Against Islamophobia
by Sean Gabb
(13th September 2016)
This brief essay on the relationship between Islam and violence is inspired by and expands on a comment left earlier today by Keir Martland on the Libertarian Alliance Blog. I will not presume to call it an expression of his own view – though I suspect it largely is. But it does express a view I have held for many years, a view that I feel is worth repeating as often as it becomes relevant.
I am told every so often that Islam is necessarily a religion of terrorism – that a true Moslem has no choice but to accept the rightness of spreading and upholding his faith by violence, and that any Moslem who denounces the murder and oppression of unbelievers is either lying or not a true Moslem. These declarations of alleged orthodoxy generally come from people who are unable to read The Koran in Arabic, and who are unfamiliar with the two million hadith, or sayings and doings of the Prophet, which are variously binding on the faithful, and who have not made themselves aware of the different schools of interpretation of these foundation texts, and who have only a nodding acquaintance with the multiplicity of sects that have arisen within Islam over the past fourteen hundred years. Usually, they come from people who have not read the whole of The Koran in English. Their ignorance, even so, is matched by the certainty they bring to what they say about the nature of “true” Islam.
Rather than take issue with these factual claims, let me shorten the argument by discussing our own religion. A Christian is minimally defined as someone who believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ, whose coming was prophesied in the Old Testament and whose life and teachings are to be found in the New Testament. This definition being stated, there is much else in dispute. Is Christ one with the Father, or like unto the Father? Has He a dual or a single nature? Is The Bible the only source of authority, or is it supplemented by, or co-ordinate with, church tradition? If it is the only source of authority, are we to believe that the universe is six thousand years old, and that the value of π = 3, or are we to apply some scheme of interpretation? Is the Pope vested with the keys to heaven, and infallible in matters of dogma? Or is he only the first among the Patriarchs? Or are popes and patriarchs and bishops, and all else not explicitly endorsed in the Gospels or the Letters of St Paul, absolutely illegitimate? Are we obliged to kill witches, or should we follow our reason and deny their existence? Are we to burn heretics, or are we to call them “separated brethren”? Are we able to choose good or evil of our own free choice, or is all predestined? Are kings by God anointed, and to be obeyed in all things? Or have we inalienable rights that we are justified in using violence to defend?
These are the questions that come immediately to mind. There are many others. The answer to all of them is open to argument. I have friends who believe that their answers are the absolute and obvious truth, even if there are only fifty people on earth who agree with them. Looking, however, at the generality of Christians, the practical consensus is that, adherence to the minimal definition being given, Christianity is whatever Christians believe. John Locke was a Christian, and so was Torquemada. So was Martin Luther. So was Pope Innocent III. So is the Patriarch of Moscow, and so is Justin Welby.
I turn back to Islam. There are Moslems who smoke, and Moslems who shoot smokers. There are Moslems who wear short dresses, and Moslems who circumcise their daughters. There are Moslems – in Iran, for example – who have given themselves functioning representative democracies. There are Moslems who think it right to live under absolute monarchies. There are Moslems who blow themselves up in coffee bars, and Moslems who run coffee bars. There are over a billion of them, and they have been around for over a millennium. Their theologians have been almost as clever as ours, and just as soaked in Aristotle. You stand up as an outsider, ignorant of the libraries of exegesis that go into the average tract, and tell any Moslem what he is obliged to believe, and you will get – and deserve – at least an impatient frown.
We are told that Moslems are hand-chopping misogynists who persecute Christians and throw homosexuals off tall buildings. Some of them are. But judge not lest ye be judged. Under a law of Henry VIII, poisoners were to be fried in molten lead. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, women who murdered their husbands were burned alive. In France until the Revolution, the normal mode of execution was breaking on the wheel, and blasphemers were roasted to death over slow fires. Judicial torture was common throughout Europe before the 1780s.
In traditionalist Islamic states, Christians have been subject to legal discrimination, and have had to pay special taxes to be left alone. We are supposed to raise our eyes in horror. Well, in Christian states, until a few hundred years ago, it was considered a duty of the secular power to uphold one view of Christianity, and to persecute anyone who dissented. One of the many reasons why the Islamic conquest of Syria and Egypt was so complete and final in the seventh century was that their overwhelmingly Christian populations could no longer be bullied from Constantinople into accepting the canons of the Council of Chalcedon on the dual nature of Christ. One of the reasons why Hungary has a large Protestant minority today, and Slovakia has none, is that the Turks ruled Hungary until the Austrians had given up on religious persecution, and the Austrians ruled Slovakia throughout the Counter-Reformation.
The hijab is, no doubt, an inconvenient form of dress. But I doubt it is so constrictive and unhealthy as the corsetry and mass of petticoats that European women were expected to wear until just over a hundred years ago. And, if corsets and petticoats are not prescribed by any religious text, it was not unusual for Christian ministers of religion to denounce the more comfortable female attires that came into fashion after the Great War. Equally, the hijab does not appear to be prescribed in The Koran. It is a Greek and Syrian custom that has been associated with Islam, and has never been universally followed in Islam.
I go further. Until the 1880s in England, married women had no separate legal personality. On her marriage, Jane Jones became Mrs John Smith. Any property she held at the time of her marriage was automatically conveyed into her husband’s possession, and the law gave no regular protection if he promptly stripped her naked and left her in the gutter. I am not sure if traditional Islam is better than this, but doubt if it is greatly worse.
Where homosexuals are concerned, I was born into a country where men were routinely locked away for having sex with each other. I was nearly thirty when two men were arrested for kissing each other at a bus stop in Oxford Street. Traditional Islamic societies have been notoriously more tolerant in these matters, and with at least some religious support.
We have two great advantages over Islam. The first is that, in every European state, and wherever Europeans have settled, there has been a tendency towards consultative government. There have been periods of despotic rule, but these are the historical exception. Even the Roman Empire was largely a confederation of city states, negotiating with the central authorities. The second is our scientific and technical progress. These advantages placed us ahead of all other civilisations after our earliest emergence from barbarism, and our consistent use of the inductive method, since the seventeenth century, has placed us in a position of unique wealth and power in the world.
But, if no Islamic civilisation has matched us in these things, that is because Europeans may have certain advantages over all other peoples. Assume ourselves out of existence, and Islam automatically moves into first place in terms of relatively less despotic government and a relatively less stagnant technology. Another reason the Christians of Syria and Egypt settled so easily under Islamic rule was that the new tax gatherers were for a long time less rapacious than the old.
I will not say that the House of Islam was ever paradise on earth. But it has often compared well with Christendom, and has been better than all the other civilisations – not excepting classical paganism. The idea that Islam is some kind of religious virus that turns human beings into suicide bombers is an absurdity on the most casual acquaintance with the historical record.
The problem we face is not Islam. It is mass-immigration from the third world. The arrival among us of large numbers of people radically different from ourselves in their ways and appearance is destroying free constitutions all across the West. Mixed populations can only be kept at peace by unaccountable and vastly empowered ruling classes that regard themselves as detached from those over whom they rule.
And the enemy in this process is not the immigrants. Some of them are human trash who make trouble because they are trash. Many of them are essentially decent people who, but for their ineradicable difference of appearance, might blend in among us to our common profit. The enemy is our own ruling class who allowed these people to settle among us, and who have made it a crime to try avoiding them or to complain about their presence.
All this being said, I reject the Islamophobia now fashionable in our movement. I regard traditional Islam as a most admirable civilisation – inferior on the whole to our own, but admirable all the same. My view is that our present difficulties could be easily settled, and to general satisfaction. Part of the deal is that our government should stop invading and bombing their countries. And, if I prefer to leave the other parts unsaid, it is not because I am worried that someone with a beard will murder me in the street.
Islam is not our enemy.
I don’t agree with many of the details and assumptions of the essay, such as your latitudinarianism on matters of doctrine and liturgy, your belief in representative democracy, your almost evident disdain for absolute monarchy, and your rather positive view of the Reformation. Even so, I am glad that you made sure to criticise Christendom rather than Christianity.
However, the essay in its generality is indeed an expression of my own view. I might also have tackled the view in the essay held by many libertarians that Muslims qua Muslims are “invading” “the West.” This is not the case. Those Muslim immigrants whose countries we haven’t bombed out of existence (and therefore who have to come and settle somewhere, and they will naturally go to the most welcoming and richest country then can easily get to, which is often England at present) our own ruling class has invited to come. And they don’t come as Muslims, they come as Pakistanis or Bangladeshis or Africans, and the problems they bring are Pakistani or Bangladeshi or African problems.
Unlike Keir I do agree with almost every word you write here Sean. As an atheist it has long been my view that, accepting that I consider all religions rather ridiculous, there is nothing inherently less civilised about Islam than there is about Christianity.
In many ways I am sorry either existed because of the way they have been used to cause harm to millions of innocent people. But at the same time I am forced to accept that civilisation itself seems to need some form of organised belief system to allow it to grow and flourish and I am not at all sure the world would be a better place if neither Chartres Cathedral nor the Nasir Al-Mulk Mosque had never existed.
I am reminded that it was a devout Christian sanctioned by the Pope who is purported to have uttered those infamous words “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.”
I’ve never understood the irrational hatred of Islam by some people on the right. It opposes homosexuality, usury, Zionism, and tells women to keep their mouths shut. What is so bad about that?
http://news.wikinut.com/The-Truth-About-Islam-In-The-West/36z809ky/
The reaction against Islam may be exaggerated and inappropriately applied, but it’s not “irrational”. It stems from a general awareness that a) the Islamic METHOD of opposing homosexuals, zionists, women, etc. is often to repress, punish and kill them cruelly; and b) that they too fall into the category of opposable, repressible, punishable and killable people. In that respect, “terrorism”seems to have accomplished at least one of its goals — creating a social atmosphere dominated by fear.
LA needs an “editing” function for its comment boards. — “they too” should be “the Rightists themselves”, for clarity’s sake.
Why are Christian countries from hundreds of years ago being used to justify what is currently going on in ME Moslem countries? Are you saying Moslem country’s are stuck in the Middle Ages?
Thanks for the thoughtful essay, Sean. Regarding the rights of married women, you say, “I am not sure if traditional Islam is better than this, but doubt if it is greatly worse.” Actually it is great deal better. Muslim women do not take their husband’s name and retain full title to whatever property they bring into the marriage as well as what they may earn during the marriage. Since most married women historically have not worked outside the home, the husband is required to bear all costs of the household expenses (except what the wife may choose to contribute as a gift) and the groom must give the bride a (usually cash) gift in the amount of the bride’s choosing. This gift is in two parts, the first payable on marriage and the second upon divorce or death of the husband. (The bride also chooses how the installments are divided.)
Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, Ph.D.
Minaret of Freedom Institute
http://www.minaret.org
The problem with Islam, as with all religions, is that they are certain they are right and when you give real believers power they tend to try to deny all the things we appreciate like freedom of thought, speech, movement, association etc.
That being said, Islam has a problem with the moderates being able to convince the more hard line people to ease up a bit. In Christianity you had the example of meek and mild Jesus but in Islam you have the warrior prophet Mohammed. They both have their good and bad points, but it’s harder to convince people to kill for Christianity using Jesus as an example than to convince a Muslim to kill for Islam using Mohammed as an example, not that people haven’t tried and succeeded with both.
Islamophobia is fine, as long as you also have Christophobia and indeed a phobia of any religion that wants to take power away from an ostensibly secular state. But being afraid of Muslims in general is dumb.
It’s easy to find bloodthirsty verses in both faiths (Quran 2:191, Quran 4:89; Deuteronomy 13:15, Numbers 31:17-18), and the “scholars” can bark at each other as to which is the most sanguine (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124494788). It all depends upon which sect/philosophy/theologians/cranks are in ascendancy at any given time, “interpreting” scripture to their needs.
Nearly everyone would agree that all religions cherry-pick verses to suit their more sublunary goals. And since they do, by what standard is it done? By reason, as each sees it. Cite C.S. Lewis or Sayyid Qutb as you please, unless someone produces a ghost whispering in the ears of these or any others of their ilk, reason (however twisted) inescapably decides.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, Sean, your suggestion — regardless of its dubious “truth value” — is practically useful. Since we have never seen the invisible world that these divines pretend to see, let’s just pay them in this worthless coin of their own mintage… — and keep the door firmly shut against them.
The level of self-deception in this article and many of the comments is off the scale. And trawling back through the centuries in a pathetic attempt to excuse today’s barbarians smacks of something even worse.
“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”
Winston S Churchill
The idea that we are responsible for the chaos in the Middle East, Somalia, Eritrea and Nigeria etc – bombed them out of existence – is nonsense. They are responsible for killing their own. We, perhaps inadvisably, decided to topple Saddam and Gaddafi etc. and have no idea what to do about Syria.
As to violence, in 2004 Prince Charles tried to persuade the Moslem Council of Great Britain to forswear death to apostates etc, but teh leaders would not. Policy Exchange, in its paper “Living
Apart together”, found 36% of UK Moslems between the ages of 16 and 25 along with 19% of those over the age of 55 believe apostates should be executed. The Economist in “Show who’s boss” reports the American pollster , Pew, as finding 75% of those from Egypt, Pakistan and Jordan believing the same.
One extreme option may be to require all Moslems to sign a holy declaration forswearing such things with refusal leading to repatriation to land of ancestors. However, that would not prevent the segregation, which has happened naturally.. Meanwhile the differential birth rates suggest that, within a few generations, those of European descent will be a minority in the lands of their ancestors, let alone the able who tend to have the fewest children.
I am with Charles G and Paul Withrington. Sadly and unusually I find Sean and Keir’s arguments artificial and totally unpersuasive.
Drawing comparisons with awful regimes and periods, whether the Christian Crusades, Genghis Khan, or Hitler’s Germany generates more red herrings than useful insights.
More telling, to my mind, is the fact that (a) no Moslem country does even moderately well in any international assessment of individual freedom and most do very badly indeed; (b) multiple polls indicate that very significant proportions of Muslims are in favour of killing those who wish to leave the Muslim faith; and (c) it appears that a large proportion of Muslims think that the events of 9/11 were praiseworthy.
Islamophobia is entirely understandable and “the West” is entitled to feel quite proud of the generally low levels of Islamophobia in all Western countries.
I haven’t said that I welcome the Islamic presence in the West, only that they aren’t that bad in their own part of the world, and that they should be left alone.
[…] By Sean Gabb […]
They can do what the Hell they like in their own countries.
Not over here.
None would be the ideal number but:
no more migrants,
*no more UK re-unions,
*Benefits for only 1 woman and 2 kids and Housing benefit to house exactly that many
*loss of the vote
Islamic marriages recognised and bigamy laws strictly applied–I wife only
No more mosques/halal or Sharia courts “voluntary” or not
that should prevent demographic takeover and show we are serious about having no more violent antics.
To that I would add:
• Each immigrant must have a sponsor who must post a significant bond for that immigrant.
• If the immigrant commits a misdemeanor, a percentage of the bond is forfeit;
• if he commits a felony, a very large percentage of the bond is forfeit;
• if he commits rape, murder, or arson, the entire bond is forfeit and the sponsor is deported.
“No more Sharia courts”?
So you’d also be in favour of getting rid of the Jewish family courts, Beth Din?
And employment tribunals?
And transfer tribunals?
And…
English law states that any third party can be agreed by two sides to arbitrate in a dispute. I am absolutely no fan of getting religion involved in any dispute, but if people want to go down that route then, as long as they are fully informed of the alternatives, then who the heck are you or I to stop them?
Excellent column. To me it seems clear that institutional “Christianity” is every bit as bad, or worse, than institutional Islam. It is, after all “Christian” America that is running around the world murdering innocents in the name of “fighting terrorism”, instead of minding its own business.
I’m baffled, though, by this:
“The arrival among us of large numbers of people radically different from ourselves in their ways and appearance is destroying free constitutions all across the West. Mixed populations can only be kept at peace by unaccountable and vastly empowered ruling classes that regard themselves as detached from those over whom they rule.”
Surely this is over-stated. Isn’t it true, for example, that in both Iraq and Iran (before the West stuck its big fat nose in), Christian and Jewish minorities lived in peace among Muslim majorities?
Only at peace under despotic rule. One of the reasons democracy doesn’t work there is that politics become a proxy for group conflict.
I do not think the murder of Christians and Jew can be blamed on the American’s or us. The overwheming majority of Mosems in those countries believe apostates should be executed. Arround 25% of those in the UK believe the same. I comment, we simply cannot have people wondering about with potential murder in their hearts.
Christian brutaily of the past is no excuse, although “Israel” poses a problem.
The term “Islamophobia” is an anti-concept i.e. “an unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept. The use of anti-concepts gives the listeners a sense of approximate understanding. But in the realm of cognition, nothing is as bad as the approximate…” – Ayn Rand.
This particular anti-concept owes much to the propaganda efforts of the notorious dhimmified Jew, and “anti-racism” campaigner Richard Stone:
http://islamversuseurope.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/origins-of-term-islamophobia-in-english.html
Personally, I find the term deeply offensive.
Laudable sentiments by Sean but regrettably they belong in that other world of fantasy not this one. The West and its advanced civilisation is at ever closer risk from the demographic time bomb. I beleive that the birthrate of Muslims in the Uk runs at around 4:1 of natives. It can all be over for the Non Muslims here by perhaps 2075……
Quite so. In Europe the birth rate among those of European descent is roughly 1.5 per couple. Hence, after four generations that population collapses by 70%. If the others have three per couple theirs expands by a factor of five. Worse still, our able have the fewest children, which is why Professor Richard Lynn believes we have lost 5 to 8 points from the inherited IQ since Victorian times. If its only 5 points we have halve the proportion with IQs above 130…..
Thank you ,Paul. I was not aware of this factor……..
It’s the elephant in the room – funny if the human species eventually goes extinct because of the ease of contraception. There is roughly a one in fortieth chance that the species has had 97.5% of its life and a one in fortieth chance that it has only had 2,5% of its life. So there is a 1/40 chance we will be gone in e.g. 150.000 divided by 40 = 3,750 years.
Where does the 1 in 40th constant arise from, Paul?
Sean is teasing when he talks about the lot of MARRIED women in England [ while craftily omitting the freedom of unmarried women in England or the sequestration of females in Islam] or comparing the Koran to the New Testament [ while omitting the Sira ] or discussing a Western culture which has historically accepted the Law of Identity and the corollary of non-contradiction [ with a culture that flatly rejects it ] etc. – it’s how Sean likes to amuse himself today – by comparing an ant to an elephant and pretending they a similar in order to receive the acclamation of idiots.
But Sean is surely right in the main thrust of his argument – it is our own rulers who have brought this upon us and we cannot blame the Muslims, for whatever else they are, they have been quite candid in their intentions:
So, basically, in order to oppose “Islamophobia” (i.e. the traditional view of all European people, and I’ll wager all people who has come into contact with Islam, before 1960), we find British Libertarianism’s primary defender of traditional values launch into a full SJW rant, replete with randomly strewn factoids about how sexiss’ and homophobic Christendom was. I thought I was reading Vox for a bit.
That said, one can only agree with the author that (a) Islam is only a problem in as much as Muslims are being allowed to immigrate in unprecedented numbers and (b) that the people to blame for this are primarily western non-Muslim elites.
So, that point given, we are only arguing about details, but not, I think, trivial ones and I will list them.
1) The historical record does not show that all immigration is equally destabilizing of society (and thus stabilizing of the police state). I will not use the usual example of the Jews because in my view Jewish immigration to Britain has been a massive net negative (if it helps, I’m a Jew). However, let’s take the Chinese. Is there any serious person who would claim that Chinese immigration to Britain has been as damaging as Muslims immigration? After Rotherham? Really?
2) Now let’s take the implicit racialist argument of the author and his defenders, namely that the problem with Muslim immigrants isn’t that they are Muslim, it’s that they are Pastun/Somali/Arab (don’t worry, water off a duck’s back to me). Isn’t is interesting, just a little, that Islam is almost solely the majority religion among low IQ, high time preference races that can’t get their act together?
3) Even if we acknowledge the strength of the racialist argument argument and ascribe the correlation between Islam and low functioning peoples to historical chance, the facts of the matter seem to show that, after a history of Communism, Islam is the largest factor that makes countries underperform relative to their IQ. (Granted these statistics are based on GDP making any mathematical modelling useless, but I have yet to see any analytical work that shows that Muslim countries are doing better than the numbers suggest. Moreover, once you take out the Emirates, which are not really Muslim majority countries at all, then the Islamic world picture looks even worse)
4) The author’s view that Islamic civilization has the status of honourable runner up too Christendom/the West is pretty dubious. First, who are we comparing it to? Illiterate tribesman in Africa or the Antipodes? American civilizations of which we know almost nothing? That leaves the great civilizations of the Far East, which I certainly rate a great deal higher than the House of Islam. Secondly,my reading, and not just mine, of Islamic history is that its great moments (Golden age Spain, Golden Age Baghdad) all occurred in places where already functioning civilizations were colonized by a majority Muslim elite who were generally tolerant and utilized the talents of their subject populations rather than slaughtering them. The subsequent trend was civilizational decline as the countries became progressively Islamicised. That’s the best case example. The result when the conquering elite were serious about Islam is much worse. Is there a counter example of a country that became more prosperous and cultured, the more Islamicised it became?
5) One really can’t avoid the issue that Mohammed as described in Muslim sources appears to have been one of the most loathsome characters in history. Ignore the killing, which, as you say, we can just as well pin on Moses, what’s with all the treachery, lying and inane peasant babble? Plus, couldn’t someone have slipped a Bromide or two in his coffee? Yeesh. And to make matters worse, it’s quite possible he didn’t exist, or at least not as portrayed, and so the early Muslims could have made up whatever they wanted about him, yet they chose to portray him as a degenerate gangster con-artist. Weird, really.
6) I’m no defender of the Iraq war or any of the West’s post 9/11 interventions, but the fact remains that the Islamic world was a mess, and getting worse, before 9/11. When this obvious fact is pointed out, SJWs and their (thankfully shrinking I believe) alt-right echo chamber start vaguely whining about “interference”. What country in the 20th century was not interfered with by America, or the Soviet Union, or China, or all three and more besides? Enough of this. We are at war in the Islamic world because it is dysfunctional and spews out its dysfunction, not the other way round. That we poured gasoline on the fire doesn’t excuse their building a wooden house with 34 fireplaces and no fireproofing.
7) Finally, the author’s agenda is, I think, confused. The enemy class/Cathedral tell lies. Of all their lies, the most whopping and impossible to swallow right now happens to be the lie that Islamic immigration is enriching western countries. Sure, they are happy to admit that there is an extremist minority that threatens our way of life and requires a police state to stop it, but the rest is great. The obvious retort is Islamophobia: there is no such thing as extremist Islam, Islam sucks. Islamophobia is, right now, the primary engine of opposition to the ruling class. Now, the author wants to advance a more subtle argument: Islam is fine, but Islamic immigration is not. We’ll observe, first, that this is already conceding half the argument to the ruling class and, secondly, that while his position is certainly more subtle, it doesn’t really seem any more true. The motivation of the author seems to be a worry that Islamophobia will lead to more intervention in the Middle East. If so, this is just a comprehension failure. Blair and Bush were (are) Islamophiles; the whole project to bring Democracy to the Middle East doesn’t even make sense if we were to entertain the possibility that Islam might, actually, suck. The unfortunate fact is that the even more fanatical Islamophilia of the anti-War Left helped Neocons mobilize essentially Islamophobic right-wing public sentiment into an Islamophilic war. (Given how the Neocons have subsequently fallen into line with Hillary, one is half tempted to say the whole thing was a set up.) Granted, this is something to be wary of, but it doesn’t change the basic dynamic: Islamophilia is enemy class propaganda, Islamophobia is resistance to it.
Bravely said. As in mine far above, if they will not forswear death to apostates and similar, they should return to the lands of their ancestors, see Policy Exchange, living apart together, – dreadful numbers there, and the Economist’s Who’s the Boss – Pew poster finds 75% of those from Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan believe apostates should be executed. We simply cannot have people wondering about the place with murder in tier hearts..
Arab monarchies DON’T take in refugees:
http://www.dw.com/en/arab-monarchies-turn-down-syrian-refugees-over-security-threat/a-19002873
Arab monarchies DO take in refugees:
http://www.newsweek.com/gulf-states-are-taking-syrian-refugees-401131
How to reconcile the two contradictory accounts? Notice that the “DO take in” story from Newsweek carefully (a) redefines the definition of “refugees,” (b) selects the most favorable range of years, (c) tweaks the source for numbers (adding extended families of current workers vs. acceptance of new refugees), and (d) questions the “official” numbers.
Short story, which is NOT in dispute: The Arab monarchies, unlike the West, are not about to commit philanthropic suicide.
The Terrible Truth about moderate Islam straight from the horse’s mouth:
Thanks for that link to that video clip. It should be seen, listened to and digested by as many people as possible, but especially by those who sing the song of the Moderate Moslem Majority.
How can that be even partially achieved when all the major national news channels are so totally committed to the MMM?
Anyone who calls himself a libertarian should see Islam as a threat to liberty in the same manner he sees socialism as a danger to freedom. Yes, there are many socialists who are really decent people (my dad is a socialist) and I’ve had close relationships with a number of Muslims (my former boss is a Muslim), however that doesn’t change the fact that they are following a dangerous ideology whichever way you cut it.
What people don’t seem to get about Islam is that it is inherently political and supremacist. Open up any page in the Quran and all you’ll find is ‘god is great, disbelievers burn in hell, god is great, Mohammed is his messenger, disbelievers will be thrown into the fire’.
The Quran instructs Muslims to follow Mohammed as an example of the perfect man. If you look at the long list of atrocities Mohammed committed throughout his life, it’s hard to imagine how a cult that has been created around him can do anything good other than avoid living like him.
Your point about only reading the Quran in English and not Arabic sounds like an argument parroted from someone else. Are translators really that bad that the 109 verses in the Quran that speak of war with nonbelievers really means something else? Maybe just half were mistranslated?