the Palestinian intifada have served to make Jews and Jewish institutions seem like socially acceptable targets of hatred and contempt in France. After all, it was before synagogues began to burn in France that protesters could be seen at pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Paris carrying banners juxtaposing Sharon and Hitler or featuring a swastika and a Star of David connected by an equal sign.
According to Frank Savage, a career State Department diplomat, “The September 11 hijackers were not simply based in Europe; they were Arabs whose outlook had been radically transformed by their experiences in Europe.” Some of the European Muslim antisemitism is supported by the European elite. London Mayor Ken Livingtone publicly embraced radical Qatar-based Islamist Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi upon his visit to the United Kingdom, denouncing al Qaradawi’s opponents as “Islamophobic.” The behavior of the London mayor, echoed by Europe’s Islamic community, is a reflection that European antisemitism is, in fact, not a phenomenon of the downtrodden but rather one of the elites. According to Yehuda Bauer:

It appears that the present, fourth wave of antisemitism in the West since 1945, is a basically upper middle class, intellectual phenomenon. It is widespread in the media, in universities, and in well-manicured circles. Typical is the statement of the French ambassador to Britain at a cocktail party, later reported in the British Press, referring to Israel, with typical diplomatic politeness and finesse, as that “sh##ty little country.” What is important here is not the statement itself, but the fact that that gentleman felt perfectly at ease making it in an environment he was sure would understand and appreciate it. It is the atmosphere, the ambiance, that is important.

European Muslim antisemitism is a combination of traditional European antisemitism and Islamic fundamentalism. It is perhaps for this reason that a recent European Union study on Muslim antisemitism whitewashed Muslim antisemitism, instead of blaming it disproportionately on the traditional target: the far right. As social psychologist Neil Kressel points out, “Muslim antisemitism has a global dimension.” Muslim antisemitism borrowed from Christian European antisemitism. It seems that modern European Muslim antisemitism, while influenced by Muslim antisemitism is heavily legitimized by Christian European antisemitism, often disguised as anti-Zionism. Globalization, European integration, identity politics, and a Europe struggling for its identity meld together and provide legitimacy for a growing European Muslim antisemitism. In creating a new European identity, a new European Muslim Judeophobia that is a combination of ideologies is being formed. It is often said that antisemitism is the “canary in the coal mine” and a foreshadowing of the future. Europe faces a multiplying Islamic population and its own identity crises, the impact this new European Muslim Judeophobia will have on Europe remains to be seen.

Farnaz1Mansouri1:

Your anger is misdirected. You should have condemned the Rabbi who justified killing of innocent children or should have complained about the author of the article as to why he reported it. I simply posted it without comment.

I have written about the honorable Jews many times--those who do not approve of the Israeli Apartheid.

How many times have you written about Muslims who did wrong things? The answer is many times.

Violence against the innocent is wrong whether committed by Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus or people of any other faith. This is the umpteenth time I am writing against the violence against the innocent.

Hi hsnkhwj,

Thanks for the reply and book recommendation! I had heard a bit about Mortenson from friends, but you have convinced me to read "The Three Teas."

You are, of course, right. There are many, many good Americans, truly good. It is often they, who are the most critical of some US policies here and abroad. They are among the patriots.

I still think about Maj. General Taguba's unflinching report on Abu Greib, still assign it in classes, along with testimony of American heroism, generosity.

The truth, someone said, will set us free. Many Americans are open to the truth. Some are committed to it. Some understand that there is often more than one. We do not find such people in great numbers anywhere else in the world. At least, I haven't, thus far. This is a great nation. It can and will be greater.

Farnaz

Yassar and Zebra

I am impressed. Your little knowledge of world religious thought has mounted your mind again.

I asked yassar for quotes. He found none and calls me a bigot. I got to now yassar when he called Matahari a bigot. It appears that if anybody challenges him they are bigots. Let alone the fact that yassar has not met anyone of us. He can pass judgment because his ideology tells him to. Yassar asked for proof in his translation of the koran of intolerance, when it was given, his calls it micro analysis.

Zebra, I do not disagree with you about western problems in history. It appears that islam is going to do the same, and has already done so. The fact that islam does not seek an alternate route means that is is just another power hungry ideology. If you are going to argue that islam is a peaceful religion, then muslims must protest abuses against all minorities. When muslims come out into the streets and celebrate the fall of the Twin towers, they should come out and celebrate the fall of the decrepit babri masjid and reclamation of Rama temple. They should come out and celebrate a Danish artists right to point artistic insight into islam as much as they celebrate MF hussains right to disfigure Hindu idols. They should burn and destroy the kabaa as an idol as they burned and destroyed idols throughout the middle east.

But, I am afraid that you and yassar are not interested in truth. Your inability to find what makes you different from other religious movements like Aztecs and Nazi christianity, is fodder for your anger at yourself that, prevented by islamic ideolgy, is turned to slander and name call instead of reason.

That is, after all, the ultimate sin of a religion, to create superstition to the point the a person chooses ignorance rather than the truth of being. That itself is not the ideology of violence against others, rather it is a violence against the self.

I can only hope I am wrong. Yassar will give up his/her anger and say, ok here is a quote. OK, here is what makes islam different and better, .... But attacking those who speak the truth to potentates is an old trick and in the day of internet communication and egalitarianism, is proof is nonsensical thinking and true idolatry of an ideology - place no gods between you and God: that includes books, cultures, imams, prophets, and books - for these are all idols that prevent you from becoming true believers.

A sufi was once punished by a muslim for putting his feet towards Mecca and retorted, "then where should I point my feet that they are not pointing towards god?" I ask you, are you insulted by challenges of a book, or are you looking to find god in every place?

hariaum

Zebra4,

Below is a link to a brief PDF on anti-Jewish racism in Muslim nations. The text, authored by Robert Wistrich, is far from exhaustive, but will give you a fairly good idea of government sponsored Jew hatred and the many venues in which one finds it throughout Muslim lands, most of which are all but Judenrein.

I wonder, where, precisely, that is, in which nation, has this decades-long filth caused a "firestorm," as you said the book you cite did in the Israeli media?

Many nations are mentioned in this PDF. KINDLY CHOOSE ONE IN WHICH TO TELL OF OF THE "FIRESTORM."
---------------------
http://www.ajc.org/atf/cf/%7B42D75369-D582-4380-8395-D25925B85EAF%7D/WistrichAntisemitism.pdf

Here is a link to Wikipedia's bio on Prof. Robert Wistrich, a stellar academic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_S._Wistrich
------------------------
Finally, given the numerous, indeed the endless anti-Muslim web sites run by Christians, Catholics, and, of course, Hindus, I find your choice quite telling.

You say you "served your country" for many years, have said it repeatedly. Well, guess what? You're not serving it now.

NOthing in Mubarak's article concerns Israel or Jews, but there you went. Just like your co-religionists in Muslim nations, and in Europe. (More on European Islamic Jew hatred to follow.)

Kissing up to Christian bigots will not do it for you. They hate you, and they will not stop. Cringe all you want. Displace your anger on to Jews.

Just understand that this has been the strategy of every dictator in the Muslim world. It keeps the people in the dark about who their real enemies are, both within and without.

You are not serving your country now. NOt serving to show that Muslims aren't haters, quite the reverse.

Disappointing.

Walter-in-Falls Church:

Where is your outrage and where are the street protests on this Yahoo News Story:

Gates blocks release of detainee abuse photos

By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER, Associated Press Writer Stephen Ohlemacher, Associated Press Writer
Sat Nov 14, 9:18 pm ET

WASHINGTON – Defense Secretary Robert Gates has blocked the public release of any more pictures of foreign detainees abused by their U.S. captors, saying their release would endanger American soldiers.

The Obama administration filed a brief with the Supreme Court late Friday saying that Gates has invoked new powers blocking the release of the photos.

The American Civil Liberties Union had sued for the release of 21 color photographs showing prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq being abused by Americans. Federal courts had rejected the government's arguments to block their release, so Congress gave Gates new powers to keep them private under a law signed by President Barack Obama last month.

Gates' order specifically cites the 21 pictures sought by the ACLU, plus 23 additional ones cited in a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. However, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the order covers all photographs from investigations related to the treatment of individuals captured or detained in military operations outside the United States between Sept. 11, 2001, and Jan. 22, 2009.? ?

READ FULL STORY on Yahoo News!

no kidding!! this hasan incident should have sparked a series of MUSLIM protesters storming the streets to DENOUNCE hasan. sure, we got the perfunctory "he was a troubled man who misinterpreted islam" public statements by various muslim groups, but where's the real outrage?
Posted by: walter-in-fallschurch
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

You are something else! Do you expect Muslims were waiting to come out on the street for things like this to happen and come out on the street to protest?

How many street protests did we see when Rev Jones murdered Congressman Ryan and hundreds of his followers to suicide?

How many street protests did we see when Eric Rudolph and the Army of God fanatics bombed numerous abortion clinics in America? Were Christians waiting to launch street protests? Did't they have to go to work and put the food on the table for their families?

How many street protests did we see after Timothy McVeigh bombed federal building in Oklahoma City?

How many street protests did we see when Catholics and Protestants were terrorising one another for 400 years?

How many street protests did we see after Catholic nuns and priests hacked 900,000 Tutsis to death with machettes in Rwanda?

How many street protests did we see when 2 million human beings were slaughtered in Cambodia?

jttn, you said,
"But when the f**k will you moderate, God loving Muslim STAND UP for your Way and be counted? You do realize, yes?, what a PR NIGHTMARE this is for your religion..."

no kidding!! this hasan incident should have sparked a series of MUSLIM protesters storming the streets to DENOUNCE hasan. sure, we got the perfunctory "he was a troubled man who misinterpreted islam" public statements by various muslim groups, but where's the real outrage?

http://www.themedialine.org/news/news_detail.asp?NewsID=27051

PART II

Rabbi Shapira's book argues that revenge is a necessity under Jewish law.

"To defeat the wicked one should be vengeful, tit for tat," the book reads. "Revenge is a necessity... and sometimes doing savage things intended to create a true balance of terror."

The book further states that Jews are permitted to kill children "If it is clear they will grow up to harm us."

"If hurting an evil leader's children will pressure him to stop acting maliciously," Rabbi Shapira wrote, "you can hurt them."

The book discusses the laws regarding such killings in theological terms, never specifically mentioning Palestinians, Arabs or Israeli soldiers sent to remove Jewish settlements. Its release comes weeks after the arrest of Yaakov Teitel, a Jewish Israeli settler of American origin who is understood to have admitted to killing Palestinians and attacking progressive and messianic Jews.

Israeli Rabbi's Guide to Killing Causes Firestorm

Written by Benjamin Joffe-Walt

Published Tuesday, November 10, 2009

An Israeli Rabbi living in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank has caused a firestorm in both Israeli and Palestinian media with a new book outlining a series of Jewish theological arguments for killing those who threaten Israel or demand Israeli land.

The 230-page book, "The King's Torah" was released over the weekend by Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira and gives theological backing to Jews killing those perceived to be violating Jewish commandments or threatening the Jewish nation. A theological treatise based on Rabbi Shapira's interpretation of passages from the Jewish bible, "The King's Torah" is an extensive guide to when it is permissible for Jews to kill non-Jews.

Rabbi Shapiro's book argues that Jewish law allows the killing of "non-Jews who demand the land for themselves", those from a nation which "helps a murderer of Jews," those spreading "hostile blasphemy" and "those who, by speech, weaken our sovereignty."

y.a.s.s.e.r.y.o.u.s.u.f.i

Yes; Judeo-abe "ISLAM" (means "submit"; free will or not) is the LAST Religion via a nice sounding name called "ALLAH" (1st used, as a drifters slang by The-Jerusiccans, aka Judeo-abe-Ju's called "Ya Allah" but was hijacked/borrowed, copy-cated/ReHASH'd for Muhhamad & CO's Propheteering Endeavours/goals which suddenly became their-"ALLAH"; nomore the judeo-abe-Ju's Brother/Sisters 'Ya-Allah'). Sorry 19th century Mormons & Co.,.

Yes! al Judeo-abe-Islam is 'the-Last? Religion'! But, but but;

Islam is also the last-Religion exclusively for all those (low/sub-middle IQ's) who was left-Behind by the higher IQ'rs; West, North, South & Easterners via their man-made Judeo-abe-Christian Systems, abeic-Jews & Judeo-vedic-Hindus & Judeo-vedic-Confucuos's, or Judeo-vedic-Buddhists Systems & Co. via Space-Forth Activities, Future-Bound endeavours, Patents, Copy-Rights, Intellectual Propery Economy etc... like that.

Yes, Judeo-abe-ISLAM is the last Religion for the LOW-IQ's People! Not the last Religion for the HIGH IQ'rs! Note: History, where hope comes from, is our Jury; not Judeo-abe-Islams alone. So

Less tiny Israel; In order for al ISLAM to catch-up, to the majority of THE-SECULAR-Nations, on THiS blesseth S.S. Earth(zero Curseth) of many like here, THAT

THEY [the vintriliquisting ummah Of Islamic 'AL TAQIYAH'; a sort of stealth-Zionizm for world domination later, i.e., Tell world leaders/Peoples a big lie & hope "Kiffirs?" will believe it/them]

need to Change/Overhaul their own Quron/Koran/Quran ASAP; else be left behind further & further.. via the RELIGION OF EVERYTHING, before the Science of Everything. see 2 of 2:

2 of 2:

Note: The Int'l Judeo-abe-Islamic Ummah Know, but now won't admitt; that it is 'Forbidden By Allah"; and against [pbuh] Muhhamad himself to 'Translate" ANY (meaning Every & All) Sura, parts, line upon line of [Allah's via Angel Gabriel] so-called "Glorious-Quran/Koran/Koron."

Fact: 90% of this S.pace-S.hips own Judeo-abe-ISLAMICs, whom have dual or triple or even quad translation(s) other than "ARABIC", still DO-NOT NO-NOT understand what they are Saying or phonetically reading!

Even our Prez, BORACK Hussain (not Insaine) OBAMA does'nt Know Arabic himself! (maybe Wah Ahsalam, Shookron; Allah Karim, in shalah... but he Can't COMMUNICATE nor make a confersatioin! He can Read "Aleph, Betha..LaLaLaLa, but not what a sentence sais.

Even if ye gave'th Brother Obama something in 'Transliteration' (in American; not in English, some panglishHe) to pronounce there's a sure probability that he would NOT-NO know what is being phonetically [Effectively] communicated! i.e.,

1.Bismi Allahi alrrahmani alrraheemi"
2.Alhamdu lillahi rabbi alAAalameena"
3.Alrrahmani alrraheemi..."

1.In the name of God, the Mercy-giverer, the Merciful!
2.Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds,
3.the Mercy-giver, the Merciful...

Note: This is just only the Preamble of a very redundant Sura(s).So 90% of 1.3 Billion Indonesians or Malaysians, for example; DO-NOT know Arabic! Hence Do not , in fact, know thier (acsually someone elses) Quran/Koran/Quron et al.

(Continued from below)

George Bush didnt attack Iraq with just American soldiers. He had a coalition of willing of mostly Christian countries most prominent being Britain, Australia, Denmark, Italy and Spain. So shouldn't we muslims see it as a "manifestation of Christian hatred toward the Islam??" More than a million innocent people have since died in Iraq. And americans can now turn around and casually say "well yea maybe we were wrong on those WMD's but are intentions were noble". What kind of idiots are they trying to fool? And on top of it the fact that after all of Bush's lies regarding WMD's, Abu Gharaib, killings of a million Iraqis came to light American once again re-elected him with an even bigger mandate to continue his wars of death and destruction for 4 more years~! What does that tell you?? Really you dont want me to go into details of the horrors americans perpetrated on the Iraqi's during their occupation. I have often said on these blogs that for every atrocity muslims have been accused of committing against Christian, Jews and Hindus the other side has committed 10 times more atrocities. I stand by that comment.

So there you go. I have spoken as truthfully as I have ever on this blog. Hope you dont take any of it personaly as it wasnt my intention~!

Hello justillthennow,

I like reading your posts, even though I disagree with some of them but you are definitly one of the saner voices on this blog. I understand your perspective sitting on the other side of the fence. If you believe that I think muslims can do no wrong, thats not my position. We have let down ourselves in terms of education, eradication of poverty, corruption and above all the rise of fundamentalism. Islam is not some homogenous group of people all displaying same understanding of Islam. There are bound to be differences for the simple fact its such a huge group of people.

But allow me to apprise you of some of my feelings towards the humaneness of western society. You said "Osama was a manifestation of islamic hatred toward the west". That might be true and might not be true. No one in the Islamic world ever elected Osama. If he were ever to stand an election in any muslim country he will fail miserably. Now that you have raised the Osama analogy (and dont get me wrong, I like the straightforwardness of your argument), I am compelled to raise the George Bush Analogy~! I cannot forget the first night of 'shock and awe' in Baghdad. Because not only did the american dropped those hundreds of thousands of pounds bombs on a defenseless people in one night, they even had the gall to show it live around the world on CNN. I dont know about you guys but as muslim, sitting in my house watching the TV I felt so helpless, so sick in the stomach. How many people died that day no one knows! Baghdad was no small town. It was a city filled millions of people. And the next day, what I read in the newspaper regarding 'shock and awe' totally blew away my mind! There was a poll conducted in US after the first night of bombing in Iraq and more the 80% americans supported it!

(continues above~!)

Navin,

I dont have to justify my belief system to anyone! least of all to a typical hateful pseudo-pacifist Hindu bigot who poses to be peacefull but instead has deep hatred for anyone who is unlike him. I believe you think too much about yourself.

Do you also suffer from a memory loss?? I had given you undue importance by detailing the instances where Bhagvut Gita talks about death and destruction whether it be Pandu Brothers and Krishna episode or Rama's fight with the King of Srilanka. I had also told you that I do not believe that Bhagvut Gita is a violent book and only if you take these episodes out of context can you prove otherwise. Same goes for the Quran, Bible and Torah.

"Otherwise I am happy to say that Islam, Nazism, and Aztecs are essentially equal ideologies."

You are happy say whatever you like. What makes you think your opinion counts???

Hello again zebra,

Just to follow up briefly on the last post I sent your way:

I recognize that, mathematically speaking, the "Osama quotient" is a bit "fringe". Understand that I am making some assumptions here, as I do not have numbers to support my belief that the majority of Muslims are good, kind, upstanding, God-loving, peace and prosperity desiring, absolutely stellar humans and families. And believe me, I do hold that to be true.

But when the f**k will you moderate, God loving Muslim STAND UP for your Way and be counted? You do realize, yes?, what a PR NIGHTMARE this is for your religion and culture that fanatics have seized the initiative and momentum of world opinion and are taking you for a hayf**k? I can easily concur that media, especially american media, only WANT to focus on the negative. But you have got to understand that unless you alter the course of the river, and with no other input, you are effectively p**sing your religion into the dirt.

By not fighting for it.

Hello yasseryousufi,

First response posted. How did I do?

I have not read your response to Navin and will in a bit. Please do not read too much into my response to zebra. I have a tendency to aim at what is truth, to me. Got a thing for it.

Hello sebra4,

"Osama Bin Laden and his organization do not represent Islam. They are a fringe group of fanatics."

Osama bin Laden? Do you think this is only about Osama? We are so far past Osama, zebra, that it is no longer funny. If it ever was which, very dark humor aside, (and I am a friend of dark humor), let me be clear that it was NOT!

Osama was a manifestation of islamic hatred toward the west. Do not get me wrong, I have empathy for some of the issues that Islam, and the (non-existent) "Muslim world", may have with the West. But then, I would not have acted out in the way that some of your relations chose to.

But that manifestation that Osama came to represent is in no way limited to him. As we have seen, and continue to see.

I have no interest in your deflection. Speak truthfully and consistent with the clear events of the day, or fall back into the hole you came from, zebra.

N A V I N 1:

According to 2-escaped god-like Genies on an imaginary Chariot, one called KRiSHNA & another Called ARjUNA, that in-fact (as their story goes) there is a choice to Mass-Kali, fight against their own [non believing Indu] "COUSINS" (which i consideras a "GROUP") and or to mass kill their own Brothers/Sisters, which i [WE] consider as a targeted "GROUP" No?

So Hindu "WAR BLESSINGS" (same like POW WOW blessings) therein is also written stories [Violence] against/about "Killing" a Group of Cousins, or a Group of Brothers or group of Sisters over some folk lore(s)?!.

The "SUperStupidSTitiousness>" Bug is in ALL, EVERY & ANY man-made Pre-Apocalyptic god(less) competing for a NAME FOR god, (not G-D() System(s)!

Again; Who or what is a "Muslum", "Moslim"? Muzleman"? Or Who/What is a "HiNDUi"? , a "Jewshess" et al self serving Geeta/Bible/Koran.. 'my-god-is-better-than-your-god' Sindrome?!

I don't believe all innocence belongs to Hindus. That would be Yassar's oversimplification for justifying his belief.

Yassar, you have not quoted anytime in Hindu scriptures where god hates a group. So put the microscope of analysis on the Gita and show me or recognize the insanity of an ideology of the koran so filled with a hateful god. Find a time in the Dhampada where the buddha hates a group of people. Do you dare to really read the world's literature or are you going to believe what you imam tells you?

Otherwise I am happy to say that Islam, Nazism, and Aztecs are essentially equal ideologies.

hariaum

i traveled this Miraculous Space-Ship Earth several times. And i never have seen nor encountered nor communicated with what you people call as "JEWS" or "CHRISTIANS" or "HINDU" or "BUDDHIST" or eve a "ISLAMIST".

Can someone on EARTH please tell who or what is an Islamic man? or Who is a Jew lady? Who is Christian fella? Who is a Hindu gal? Who is a Buddhists mon...?

Aren't WE [i] ALL supposed to be "HU{eMATE" kinds"; Not "Human un-kinds" Anymore?

If so. Then Each of you should be aSHAiMED to call onself a "JEWISH" this or that or a "ISLAMISH" or even a "CHRISTIANISH" nor a "HINDUiSH" or a "BUDDHiSH" or "MORMISH" tit athat!

ISLAM is not, was never meant for EGYPTIANS! nor was/is Islamish ever meant for MALAYSIANS nor INDONESIANS et al! Maybe in the Desrerts of Scorpian Kings Arabous's; but thats it. But like in the old folk-Lores/tales story's of the ancients where letting-out a GENie (a Fugitive) out of Bottle can become a good omen or a bad omen fot the Master!??

'Islam' (What ever that Means) needs to be not only put in its place, but contained/captured or re-captured and stuffed-back in there or bottled-up (Scrolls & All) for the Good of HUe{MATE-Kinds, not for gthen Human-[Selfish] unkinds!!

Note: Using the "Train-Wreck" parable,analogy is not applicable to "Runnaway-IslamIcizm" a Psychological distortion of various unkind so to speaketh TRUTH (opposite MYTH).!

D O W N
w/THEOCRACY!

D O W N
w/MONARCHY!

D O W N
w/PLURALITY! (of All man-made Religions; Zero G-D made!)

V O T E
Yes, to S i N G U L A R I T Y! (of All mad/man Made Fearing & jealous man-made competing multi gods systems into the 'promised' innate Single-GOD system; thats inheriantly NOT Jealous gods nor a feariring god; as if be our Reality?!

D O W N
w/Man-Made Religion(s)!

WSKNJ writes:
“ABHAB and Halozcell are the two sides of the same coin. They invent different things for the same goal--Islamophobia.”I never read anywhere that American Muslims want Sharia Law.”
Well read it here.
An internal memorandum found in the possession of the founder of CAIR; the largest of Muslim organizations in the USA states in part:
“The process of settlement [of Islam in the United States] is a “Civilization-Jihadist” process with all the word means. The Ikhwan ( Muslim Brotherhood Organizations) must understand that all their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who choose to slack.”
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/columnists/rdreher/stories/DN-dreher_09edi.ART.State.Edition1.4235f88.html

Farnaz! Thank you!

My spouse recently read the book, THE THREE CUPS OF TEA. This book is a must read for everyone.

It is a true story of an American who went originally for mountaineering hobby in the remote Himalayan region of Pakistan. He was helped by the locals in times of his needs.
Eventually, he stayed with the people and helped them in every possible way he could.
The area is totally undeveloped and people suffer from extreme poverty and lack of basic facilities.

He lived there and learned their mores and they adopted him as one of their own. Despite their poverty they shared their food with him.

This American was of modest means. He came back to America and organized a campaign to help those people. HE HAS DONE A LOT FOR THEM DESPITE ODDS AGAINST him.

This is a very touching story where our common humanity becomes of paramount importance.

It is amazing how one individual could help an impoverished people in every possible way.

There are many good Americans. The "three cups of tea" in the title have great significance. Read the book to know what it signifies.

justillthennow,

Please refer to Zabra4's response and my response to Navin1. Let me know if you disagree ith them~!

Navin,

So which part was a I generalizing about? That there are criminals belonging to all cast and creed? Or that a majority of the religions reject these criminals and their justifications for their crimes even if they may be religous? What kind of generalization did you exactly have in your mind?

With regards to anti-muslim riots in India, I believe you are a well meaning, hariauming vegetarian Hindu who believes no Hindu has ever killed in the name of his religion and its only muslims who commit these crimes. That I am afraid is untrue. Hindus seem to have their fair share of religous fanatics as well, who dont mind killing people of other religions for their own vested interests.

Now I've had this discussion regarding the nitty gritties of punishments in the Holy Quran for non-believers with you before. I do not want to revisit that. I think I told you that their is a principal of reward and punishment in all religous texts. If you put the same microscope you put on the Quran and are bent upon taking the text out of context, you will find the Bibles, the Talmuds, Old Testaments, Bhagvaut Gitas are just as, if not more violent than the Quran.

There is nothing in the Islamic Ideology that justifies killing innocents. I dont know how many times we have to repeat that. I cannot help you if you want to keep believing in a falsehood despite being provided ample evidence.

"That is rational. Just saying everybody is a bad guy so we can be bad guys is nonsensical rationalization."

I never said that. Its just you twisting what I wrote to suit your argument. I provided in detail my understanding of the situation. I believe Nidal Hussain was a despicable criminal who took the life of 13 innocent people. For this he deserve whatever punishment the US government gives him and after death he will rot in hell for his crime. That is traditional, mainstream Islamic description of Nidal's crime. But if you want to cite some phony Al-Qaida mullah's explanation of this crime I dont accept that and its not Islamic.

hsnkhwj,

Good to see you back on this blog.

Farnaz

But one hears loads of Muslim religious authorities validating and condoning violence against non-muslims. When a belief goes malignant, it is malignant. That does not make Islam evil or vile at all to me, but it does seem true that enough of Islam has become allowing for a potentially cancerous sickness to take hold of it's 'mind' and soul as to threaten not just non-muslims but the body of Islam itself.
Posted by: justillthennow
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Which religious authorities? Can you be specific?

I have read that Islamic Society of North America condemned terrorism of any source including Fort ood killings.

I read that the Grand Mufti of Al Azhar University in Cairo condemned Fort Hood killings.

I read that the Council of American Islamic Relations condemned Maj. Nidal Hasan's misdeeds.

I have read condemnations of terrorism from Islamic countries from Indonesia to Morocco to India.

You are engaging just in hype to malign Muslims.

Osama Bin Laden and his organization do not represent Islam. They are a fringe group of fanatics.

Hello Yassaryousufi,

I am in some agreement with Navin's post, even as I agree with what you are trying to say. Yes, sick minds are in all religions and their pathology is not necessarily ascribable to the religion they adhere to. But it is true that we currently are experiencing versions of sick theology being performed more often by muslims than by others.

It is of course arguable that christians have performed 'sick' violence against muslims through the state as opposed to through non-state organizations. Bush was an evangelical and a neo-con, and I have no love for what he did during his administration. And Israel continues to oppress and control the Palestinian population, sometimes to devastating results.

But one hears loads of Muslim religious authorities validating and condoning violence against non-muslims. When a belief goes malignant, it is malignant. That does not make Islam evil or vile at all to me, but it does seem true that enough of Islam has become allowing for a potentially cancerous sickness to take hold of it's 'mind' and soul as to threaten not just non-muslims but the body of Islam itself.

for example, how would you reply to the charge that islamic and nazi ideology is as valid and good and bad as aztec ideology?

hariaum

yassar,

you are generalizing too far.

After the Rama temple was reclaimed, about 200 hindu temples were destroyed in Pakistan. Is that self defense?

The majority of people who have died in India by communal violence have been Hindu by muslims.

criminals do need justification and righteousness. If your ideology supports that then you are more likely to kill. Just because all humans can kill does not make you a killer. Just because all societies have problems does not make all societies equally guilty of killing.

There is discrimination. The koran over and over again discriminates between infidels and idolators and those that god does not hate. That discrimination is wrong; based on simplistic stereotypes. We can learn to discriminate with greater reality: the probability that a certain person will be himsic in the future is high, the probability of another is low based on their past behavior. Likewise, we can state probabilities of a certain ideology being used to justify killing (killers in a culture/population of that culture, verses in a scripture showing god's cursing the other/total verses in a scripture...) and then come to rational conclusions of how to discriminate one ideology v another.

That is rational. Just saying everybody is a bad guy so we can be bad guys is nonsensical rationalization.

hariaum

ABHAB and Halozcell are the two sides of the same coin.

They invent different things for the same goal--Islamophobia.

I never read anywhere that American Muslims want Sharia Law.

Thankyou Hadia Mubarak,

Its always good to hear Islamic Scholars speaking from a position of authority backedup with an understanding of Islam and Quran instead of neocon plants in garb of muslims like Pamela Taylor and Irshad Manji basically saying basically what the west wants to hear from Muslims.

Nidal Hussain was a sick criminal. Even criminals look for excuses to justify their crimes and if they can find religion as a scapegoat, so be it. Can we forget that George Bush said God had ordered in his dream to attack Iraq, Blair also used an excuse on similar lines? Jewish Rabbi's have cited phony biblical evidence that the Palestinian land was actually given to them, to justify murder and displacement of defenseless Palestinians. Hindu mobs whippedup into a frenzy by Hindu Fanatic Religous leaders went on a rampage after destroying the Babri Mosque kiiling thousands of muslims in Mumbai alone and again in Gujrat the same religous party led another massacare of thousands, where one of leaders proudly recalled in an interview later how he ripped open the belly of a muslim woman took out the child inside it and raised it on his sword (The interview is on Youtube~!). So there you have it criminals of all cast and creed will use justifications which may be religous in some cases to justify their crimes. A majority of religions reject these extremists. Therefore its wrong to accuse Islam, Christianity. Judaism or Hinduism etc for the crimes some sick minds commit in their name.

******************************************************

abhab1 writes,

"1. This is also why I object to the methods of modern warfare because it “(leads to) a violation of God's commandment "Thou shall not kill."”
Moi:
Where in the Quran or Hadith is written “Thou shall not kill”?"

Abhab if professional haters like you had an IQ of over 35, you'd have understood she isnt talking about the Quran. She's referring to the Bible that says "Thou Shalt not Kill", and yet the Christian Soldiers around the world are at the forefront in killing most number of people, developing most destructive weapons (Nuclear, Atomic, Biological......you name it). So please look at the mote in your own eye before spewing your hatefilled diatribe on muslims!

1-Terrible Theological Mistake,Headline;

**On being a Patriotic and Faithful Muslim American**

If a muslim/submission follower lives in House of War(USA),can not be Patriot.
Devout/True Believer Muslim can not be Patriot of Infidel Land.He has to be Jihadist/Holy Warrior and participate Holy War and struggle,with his wealth and Live such as written 49.15 in the Book which says *Unlettered Man took Read revelation,to make House of War to House of Islam.

2-The verse over and over again being repeated by some Panelist and Bloggers;

Quran,The Book which says *Jesus was a muslim*19.31,writes,

*....if anyone slays/kills a person/human being-UNLESS IT BE FOR MURDER or SPREADING MISCHIEF/CORRUPTION in the land-.....* 5.32

Exact notion *...if anyone kills innocent person(according to islam) WITHOUT CAUSES...* Key word is without Cause/Reason.
Keep in mind,there are always Causes in islam to kill someones.
Islam,Cult of Beheading(Eid al Adha/Feast of Sacrifice) coming 2 weeks later,says;
Mischiefmakers(it's round concept,almost everyone may be accused to be Mischiefmaker and be punished to death),Converts,Aduterers,Idolaters(Trinity is Idolatery/Partner to Allah(shirk) biggist and unforgivable sin),Infidels may be slain

In case of Fort Hood;
Those are Infidel Soldiers who kills muslims.
-Infidel soldier can not be Innocent.
-There is Islamic Cause to murder Infidel Soldiers.

I agree almost entirely with Ms. Mubarak. But the next step, and this is even a bigger one. If a bad person is not bad because of his religion, a good person is not good because of his religion.

In fact, we need to say people are good and bad based on principles not the religious group they belong to. That entails defining religion as man made and humans as divine. The religion is irrelevant but for the person's moral ancestry. This means religions need to see themselves as irrelevant but for the fact that they teach morality and connect us with the deeper reality of Truth as it is. This means that religions are subservient to mankind, not that mankind is subservient to a savior, a prophet, a book, etc.

(I don't agree with the simple idea that modern warfare is bad because a simplistic ideology of god said though shalt not kill.)

hariaum

Ms Mubarak states:
1. This is also why I object to the methods of modern warfare because it “(leads to) a violation of God's commandment "Thou shall not kill."”
Moi:
Where in the Quran or Hadith is written “Thou shall not kill”?

2. “What is absolutely unacceptable…..is his (Hasan) interpretation of the Qur'an's prohibition against "murdering fellow Muslims" as a license to go and kill fellow soldiers.”
Moi:
There are many verses in the Quran and Hadith that clearly and unambiguously incite about killing the non-Muslims.

3. I call for a “Muslim scholarship that understands and appreciates the American system of life and one that is authentically grounded in Islamic law”.
Moi:
Islamic law and the American system of governance are not in any way shape or form compatible. This is why the Muslims openly advocate the replacement of the US constitution by the Sharia (Muslim religious laws).

Wow. I am impressed.