timeimmortal

Connie writes in with the following observation:

The question is “Is Islam a Valid Ideology?”

It may surprise the reader to hear that I disagree, but I do. I don’t think the question is one of whether Islam is a valid ideology, because I’m not convinced that a metric exists which is suitable to judge whether an ideology is valid. That Islam is, in part, an ideology with political and religious aspects, is beyond dispute at this point.

The question I ask of Islam is simply this: is it true?

That may be what Connie was getting at; I don’t know. Generally speaking, assuming a metric exists by which an ideology’s validity could be determined or denied, an ideology could easily be valid without being true. Marxism, for example.

Note: the video is Robert Spencer talking about his book, The Truth about Muhammad. While I don’t always agree with Mr. Spencer, it did make for some interesting watching. Food for thought, to be sure. I haven’t read the book myself, but I understand that honest history is not, shall we say, flattering to the (false) prophet of Islam.

Interestingly, the web portal that the video is hosted at is Iranian.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Are women in America already on a downward arc because of misogynous immigration and multiculturalism? I think so. But there’s no recognition of the problem, much less help in the offing, either from Washington or from Establishment feminists, who remain strangely attached to multiculturalism in spite of the ideology’s innate conflict with women’s rights.

One official feminist who should know better is Katha Pollitt, an opinion writer at The Nation. On one hand, she wrote a sensible response to Susan Okin’s question (later an anthology), “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” Pollitt directly criticized cultural relativism: “You could say that multiculturalism demands respect for all cultural traditions, while feminism respects only traditions that indeed deserve respect.” Yet Pollitt recently endorsed Obama, giving as one reason being his support for illegal aliens receiving driver’s licenses, and she criticized David Horowitz for his interest in women’s rights in Islamic countries. She dogmatically refused to believe a conservative would care: e.g. “David Horowitz, Feminist?”, The Nation, Nov 1, 2007. (See JihadWatch.org’s Robert Spencer commenting on YouTube about this matter.)

However, given the precious little attention given to the issue of Third World brutality against women in general, why didn’t Pollitt welcome any publicity, no matter the source? (Ask her at kpollitt@thenation.com)

…

Not only is immigration the new way of war, it is also the spearpoint of the attack on Western civilization’s tradition of liberty and individual freedom.

Geography is a lovely antidote to diversity. If members of backward cultures would stay put we would all be better off, but they don’t. The worst of the worst are headed this way due to the multicultural ideology underpinning US Immigration policy as well as the Refugee Industrial Complex maintaining itself.

In fact, diversity is so extreme that Washington doesn’t even bar criminal cultures like that of Somalia, where 98 percent of residents practice a form of child torture which is a crime in this country — female genital mutilation (FGM).

The State Department supposedly endeavors to keep out individual criminal refugees, but entire societies that normally brutalize children are welcomed. Go figure.

One of the most worrying trends is how quickly women’s rights are discarded by host First World societies in the name of multiculturalism. The recent British dust-up when the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams urged implementation of Islamic Sharia law in order to “maintain social cohesion” in Britain’s rapidly diversifying society is a sad example of the willingness of Establishment elites to eliminate western legal protections for women in order to appease Muslim immigrants.

For all the weakness in Britain’s cultural resolve in recent years, however, the reaction to the Archbishop has been surprisingly intense and widespread. Perhaps the slumbering British people have finally awakened to the threat within. We can hope.

…

In 2001, Oslo professor Unni Wikan lectured her fellow Norwegian women that the “Muslim rape wave” against them was their fault. She said that “Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes”. The professor did not call for violent criminal aliens to shape up. Instead, she said that “Norwegian women must realize that we live in a Multicultural society and adapt themselves to it”.

(Honest observation reveals the burqa is a cloth prison designed to erase the individual personhood of women. If the all-encompassing garments were designed merely to enforce an extreme level of modesty, burquas would not need to be identical. And the lack of an opening for the mouth suggests disapproval of speech and eating.)

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And Islamic scripture approves of abusing women. As Jihad Watch’s Robert Spencer observed in his online Blogging the [Koran], “Wife-beating exists in all cultures, but only in Islam does it enjoy divine sanction.”

Add the failure of Muslim societies to achieve anything of value in the modern world — such as the famously sparse level of books published in Arab countries — and social frustration can become personal. Muslim culture around the world may appear pitiful. But in the castle of the home, a Muslim man can beat the tar out of his wives and feel both powerful and virtuous.

Is this the kind of diversity we should welcome?

In a word? No. No, it definitely is not.

When it comes right down to it, Canada needs to take a long, hard look at inbound immigrants and understand that the degree to which those immigrants profess a desire to live according to the tenets of sharia law is the degree to which they are unsuitable candidates for citizenship in this country. People of any culture wanting to live under sharia are more than welcome, I think, to go to a country like Iran or Saudi Arabia (where sharia is law) and live there. The fact that many such countries are Third World hellholes shouldn’t give us pause when we tell such people that they are, simply put, not welcome here. Because it must be made true that they are not welcome here: their barbaric, backward, misogynistic, 7th century system of rules is incompatible with the rights and freedoms that all Canadians have, even (yes) Canadian women.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Kathy Shaidle)

Update: Welcome, Steynians! Binks is too unfortunately correct — in Islam, the women of the conquered people are “gifted” to the “brave” jihadist “warriors”. Is this perhaps what we are now seeing take place in Europe?

The Update Strikes Back: Welcome, Dinosaur fans!

Last Friday, three people died in Nigeria because of another caricature of Muhammad.

Three persons including a police officer were killed after Muslim students rioted over a caricature of Prophet Mohammed by their Christian colleagues, police and teachers said Friday.

Students of Government Secondary School Sumaila, some 76 kilometres (47 miles) south of the northern city of Kano, went on the rampage late Thursday, after a Christian student suspended for two weeks returned to the school.

He had been suspended for having drawn a caricature of the Prophet and posted it on a wall inside the school.

“Two people and a police inspector have been killed in the violence while the divisional police station and everything inside including ammunition have been burnt by the rioters”, Kano police chief Aminu Yesufu told reporters outside the burnt police station.

He said about 20 others were badly wounded, including the divisional police officer, who suffered a deep machete cut to the head.

Police had arrested 25 people and opened an investigation, he added.

“The students began chanting Allahu Akbar (God is the greatest) when the Christian student returned and pursued him to lynch him”, Sadiq Haruna, a teacher at the school, told an AFP reporter who visited the town on Friday.

“The Christian escaped in taking refuge in the local police station but hundreds of angry Muslim students attacked and set on fire the premises after the police refused to hand him over,” Haruna said.

So much for the law of the land, I guess — these people evidently make up their own laws.

Robert Spencer comments thusly:

A cartoon of Muhammad does not harm Muhammad. It does not harm Islam. It may even reflect more poorly on the cartoonist than on the object of the cartoon. Yet all too many Muslims around the world continue to fail to grasp this, and to commit cold-blooded murder in their static rage, unaware of or indifferent to the fact that their murderous anger is impotent to eradicate the fact of the cartoon itself, and reflects more poorly on their religion than any cartoon ever could.

I don’t honestly know if the rage these cartoons inspires is a genuine religious issue, or whether it has more to do with rampant ignorance and lack of education in the Muslim world (and, more and more, within Muslim communities in Western nations). I do know, however, that whatever the reason, the reason is irrelevant — violence over a cartoonish depiction of a religious figure, even a false prophet, is pointless, absurd, and completely unjustifiable. Christians at the University of Saskatchewan didn’t riot, storm the police station, and murder three people when this cartoon was published:

And Christians at the University of Alberta didn’t riot when this cartoon was published:

Respectfully, I submit that the image of a zoophillic, homosexual Christ performing fellatio on a pig is substantially more offensive than an image of Muhammad with a bomb for a turban. And yet strangely, nobody died over the Christ image. Oh, sure, some people wrote letters of complaint, and some other people boycotted the student paper that ran the cartoon…but that’s just the point. Those are legitimate avenues of protest, and are appropriate forms of protest. Rampaging and killing? Not so much. Not at all, in fact.

I get that some Muslims understand this principle. I really, really do get that. But it seems to be the case, just a little bit more each week, that the majority of Muslims tend toward the opposite view, and see rage and murder as wholly justifiable whenever even the most crudely-drawn depiction of their false prophet is published.

And why? Because images of Muhammad are forbidden out of fear that the Muslim faithful might commit idolatry, giving undue reverence to the image rather than to the person it depicts. Okay, fine…but, as a Catholic, I can do nothing but scoff at that very sentiment. Is their faith so weak, and are they so ignorant, that a poorly-drawn image could distract them from proper reverence for their prophet? Can they even tell the difference between a picture of the prophet and the real deal?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!