We "celebrate" 9/11

Tomorrow, at Ryerson University, in the heart of Toronto, a weekend lecture series will kick off under the auspices of the Al-Fauz Institute of Islamic Thought. The AFIIT is a new player in the game of educating young Muslims in Toronto. The series is called, From Caliphs to Kings, the rise and fall of the Muslim ummah.

Its guest lecturer for this series is a British-based, Palestinian-born academic, Dr. Azzam Timimi, who, according to writer Terry Glavin, in The National Post, is an unabashed supporter of suicide bombing, Hamas, the Taliban, etc. Glavin spoke to the folks at AFIIT, who disavowed knowledge of Timimi's political views. You can read Glavin’s columns here and here.

I looked at the AFIIT site and it contained two videos of Dr. Timimi lecturing in Britain in September of last year. He didn’t engage in any of the pro-violence stuff that Glavin writes about, but he still had some disturbing messages – disturbing to this Canadian.

In the first video he gives a very white-washed view of how Islam spread from Arabia. I shouldn’t be too critical of this, since President Obama gave his misdirected Cairo speech and did very much same thing. However, Dr. Timimi is here to guide young Canadian Muslims, so I will critique him.

In reference to Palestine, for example, which he acknowledged was part of the Christian Byzantine Empire, he talked about how Islam was welcomed by the people because it brought justice – something he claims they didn’t have.

I don’t know enough about that place and that time under the Byzantine Empire to be able to confirm or deny what Timimi says about the level of justice enjoyed by the non-Arabs, but after the Arabs arrived there are definitely some things they didn’t have. Wives no longer had husbands because they were slaughtered. Husbands who escaped no longer had wives or children because they were carted back to Arabia and sold as slaves. Property that was once owned by Christians and Jews (the majority of the residents) then became the property of the Muslims who supplanted them. Much of the early spread of Islam had to do with Arabs carrying out commerce in the old style – stealing and killing.

He talks about the spread of Islam to India in the most benign language. He left out of the description the fact that Muslim invaders butchered more than one million Hindus and Buddhists and razed thousands of temples.

He starts his lecture by referring to the word minority as being a bad thing. Later he admits that minorities are well protected by laws in liberal democracies.

He pretends that minorities under Islam were protected and treated with respect, and that there were no problems with them continuing worship in the religion of their choice. In fact, they were protected only in so far as they paid a protection tax to the Muslim rulers, and they weren’t permitted to build new houses of worship or openly worship outside of those houses. There were a number of other restrictions that made it clear that in Islamic societies non-Muslims were clearly second-class citizens. And people with no religion, or no religion recognized by Islam, did not have even that status.

I hope some less than bedazzled young Muslim attending these lectures this weekend asks the good doctor why it is that millions of Muslims can live on equal terms and openly practice their religion in predominately Christian-based, secular western societies, but there are very few Christians and even fewer Jews to be found in Muslim countries, and those numbers are rapidly declining?

Timimi made it quite clear in the second video that he does not see Muslims integrating with western secular societies. He claims Muslims are principally disliked because they are part of a global ummah and this transcends geographical and national boundaries. He depicts western society as if it has a Gestapo-complex regarding Muslims – referring to the knock on the door in the middle of the night.

His lecture must have been given before the trial of the airline plotters, because he claimed that everyone of them was innocent. In fact, three of them were convicted, but not for conspiracy to destroy airplanes over the Atlantic.

Finally, the dead giveaway for me was a reference he made to “celebrating” the anniversary of 9/11.

Only a jihad supporter would use a term like that.

The one really honest thing Timimi said was that there was a war going on with Islam. Not that there is a war going on with people who claim to be Islamic but are not really representative of Islam, as the U.S. and British governments try to pretend, but with Islam -- period, full-stop, no qualifications, no obfuscations.

I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect.

UPDATE TO POSTING BELOW

Jihad Watch reports that for the first time in the United States somebody has been arrested for handing out Christian literature to Muslims.


There is a festival starting today in Dearborn, Michigan. It is the 14th annual Arabic International Festival. It claims to draw 300,000 participants from all over the United States and Canada.

Here is its website.

Notice the list of sponsors to the left of the festival description. How cool is it to have the FBI and the CIA sponsor your festival? That’s like having a delegation of Mounties greeting a planeload of Polish tourists.

Why Dearborn?

Apparently, 30% of the population of that city is Arabic. And, of course, the majority of those people are Muslim by religious affiliation. But, you know, the U.S. is multicultural and free. It is the world’s melting pot of immigrants and foreign creeds. There is no problem with a predominately Muslim-attended festival being held in a country that so vigorously practices Christianity.

You would think.

But apparently not.

A California-based evangelical church, the Arab Christian Perspective, which specializes in proselytizing Muslims of Arabic ethnicity has been denied the right to wander around and hand out Christian literature. It has been doing this for five years at the Dearborn festival, but this year, in the alleged interest of “crowd control”, the authorities decided that this group should be confined to a booth at the outer edges of the festival. It is the only attendee that has been restricted in this fashion.

Under Islamic law, Christians may practice their religion provided they do not do so in your face, so to speak. They must keep a low profile and must not offend Muslims. They must not distribute Christian literature to Muslims. This is the rule in countries where Islam reigns supreme. It is known as dhimmitude – second class citizenship, if you will.

Is this what President Obama meant when he said in Cairo the United States was turning a new page and respecting Islam? He is one smart cookie, knowing how local politicians will be prepared to sacrifice the U.S. Constitution to curry votes.

Goodbye tolerance. Goodbye religious freedom. Goodbye free expression. Goodbye equal rights under the law. Hello dhimmitude and a big, hearty welcome to the United States. I think you are really going like it here. After all, President Barack Hussein Obama has declared it to be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.

By the way, did Obama mention any of this Islamic stuff when he was running for the Democratic nomination and then the Presidency?

Mama always said, "Stupid is as stupid does." Why pick on Scientology?

A story today indicates that Scientology, the so-called religion invented by British science fiction writer, L. Ron Hubbard in 1954, is about to go on trial in France as being a fraudulent organization. You can read the details at this website, but one thing struck me as a cop-out.

It is the allegation that the adult complainants who were fleeced for hundreds of thousands of dollars were “vulnerable”, as defined by psychologists. This puts them in the same category as 6-week old kittens and 5-year old children, as well as 80-year old seniors suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Surely, fully-formed adults, lacking brain tumors or serious alcohol and drug addictions cannot be classified the same way.

Where does vulnerability leave off and stupidity start?

If I am a guy who believed Bernie Madoff’s promises about much “better than market” financial returns and ended up losing everything, does society immediately brand me as “vulnerable” or was I just made stupid by giving into my greedy instincts. I am sure the latter.

So why do people who were taken to the cleaners by a fraudulent religion rate a special victim category of being “vulnerable”? Weren’t they just acting on their own self interests by embracing the lies of the liars the same as I would have been had I fallen for Madoff’s proposals?

The only reason I can think of that fits the facts is that these people were seduced by an allegedly fraudulent religion as opposed to a legitimate religion. If it weren’t for the religion aspect these people would simply be seen as stupid, unlike the followers of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, for example, who can never be seen as stupid because they believe the fantasies their religious leaders hand out in return for service in coin and kind to those organizations.

Let’s take the American Christian Reverend, Peter Popoff, for instance. He is a faith healer and has now branched out into financial healing. Perusing my late night fare on television I came across his program and was subjected to a pitch by Popoff to buy some magic “spiritual” water. I was promised that if I sprinkled this stuff on any of my credit cards the outstanding balances would simply disappear. I am not making this up. His patter was followed by testimonies from people who claimed it worked for them.

As you will see from this website, Popoff was investigated more than 20 years ago and declared to be a fraud. Yet, there he is still, larger than life and even richer.

Well, yes, you say, but he is a televangelist and we all know they got their training either from the ranks of used car sales people or the public relations departments of Big Tobacco. So the people who believe him, even if they are Christians, would still be stupid and not vulnerable.

Hmmm.

Well what about the Reverend Fred Phelps, an American Baptist minister who runs around claiming U.S. soldiers die in Iraq and Afghanistan because the U.S. tolerates homosexuality, or the Church of England bishop who blamed devastating floods in the northern U.K. a couple of years ago on God’s displeasure with British homosexuality? And what about the Pope, who set up exorcism squads to cast out demons possessing the faithful (or is it the "less than they ought to be" faithful)?

I won’t even get into the business of dying in the service of your religion and getting to enjoy -- if that is really a word that could be applied to the concept -- the sexual services of 72 virgins forever.

Are all the people who believe this stuff vulnerable, or are they just stupid?

Defend liberty. Defend freedom. But, above all, defend single malt Scotch.

Here is an interesting essay by Roger Scruton on the differences between Islam and Western societies and the things we ought to be defending in our culture and historical narrative. There is a little more Jesus and Christianity in this for my taste, and his prescription for dealing with Islamic resentment, “forgiveness”, doesn’t provide the necessary punch, in my opinion.

However, there is a lot food for thought here.

Mr. Scruton is a writer, philosopher, and public commentator. He is currently a professor at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington, Virginia. His essay is a revised version of a lecture given as part of the Program to Protect America’s Freedom at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Consider his views on the terrible tendency of western-loathers to indulge in guilt and make common cause with Islamic critics of the west:

The illusion that we are to blame, that we must confess our faults and join our cause to that of our enemies, only exposes us to a more determined hatred. The truth is that we are not to blame; that our enemies’ hatred of us is entirely unjustified; and that their implacable enmity cannot be defused by our breast-beating.

There is a drawback to realizing this truth, however. It makes it seem as though we are powerless. But we are not powerless. There are two resources on which we can call in our defense, one public, and the other private. In the public sphere, we can resolve to protect the good things that we have inherited. That means making no concessions to those who wish us to exchange citizenship for subjection, nationality for religious conformity, secular law for shari’ah, the Judeo-Christian inheritance for Islam, irony for solemnity, self-criticism for dogmatism, representation for submission, and cheerful drinking for censorious abstinence. We should treat with scorn all those who demand these changes and invite them to live where their preferred form of political order is already installed. And we must respond to their violence with whatever force is required to contain it.

He raises seven areas of distinction between Islam and secular western civilization. The one that really caught my attention was this one:

This brings me to a final and critical point of difference between Western and Islamic communities. We live in a society of strangers who associate rapidly and tolerate each other’s differences. Yet ours is not a society of vigilant conformity. It makes few public demands that are not contained in secular law; and it allows people to move quickly from one group to the next, one relationship to the next, one business, religion, or way of life to the next, and all with relative ease. It is endlessly creative in forming the institutions and associations that enable people to live with their differences and remain on peaceful terms, without the need for intimacy, brotherhood, or tribal loyalties. I am not arguing that this is a good thing, but it is the way things are, and this is the inevitable byproduct of citizenship as I have described it.

What makes it possible to live in this way? There is a simple answer, and that is drink. What the Koran promises in paradise but forbids here below is the necessary lubricant of the Western dynamo. You see this clearly in America, where cocktail parties immediately break the ice between strangers and set every large gathering in motion, stimulating a collective desire for rapid agreement among people who a moment before did not know each other from Adam.

I am a guy who likes my “tot” and when I first cast around for a name for this blog I thought of calling it “Single Malt” in honour of my favourite beverage, but, I didn’t want people to think this was just a blog about Scotch. Had I realized that by adopting such a title I would have been acting in the defense of western civilization, I might well have proceeded with my first choice.

It goes on and is well worth the read if you click on the link at the top of this posting.

Valentine's Day, and "The times they are a changing"

Valentine’s Day is for lovers.

This Valentine’s Day should be dedicated to the lovers of free speech who are living in cultures that are committing suicide.

It seems hard to believe, but it was 20 years ago today that the world was shocked to learn that some bearded cleric in Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, could issue a death warrant against an author in Britain, Salman Rushdie, that would cause that writer to go into hiding and receive police protection for the next decade. Because the alleged offense was dressed up in the guise of insulting a religion, the leaders of other religions rushed to condemn the author for causing the trouble.

What have we learned from this?

Considering the history of the conflict between Islam and western liberal-democracies since that day, I would have to conclude very little.

Each time somebody raises their head to say or write or cartoon something about Islam, out come the religious fanatics in terrifying displays of violence and threats. But more frightening than this is the reaction of the authorities in western societies. They have taken their cue from the “leadership” displayed by the Christian and Jewish clergy towards Rushdie and have applied it to those who question either Islam or the wisdom of permitting large scale immigration from Muslim countries.

I saw Kathy Shaidle on TVO’s public affairs program, The Agenda, this week, making a point that the decline of Christianity as a popular religion has “caused” its replacement by Islam in western Europe. Not exactly. Large scale immigration of young Muslims contributes to this phenomenon, as well as aging, non-reproducing Europeans.

In Britain, it is the mouthing of the Christian clergy suggesting that Sharia law should be incorporated into Britain’s legal system that is contributing to the robustness of the Islamic project. The Christian and Jewish clergy continue to be an obstacle to understanding the threats to liberal democracy with all their nattering on about “the commonality of the faiths” and their inter-faith dialogues.

To parapharase the old Bob Dylan anthem:

Come priests, rabbis
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside raging
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a changin’

In Sweden, Belgium, France, Britain, Spain, Germany and especially the Netherlands, the “troublemakers” are suppressed to appease the angry Muslims. Muslims parade through the streets of European cities with posters and banners calling for the downfall of western societies and the replacement of their liberal-democracies with Islam and the odious Sharia law -- these would be the non-troublemakers, by the way, if you forgot to buy a program before the parade.

Politicians who speak on behalf of their constituents against this rising tide of Islamic hegemony are beaten by police or criminally charged with “disturbing the harmony” of the community. Their homes are invaded by police without warrants to remove symbols Muslims claim are offensive. At least one Dutch politician, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, fled to the United States when the state turned on her for raising issues that affected Muslim women in the Netherlands. Another, Geert Wilders, has been denied entry to a fellow member state of the EU, Britain.

Publishers in Britain have been forced to shred books about Muslims that might subject them to financially ruinous lawsuits from wealthy Arabs. One American publisher refused to print a novel about one of the wives of Mohammed for fear of reprisal by Muslims.

In Canada, the shameful human rights tribunals have been turned into state-supported fatwa-issuing organs for Islamic activists. Even reform-minded Muslims have been threatened with death by Muslim extremists (to date, nobody charged with the crime) and told to tone it down so that “harmony” will prevail. Despite the increasing boldness of Islamic advocates to choke off any rational discussion of Islam, Barbara Hall, Ontario’s Human Rights Commissioner, foolishly proposes even more legislation to provide better tools for Islamists to crush free speech.

Internationally, the Organization of Islamic Countries (57 members) has promulgated its own human rights code that declares the supremacy of Sharia law, notwithstanding their members prior agreement to the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights. As well, the OIC has obtained a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly to criminalize criticism of religion.

This step has enabled the state of Jordan to issue a warrant for the arrest of Geert Wilders for insulting Islam should he travel outside the territory of the Netherlands.

The mainstream media has been generally unhelpful to the cause of free speech. In Canada, they woke up very late in the game when the charade conducted by human rights tribunals against Mark Steyn and Maclean's magazine was well underway. The blogosphere was ahead of the curve on that one, and remains ahead of it.

When the MSM are not asleep at the switch they are thoughtlessly dismissing Islamic critics as a bunch of Islamophobes (bigots) – a term coined by Islamists as an aid to the politically correct police to further stifle commentary about Islam.

And they wonder why they are losing market share!

Even today, you will see pundits and columnists writing stuff like this: “Well, I don’t much like or agree with Mark Steyn or Geert Wilders, but I do support free speech.”

Why the Pontius Pilate posturing of washing your hands before making the statement about free speech? Can’t you just say that they are being unfairly targeted for their opinions, which, in a free liberal democracy they are supposed to be able to voice, without this politically correct preamble? What are you afraid of – Islamic retribution – other people in society who think there shouldn’t be free speech (people you should be shunning anyway) -- Barbara Hall?

Hmmm. On reflection, perhaps you should be afraid of Barbara Hall.

I see no silver lining.

Christians putting atheists in their place at the back of the bus

We have a society in which we are told that there is no state religion and that secular interests, when it comes to the public square, trump the religious.

And yet, and yet, the huffing and puffing this week over a couple of perceived atheist intrusions into the area of the separation of church and state brought out the conservative editorials in full force in defense of the supremacy of the Christian god.

First up was The National Post commenting on the New Brunswick flap over the elementary school prinicipal who cancelled the singing of the National Anthem as part of the morning ritual. He never did come clean on why this was done. He claimed privacy for two alleged families who wanted it stopped for reasons unknown.

That did not prevent the Post from speculating that atheists were the root of the problem, without any proof. After sounding off about patriotism and preventing the minority tail from wagging the majority dog, it had this advice:

It may be unfortunate that God still persists in the anthem as a historic holdover. But atheists cannot begin too soon in educating their children that they live in a historically monotheistic civilization, and that, for better or worse, we signify respect for tradition on public occasions as a matter of continuity with the past.

I wonder how this would have been received if it had been written like this:

But Jews, Muslims and Hindus cannot begin too soon in educating their children that they live in a historically Christian civilization, and that, for better or worse, we signify respect for tradition on public occasion as a matter of continuity with the past.

That is to say that Christians are running the show and we better get used to it.

Had they printed that there would have been weeks and weeks of pundits and editorials from one end of the country to the next, castigating the Post for being insensitive to Canada’s diversity and the religious sensibilities of non-Christians, even if it was right about the importance of respecting tradition. The Post would have backed down.

The point of this observation is demonstrate yet another instance in which it is taken for granted by the main stream media that atheists are second-class citizens when the sensitivities of the religious are weighed in the balance, and like the generation of feminists before them, they should just suck up the objectionable language and like the homosexuals of twenty years ago understand that remaining in the closet is still society’s preferred option.

By the way, I would be more impressed with the heritage argument if the words of the song hadn’t been rewritten more than half-a-dozen times. The current version is actually circa 1980, when it was blessed by an act of Parliament. Hardly a heritage year, if you discount the fact that the government of the day was being run by Saint Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Canada’s patron saint.

If it can amended to change with the times, as this site so readily shows, it can be amended again to get rid of this obnoxious Christian diety, and then it can be sung by everybody as lustily as possible, instead of having about a third of the participants remain silent – the 25% who are non-religious and deeply resent these words and the other 8% who are of non-Christian faith and feel that they are being disloyal to their faith if they sing the praises of the Christian god.

But of course if we did that sensible thing we would forgo the opportunity to be a good example to the rest of the student body, as in this suggestion of the Post:

And if you don't like it, you don't have to sing along; that might be the most important lesson of all. It's one that is crucial not only for children of atheists or religious minorities, but for the classmates who might see their example and discover a new dimension in that quality supposedly most prized by educators: diversity.

Gosh, what to do, what to do? Be patriotic and sing the National Anthem or shut up and teach fellow students about diversity? So many roads are open to atheists.

I just don’t think the thick-headed Christians understand (or truth be known, care) how unsettling it is to have to choke back on the Anthem when these words pop up.

Then we have The Calgary Herald rattling on about some atheists at the University of Alberta rolling back the references to God in the Convocation ceremonies. The Herald wags its finger at us and warns us about how ungrateful we atheists must be to do such a thing when we consider what our fates would be in more faith-dominated societies:

There are many countries where they would be very silly atheists, (sic) if they challenged observance of the dominant religion.

True enough, but we are not acting in those countries, we are acting in this one which claims not to impose religious observance of any particular faith on its citizens.

One could just as easily have written, “There are many Muslim countries where they would very silly Christians, if they challenged observance of Islam.”

Does that require Muslims in this country to go about and wish everybody Merry Christmas in this country? Of course not, that would be tantamount to imposing one religion on another. But it is ok to impose it on atheists, because, well, they are only second class citizens anyway.

Do these people understand the implications of what they are actually saying?

It goes on a historical road, drawing on the U.S. emphasis on individual liberty and trying to weave that with Christianity. You would think that the well known rejection of a religious creed by the American founding fathers was simply an accident, nor did the impact of the Inquisition or the French revolution have much to do with the fate of Christianity.

Canada has always shared proudly in the so-called Anglo-American tradition of personal liberty, that (sic) regards individuals as society's building blocks and joint owners of the state, rather than the other way around. This belief in personal liberty is peculiarly compatible with what Christians understand of God. For, this Sovereign is nevertheless a respecter of individuals, making His appeal to people one by one rather than by race or tribe, leaving them personal responsibility for accepting Him -- or not.

Well, Calgary, get this. Atheists accept that personal responsibility and reject him. So why keep shoving him literally down our throats? If I attended a Christian church I would expect to be treated to that and would have nothing to complain about. But when I attend a publicly funded educational institution, I don’t have to praise anybody’s deity, nor should I have to.

Authoritarian versus Totalitarian

In my post about the TVO episode with Mark Steyn, commentator "aelfheld" took issue with my assertion that Islam is an authoritarian religion, claiming that, as it recognizes nothing outside of itself, totalitarian would be a more apt description.

I don't agree with that. I think it is very important to be clear in our use of language so that we have proper problem identification. Normally, people spend about 10% of their time identifying a problem and 90% coming up with solutions (e.g. Kyoto Protocol.

To describe a religion as authoritarian is to refer to the requirement of strict obedience to the dogma. Islam demands strict obedience. Other monotheistic religions, Judaism and Christianity, do as well. Although, what we find is that people stray from obedience for different reasons in all three of these religions. But that doesn't mean at their historical and purest core they don't demand obedience as the key to entering the kingdom of heaven.

The term totalitarian applies when a religion becomes the operative agency in the administration and policy formation of the state -- when it controls the civil functions of a society. Iran would be an example. This is a theocracy, whereby clerics dictate to the civil authorities the policies and the laws. In Saudi Arabia, the civil authority, the tribe of Saud, having entered into a pact with the Wahhabi sect of Islam, allows the religious authorities free rein in enforcing religious rules.

This is not peculiar to Islam. In the 9th century, Charlemagne created France (and Europe) by entering into a pact with the Vatican and either destroyed or converted the Germanic barbarian tribes to Christianity. All pagan gods were abolished.

In the 15th century, Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain threw out the Islamic Moors, then entered into a pact with the Vatican, commenced the Inquisition, and drove the Jews from Spain in an effort to make the country completely Catholic Christian.

And while our historical evidence is weak, Old Testament accounts from the time of the Jewish kings, Saul, David and Solomon, suggest that the ancient Israelites were no less fanatical about religious purity within the territory of the state's writ.

To speak of a religion as totalitarian without identifying in its relation to the secular power of the state is not accurate.