timeimmortal

Tarek Fatah points to a troubling new trend:

It seems only yesterday that Premier Dalton McGuinty declared: “There will be no Sharia law in Ontario.” Many of us, who witnessed the medieval nature of manmade sharia laws in our countries of birth, heaved a sigh of relief back in September of 2005. We thought this was the end of the attempt by Islamists to sneak sharia into a Western jurisdiction. We were wrong.

The campaign to introduce sharia is back. Last time, the campaign took a populist approach, invoking multiculturalism. This time, the pro-sharia lobby is dangling the carrot of new niche markets and has the backing of Canada’s major banks. Such icons of the corporate world as Citibank NA, HSBC Holdings PLC, and Barclays PLC have endorsed sharia banking and have started offering Islamic financing products to a vulnerable Muslim population.

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The origin of Islamic banking has its roots in the 1920s, but did not start until the late 1970s and owes much of its foundation to the Islamist doctrine of two people — Abul Ala Maudoodi of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan and Hassan al-Banna of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The theory was put into practice by Pakistani dictator General Zia-ul-Haq who established sharia banking law in Pakistan.

Proponents of sharia banking rest their case on many verses of the Holy Koran that outlaw usury, not interest.

Verses that address the question of loans and debts include:

Al Baqarah (2:275): God hath permitted trade and forbidden usury;

Al Baqarah (2:276): Allah does not bless usury, and He causes charitable deeds to prosper, and Allah does not love any ungrateful sinner.

Every English-language translation of the Koran has translated the Arabic word riba as usury, not interest. Yet, Islamists have deliberately portrayed bank interest as usury and labelled the current banking system as un-Islamic. Instead, these Islamists have created exotic products with names that are foreign to much of the world’s Muslim population. This is where they mask interest under the niqab of Mudraba, Musharaka, Murabaha, and Ijara.

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In the name of Islam, deception and dishonesty is being practised while ordinary Muslims are being made to feel that their interaction with mainstream banks is un-Islamic and sinful. As Mr. Saleem asks, “If Islamic banks label their hamburger a Mecca Burger, as long as it still has the same ingredients as a McDonald’s burger, is it really any different in substance?”

Sharia is a barbaric system, a fusion of Islamic religion with political ideals. It is backward and openly misogynistic (a couple of examples that I find particularly odious are (a) how males, under sharia, are free to marry any woman from one of the three major monotheistic religions…but women are permitted to marry only another Muslim, and (b) divorce is a man’s unilateral right, but women must seek their husband’s permission to obtain one). It’s also just plain silly at times. And all of this doesn’t even begin to bring into focus the punishments Sharia prescribes for adulterers (stoning to death) or thieves (forcible removal of the hand). And did I mention the part where wife-beating is permissible under certain circumstances, and subject to certain criteria?

Put more plainly: Sharia and Western principles are wholly incompatible. No person has any business demanding that Sharia become the law of this land, or of any Western nation; any person who desires to live under Sharia is welcome to move/return to the Middle East and any of the nations there which are governed by this ugly system of laws. Yes, I am aware that most such countries are unliveable hellholes. Yes, I do think there’s a connection. No, I don’t think that means what I’m suggesting is unfair.

This will not be the last attempt to sneak principles of Sharia law in the back door of Canada’s legal system, and (as was the case with Sharia courts in Ontario a couple of years ago) must be opposed in no uncertain terms. Put simply, there is no place in Canada for the sort of near-barbarism that Sharia law represents, and it must be openly and plainly communicated that not only do Canadians regard as odious the deceptive and falsehood-laden tactics of Sharia propnents in the case of these banks, but that Canadians regard as odious the very tenets and principles which these would-be bankers claim to be driven by.

Because no sane Canadian should ever desire to see Sharia gain any foothold here.

(Unrelatedly, though, I’ll try not to feel too much of a swell of pride that a phrase which I may have coined is being used in the title of a column in a national newspaper (even if it is just the Globe & Mail).)

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

James Gregoire writes in regarding the formal document complied by the 4 Osgoode Hall law students currently embroiled in the Mark Steyn/Maclean’s-HRC fracas. That document bears the title A Case Study of Media-Propagated Islamophobia, and serves as a handy catch-all reference of pretty much every time anybody in Maclean’s magazine in the last six or seven years has said anything about Islam which is not fawning praise.

I just read the complaint submitted to the various Human Rights Commissions (I agree that they should go by the way) regarding the Maclean’s articles.

I also took the time to review the complete articles at macleans.ca.

Everytime I find myself beginning to sympathize with adherents to Islam because of perceived slights, after reading a little further, I inevitably find that the body of the complaint contains skewed and inacurate information.

Sad to say, this tends to remove what sympathy I may feel and replace it with dislike and disbelief.

If the majority of Muslims are pro-peace and anti-terror, (And I do believe most are) why don’t they make more noise against the radicals? Why are they a silent majority? The only time we hear from them is about some slight they feel they have suffered.

The four who submitted the above complaint are typical examples. They misrepresent the information to the point where one must consider them stupid or deliberately obtuse.

This colours the perception of all non-Muslims and gives every Muslim a bad rap.

The Islamophobia is bing created by the silent majority of Muslims!

This raises an interesting question, of course.

On one hand, one wants to believe that a majority of Muslims are indeed opposed to terrorism committed in the name of Islam, and that most Muslims are of a non-radical bent (and therefore are not chomping at the bit to see the Sharia — disgusting and misogynistic as it is — become the law of every land). And indeed, one may know any number of reasonable Muslim folk who would seem, on the surface of it at least, to prove the belief in this silent majority correct.

But on the other hand, there is the silence, and that is a major stumbling block towards accepting the conclusion that a majority of Muslims are reasonable. Because if there is a majority that is not speaking out, then the only reason they are not speaking out is that they are fearful of being ostracized from their communities, or else persecuted somehow.

But it’s kind of misleading to say that, because if the reasonable sort are in the majority, it should be they who have no trouble driving out troublesome imams and/or community leaders/members. That they do not is puzzling, and also seems somehow contradictory — it casts a doubt on the idea that a large majority of Muslims are reasonable (although, to be fair, it could mean that only the narrowest majority of Muslims are).

Far more likely, then, is the possibility that a majority of Muslims agree, at minimum, with the aims and goals of the radicals, if not with their methods per sé. That is to say, the silent majority tends not to speak out in denunciation of the Islamist radicals because that same majority approves of any (or all) of the following causes:

• the destruction of Israel and the establishment of a Palestinian state
• the implementation of Sharia as the law of the land
• the responsibility of the government to censor any and all criticism or mockery of Islam or its supposed prophet, Muhammad
• the responsibility of the government to jail and punish any transgressors who engage in the aforementioned mockery and/or criticism
• the partial/complete integration of mosque and state

(Some of those categories overlap, which should come as no surprise.)

Unfortunately, this interpretation of the lack of a response to idiots like the Osgoode 4 and the Canadian Islamic Congress (and its leader, Mohammed Elmasry) fits the available evidence a bit better. Again, one wants to believe that this silent majority is not speaking up for some easily-excusable reason…but it makes more sense to conclude that the real reason so many Muslims are silent about these issues is that, to one degree or another, many Muslims agree with the goals of the radicals.

The HRCs have been a huge issue in the blogosphere, but most of the commentary is coming from non-Muslim sources. Some Muslims have indeed added their own commentary in support of the downfall of the CHRC and its provincial equivalents, but I note that a number of these — Tarek Fatah is an easy example, though not the only one — are do not hold orthodox Islamic beliefs (and so are open to the charge of apostasy), or have parted ways with the formal practice of the Islamic faith (and so are open to the charge of apostasy).

Very few orthodox Muslims that I have read have come down as being opposed to the censorship that the CHRC is attempting to impose on Steyn and Maclean’s. Taking that and coupling it with the apparent silence of the larger Islamic community in Canada, one is left with the impression that the possibility exists that the number of truly reasonable Muslims in Canada is smaller than one might be hoping for.

Although, to be fair, I’d be happy to be proven wrong about that conclusion.

At any rate, I think Mr. Gregoire is quite right to note that it is becoming increasingly difficult to sympathize with Islam in general, especially given the rather bald-faced falsehood of this latest attempt to silence anyone who has the temerity to ask some pertinent questions about the aims and goals of the Islamists. Still, one possible benefit of such issues as these is that it will force Western society to consider more carefully whether or not Islam is compatible with Western ideals and values.

One can only hope that, in the case of Western society realizing that several key incompatibilities exist between the tenets of Islam and the values of the West, Western society will have the guts to take a stand against the slow (and, at times, not nearly slow enough) creep of Sharia into once-civilized parts of the map.

Update: Welcome, Steynians, to what Blazing Cat Fur calls a “really cool” blog!

I’ve been abstaining, in recent days, from commenting on the whole Muslim cartoon controversy, primarily because I’ve been busy getting the new site operative, and also because in a realistic sense I’ve just not been up to writing about it. But I feel moved to wade in with some commentary, some comparison/contrast if you will, because of the recent (rather predictable) turn of events that has come about.

For those who have only just heard of what’s going on with these cartoons, I can recap just briefly what has happened. It began with a Danish author writing a book about the life and death of the Prophet Muhammad. He had wanted illustrations done for it, but found that nobody wanted to touch the project, nor come within ten feet of it. Not surprising — according to Islam, graphical depictions of the Prophet are haram (forbidden), and in the region around Denmark, artists who have in the past flouted the tenets of Islam, or offered direct criticism of that religion, have met with death threats, and even murder in the case of Theo Van Gogh. Many European nations, faced with stagnant birthrates of their own, have opened their doors to millions of immigrants, and many such nations now have large Muslim communities that are almost nations within themselves. This has led to any number of problems in the past: rapes committed for sectarian reasons, violence against people who criticize Islam (see above), race riots in France and Cronulla, Australia, and so forth.

And it has contributed to a climate of fear in, among other places, Denmark. That is why the Danish author could not find illustrators for his book: the artists feared a backlash from the Danish Muslim community.

As a result of this, one Danish newspaper — Jyllands-Posten — challenged artists to come up with pictures of Muhammed, and received twelve submissions. Some of them were rather lame, and others flirted with offensiveness, and one or two were kind of funny. Some of them — depicting fearful artists and violent Muslim rage at the cartoons — turned out to be rather prophetic in nature. Not that it was a hard call, I suppose. The composite image on the right is an assembled montage of all the cartoons that I cribbed off of Kathy. The pictures, clockwise from the upper right, depict the following:

• A man in a turban holding up a stick-figure sketch. I can’t remember which one is supposed to be Muhammed…but I think it’s the stick-figure. The orange ball in the turban reads “PR Stunt”.
• Muhammed, with the Islamic crescent forming the bottom of his face and the Islamic star as his right eye.
• Muhammed with a bomb for a turban.
• Muhammed with golden horns that look, from a distance, like a halo.
• A series of sketched balloons — actually the Islamic star and crescent. The words read: “Prophet! daft and dumb keeping woman under thumb”.
• A slightly frumpy Muhammed walking in the desert
• A fearful cartoonist looking over his shoulder as he draws a picture of the Prophet.
• A Muslim holding up his hand to stop two of his bretheren who are wielding swords. He is saying something in Dutch that roughly translates as “Relax folks, it is just a sketch made by a Dane from the south-west of Denmark”.
• A student named Mohammed Valloyskole standing at a blackboard. The Arabic text he has written reads “Jyllands-Posten’s journalists are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs”.
• Muhammed, with his eyes covered by a black box, flakned by two women in full burqas.
• Muhammed greeting a line of suicide bombers in Paradise with the words: “Stop! We have run out of virgins!”
• And the middle picture, which is a line-up different people (Muhammed is second from the right, I think) and a man viewing them saying “Hmmm…I don’t recognize him”.

If you’re really curious, you can view all of the cartoons in detail here, in another posting on the site.

Okay, so these cartoons were drawn. Now what, you might ask, was the result?

Well, I said that some of the cartoons, depicting fear and backlash, were rather prophetic, didn’t I? And you may have noticed the protest rally picture that began this posting. That’s right…outrage resulted from the printing and re-printing of these cartoons. Outrage would, I suppose, have been justified, much as Christian outrage over things like Piss Christ was justified…provided that the outrage over these cartoons also took the same form as Christian outrage over Piss Christ.

Which means that boycotting art shows and writing letters of complaint would be justified. Burning embassies, making death threats against the artists and the newspaper, attacking Danish social workers in other nations, and murdering Catholic priests would not be justified. And, as Lost Budgie points out in the article concerning that priest, the cartoons are not really the incident so much as they are the reason-du-jour for violence and rampage.

Christian communities in Lebanon have been torched, allegedly because of these cartoons. What connection a Christian enclave has with Dutch secularist artists is suspect, and indeed probably does not exist. But it is as Budgie says: the cartoons are not the reason, only the thin justification. Muslim mobs can use these cartoons as the “spark” that starts the fire, but once the blaze is lit, anyone who isn’t Muslim is a legitimate target for “revenge”. That is why a Catholic priest was shot dead in Turkey, allegedly in connection with riots over these cartoons. Father Santoro’s murderer didn’t say anything about cartoons: he simply shouted “God is Great” and fired his gun…his desire was not to avenge himself upon a Dane, but instead to please Allah by slaying the infidel.

It was irresponsible of Jyllands-Posten to provoke this response, I think, but it serves to note that they do have a freedom of the press, and freedom of speech, as we ostensibly have over here as well. And the exercise thereof cannot be trodden upon to accomodate the sensibilities of any particular group…and I apply that even to my fellow Catholics. I think Piss Christ was offensive and vulgar, but I accept that the artist, being made in the image and likeness of God and therefore possessed of free will, had a right to make that picture. And even though I find it offensive and vulgar, I don’t respond by uttering death threats, or by holding up signs like these that are pictured, calling for the extermination of the artist in question, and indeed all who oppose Catholicism.

Tarek Fatah, who I mentioned previously in connection with Khalid Usman, had this to say regarding the reaction of his Muslim bretheren world-wide to the cartoons:

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“The protests in the Middle East have proven that the cartoonist was right,” said Tarek Fatah, a director of the Muslim Canadian Congress.

“It’s falling straight into that trap of being depicted as a violent people and proving the point that, yes, we are.”

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And he is right. And indeed, in all of this violence, there is irony. For when cartoons were published that depicted Muslims as exciteable and murderous, how did Muslims the world over respond? With riots and murder.