Inside the Asylum

Raymond Ibrahim takes up the question of whether Judaism and Christianity are as violent as Islam. He argues that the Qur'an endorses violence in a way that is quite different from that of the Old Testament (and that the New Testament does not endorse violence at all).

When the Qur'an's violent verses are juxtaposed with their Old Testament counterparts, they are especially distinct for using language that transcends time and space, inciting believers to attack and slay nonbelievers today no less than yesterday. God commanded the Hebrews to kill Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites—all specific peoples rooted to a specific time and place. At no time did God give an open-ended command for the Hebrews, and by extension their Jewish descendants, to fight and kill gentiles. On the other hand, though Islam's original enemies were, like Judaism's, historical (e.g., Christian Byzantines and Zoroastrian Persians), the Qur'an rarely singles them out by their proper names. Instead, Muslims were (and are) commanded to fight the people of the book—"until they pay the tribute out of hand and have been humbled"[13] and to "slay the idolaters wherever you find them."

The two Arabic conjunctions "until" (hata) and "wherever" (haythu) demonstrate the perpetual and ubiquitous nature of these commandments: There are still "people of the book" who have yet to be "utterly humbled" (especially in the Americas, Europe, and Israel) and "idolaters" to be slain "wherever" one looks (especially Asia and sub-Saharan Africa). In fact, the salient feature of almost all of the violent commandments in Islamic scriptures is their open-ended and generic nature: "Fight them [non-Muslims] until there is no persecution and the religion is God's entirely.

The example of Muhammad's life and the early history of Islam do nothing to moderate this call to perpetual war.

Aside from the divine words of the Qur'an, Muhammad's pattern of behavior—his sunna or "example"—is an extremely important source of legislation in Islam. Muslims are exhorted to emulate Muhammad in all walks of life: "You have had a good example in God's Messenger." And Muhammad's pattern of conduct toward non-Muslims is quite explicit.

Sarcastically arguing against the concept of moderate Islam, for example, terrorist Osama bin Laden, who enjoys half the Arab-Islamic world's support per an Al-Jazeera poll,[19] portrays the Prophet's sunna thusly:

"Moderation" is demonstrated by our prophet who did not remain more than three months in Medina without raiding or sending a raiding party into the lands of the infidels to beat down their strongholds and seize their possessions, their lives, and their women.

In fact, based on both the Qur'an and Muhammad's sunna, pillaging and plundering infidels, enslaving their children, and placing their women in concubinage is well founded. And the concept of sunna—which is what 90 percent of the billion-plus Muslims, the Sunnis, are named after—essentially asserts that anything performed or approved by Muhammad, humanity's most perfect example, is applicable for Muslims today no less than yesterday.

In all religions there are core texts, ideas, and examples that act as centers of gravitational attraction, continually pulling religious thought in particular directions even as it changes over time. In Islam the tide is always going to run towards violence because that is the direction in which the text of the Qur'an and the example of Muhammad's life will always pull.

Further to Egyptian action against Lebanese hottie Wehbe, now they're getting worked up about Beyonce.

"Why are you encouraging this insolent sex party?" lawmaker Hamdi Hassan from the opposition Muslim Brotherhood wrote in a letter to the government. "You are accused of disturbing social peace and stability, encouraging vice and debauchery."
Another Islamic lawmaker, Ali Laban, called for banning the "nudity concert."
A Facebook campaign against Beyonce's concert collected nearly 10,000 supporters.
But the war of words has not derailed the glitzy concert, due hundreds of miles south of Cairo in the luxury Red Sea resort of Port Ghalib.

They're certainly doing a good job of promoting the event. Event organiser Ahmed Beltagi said

"We should salute her instead of criticising her," he said of the diva.

It seems he's in favor of insolent nude sex party concerts.

Hey, those are his words.

Iran's Supreme Leader, spurning what he described as several personal overtures from US President Barack Obama, has warned that negotiating with the US was ''naive and perverted'' and said Iranian politicians should not be ''deceived'' into starting such talks.

I wonder what he thinks they would talk about? Really, it's quite hard to be both naive and perverted at the same time.

Apparently "Nubian monkey" is a highly offensive racist slur. Or so lawyers are claiming in their suit in Egypt against Lebanese singer Haifa Wehbe.

The song ‘Baba feen’ – which translates to ‘where is dad’ – was found to be extremely offensive, said the lawyers in their petition. So much so that Nubian children have stopped attending their classes at school because their classmates would mock them as ‘Nubian monkey’s’, said the lawyers.

I think the following is the song, but since I don't know the language, I can't guarantee it. It's actually pretty cute, and the clip can easily be understood by any parent with small children who keep getting up in the night. I presume that at some point that kid's momma calls him a "Nubian monkey" for waking her up. Maybe? Heck, I call my kid "monkey" all the time. I had no idea I was being so racist (against monkeys?) Oh, and Haifa Wehbe is seriously hot.

I'm not exactly sure what century it is in Saudi Arabia ... but this certainly doesn't belong in the 21st.

A Saudi lawyer says a female journalist has been sentenced to 60 lashes for her involvement in a TV show in which a Saudi man publicly talked about sex... The charges against her included involvement in the preparation of the program and advertising the segment on the Internet. The same court sentenced the man to five years in jail and 1,000 lashes.

1000 lashes? Wouldn't that be lethal?

Gulf news reports on a new comic book featuing 99 Islamic Superheroes. Shown below we have

Dana Ebrahim (Noora the Light), HOME COUNTRY: UAE, POWERS: Allow her to create realistic holograms, see the good and evil inside of people and even levitate!

But they left off her most impressive power: the ability to appear in public in Islamic countries wearing pants with her hair uncovered. Truly, she must be a formidable superhero. Oddly, another superhero called Samda The Invulnerable can't be all that invulnerable, because she does have to wear a headscarf. As for superhero Widad from the Philippines (also with hair revealed), they don't quite spell out what her power is, but she's called Widad the Loving...

This is what passes for progress in women's rights in the Middle East:

Kuwait's highest court has granted women the right to obtain a passport without their husband's approval.
The ruling is the latest gain for Kuwaiti women since they were granted the right to vote and compete in elections in 2005. Unlike in neighbouring Saudi Arabia, women in this small oil-rich ally of Washington can drive and travel without the permission of their fathers or husbands. Women activists still say they need equal access to government housing and the right to pass their citizenship to their children.

Yet somehow or other, Western feminists prefer to talk about "cultural relativity" and "respecting other countries" ... after all "these colors don't run (the world)" as a bumper sticker says, putting a liberal twist on a favorite conservative slogan. If only we had a Democrat in power, then all the world would embrace leftist ideals ... Oh wait...

This is my second post linking to Dar Al Hayat, a major Arab newspaper. I have to say, it contains stuff that I just never expected, from my last post in which an article argued that Obama was being too weak and encouraging extremists in the Middle East, to this:

I have another suggestion to increase the number of Arab readers, since we are one of the most smoking-prone nations in the world despite the health risks involved, and perhaps we are indeed prone to smoking, because of our stubbornness to acknowledge these risks. I therefore suggest that we print on the cover of each book “Reading may be detrimental to your health”, or “reading causes heart disease”, and because half of our women are constantly pregnant, perhaps we should also print “reading may pose health risks to pregnant women and foetuses”. This is because I am almost sure that any Arab who will read such a warning, will immediately take up reading the book with the same greed, gluttony, recklessness and idiocy with which he would take up smoking a full packet of cigarettes.

I don't think I'm even going to try to comment on it. I will say however that I really wish that more Americans would read. I am constantly shocked at the extremely limited vocabulary of many of my students. How do you improve vocabulary? You read. You read anything. Just read. As an example, I'd be prepared to lay down money on a bet that more than half of my freshman students wouldn't be able to accurately define the words "detrimental" and "gluttony" from the above quotation, and I wouldn't be confident that they'd know "acknowledge" "prone" or "pose".

Well, this is a surprise. Egypt's Culture Minister Farouk Hosni has unexpectedly failed in his bid to lead UNESCO. A dark horse candidate, Bulgaria's Irina Bokova came from behind to edge him out 31-27. Greece and Spain even voted for the Egyptian, but he still lost. Given his assertion that he wanted to burn Jewish books in Egyptian libraries, I can't say it's an undeserved defeat, but it's a surprise nevertheless. Bokova will be the first woman to head the organisation, and as far as I know, hasn't yet publicly called for any books to be burned, or singled out any race or religion for condemnation. That already makes her infinitely superior to the favored candidate. However, she's not without problems.

"Those who dislike communism in this country are not happy about her promotion," Ivo Indzhev, a Bulgarian political blogger, said, quoted in the New York Times. "For people in this region, her appointment sends the message that the West can swallow someone’s communist past very easily but can’t abide an Arab who is anti-Israel."

Hmmm ... so communist vs book burning anti-Semite. I can see why the voting was so close with two such well suited candidates to head a cultural organization. After all, it's the Arabs and the communists who have been producing most of the worlds cultural output in modern times.

Egyptian weekly Al-Ahrar wrote on its front page about "a ferocious campaign against him by the American administration, under Jewish pressure".

Yes, again, I can see how the Obama regime would have liked the Egyptian candidate, ... but let's face it, a communist is always going to trump an anti-Semite with the Obama crowd. They could no sooner repudiate a communist than Obama could repudiate his grandmother, or something like that.
[Update] Some further digging reveals some interesting things. Despite the Egyptians wanting to blame it all on an American-Zionist conspiracy:

President Mubarak of Egypt had refused US and European entreaties to offer another candidate. "Any other Egyptian would have been fine," an American official lamented. Mr Hosni apologised last summer for his book-burning remark and Israel did not not oppose him.

Oh, so if it wasn't the Americans, or even the Israelis, who the heck was it who successfully worked to keep the book-burner out of UNESCO?

French intellectuals kept up a campaign against him yesterday with a new accusation that, as a Rome-based diplomat, he had shielded Palestinian terrorists in 1985 after they murdered an American tourist in the hijacking of the Achille Lauro liner.

French intellectuals? French intellectuals? French intellectuals? French intellectuals using the accusation that he aided the murderer of an American? The French fighting and winning? Huh???????? Yes, you got it, it was freaking French intellectuals!!! And that's a pretty interesting allegation too... though of course, the Obama administration wouldn't care about that. Heck, what's the bet Obama has never even heard of the Achille Lauro? What with his inability to remember his close relationship with ACORN, I figure he must be suffering early on-set Alzheimers or something. And people thought Reagan was bad with his "I don't recalls".

There's still more:

Catherine Colonna, the French Ambassador to Unesco, was said by diplomats to have disobeyed President Sarkozy's orders and voted for Ms Bokova.

What is the world coming to? I guess the French have just got so used to being the anti-USA, that now the US government is fulfilling the role of being the world's socialist surrender monkeys, that they better do something different, like show some fight, and show some honor, and what's more, to win. Truly an amazing turn of events. Whatever next?

I posted a couple of times about Pakistan's election to the board of governors of the IAEA, and hey, what do you know, today we get this:

The recently concluded 53rd General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) passed a resolution that urged Israel to join the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) and to put its entire nuclear program under IAEA inspection.

I wonder who voted for it?

Western countries, including the United States and the European Union, also opposed the resolution, arguing that after Thursday's resolution calling for a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction was adopted, there was no need for a separate one on Israel.

Oh, so it wasn't western countries ... maybe it was Buddhist countries? Hindus?

With the swine flu scare sweeping the world, Egypt took it as an excuse to wipe out the country's entire pig population. Of course, it was really a religious/political move aimed at Egypt's Christians (who can eat pork). I posted recently about the inevitable chaos of putting Italians in charge of your garbage collection, but it seems that the decision to wipe out the pigs is equally to blame. It's not as if they weren't warned:

When the government killed all the pigs in Egypt this spring — in what public health experts said was a misguided attempt to combat swine flu — it was warned the city would be overwhelmed with trash. The pigs used to eat tons of organic waste. Now the pigs are gone and the rotting food piles up on the streets of middle-class neighborhoods like Heliopolis and in the poor streets of communities like Imbaba.

And how do the former pig owners feel about the situation?

“They killed the pigs, let them clean the city,” said Moussa Rateb, a former garbage collector and pig owner who lives in the [Christian] community of the zabaleen. “Everything used to go to the pigs, now there are no pigs, so it goes to the administration.”

Who will guard the guardians? Heck, are we sure they're actually guardians? The International Atomic Energy Agency has some interesting governors.

ISLAMABAD, Sept. 18 (Xinhua) -- Pakistan was elected Friday to the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)... Pakistan was the consensus candidate of MESA (Middle East and South Asian region) at the 53rd regular session of the IAEA General Conference which is underway in Vienna on Sept. 14-18, said Abdul Basit, the Foreign Office spokesman. Pakistan will now commence its 17th two-year term on the IAEA Board. Pakistan's election to the Board of Governors is a recognition of its long standing commitment to the aims and objectives of the IAEA, Basit said.

(Full story here)

There's nothing much in the news about Hezbollah lately, but I saw this story, and wanted to highlight one section of it:

Hezbollah's chief Hassan Nasrallah said Friday [that] making deals and normalization with Israel is "religiously forbidden," and his group will neither recognize Israel, nor succumb to it, "even if the whole world recognizes its existence."

There's this tendency in the west to assume that all the "players" in the middle east are rational, and subject to the rules of logic. It's a false assumption.

Dar Al Hayat is an Arab news organization. Their stories are mostly in Arabic (so beyond my reach) but I was interested in one of their translated articles. Of course it has some inevitable positions: US policy must help the Palestinians, and stop helping the Israelis, but let's look at a few other comments:

Let us take Lebanon for instance... [which isn't being helped by] US policy which lacks rigor, perenniality and perhaps even competence... the Obama Administration must realize... that its policies towards both Iran and Syria... are radically contributing to strengthening the forces of defiance against the forces of moderation, to undermining democracy in Lebanon... The Barack Obama Administration’s infatuation with dialogue and its overlooking violations to protect such dialogue only constitute ammunition for Iran and Syria to persist in obstructing legitimate rule in Lebanon.

So let's get this straight... an Arab media organization is saying that Obama's foreign policy is incompetent, infatuated with dialogue, and that it is weakening the moderates, and strengthening the extremists. Ummm. What kind of extremist right wing fascist organization is Al Hayat? Well, Wikipedia describes it like this:

It is the newspaper of record for the Arab diaspora and the preferred tribune for left-wing or liberal intellectuals who wish to express themselves to a large public.

Hmmm, so it's basically the New York Times of the Arab world? As Glenn Reynolds would say: heh.

In this case, Istanbul, Dresden (plus Alexandria and Tehran).
First Istanbul Turkey:

A 24-year-old street seller assaulted a man on the grounds that he was proselytizing Christianity, holding a knife to his throat in Istanbul before surrendering to police, newspapers reported Tuesday... The assailant – identified as 24-year-old pirate CD vendor – wrapped a Turkish flag around the head of İsmail Aydın, 35, put a knife to his throat and shouted, "This is Turkey, you cannot distribute Bibles here," Habertürk newspaper said. The stand-off lasted 20 minutes before the police persuaded the assailant to surrender, according to the daily Sabah... An Italian Roman Catholic priest was shot dead in 2006 and three Protestants – a German missionary and two Turkish converts – had their throats cut in 2007.

Now, for the record, Turkey is a secular republic, not a Muslim country. The Turkish news coverage of this incident is obviously disapproving, and the attacker was promptly arrested. The attacker's mental stability is questioned. This story reflects negatively on certain people in Turkey, but it is not representative of Turkey at all. That's not the point I'm trying to make. Let's continue shall we?
Now, Dresden Germany:

Initially it started out as a liable case: A Muslim woman filed a case against a 28-year unemployed German of Russian descent, in August 2008, after he had called her a “terrorist” on a Dresden street because she wears the higab – the Islamic headscarf that covers the hair.

But, after the Russian (not German) was fined 2,800 Euros for his crime, he decided to take matters into his own hands, stabbing Marwa Al Sherbini outside the courtroom. At least in Turkey the Christian wasn't killed, but there are clear similarities in the nature of the crimes. Now we get to the interesting bit ... the reaction to the incident in Germany in the "Muslim world" (whatever that is).

In Alexandria Egypt:

Alexandria governor Adel Labib “agreed to give the name of martyr Marwa al-Sherbini” to a street in the northern Egyptian Mediterranean city

There's also this:

It has also fuelled anti-German sentiment in Islamic countries, notably Iran and Sherbini's native Egypt, where she has been dubbed the "veil martyr" as she was wearing a headscarf when she was attacked... Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blamed the German government for the act, and on the streets around 150 Iranian Islamist students pelted eggs at the German embassy in Tehran chanting "Death to Germany! Death to Europe!"

Meanwhile, back in anti-Muslim racist Germany:

"A meeting with town representatives and the Central Council of Muslims is set to take place next week to decide how we can honour her," Kai Schulz told AFP, adding discussions would also take place with the woman's family. The city's immigration officer, Marita Schieferdecker-Adolph said: "We are thinking of naming one of the city's streets after her."

I guess all I'd like to say (or ask) in conclusion is this: how would people in Egypt and Iran (the ones getting all hot and bothered against Germany) care to respond to the attack on the Christian in Turkey? Anything to say? Would you suggest, perhaps, that chanting crowds should pelt the Turkish embassy in Berlin? Is it fair to blame either Germany or Turkey for these nasty incidents? Is what's good for the goose what's good for the gander?

Published in Turkish media:

After 9/11, the Arabs have increasingly reached out to China investing heavily in its exploding industries and markets. China’s direct trade with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and other Arab states has multiplied incredibly fast over the past couple of years. All this could change if China does not change its ways of treating its Muslims. And if festering wounds in Xinjiang are not treated soon, Beijing could have a problem on its hands that would make the Tiananmen Square carnage look like a picnic.

Yes, it's possible that Arabs and Muslims may change their attitude to China, but let's face it ... it's not all that likely. If the Chinese were Jewish, that would be a different story.

Yes, you heard right ... Hamas is launching itself into the wonderful world of moving making. Facing a terrible economic crisis, what else did they have to do with the $200,000 they spent making a movie?

The two-hour feature film, with the screenplay written by Gaza Hamas strongman Mahmoud al-Zahar, tells the story of Emad Akel, the commander of Hamas movement's armed wing al-Qassam Brigades, who was killed by Israel in 1993... the movie [was] shot over 10 months on a production lot located in southern Gaza Strip, which Hamas hopes will one day grow into a media city.

It's kind of ironic really, considering this:

Gaza used to have six major movie houses, but all were shut down because Palestinian activists felt entertainment was inappropriate at a time of struggle. A movie house called al-Nasser was only reopened in 1995 for three months before being burned and destroyed by radical Hamas protestors in Gaza.

Come on guys ... which is it going to be? Oh well, I guess it's appropriate since Hamas clearly lives in a fantasy world. Maybe they've finally found their true calling.

The Chinese should be liberals ... they think you can solve every problem by passing a law against it.

Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region would accelerate local legislation against separatism, said the region's top lawmaker on Sunday.

That'll certainly get rid of all ethnic tension, and make all Uighurs happy to be part of China. Just to make sure the Uighurs get the point:

A most urgent problem to be solved was the lack of law booklets in ethnic minority languages, he said. The region had organized experts to do the translation work and the booklets would soon be distributed to farmers and herdsmen across the region, he added.

You see, that was the problem. The Uighurs didn't know they shouldn't riot against the Han Chinese, because the relevant laws weren't widely available in Uighur. If only all problems were solved this easily.