Time Immortal

Islamist blogger (and Pickering, Ontario nuclear power plant worker) Shaukat Khawja — also known as Rehmat, owner/operator of the Rehmatpedia blog — has had some very…interesting things to say in the past, but I’ve a feeling that this latest offering of his (put not on his blog but in the IslamUnity.net forums) might just take the cake. If nothing else, it at least confirms a suspicion that I’ve had about the guy for a while: underneath any pretense he might have established about being committed to peace and mercy (the name “Rehmat”, if memory serves, means “mercy” or “kind”), he’s just your typical anti-Jewish bigot.

Choice samples from his latest include:

Jew elites always played a major part in great wars and reactionary movements. They’re known for tricking the both parties in a conflict. For example, Jews funded most of Crusades against Muslims and Jews; Jew sided on both sides of American Civil War; they were behind French Revolution and Communist Revolution in Russia – and they declared war on Nazi Germany, while 150,000 German Jews were serving Nazi Army and some Zionist terrorist groups were having honeymoon with Hitler and Mussolini regimes.

Jew elites, eh? You mean, like this?

Okay, Photoshoppery aside, Shaukat is here saying more or less the same thing that got Mel Gibson into trouble a couple years back: “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world”. Now, to be fair, I’m sure that Jews probably did fight in e.g. the American Civil War, and then on both sides. But that is because such conflicts transcend religious considerations — neither the Civil War, nor the French or Russian revolutions or World War II were about religion, and did not have any real religious significance. Even the Crusades were more about politics and territory than they were about religion. And in such conflicts, people of the same religious stripe might well end up on opposite sides of the field of battle.

Case in point: there currently Muslims serving with e.g. NATO forces in Afghanistan, and who do battle with the Muslims in the Taliban.

Shaukat claims that he doesn’t need to prove this — or any other — statement made in the list of his that I have linked to, and yet the claim made above is hardly sufficiently self-evident to be able to stand on its own. Where is the evidence of Jewish funding of e.g. the Crusades against their own people?

Nazis never killed six million Jews. It’s 20th century’s biggest hoax – which has only flourished under government protection in several western countries.

Nazis are known for killing several million of Gypsies, Christians and Jews under their rule – but the largest victims were Gypsies. Even Auschwitz museum in Poland now have reduced the figure of Jewish killed by Nazis as 2.5 million.

Ah, Holocaust denial — pretty much a staple of Islamic discourse, unfortunately.

The problem with it is: the Nazis themselves were reasonably good book-keepers; we know from their own documentation that approximately 6 million Jews were murdered in various ways in the 1930s and 1940s. The figure of 2.5 million Jews that Shaukat gives is reflective of the number of Jews killed in Poland alone. And again, many of these deaths were documented and/or witnessed; the figures are not baseless.

Holocaust denial is ostensibly a punishable offence in Canada (not something I agree with, but that’s another matter). Strangely, however, I very much doubt that Shaukat is going to be charged with anything over this utterance.

September 11, 2001 attack on WTC and Pentagon was an inside terrorist job – conceived by Israeli Mossad, CIA and pro-Israel politicians and government officials.

Ah, the World Trade Center conspiracy. Another canard, and again a common staple of Islamic discourse.

There’s other stuff, some of it laugh-out-loud wrong, but these are some of the highlights. I think there’s room for one more, and that’s good…because of all the things Shaukat has asserted about Jews in his latest post, here’s my personal favourite:

Jews have the most powerful Jewish Lobby (AIPAC, ADL, AJC, etc.) in the US - which works for the interests of Zionist Israel instead of the US.

Here I had thought that the Hindu Jewish lobby was the most powerful. It appears, O Reader, that I have been grossly misinformed about the size thereof.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Let’s all watch Canada’s new favourite raving Muslim/power-generation engineer rant and rave about how great Hezbollah is, shall we? It’s another pitch-perfect piece that fuses anti-Zionism paranoia with fears of Christian conspiracy, all the while praising Hezbollah as “Lebanon’s Islamic Resistance militia” and noting their commendable “religious dedication, discipline, military skills, large public support base, high morale, good communication and [supply of the] enemy’s military information.”

Yup, he’s a Canadian. Apparently.

Over at Ace of Spades, LauraW and Ace joined the group of folks who have wondered aloud at the strange connection between engineering as an educational discipline and the tendency to become embroiled in radicalism — Ace, in particular, wonders if it’s a “personality type” issue, assuming I read him correctly. And certainly, there has been something of an established trend that has been observed in the past that suggests that engineers are prime recruiting targets for the global jihad.

It’s not hard to see why terrorist groups would want to recruit engineers — backpack nukes and Qassam rockets work so much better when someone with solid, relevant technical know-how has been involved/instrumental in their creation and setup. What’s perhaps harder to see is why engineers would be as apt as they are to sign on with the radicals.

Ace might just be on to something when he notes:

I’m asking because the engineer’s mindset — and likely then the personality type most strongly attracted to the profession — is much concerned with streamlining, simplifying, cutting through bullshit, cutting down on wasteful steps, etc. And I wonder if then doesn’t result in a tendency towards rejection of Politics entirely as simply irrelevant to one’s day-to-day life or else a strong identification with one political faction due to identifying one of any key factors (freedom, security, what have you) as primary and discarding most others as secondary at best.

Certainly, the above describes most engineers I know, including most of the ones I went to school with. But there’s a bit of a problem can emerge in all the simplifying and cutting out. Oh, one expects (as things like Dilbert have reminded us ad nauseum) a certain degree of social isolation to accompany any foray into engineering as a discipline, and certainly most of the people I went to school with could easily be said to fall under the category of “social misfit” — a category I myself an easily a part of.

There was an incident I can think of related to one engineering student in particular who wound up being banned from the University of Alberta campus, in no small part because his life had basically been trimmed to the point where all he had was his engineering, to the point of having forgotten the rules of basic human interaction. Suffice to say, he was banned for stalking a few women (some of whom I know), and I suppose that his doing so shouldn’t have come as the surprise that it did: having cut out all other aspects of normal human-to-human interactive ability from his life, he really had no idea what the proper way to express interest in a member of the opposite sex was anymore.

I think the sort of excessive social isolation that can accompany an education heavy in numbers and equations (untempered by the occasional bold expedition into writing or art) is not particularly different from the sort of social isolation that the young, exciteable men of…say…Palestine feel. Many of the same tensions are present, in fact…especially sexual tension, which fanciful tales of an endless harem of virgins in Paradise appeals to only too easily, and often with deadly results.

It’s a two-fold problem, then. On one hand, terrorist groups in need of people with solid technical training and education, who have only martyrdom and the lure of virgins in Paradise to offer. On the other hand, socially isolated, shy, technically gifted (and highly trained) professionals who’ve spent too much time in their books and wouldn’t mind a little companionship, but who may have next to no idea how to go about finding a companion.

Hmmn…and people wonder why there’s a natural connection here?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

For all my commentators and/or readers who are of the opinion that the murder of Aqsa Parvez, and/or the double-murders of the Said sisters, might not have been a case of honour killing of errant children by orthodox Muslim parents, I present an alternative theory.

Both of the fathers — the men standing accused of murder in both cases — drove taxis. I remember that detail about Mohamed Parvez from the Asqa Parvez story (sorry, no link), and it turns out that the same is the case for Yaser Abdel Said. Maybe that had something to do with it?

Bill Whittle is on fire, O Reader, and this latest article by him must be read. It doesn’t matter if you love or hate America. It doesn’t matter if you love or hate the Republican Party, or the Conservative Party of Canada. It doesn’t matter if you love or hate Stephen Harper, or George W. Bush.

Just. Read. It.

There is a sad, sorry truth at work in the world today, especially in America and Canada. And it can be addressed, and must be addressed, with one important question: if you honestly believe that your government has orchestrated, or is knowingly a stooge of a government that has orchestrated, thousands of murders in the past few years and has knowingly and financially encouraged tens of thousands of people to lie about events; and if you honestly believe that things like 9/11 were mere stepping stones on a plot by Chimpy McHarperburton and Co. to impose a fascistic Christian theocracy on North America that will begin its ascendancy by executing homosexuals and abortionists in the streets…then why the hell are you spending money on your venti latte and lemon-almond biscotti? Shouldn’t you be saving that cold hard cash to buy yourself a plane ticket to get your sorry ass as far the hell away from the murderous psychopaths you believe are running your country as is humanly possible?

I have no patience for conspiracy theories or the people that cling to them.

I am more interested in the psychology of someone who believes in these conspiracy theories. I exempt people who have only heard one side of the story, as I did. Sadly, skepticism doesn�t sell as well as hysteria. With regards to The View, ABC and Disney would rather count their ad money than waste potential revenues placing the truth for sale. If this offends you as much as it does me, you may make your purchases and plan your vacations accordingly.

Intellectually honest people, people without a deep, vested emotional need to believe the worst, are usually relieved to hear the facts that demolish superstitions like the Bermuda Triangle and the Loch Ness Monster. While there may be disappointment at the loss of an unseen world, people who have chosen to live in reality find comfort in the fact that reality is, in fact, made up of the real and not the wished for.

No, what fascinates me is the emotional motive of people who, presented with overwhelming evidence that the events that transpired on November 22nd, 1963 or September 11th, 2001 really happened exactly the way it appeared, continue to spin ever more elaborate webs in order to get to a place they need to be emotionally. Who are you going to believe: them or your own lying eyes?

…

Once you know Lee Harvey Oswald, you realize that he would have pulled the trigger on Cantinflas or Bozo the Clown if either one of them had been parading beneath his window that November day.

It is so obvious, so straightforward, so simple�so inevitable.

But no. Instead we have to have teams of assassins, and the purchased cooperation of dozens, if not hundreds of people, all to commit a ghastly crime and pull one over on an entire nation. Posner posits at the end of his book � and I agree completely � that what drives the conspiracy idea is the intolerable belief that a lone wacko can change history. On one side of the scale, writes Posner, you have the handsome, charismatic, Leader of the Free World, and on the other side a scrawny, pathetic loser. The mind wants to add weight to Oswald�s side, to give the horror some meaning. But it just isn�t so. And the lie you create to meet this emotional need is more damaging to the country than the assassination of a beloved President could ever be.

I�ll tell you something. These conspiracy theorists that ignore that miserable, pathetic, self-aggrandizing egomaniac named Lee Harvey Oswald, or glorify him as a patsy and a hero, do so because deep down inside they realize something unpleasant about Lee Harvey Oswald and themselves.

They are Oswald.

I’ve had people tell me to my face that the Da Vinci Code is the real truth and revelation of the sinister machinations of the Catholic Church (if only). I’ve had people tell to my face that they would cheer if Stephen Harper were killed in a fortuitous RPG attack on that Lebanese runway last year (and here I thought I was the raving warmonger). I’ve had people attempt to convince me in numerous debates that there is some sinister Satanic cabal in the White House that orchestrated an intricate plot to murder thousands of American citizens — their own people — on 9/11 so that they could…launch a series of “wars for oil” that have not yet seen one barrel of Afghani or Iraqi oil shipped to an American port.

And I sing with people who honestly believe that a cabal of Christian theocrats is only a few steps away from successfully subverting the governments of North America — if they haven’t already with the re-election of George W. Bush.

I hope — honestly hope — that the people who espouse such patently stupid ideas have an emotional need, and only an emotional need, to believe such things. It is a catastrophic and horrifying thing to think that millions of people might believe such delusional things for some pathological reason instead.