Two Views of Islam

In recent years there has been a lot of bad blood between the Muslims and the infidels or kuffar (unbelievers). They feel that we have been attacking them, and we are equally disturbed by their efforts to turn our cities into Islamic enclaves and "no-go" zones, and by their terror attacks. Each side considers the other's legal system as invalid, improper, worthless, and terrible. Of course, it's more complicated than that, but that gives the flavor of the dispute.

With all this, it should not be surprising that derogatory things have been said on both sides. Like this one about Muslims and their Sharia Law. Some — especially the more sensitive or perpetually offended among us — would find this description rather harsh.

But that's not harsh at all compared to what they say about themselves. Like this.

This strikes me as an explicit admission, by those most heavily steeped in Islam and most knowledgeable about it, that Islam makes no sense on its own terms. That also fits with the violence and intimidation the Imams are preaching. It's what appeals to those who know they are being dumped on and respond by striking out with any actions through which they can claim some form of dominance — "honor killings", thuggery, terror attacks, jihadism.

That Western "1400 years" view is also not harsh compared to what Muslims say about us (non-Muslims), or what they intend for us. It's the same as they intended, and implemented, for every group of people they ever encountered. It was a simple mantra: "Convert or die." And once they got past that immediate threat, they learned their problems were just beginning: "If you try to leave, we will kill you." It was all a part of, and a follow-on, to the only way Islam has ever spread — conquest.

How does this problem get solved? I'm not sure, but I do look forward a world like that described in this story.

How Stupid Are We?

This was received by e-mail. The comment with it suggests it should be hung in every public place so people can read it and just maybe the danger we face will sink in. This war is ongoing, and will continue as long as Muslims continue to follow what the Quran commands.

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Ask any person not your child between the ages of 18 and 25 if they ever heard of the Nuremberg Trials. Most answer "never heard of them". Or consider that 1 in 13 will not be able to tell you the name of the Vice President.

Unfortunately, 84% of those who receive this will not read it completely, or at all. 10% will but will also chose not to forward it. The remaining 6% will forward it. But the truth is re-emphasized as..... Stupid is as stupid does...

Ohhhhh YES!! The war started in the 7th century and lasted through the 17th century. I would contend it never stopped but historically the facts below are correct.

This is why I choke when I hear someone say we will defeat or contain these Islamic terrorists in a few years or even 30 years as recently stated by Leon Panetta. If the latest batch of murders, beheadings, and killing of innocent Christians has shocked you, maybe you should read this compilation of historical facts about the hatred of Muslims.

WE, THE STUPID: This is factually (and historically) correct - and verifiable:
In 732 A.D. the Muslim Army, which was moving on Paris , was defeated and turned back at Tours, France, by Charles Martell.
In 1571 A.D. the Muslim Army/Navy was defeated by the Italians and Austrians as they tried to cross the Mediterranean to attack southernEurope in the Battle of Lepanto.
In 1683 A.D. the Turkish Muslim Army, attacking Eastern Europe, was finally defeated in the Battle of Vienna by German and Polish ChristianArmies.

This crap has been going on for 1,400 years and half of the politicians don't even know it.

If these battles had not been won, we might be speaking Arabic and Christianity could be non-existent; Judaism certainly would not exist.

Reflecting: A lot of Americans have become so insulated from reality that they imagine that America can suffer defeat without any inconvenience to themselves. Pause a moment and reflect back.

These events are actual events from history. They really happened! Do you remember? 47 years since 1968 and this just keeps going on and on.

1. In 1968, Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed by a Muslim male.
2. In 1972, at the Munich Olympics, Israeli athletes were kidnapped and massacred by Muslim males.
3. In 1972, a Pan Am 747 was hijacked and eventually diverted to Cairo where a fuse was lit on final approach. Shortly after landing it was blown up by Muslim males.
4. In 1973, a Pan Am 707 was destroyed in Rome , with 33 people killed, when it was attacked with grenades by Muslim males.
5. In 1979, the US embassy in Iran was taken over by Muslim males.
6. During the 1980's a number of Americans were kidnapped in Lebanon by Muslim males.
7. In 1983, the US Marine barracks in Beirut was blown up by Muslim males.
8. In 1985, the cruise ship Achille Lauro was hijacked and a 70-year old American passenger was murdered and thrown overboard in his wheelchair by Muslim males.
9. In 1985, TWA flight 847 was hijacked at Athens , and a US Navy diver trying to rescue passengers was murdered by Muslim males.
10. In 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was bombed by Muslim males.
11. In 1993, the World Trade Center was bombed the first time by Muslim males.
12. In 1998, the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed by Muslim males.
13. On 9/11/01, four airliners were hijacked; two were used as missiles to take down the World Trade Centers and of the remaining two, one crashed into the US Pentagon and the other was diverted and crashed by the passengers. Thousands of people were killed by Muslim males.
14. In 2002, the United States fought a war in Afghanistan against Muslim males.
15. In 2002, reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and beheaded by - you guessed it - a Muslim male. (Plus two other American journalists who were just recently beheaded).
16. In 2013, the Boston Marathon Bombing resulted in 4 Innocent people, (including a child) being killed and 264 people injured by Muslim males.

No, Obama, I really don't see a pattern here to justify profiling, do you? So, to ensure we Americans never offend anyone, particularly fanatics intent on killing us, airport security screeners will no longer be allowed to profile certain people.

So, ask yourself "Just how stupid are we???"

Absolutely No Profiling! They must conduct random searches of 80-year-old women, little kids, airline pilots with proper identification, secret agents who are members of the Obama's security detail, 85-year-old Congressmen with metal hips, and Medal of Honor winner and former Governor Joe Foss, BUT........leave Muslim Males alone lest we be guilty of profiling. Ask yourself, "Just how stupid are we?" Have the American people completely lost their minds or just their Power of Reason???

Let 's get this to as many people as we can so that the stupid defense attorneys, along with Federal Justices, that want to thwart common sense, feel ashamed of themselves — if they have any such sense.

As the writer of the award winning story Forrest Gump so aptly put it, "Stupid Is As Stupid Does."

A Huge Double Standard

Here is a piece of today's reality.

I keep wondering why there is such an extreme double standard. Is there any reason other than concern over Islamist violence? Is the Left allied with the Islamic extremists?

Scared of Widows & Orphans (2)

I'd like to amend the program I proposed below for President Barack Obama's Syrian Refugee Resettlement Program. The new version still proposes to "admit the number of Middle East refugees (all claimed to be Syrian, of course) that Obama wants, but let's limit the admitted refugees to the following two groups", and I would say in the following order:
      1. Translators who have worked for and with U.S. and allied forces,
          and their families,
      2. Refugees from groups subjected to genocide in their home
          countries. The groups in this category would be
            a. Surviving Yazidis and
            b. Surviving Christians and
            c. Surviving Jews, and
      3. Widows, with their young children, and young orphan children.
Additional genocide victim groups can be added as appropriate. The likelihood of there being jihadists among these groups — particularly the first two — is small.

No matter what Obama says, category 2 is not "putting a religious test on our compassion." It is giving a preference to genocide's victims over its perpetrators.

I made a recommendation before, and I now make it again: Put this structure in a bill and pass it through Congress. Dare Obama to veto it. After all, this gives Obama what he claims to want. If he vetoes this bill, he proves his claims are lies and what he really wants is something other than what he says. If he signs it — and follows its requirements — he gets his refugees without endangering our security. That would be a win-win.

Followers of Islam v. 2.0

For Islamists, thoughtcrimes are justifications for murder.

Many wonder why they do things like that, how they can possibly do that. I think this makes it clear — this is the jihadist reality:

Only a slightly separate topic: "Why do I say 'Islam version 2'?" Because the original Islam, which was preached in Mecca, was peaceful. Islam only became violent and jihadist when Mohammed changed it and his preaching (to version 2) after realizing he could get a lot more power and riches as a warlord than as a prophet.

Scared of Widows & Orphans

The headline reads Even Democrats Worry About Obama's Weirdly Detached Views On ISIS. The story particularly cites a statement by California Senator Diane Feinstein: “I’ve never been more concerned. I read the intelligence faithfully. ISIL is not contained. ISIL is expanding.” New York Senator Chuck Schumer, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, and New Hampshire Governor Maggie Hassan agree with Feinstein at least in part. All are Democrats.

What triggered these responses, at least in part, was President Barack Obama's bellicose and hostile statement in Manila about Republicans: “Apparently, they're scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America.”

Once again, Obama has made up a straw man using a tiny piece of reality and a huge amount of imagination, all for the political purpose of advancing himself and his agenda. According to Obama, they all oppose letting poor downtrodden Syrian refugees into the US. But he doesn't say the same about those in his own party who are concerned over how detached he has become from reality, while staying close (of course) to his ideology.

This particular straw man is especially dishonest. Widows and orphans aren't the problem, as President Obama well knows. The issue is the jihadists who are coming out of the Middle East mixed in with the real refugees — a number, according to statements by involved individuals and organizations, inserted among the refugees by ISIS. The issue of jihadists among the refugees was brought to the fore by the jihadists' terror attacks in Paris on Friday, November 13th.

So here's a thought: Let's admit the number of Middle East refugees (all claimed to be Syrian, of course) that Obama wants, but let's limit the admitted refugees to the following two groups:
      1. Widows, with their young children, and young orphan children,
          and
      2. Refugees from groups subjected to genocide in their home
          countries. The groups in this category would be
            a. Surviving Yazidis and
            b. Surviving Christians and
            c. Surviving Jews.
Additional genocide victim groups can be added as appropriate. The likelihood of there being jihadists among these groups is small.

No matter what Obama says, this is not "putting a religious test on our compassion." It is giving a preference to genocide's victims over its perpetrators.

Put this structure in a bill and pass it through Congress. Dare Obama to veto it. After all, this gives Obama what he claims to want. If he vetoes this bill, he proves his claims are lies and what he really wants is something other than what he says. If he signs it — and follows its requirements — he gets his refugees without endangering our security. That would be a win-win.

UPDATE: Mrs Critter has another suggestion that may improve our national security: House all "Syrian" "refugees" admitted to the U.S. under this program at the White House.

UPDATE: From the Washington Examiner e-mail today (Thursday):

Is Islam Beginning to Soften?

I heard on the news that the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a new statement. Talking about the "Death to America" refrain that is repeated ad nauseum there, he said “It goes without saying that the slogan does not mean death to the American nation; this slogan means death to the US’s policies, death to arrogance.”

A good friend of mine thinks this statement, and the Iranian nuclear deal, mark a turning point. He thinks Islam is beginning to soften, moving into some form of Reformation, and may cease to be the warlike and frequently genocidal belief structure we've all come to know from the news ever since Mohammed became a warlord. He forsees Islam moving out of the 6th century Real Soon Now, coming at least a little closer to modernity.

Maybe my friend is right. Just a few days later I ran across the story of a major Jordanian sheikh, Sheikh Ali Halabi. Halabi is one of the most well-known Salafi sheikhs in Jordan and he is the head of the Imam al-Albani religious studies center in Jordan. He issued a fatwa against killing Jews, a fatwa delivered in a video that was widely distributed through social media. He said Jews may be killed only during a war and that killing them at any other time is a betrayal of Islam.

But there are some contrary indications, things suggesting Islam isn't changing at all.

The 76-year-old ayatollah also said “The slogan ‘death to America’ is backed by reason and wisdom.” He made it clear that the refrain "Death to America" will not leave the Islamic republic’s political lexicon any time soon. He also notes the irrelevance of this year's nuclear deal, saying that relations between Tehran and Washington will not be normalised.

And the sheikh got in trouble, too. His video went viral on social media and, as might be expected, caused a stir in the Muslim world, with activists attacking the sheikh. As a result, he has backtracked on his fatwa. He may be the highest-ranking cleric to try making such a statement, but he's just as likely to be killed for making it as the lesser clerics who have tried. Apparently being one of the top authorities of the religion isn't enough protection from the religion's adherents. Apparently those adherents aren't actually required to follow the fatwas issued by the authorities, in spite of everything we've been told for years / decades / centuries. Perhaps this was just another instance of Islamic taqiyya — another Islamic lie.

The bottom line: Islam isn't changing. It will continue to be characterized by the Muslim Brotherhood, the Iranian theocracy, and the Islamic State.

No More Pork

The Washington Post reports that

The nation’s pork producers are in an uproar after the federal government abruptly removed bacon, pork chops, pork links, ham and all other pig products from the national menu for 206,000 federal inmates.

The bureau "said the decision was based on a survey of prisoners’ food preferences: They just don’t like the taste of pork."

I call bullshit on the Obama Administration's Bureau of Prisons. Who doesn't like ham and bacon? Maybe sausage and pork chops, too? No one. But those who avoid them for religious reasons deny themselves these pleasures.

The Bureau of Prisons admits as much. The same story notes that "the prison menu had added an 'economically viable' turkey bacon substitute." Even though turkey bacon is a very poor substitute for real bacon, that menu change is an admission the inmates really do like the taste of bacon and don't want it removed from their menus.

It's worth noting that the only ones cheering this decision are those like Ibrahim Hooper in the propaganda arm of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). CAIR styles itself "the country's largest Muslim civil rights advocacy group." CAIR's statement said "We welcome the change because it’s facilitating the accommodation of Muslim inmates."

But there was always an accommodation of Muslim (and other) inmates who chose not to eat pork products. There were always alternative food choices for them. Now there are no choices.

Only Muslims would not only avoid pork products themselves, but would insist that no one else be allowed to have them. I guess they figure that, without the coercion, most of their fellow religionists would be enjoying their ham & bacon & sausage. Once again, Islam without coercion is empty — worthless — a nothing-burger.

The Myopic Administration

A young Muslim boy dismantled an old digital clock, reworked it a little, and scared the crap out of folks at his school. Because he's a Muslim, this got him an invitation from the White House and a claim that the response to his device was an example of Islamophobia. (Frankly, I'm not sure Islamophobia really exists. Truth and reality are defenses.) This summarizes the problem:

This is just part of a broader general issue. The Obama Administration is willfully blind to a lot of stuff.

Even that isn't the whole story. The past six years shows the White House world view is like this:

Why President Obama has this world view is unknown. And I don't really care. My question is more like this:

If they're coming here because they want part of what we have built and the life we live, and if they're willing to assimilate, they should be welcomed. If they're here to infiltrate and/or invade and/or conquer us, they have to be stopped, rejected, and sent back. We cannot let them turn this country into the kind of place they came here to escape.

Does This Sound Familiar?

There is a city named Urfa, a regional commercial center in southeast Turkey not far from the Syrian border. It seems an ordinary enough place for the Middle East. But it hides a secret history. And it hides it very well indeed.

The fact is that the town's appearance is an accident of history, created in the twelfth century when Turkish Moslems took the city, dispersed the Christian population, and wiped out every feature of Christian civilization. For below the tightly packed houses and shops that comprise modern Urfa, under the name Edessa, was one of the famed cities of Christendom. In those days it attracted Christian pilgrims from more than a thousand miles away. It bristled with some three hundred churches and monasteries. In its surrounding cave tombs, now dung-smelling and desolate, lived a population of thousands of hermits and monks, many shunning bread, meat, and wine and leading "so extraordinary a life that it can scarcely be described."
          from The Shroud of Turin by Ian Wilson,
          revised edition, 1979, page 127.

Does this sound familiar? The time was the twelfth century, but it's the same thing that's happening today. It's what ISIS — the so-called Islamic State — is doing now in the regions they have captured in Syria and Iraq. They are destroying Christian churches with dynamite and bulldozers. They are doing the same with the houses of worship belonging to Jews, Yazidis, and any other non-Muslim group. They are killing or enslaving everyone they can get their hands on that were associated with those places.

There is a common thread in these actions. The ISIS fanatics, like their ideological forbears, want to destroy anything and everything that came before them and their way of thinking and belief. Thus, they are destroying libraries and museums all over Iraq and Syria, including the large ones in Mosul. They are committing crimes against humanity, destroying historic sites including Nimrud (see here, too), Hatra, and Ninevah, as well as the Assyrian capital of Khorsabad. They have also destroyed Jonah's Tomb and a number of other religious tombs and shrines. The same things will probably now happen in Palmyra in Syria.

The ISIS destructive impulse is being applied to more than just pre-Muslim and non-Muslim sites. It also applies to anything that is not part of their particular flavor of Islam. That's because "ISIS is part of a puritanical strain of Islam that considers all religious shrines — Islamic, Christian, Jewish, etc. — idolatrous." So, in addition to anything non-Muslim, they are destroying sites belonging to every group except — as I already noted — their particular flavor of Islam, whether Sufi or Shia or Sunni or anything else. And it has bigger plans for the future — Rome, of course, and the pyramids of Egypt (pre-Islam, non-Muslim) as well as Islam's most sacred mosque (and the Ka'aba) in Mecca. In essence, ISIS seems intent on demonstrating that its members are incapable of moving up to become members of the human race.

But this is not new. As the quotation at the top of this posting attests, Muslim groups have exhibited this kind of behavior for centuries, including the total destruction of Edessa and the ideology-based vandalism in the royal palace (dating from India's Mughal period) at Fatehpur Sikri in India to name just two. The current barbarian set — the Muslim Brotherhood, Taliban, al Qaeda, and Islamic State — are historically recent, but this kind of uncivilized Islamic behavior goes straight back to the time of Mohammed.

ISIS et al. proclaim themselves as fundamentalists. They say they are going back to the original Islam, but it seems to be more like Islam 2.0 — the second version of Islam. The original Islam that Mohammed preached in Mecca was peaceful and tolerant. It was only later that the kind of violent and intolerant ideology characteristic of ISIS began to be preached. Did Mohammed succumb to temptation, as suggested here, and change the revelation given him by Allah's angel for an ideology that would bring him wealth and power? Or were the Mohammed of Islam version 1 and the Mohammed of Islam version 2 two different people? If so, that would make the original Mohammed an early victim of identity theft.

Either way, if ISIS really wants to go back to the original Islam, it and its adherents will have to return to Mohammed's original teachings in Mecca, and become civilized human beings instead of the monsters they are today.

What Happened to Islam?

"What happened to Islam?" Azeem Ibrahim uses this question to open his essay for the Chicago Tribune, which has been published online by the Athens (Georgia) Banner-Herald with the headline Wahhabi perversion of Islam sows seeds of terrorism.

Ibrahim argues that

Wahhabism isn’t Islam — it is a cult movement that uses Islamic terminology and has hijacked the religion using petrodollars. In the process, its adherents are killing and maiming more Muslims than people of other faiths . . .

Wahhabism came out of what is now Saudi Arabia in the 18th century, and became the state-supported religion of that country when the current royal family took over.

Ibrahim notes that Wahhabism spawned the Muslim Brotherhood, which in turned spawned both al Qaeda and the Taliban, and states "The global propagation of a doctrine that has been a parent to jihadism impedes counterterrorism efforts."

He has some observations about other religions, as compared with Islam:

All religions have their extremists. Self-described pastor Terry Jones caused an international furor when he threatened to burn the Quran. The Ku Klux Klan has been parading nominally Christian symbols like Bibles and crosses for centuries. But these movements are seen for what they are: cults that appropriate the symbolism and style of a religion for their own amoral ends. Yet when voices like Anwar al-Awlaki, or before him, Osama bin Laden, preach that Islam requires murder — a straight reversal of the truth — their message finds fertile ground.

He wonders why that is, and he asks "How did Islam come to this point?" What may be an answer to Ibrahim's question is here.

Uncontrollable, Irresponsible, Uncivilized

An article in The Telegraph today noted the removal of an artwork from a Paris art exhibition.

The French-Algerian artist, Zoulikha Bouabdellah, withdrew the work from an exhibition in a northern Paris suburb with a large Muslim population after an Islamic group told local authorities it could provoke “uncontrollable, irresponsible incidents”.

Thus, the Islamic group admits that its co-religionists are completely, irredeemably uncivilized.

Look at a small portion of the evidence:

• A rather inoffensive picture showing women's shoes and a small rug would provoke, according to an Islamic group in this instance, “uncontrollable, irresponsible incidents” of violent behavior.
• 
  Satirical cartoons provoke a a group of gunmen to attack a magazine office and murder those inside.
• Milder cartoons published in 2005 produced murderous riots, elsewhere, six months later.
• Damaging, or even disrespecting, a printed item is accepted as justifying execution and murder.
• A simple statement that "I believe in (whatever, not Islam)" is "insulting Islam" — often a capital offense.
• Muslims justify rape in Western countries saying the sight of even a single lock of a woman's hair drives Muslim men to uncontrollable sexual behavior. But note that most of the Muslim world, before the Muslim Brotherhood, clearly didn't believe this — not even in Afghanistan.
                            A scene in pre-Taliban Afghanistan.
  
• Muslims justify "honor killings" for anything that "offends" them — murder is the solution to almost everything. (There is never any honor in such "honor" killings, which are simply unjustifiable common murders.)
• Muslim sects justify the murder of innocents (such as 150 Pakistani schoolchildren) on the grounds that their parents & relatives aren't sufficiently Islamist.
• Muslims believe than anyone leaving Islam must be killed, because it insults Islam and because Mohammed commanded it. Again, murder is the solution to almost everything, just like in any criminal gang.

The examples can go on and on. In short, everything offends these people, and everything drives them to "uncontrollable, irresponsible" behavior. That is, there is none of the self-control that is the hallmark of civilized behavior. These people — these animals — demonstrate by their behavior that they are completely uncivilized.

It's either that or it's all just excuses for uncivilized behavior.

Please feel free to pass on other elements demonstrating uncivilized behavior in the comments.

Bloody Payback Beginning

But the situation in Europe changed all that. It’s difficult to go about business as usual while The Eternally Aggrieved are beginning their bloody payback for imaginary slights.
    — Gates of Vienna

The Charlie Hebdo Cartoons

The latest terrorist outrage is the murders in Paris at the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, and the other related attacks in the Paris area. Like the riots in 2006, this attack was blamed on the publication of "offensive" cartoons. Here are at least some of those cartoons (from here, other Gateway Pundit posts, and elsewhere).

This one doesn't even qualify as a cartoon — no satire or humor or anything. I guess the terrorists are angry that Charlie Hebdo actually printed Mohammed's name.

The words on this one, from 2011, say "100 lashes if you don't die of laughter!"
There were more cartoons in the rest of the issue.

In this one, from 2006, the headline says "Mohammed stressed out by the fundamentalists." and his words say "It's hard to be loved by fools."

Here's the cartoonist's view of what would happen — at the hands of one of Mohammed's followers — if Mohammed returned today.

This one is the most provocative of all the Charlie Hebdo cartoons I've seen. The words say "The Koran is shit. It doesn't stop bullets."
This one looks pretty provocative to me, as well, but I don't know what the words say.

Of course, Charlie Hebdo mocks everybody. It's an equal opportunity insulter.

Its cartoonists even insult themselves.

The man in this one is the former French finance minister, not Mohammed or any Muslim.

All in all, the Charlie Hebdo cartoons seem pretty inoffensive — especially in comparison with some of the cartoons it has printed satirizing other religions, politicians, & etc. They are, however, clearly more offensive than the drawings printed by the Jyllands-Posten newspaper in Denmark in 2005. Just to jog everyone's memories, here they are again.

The 2005 cartoons were really inoffensive — and yet (many of) Europe's Muslim leaders used them to foment riots in many parts of the world, five months after their publication. As I said in 2006, however, "It seems to me that someone was looking for an excuse that could be used to stir up trouble." In part, that was because even the rioters in 2006 agreed that the cartoons were not, themselves, offensive. Even so, they were used to create a lot of problems.

There seem to be a couple of root causes for these kinds of behaviors. (There are probably more, but this is the simplified version.) One is Islam's near-absolute lack of any sense of humor, especially about Islam itself. Like a five year old child, Islam takes itself far too seriously.

The other of these "couple of root causes" is that fundamentalist Muslims — the Islamists — have notoriously thin skins. They are always outraged about something. Perhaps the best comment in this arena, and its dynamics, is still from Daryl Cagle (before the start of his current website).

Probably no one thought the 2005 Danish drawings were of Muhammad until they were told so by their religious leaders. When they were told this, despite the evidence of their own eyes, they rioted. It is the same now as it was then. And isn’t that truly a fitting conclusion for this discussion of the ongoing “cartoon wars”?

Sane Responses to the Paris Terrorist Attacks

Islamic terrorists attacked the offices of the French satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo.

The beginning of The Astute Blogger's response looks like this:

This is clever and cute.

But this is the only thing that will work.

Meanwhile, Citizen Warrior quotes this in his response:

"To honor those who've died for Free Speech," says Bosch Fawstin, "I don't raise my pen up in the air, I put it to paper and draw Mohammad."

"The Islamic State is not Islamic"

President Barack Obama said Wednesday evening that “ISIL is not ‘Islamic.’” He followed that up by saying “No religion condones the killing of innocents.”

And Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) agrees with him.

Let's take a look at this logically.

1. “No religion condones the killing of innocents.”
   
   
2. ISIS — which President Obama calls ISIL — unquestionably does condone such killing. So does al Qaeda. So does Hamas. So does Hezbollah. So does the Taliban. So does the Muslim Brotherhood. So does every major Islamic group. So does the Koran. So did Mohammed.
   
   Therefore, by President Obama's own logic,
3. Islam is not a religion.

That seems clear enough to me.

Fundamentalist Islam Is Recent

Is the claim by fundamentalist Muslims, that they are working to re-establish the original, true Islam — as received by Mohammed — real or a is it a fraud?

Thus, Islamism represents a political ideology that claims to restore the pristine Islam of the 7^th century and indeed appeals to Muslim history and sensibility, but in fact represents something new. As Roy notes, “The illusion held by the Islamic radicals is that they represent tradition, when in fact they express a negative form of westernization.”^{4
        4}Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam, p. 20

Indeed, this claim to be restoring the "original Islam" seems to have developed at the time of the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920's, based on Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi movement (founded by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who was opposed by his own father and brother for his non-traditional interpretation of Islam).

This analysis may be accurate. If so, such an "originalist" cult appears to be a recurring theme within Islam, with the Assassin and Thug cults being its best-recognized predecessors. The new Islamic State is also part of this group. Other Islamic predecessors include the cult responsible for the vandalism long ago in Fatehpur Sikri, India's capital city during part of the Mughal Empire from 1571 to 1585, some of which is pictured here. These cults insisted that images of people and/or animals violate Islamic law, just as the Wahhabis preach. But the cult that vandalized Fatehpur Sikri was not characteristic of the Muslim Mughal Empire, which commissioned the beautiful carvings in their capital city. That cult developed in Afghanistan, just as the very similar Taliban did more recently — and, oddly enough, just as did the much more moderate Mughal Empire. (The Mughal Empire also did not agree with the cults' "convert or die" theology, as shown by the fact that the Emperor in Fatehpur Sikri had three wives — one Muslim, one Hindu, and one Christian.)

There must be a reason this kind of aberration keeps coming up within Islam. The Muslim Brotherhood's extreme version of Islam may be recent, but it represents a recurring theme within this "religion".

History & Moderate Muslims

John Hawkins has written a piece identifying 7 Things Every Moderate Muslim Should Believe. He notes that the actions of Muslims around the world — including "crazed riots over damaged Qurans, terrorists who've murdered people in the name of Allah and violent threats over Muhammad cartoons" — have caused unfair suspicion to fall on all the "good and decent Muslims".

In that article, Hawkins says the following:

But, let's also stop ignoring the obvious fact that the Islamic faith has a large, radical and violent contingent that the world's other great religions don't have. Oh, but what about the Crusades? Well it's true that the Crusades were bloody, violent and directly connected to the Christian faith. However, the last crusade ended more than 700 years ago. That same sort of fanaticism has largely died out in Christianity while it's still alive and kicking in Islam.

That statement is good as far as it goes, but it ignores a lot. What should be noted about the Crusades is this: The Crusades were a response to Islam's invasions — not just of the Holy Land and major parts of Asia and Africa, but also of Europe where Muslim armies conquered Spain and reached as far as Vienna before being stopped. Retaking Jeerusalem may have been the symbol, but stopping the conquest and halting the invasion was the key goal. And it should be noted that it took a long time for the Christians to begin to respond to the Muslim invasion.

Hypersensitivity

Some people will get upset over anything!

Happy New Year!
Enjoy 2013 — it's got to be better than 2012 was!

Netanyahu Made His Point

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to the United Nations, and made clear there was a line Iran's nuclear program must not be allowed to cross.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called this "very hideous behavior".

Netanyahu was actually quite restrained. If he were a bit less diplomatic, he might have made his point a bit more more strongly this way.