Category: Other Religions

I’ve been meaning to blog about Abdul Rahman, the Afghani convert to Christianity who was imprisoned for his faith and threatened with the death penalty.

(First, please indulge the language nitpicker in me for a moment as I point out that the /h/ in his second name is not silent. His name is pronounced /RAH-man/ with an audible expulsion of air at the end of the first syllable. Rahman is an Arabic word that means "merciful." I don’t know if Mr. Rahman is a speaker of Dari or Pashto or another language, but his second name seems to be a loanword from Arabic.)

Now for actually serious matters:

I’m pleased to report–as you likely already know–that the charges against him have been dropped, albeit on a technicality. The wave of Western pressure on the Afghani government has worked–so far.

But the struggle is not over, since Mr. Rahman’s safety must be secured, and if they just let him loose on the streets then he’ll be killed in short order by fanatical Muslims.

He has now applied for foreign asylum, and Italy has offered it. Other countries are expected to offer it as well.

GET THE STORY.

The larger issue here is that we have a victory in the process of getting Muslims to behave like civilized human beings. Sure, there are plenty of zealots who are willing to off Mr. Rahman in a heartbeat, but the Afghani government has realized that it needed to cave on this one if it didn’t want to alienate the West, upon which it is significantly dependent.

Good.

Muslim countries need to learn that they can’t have it all their own way.

When children learn this fact, we call it "socialization." Right now what the Muslim world needs is a massive series of lessons in socialization.

I’ve already pointed to the need to shame Muslims for unacceptable behavior in their culture, just as children need to be made to feel shame when they have done something unacceptable so that they internalize the drive not to do it again.

The cartoon riots and the vandalism and violence and killings that they resulted in were an example of this. They are something that the Muslim community should feel ashamed of.

So is the treatment of Mr. Rahman.

It’s high time that the West get off its cultural relativist hobby horse and say to the Muslim world: "Some behaviors are simply unacceptable, and you should feel ashamed if you commit or tolerate them. Grow up and clean up your act."

The kind of cultural relativism that has infected many in the West is itself a sign of immaturity. It’s a kind of culturally adolescent phase.

You ever notice how teen agers latch on to cultural relativism as a way of undermining the idea that anything is really wrong–so that they can justify the things that they want to do that are wrong?

It’s when you grow up and really have to take responsibility for yourself that you set aside both the self-centered tantrums of childhood and the kind of self-centered rationalizations that characterize adolescence.

The present confrontations with Muslim tantrumhood may help many in the West grow out of their cultural adolescence.

So we may both get a lesson in growing up.

Not ours. Not the traditional Italian one. But religion, nevertheless.

An Italian clothing company has now designed jeans specially designed for Muslims.

This is NOT a joke. It’s real.

The jeans are designed to make Muslims more comfortable when doing their daily prayers.

In a flash of inter-religious sensitivity, the company has named the line "al-Quds" jeans, which in Arabic means "Jerusalem" jeans.

That’s sure to please Hamas and the PLO.

It’ll probably be a bit less popular with our Jewish friends.

It’s also weird because, if the jeans are meant to make Muslims more comfortable when they pray and you want to name them after a city then you’d think the designer would want to name them after the city toward which Muslims pray: Mecca.

In that case they ought to be called "al-Makkah" jeans.

Oops!

Maybe naming jeans after someone’s main holy city would be religiously insensitive or something . . . even a provocation and a desecration.

Now why is my Spidey sense for double standards tingling?

GET THE STORY.

Y’know, I have this horrible feeling that Ann Coulter is going suggest an advertising slogan along the lines of "Al-Quds! The perfect jeans to go with your new suicide belt!"

But that would be wrong. For all the obvious reasons.

Some quotes:

"If we tell our people they have no right to offend, we have to tell the others they have no right to destroy us," Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican’s Secretary of State (prime minister), told journalists in Rome.

"We must always stress our demand for reciprocity in political contacts with authorities in Islamic countries and, even more, in cultural contacts," Foreign Minister Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo told the daily Corriere della Sera.

Pope Benedict signaled his concern on Monday when he told the new Moroccan ambassador to the Vatican that peace can only be assured by "respect for the religious convictions and practices of others, in a reciprocal way in all societies."

"Enough now with this turning the other cheek! It’s our duty to protect ourselves," Monsignor Velasio De Paolis, secretary of the Vatican’s supreme court, thundered in the daily La Stampa.

"The West has had relations with the Arab countries for half a century, mostly for oil, and has not been able to get the slightest concession on human rights," he said.

Bishop Rino Fisichella, head of one of the Roman universities that train young priests from around the world, told Corriere della Sera the Vatican should speak out more.

"Let’s drop this diplomatic silence," said the rector of the Pontifical Lateran University. "We should put pressure on international organizations to make the societies and states in majority Muslim countries face up to their responsibilities."

GET THE STORY.

Certain elements in the French population have been derisively termed "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," but the surrender monkey disease can also be found across the channel.

HERE’S A PIECE BY A BRITISH AUTHOR WHO SEEMS PREFECTLY WILLING TO STAND BY AND WITNESS THE DEATH OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION.

The author is Martin Jacques, who–despite is French-sounding name–is actually British. He’s also the former editor of Marxism Today and has been described as an  "embittered British Stalinist."

I was intrigued into reading the article by its headline: "Europe’s contempt for other cultures can’t be sustained." As a member of a culture that has been regularly the object of European contempt, the article was natively interesting to me.

The author makes a number of valid points, but I was shocked to realize just how much of a surrender monkey the author is.

Jacques writes (excerpts):

Is the argument over the Danish cartoons really reducible to a matter
of free speech? Even if we believe that free speech is a fundamental
value, that does not give us carte blanche to say what we like in any
context, regardless of consequence or effect. Respect for others,
especially in an increasingly interdependent world, is a value of at
least equal importance.

If European societies want to live in some kind of domestic peace and harmony – rather than in a state of Balkanisation and repression – then they must find ways of integrating these minorities on rather more equal terms than, for the most part, they have so far achieved. That must mean, among other things, respect for their values. Second, it is patently clear that, globally speaking, Europe matters far less than it used to – and in the future will count for less and less. We must not only learn to share our homelands with people from very different roots, we must also learn to share the world with diverse peoples in a very different kind of way from what has been the European practice.

By the end of this century Europe is likely to pale into insignificance
alongside China and India. In such a world, Europe will be forced to
observe and respect the sensibilities of others.

Regardless of what good points he makes, the fundamental message that comes through from Jacques is that Europeans should simply acquiesce to their demise, they should allow their free speech rights to be abridged in deference to the sensibilities of others, they should offer more and more accomodations to foreigners who they should continue to allow into their lands, and they should simply be prepared to go quietly into the night as a civilization.

I’m sorry, but while I’m all for self-restraint in the exercise of free expression and not giving offense to others needlessly, this kind of civilizational surrender is simply unacceptable.

No matter what its flaws have been historically or what they are presently, the world is better off with a non-Islamicized Europe than with one living under sharia.

Let’s hope that most Europeans are made of sterner stuff than this gentleman is.

When Cardinal Ratzinger, who had openly complained about the Vatican bureaucracy in interviews, was elected pope, it was widely expected that he would shake up the Roman curia and reform it. This may well be an agenda item of his, but so far ther hasn’t been a major overhaul publicly announced.

What he has been doing is transferring certain people in a slow, deliberate manner, and these transfers have led to widespread speculation about the significance of the moves. For example, when the secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments (the man under Cardinal Arinze) was transferred, it was widely regarded as a sign that the man was unsuitable for his position.

Now the president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue (the body responsible for dialogue with Muslims, Buddhists, etc.) has been transferred from his position and made nuncio for Egypt.

What does this mean?

John Allen suggests that it’s a break with the approach that has been taken toward Islam in recent years. Many at the Holy See have taken an over-conciliatory approach to Islam that has failed to appreciate the challenges the Church and western society faces regarding Islam. Since being elected pontiff, B16 has shown himself willing to call attention to the need for Muslims to reject violence and terrorism, which is already a shift in emphasis, and the transfer may be more of the same.

Allen writes:

It [the transfer]’s certainly not a question of personality. Nobody dislikes Fitzgerald, who is universally admired for his graciousness, his work ethic and his content-area expertise. He is an Oxford-educated expert on Islam, probably the best mind working on Christian-Islamic relations among the senior leadership of the church.

Yet within the Roman Curia, Fitzgerald is — rightly or wrongly — identified with what was seen by some as a "soft" approach to Islam under John Paul II. That line was never fully embraced by senior figures who advocate a policy more akin to "tough love." One example is Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the pope’s vicar for Rome. These officials desire good relations with Islam, but also a more robust capacity to challenge and critique Islamic leaders, especially on issues of "reciprocity" — the idea that if Muslim immigrants benefit from religious freedom in the West, Christians should get the same treatment in Islamic states.

It’s a view that to some extent Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, shared while at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In that sense, Fitzgerald’s transfer could be interpreted as a choice for a somewhat different approach.

GET THE STORY.

Blogger Christopher B. Wright has picked up on what I wrote the other day in The Muslim BrotherhoodKlan–and drawn a cartoon about it!

PEEP THE CARTOON.

He also adds commentary at the end of the cartoon, starting with some text that may clear away an important misunderstanding:

I suspect that someone, somewhere, is going to look at this cartoon
and decide that I am equating Islam with the Ku Klux Klan. Which is a
wholly irrational reaction to have, unless you also believe that KKK
and Christianity are exactly the same thing. That
would be a very peculiar position to take given Dr. Martin Luther
King’s profession (he was a Baptist minister), but I suppose it could
be done.

It would perhaps be more accurate to say that I am equating a
specific group within Islam with the KKK. A group that uses violence
and terror in order to advance a political agenda, a political agenda
that hides behind the justification of faith.

So it seems the IslamoKlan meme is starting to spread.

As Montgomery Burns would say: "Exxxxxx-celent."

Maybe other bloggers will consider adopting this meme.

Let the shaming continue!

The last couple of days I’ve been pointing out the disgraceful and violent behavior of many Muslims in the protests over the Danish cartoons.

THAT’S STILL GOING ON.

In fact, people have been dying in the protests. As many as 10 have been killed in Afghanistan–shot by crowd control officers.

Now the largest paper in the Islamofascist state Iran–with whom we’re going to have to go to war in the next year or so if their crazy president doesn’t get reigned in by the mullahs (who at the moment seem to be egging him on to a Shi’a apocalyptic policy)–has ANNOUNCED A CONTEST TO MAKE FUN OF THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST.

AND THE EDITOR OF THE DANISH PAPER THAT STARTED THIS SAYS HE’LL PRINT THE HOLOCAUST CARTOONS.

BUT THERE ARE MUSLIM GROUPS CALLING FOR AN END TO THE PROTESTS AND DEATH THREATS.

There’s even a group of Arabs who have set up a web site apologizing to Norway and Denmark for the shameful actions of their co-religionists.

CHECK OUT SORRYNORWAYDENMARK.COM.

The shaming has begun.

See this man?

He’s preaching a message of violence and hate.

He’s also doing something else: He’s wearing a mask.

This kind of thing is socially acceptable in many Muslim circles, as evidenced by the fact that it’s quite common. It happens all the time. Whenever there are protests in the Muslim world (or even Muslims protesting elsewhere; this gentleman was protesting in London) people wearing masks show up preaching messages of violence and hate.

Can you think of anyone else who would wear masks while preaching messages of violence and hate?

That’s right. The Ku Klux Klan.

They did this kind of thing all the time: Go out in public and preach a message of violence and hate while wearing masks.

And eighty years ago that kind of thing was socially acceptable in many American circles (and not just in the South).

But it doesn’t happen that much any more. The Klan still marches or has rallies on occasion, but nothing like the frequency with which it happened in the first half of the 20th century.

Why?

Because American society turned against the Klan. Originally, when the Klan got re-started in the early 20th century, membership in it was a means of social
advancement in many places, and many prominent citizens joined–including some who
went on to become Supreme Court justices and U.S. senators. (Just as in the Muslim world participating in violent, hate-filled
protests is a means of social advancement through proving one’s fervor.)

But non-racist Americans hardened American society against the Klan. They made it a shameful, socially-unacceptable thing to belong to or participate in. And eventually, the Klan dried up.

Good for us.

Now something similar needs to happen in the Muslim world.

Muslims who don’t support what Islamic Klansmen are doing at their rallies need to make it socially unacceptable in Muslim societies. So eventually, the Muslim Klan will dry up, too.

Muslims of good will must begin to shame their shameless brethren. They must do the same thing to the violent hate-mongers in their midst that Americans did to the violent hate-mongers here.

How might they do that?

Well, let’s consider the fellow above and the fact that he is wearing a mask. Why is he doing that?

Presumably for one of the same reasons that Klansmen in America did:

1. He is afraid to take personal responsibility in public for the message of violence and hatred he is preaching.
2. He’s connected with criminal activities and doesn’t want to be identified.
3. He wants to intimidate those he is protesting.

Point #3 can be dealt with by merely standing up to this form of bullying and criticizing it. If people start mocking the mask-wearers, it kind of neutralizes the intimidation aspect.

Muslims (and others) should therefore begin mocking the mask-wearers by pointing out that donning a mask is an admission that you are either a coward (point #1) or a criminal (point #2). Either way, you should be ashamed of yourself.

Muslims and non-Muslims alike should stand forth and say, "There is no reason to wear a mask at a protest. If you wear one, you shame yourself. Why would you wear a mask if you didn’t have something to be ashamed of? What manly men you are, you mask-wearers. You’re hiding your faces like women in burkhas."

This kind of shaming will not of itself fix the problem, but starting to shame those who participate in these kind of rallies is a good start–and an essential piece of the solution.

Let the shaming begin.

(I’ll feature a Muslim group tomorrow who is helping to do this.)