As I mentioned in my previous post, Major Nadil Malik Hasan once alarmed his colleagues by detouring away from a planned medical lecture by proselytising for Islam, during which he allegedly expressed some alarming views.
Today, the Washington Post has published what it claims to be the actual PowerPoint presentation used by Hasan during his presentation. Notice the open jihadist interpretation of Islam, including explanations of the doctrine of abrogation, whereby more violent verses of the Qur'an cancel out more peaceful ones, as well as declarations such as: “Fighting to establish an Islamic State to please Allah, even by force is condoned by Islam.”
That Nadil Hasan must really, REALLY be an Islamophobe.
Tuesday, 10 November 2009
Monday, 9 November 2009
Confronting Nadil Malik Hasan's Jihadism
"Allahu akbar!"Recent days have seen many people, both journalists and lay people, display their intolerable ignorance, and self-inflicted denial, over the motivations of Nadil Malik Hasan, who last week gunned down dozens of people at Fort Hood, Texas. Every single person I have spoken to personally on the subject has expressed the belief that Hasan was "mentally unbalanced" and that his "anxiety" over an imminent deployment to Afghanistan caused him to "snap" and engage in an act of mass murder. His Muslim identity was, consequently, irrelevant in this case.
But let's look at the facts (keeping aside a statement in support of suicide bombing allegedly posted on the Internet by Hasan months before the attack). Nadil Malik Hasan handed out Qur'ans to neighbors just before going on his rampage and yelled “Allahu Akbar,” the jihadist’s cry, as he opened fire. When he was supposed to be giving a medical lecture, Hasan instead proselytised for Islam, during which time he said that according to the Qur'an, if you are an unbeliever, "you are condemned to hell. Your head is cut off. You're set on fire. Burning oil is burned down your throat."
One former associate of Hasan's, Col. Terry Lee, recalls that Hasan “claimed Muslims had the right to rise up and attack Americans”. Finally, it has recently emerged that Hasan went to the same mosque as three of the 9/11 hijackers, and according to a fellow Muslim officer at Fort Hood, his eyes "lit up" whenever he discussed his admiration for the radical teachings of the imam at that mosque.
In short, this was an Islamic jihad attack.
Of course, there will be those who will never accept Nadil Malik Hasan's Islamic motivation for this shooting, no matter what evidence is presented to them, because the consequences of doing so frighten them senseless. If they accept the overwhelming evidence that Hasan was a jihadist, they may start to have to question their normal assumptions that Islamic terrorism is caused by poverty, or social frustration, or any number of other equally Marxist excuses. To question those assumptions leads to having to reconsider the place of Islam in Western society, and the extent of the threat posed by Islamic fanaticism even in America.
But liberals will never take these steps. To do so would make them "bigots" and "Islamophobes", reactionary and intolerant. Can't have that.
UPDATE: "U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News."
Friday, 6 November 2009
Jihad At Fort Hood
Nidal Malik Hasan, a US Army psychiatrist, trained to treat soldiers under stress, opened fire yesterday in a crowded medical building at Fort Hood, Texas. When the assault ended minutes later, the attack had become what is believed to be the largest mass shooting ever to occur on a U.S. military base. Twelve were killed, 31 wounded.
Predictably, the mainstream media have been dancing gingerly around the possible motive of this murderer, as well as what religion he might belong to. This Washington Post article, however, does point out that Hasan was a "very devout" Muslim.
This "very devout" Muslim telegraphed his intentions months beforehand when he wrote in an Internet posting:
Hasan must have been an Islamophobe.
N.B. Hasan's assessment of the Islamic permissibility of suicide bombing is almost identical to that of Al-Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri, as well as that of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a mainstream Muslim cleric who reaches millions of Muslims worldwide via his regular al-Jazeera broadcasts, and has been consulted on several occasions by White House officials on issues of US foreign policy!
Predictably, the mainstream media have been dancing gingerly around the possible motive of this murderer, as well as what religion he might belong to. This Washington Post article, however, does point out that Hasan was a "very devout" Muslim.
This "very devout" Muslim telegraphed his intentions months beforehand when he wrote in an Internet posting:
There was a grenade thrown amongs a group of American soldiers. One of the soldiers, feeling that it was to late for everyone to flee jumped on the grave with the intention of saving his comrades. Indeed he saved them. He inentionally took his life (suicide) for a noble cause i.e. saving the lives of his soldier. To say that this soldier committed suicide is inappropriate. Its more appropriate to say he is a brave hero that sacrificed his life for a more noble cause. Scholars have paralled this to suicide bombers whose intention, by sacrificing their lives, is to help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers. If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory. Their intention is not to die because of some despair. The same can be said for the Kamikazees in Japan. They died (via crashing their planes into ships) to kill the enemies for the homeland. You can call them crazy i you want but their act was not one of suicide that is despised by Islam. So the scholars main point is that "IT SEEMS AS THOUGH YOUR INTENTION IS THE MAIN ISSUE" and Allah (SWT) knows best.
Hasan must have been an Islamophobe.
N.B. Hasan's assessment of the Islamic permissibility of suicide bombing is almost identical to that of Al-Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri, as well as that of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a mainstream Muslim cleric who reaches millions of Muslims worldwide via his regular al-Jazeera broadcasts, and has been consulted on several occasions by White House officials on issues of US foreign policy!
Wednesday, 4 November 2009
Slavery In Islam And The West: The Double Standards Of The Intellectual Elites (Part 1)
INTRODUCTION
In 2006, Tony Blair expressed his “deep sorrow” over Britain's role in the slave trade. In an article for the New Nation newspaper, the then-prime minister said it had been a “profoundly shameful” affair in Britain's history.
But Blair's words angered some African groups, such as the Pan African Reparation Coalition – because he had not been fawning enough in his apology. “An apology is just the start – words mean nothing,” said a spokeswoman.
There are a number of double standards and misplaced priorities in this scenario. Is it really right that Britain – and the West in general – should be singled out for the slave trade? And should it be necessary for Blair, or anyone else, to apologise for it at all?
The fact the mainstream media and groups such as the Pan African Reparation Coalition repeatedly ignore is that there was another slave trade which was just as shameful a blot on the history of the human race – the Islamic slave trade. Not only is this never mentioned by any reparations groups or Western courses on slavery, but the Islamic world has never been subjected to any worldwide condemnation or shame because of it.
This two-part essay is intended to redress the balance and provide the corrective to the current politically correct malaise, by examining and comparing the West and the Islamic world and their roles in the slave trade. In doing so, I hope to call attention to the neglected victims of a slave trade that no one condemns, as well as to emphasise that the West no longer has anything to be ashamed of, and has much to be proud of.
SLAVERY IN THE WEST
We certainly should not glorify slavery, and nor should we minimise or celebrate the role of Western countries such as Britain in participating in it. Slavery is an unethical, inhuman, degrading practice. But the West has already paid its penance for its past crimes – and it did so by being the first to push for abolition of slavery.
The roots of abolition go back to the ancient Greeks, who developed the conception of the equality and unity of man, a common brotherhood that bound all human beings regardless of race or creed. Plato put forward the argument that one of mankind's biggest mistakes was to “divide humanity into two”, treating the Greeks as a separate class while “[a]ll other nations, although their number is unknown and they do not intermingle or share any common language, are called by the single term 'barbarian', and because of this one term it is supposed that they constitute a single class.” Aristotle saw mankind as one race, distinguished from other creatures by the power of reason. Cicero, who introduced Greek philosophy to the Romans, wrote:
There was even direct criticism of slavery during the era of the ancient Greeks. Alcidamas, the fourth-century rhetorician and Sophist, condemned the practice: “The deity gave liberty to all men, and nature created no one a slave.” And although Aristotle is known to have said that some men are by nature slaves, he also recommended that “it is better to hold out freedom as a reward for all slaves”.
Such views continued to be held in the West long after the Greeks, including among Christians, who absorbed Greek and Stoic ethics into their theology. Although it condones and never condemns slavery, the Bible also affirms the oneness of man before God: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28) This attitude caused Christians to question the morality of slavery even as far back as the so-called Dark Ages. St. Isidore of Seville declared that “God has made no difference between the soul of the slave and that of the freedman.” In 649, Clovis II, king of the Franks, married a slave, who later began a campaign to halt slavery. The Catholic Church now honours her as St. Bathilda. And in the sixteenth century, a Spanish missionary and bishop named Bartolomé de Las Casas was instrumental in enacting a law prohibiting enslavement of the Indians.
These aren't simply the actions and assumptions of a few; they are part of the grand universalist tradition of the West, and have formed our culture, part of who we are as Brits, or Americans, or Europeans. In time, they would form the basis for the abolition of the slave trade.
The pioneering abolitionists William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson were British. They were supported in their efforts by influential writers such as William Cowper and Laurence Sterne. In America, there was William Lloyd Garrison, and even Abraham Lincoln, both of whom based their opposition to slavery on Biblical principles. Slavery was pronounced to be against the law in Scotland in 1776. English philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham called the British colonies where slavery flourished “a disgrace and an outrage on humanity.”
The eighteenth century was the high tide of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but it also gave rise to the principles of freedom, equality and human rights, which were themselves derived from the ancient Greeks and found primarily in the West. Truly one of the greatest things about Western civilisation is its ability to engage in self-criticism: to subject even its most cherished beliefs and institutions to critical analysis and change. It was this willingness for self-criticism that led to the abolition of slavery, not just in the West, but throughout the world.
Stay tuned for Part 2, coming soon...
In 2006, Tony Blair expressed his “deep sorrow” over Britain's role in the slave trade. In an article for the New Nation newspaper, the then-prime minister said it had been a “profoundly shameful” affair in Britain's history.
But Blair's words angered some African groups, such as the Pan African Reparation Coalition – because he had not been fawning enough in his apology. “An apology is just the start – words mean nothing,” said a spokeswoman.
There are a number of double standards and misplaced priorities in this scenario. Is it really right that Britain – and the West in general – should be singled out for the slave trade? And should it be necessary for Blair, or anyone else, to apologise for it at all?
The fact the mainstream media and groups such as the Pan African Reparation Coalition repeatedly ignore is that there was another slave trade which was just as shameful a blot on the history of the human race – the Islamic slave trade. Not only is this never mentioned by any reparations groups or Western courses on slavery, but the Islamic world has never been subjected to any worldwide condemnation or shame because of it.
This two-part essay is intended to redress the balance and provide the corrective to the current politically correct malaise, by examining and comparing the West and the Islamic world and their roles in the slave trade. In doing so, I hope to call attention to the neglected victims of a slave trade that no one condemns, as well as to emphasise that the West no longer has anything to be ashamed of, and has much to be proud of.
SLAVERY IN THE WEST
We certainly should not glorify slavery, and nor should we minimise or celebrate the role of Western countries such as Britain in participating in it. Slavery is an unethical, inhuman, degrading practice. But the West has already paid its penance for its past crimes – and it did so by being the first to push for abolition of slavery.
The roots of abolition go back to the ancient Greeks, who developed the conception of the equality and unity of man, a common brotherhood that bound all human beings regardless of race or creed. Plato put forward the argument that one of mankind's biggest mistakes was to “divide humanity into two”, treating the Greeks as a separate class while “[a]ll other nations, although their number is unknown and they do not intermingle or share any common language, are called by the single term 'barbarian', and because of this one term it is supposed that they constitute a single class.” Aristotle saw mankind as one race, distinguished from other creatures by the power of reason. Cicero, who introduced Greek philosophy to the Romans, wrote:
“That justice is based on nature will be evident, if you fully realise man's fellowship and unity with his fellow men. No two things are so closely alike as all of us are to each other...Hence, however man is to be defined, one definition is true of all men – proof enough that there is no difference between the species, for if there were, a single definition would not cover all its members...There is indeed no one of any race who, given a guide, cannot make his way to virtue.”
There was even direct criticism of slavery during the era of the ancient Greeks. Alcidamas, the fourth-century rhetorician and Sophist, condemned the practice: “The deity gave liberty to all men, and nature created no one a slave.” And although Aristotle is known to have said that some men are by nature slaves, he also recommended that “it is better to hold out freedom as a reward for all slaves”.
Such views continued to be held in the West long after the Greeks, including among Christians, who absorbed Greek and Stoic ethics into their theology. Although it condones and never condemns slavery, the Bible also affirms the oneness of man before God: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28) This attitude caused Christians to question the morality of slavery even as far back as the so-called Dark Ages. St. Isidore of Seville declared that “God has made no difference between the soul of the slave and that of the freedman.” In 649, Clovis II, king of the Franks, married a slave, who later began a campaign to halt slavery. The Catholic Church now honours her as St. Bathilda. And in the sixteenth century, a Spanish missionary and bishop named Bartolomé de Las Casas was instrumental in enacting a law prohibiting enslavement of the Indians.
These aren't simply the actions and assumptions of a few; they are part of the grand universalist tradition of the West, and have formed our culture, part of who we are as Brits, or Americans, or Europeans. In time, they would form the basis for the abolition of the slave trade.
The pioneering abolitionists William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson were British. They were supported in their efforts by influential writers such as William Cowper and Laurence Sterne. In America, there was William Lloyd Garrison, and even Abraham Lincoln, both of whom based their opposition to slavery on Biblical principles. Slavery was pronounced to be against the law in Scotland in 1776. English philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham called the British colonies where slavery flourished “a disgrace and an outrage on humanity.”
The eighteenth century was the high tide of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but it also gave rise to the principles of freedom, equality and human rights, which were themselves derived from the ancient Greeks and found primarily in the West. Truly one of the greatest things about Western civilisation is its ability to engage in self-criticism: to subject even its most cherished beliefs and institutions to critical analysis and change. It was this willingness for self-criticism that led to the abolition of slavery, not just in the West, but throughout the world.
Stay tuned for Part 2, coming soon...
Tuesday, 3 November 2009
Dhimmitude In 2012
Something is wrong with this posterActually, it's dhimmitude right now, from film director Roland Emmerich, the man behind new disaster flick "2012". Here's the story:
He blew up the Empire State Building and the White House in Independence Day, sent a giant monster careering through the heart of Manhattan in Godzilla and destroyed the famous Hollywood sign in The Day After Tomorrow. But it seems there are places even Roland Emmerich will not go - the German film-maker has revealed he abandoned plans to obliterate Islam's holiest site on the big screen for fear of attracting a fatwa...
"I wanted to do that, I have to admit," Emmerich told scifiwire.com. "But my co-writer Harald [Kloser] said I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a movie. And he was right.
"We have to all, in the western world, think about this. You can actually let Christian symbols fall apart, but if you would do this with [an] Arab symbol ["Arab"? ~ Ed], you would have ... a fatwa, and that sounds a little bit like what the state of this world is.
"So it's just something which I kind of didn't [think] was [an] important element, anyway, in the film, so I kind of left it out."...
...in order to highlight his opposition to organised religion, the director decided to use CGI to destroy the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro instead. For good measure, he also blew up the Sistine chapel and St Peter's Basilica in the Vatican...
This fits in perfectly with the my blog post here yesterday, discussing sitcom "Curb Your Enthusiasm"'s eager willingness to have a man urinate on Christian symbols but not Muslim ones. The first question is: What do Emmerich and the film's producers glean from the fact that they won't face any death threats if they destroy Christian holy symbols, but they will if they destroy Muslim ones? And secondly, why didn't Emmerich simply leave the scene in the movie and declare that anyone who would riot and kill innocent people over a fictional event depicted in a movie is a barbaric medievalist and should not be dignified by such cowardly capitulation?
I suspect that the answer to the first question is that Emmerich knows very well what this fact means, but will never say so in public. And I suspect the answer to the second is that he does not understand the threat to free speech that Islamic political pressure on Western powers actually constitutes.
Monday, 2 November 2009
Would Larry David Urinate On The Qur'an?
I've never watched it religiously (har-de-har-har-har), but on the few occasions that I have watched the hit American sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm, I have found it to be fairly amusing. In some ways, it's like an Americanised, ad-libbed version of our own One Foot In The Grave.
Today at Front Page, Jamie Glazov examines a recent episode of the show in which lead character Larry David (played by, er, Larry David) accidentally urinates on a picture of Jesus, leading to much subsequent hilarity. Glazov asks the question: "Are producers of this show, or Larry David, or anyone else connected to it fearing for their lives right now? Are there Christian groups calling for the death of anyone in connection to this episode?"
Also:
Would the producers of this show have just as easily allowed a scene in which Larry David urinates on a Koran? He couldn’t urinate on a picture of Muhammad because we all know that making a representation of Muhammad gets you an immediate death sentence. So we have to settle for the Holy Book. But how much does anyone want to bet that this would never be allowed?
Question: Why in our culture is urinating on Jesus easily permitted but urinating on the Koran is simply unthinkable? What does this signify?
Glazov repeats the question yet again:
HBO has come to the defense of the episode, saying that it is all about parody. Everyone needs to lighten up. So, if Larry David urinated on the Koran, would HBO tell everyone they need to lighten up because it is parody? What does it say that we know for a fact that the latter would simply never happen?
What meaning and lesson do we draw from this?
It goes without saying that this question is, of course, rhetorical.
Friday, 30 October 2009
The Goldstone Report: Islamic Propaganda
You may remember the Goldstone report, which was released by the UN a couple of months ago. This report accused both Israel and Hamas of committing "war crimes" during the Gaza offensive at the beginning of the year. Despite the report's claim to objectivity and balance, it was in fact riddled with anti-Israel bias, and the majority of the report focused on supposed Israeli atrocities during the war. This bias included distortion of the facts and double standards in regard to acceptance or dismissal of evidence.
For example, the report claimed that there was no evidence that Hamas fighters hid in civilian areas and used human shields made up of civilians during the conflict. This completely disregards the testimony of witnesses; for example: "Witnesses, including Hanan Abu Khajib, 39, said that Hamas fired just outside the school compound, probably from the secluded courtyard of a house across the street, 25 yards from the school. Israeli return fire, some minutes later, also landed outside the school, along the southwest wall, killing two Hamas fighters. Nearly all the casualties were in the street outside the compound, with only three people wounded from shrapnel inside the walls." It also ignores video footage showing Palestinian fighters planting improvised explosive devices outside houses and then climbing into those houses and hiding among the civilian population:
Finally, the report actually acknowledges that Hamas MP Fathi Hammad admitted in February 2009 that his party used human shields during the conflict, citing the following statement: "...the Palestinian people has developed its [methods] of death seeking. For the Palestinian people, death became an industry, at which women excel and so do all people on this land: the elderly excel, the mujahideen excel and the children excel. Accordingly, [Hamas] created a human shield of women, children, the elderly and the mujahideen, against the Zionist bombing machine." But despite this, the report goes on to dismiss this as insufficient evidence that Hamas used human shields.
On several other occasions, statements by Hamas leaders and politicians are declared not to constitute evidence, and yet numerous quotes from Israeli politicians are provided, accompanied by the following statement: "It is in the context of comments such as these that the massive destruction of businesses, agricultural land, chicken farms and residential houses has to be understood." In other words, statements by Palestinian politicians which reflect badly upon them do not count as evidence, but statements from Israeli politicians must be taken as evidence of war crimes and nefarious motivations.
All the Goldstone Report has done is embolden and delight Islamic jihadists not just in Palestine, but everywhere, by lending credibility to the Hamas movement and denigrating Israel at every opportunity. That the report would end up being so biased is not that much of a surprise, given the UN's long record of anti-Israel policies, as well as the known anti-Israel bias of several people directly involved in commissioning the report.
But what makes it now even less surprising is the revelation that the Goldstone Report was actually initiated by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the 57-state Islamic umma which makes up the largest voting bloc in the UN and has for the past several years been attempting to push through worldwide legislation that would make it a criminal offense to criticise Islam.
Israel faces enemies on all fronts, and what makes the situation so alarming is that most of these fronts are not martial in nature, and so constitute an easily overlooked threat to its security which is undermining its defenses without the use of guns or bombs.
For example, the report claimed that there was no evidence that Hamas fighters hid in civilian areas and used human shields made up of civilians during the conflict. This completely disregards the testimony of witnesses; for example: "Witnesses, including Hanan Abu Khajib, 39, said that Hamas fired just outside the school compound, probably from the secluded courtyard of a house across the street, 25 yards from the school. Israeli return fire, some minutes later, also landed outside the school, along the southwest wall, killing two Hamas fighters. Nearly all the casualties were in the street outside the compound, with only three people wounded from shrapnel inside the walls." It also ignores video footage showing Palestinian fighters planting improvised explosive devices outside houses and then climbing into those houses and hiding among the civilian population:
Finally, the report actually acknowledges that Hamas MP Fathi Hammad admitted in February 2009 that his party used human shields during the conflict, citing the following statement: "...the Palestinian people has developed its [methods] of death seeking. For the Palestinian people, death became an industry, at which women excel and so do all people on this land: the elderly excel, the mujahideen excel and the children excel. Accordingly, [Hamas] created a human shield of women, children, the elderly and the mujahideen, against the Zionist bombing machine." But despite this, the report goes on to dismiss this as insufficient evidence that Hamas used human shields.
On several other occasions, statements by Hamas leaders and politicians are declared not to constitute evidence, and yet numerous quotes from Israeli politicians are provided, accompanied by the following statement: "It is in the context of comments such as these that the massive destruction of businesses, agricultural land, chicken farms and residential houses has to be understood." In other words, statements by Palestinian politicians which reflect badly upon them do not count as evidence, but statements from Israeli politicians must be taken as evidence of war crimes and nefarious motivations.
All the Goldstone Report has done is embolden and delight Islamic jihadists not just in Palestine, but everywhere, by lending credibility to the Hamas movement and denigrating Israel at every opportunity. That the report would end up being so biased is not that much of a surprise, given the UN's long record of anti-Israel policies, as well as the known anti-Israel bias of several people directly involved in commissioning the report.
But what makes it now even less surprising is the revelation that the Goldstone Report was actually initiated by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the 57-state Islamic umma which makes up the largest voting bloc in the UN and has for the past several years been attempting to push through worldwide legislation that would make it a criminal offense to criticise Islam.
Israel faces enemies on all fronts, and what makes the situation so alarming is that most of these fronts are not martial in nature, and so constitute an easily overlooked threat to its security which is undermining its defenses without the use of guns or bombs.
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