One troublesome kafir wouldn't take it
I WAS directed to the back of the room, far from the business of the evening.
"Why must I sit at the back?" I asked, "I want to sit at the front."
I was not permitted because of a physical characteristic over which I have no control.
Like Mississippi blacks in the 1950s sent to the back of the bus for the colour of their skin, I was segregated - but due to my gender.
The public meeting was organised by political group Hizb ut-Tahrir to complain about Western intervention in the Middle East and declare a "new world order" under Islam. They forced non-Muslims into gender segregation, openly discriminating against women.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott wants to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir, and has called them un-Islamic.
Sheik Ismail al-Wahwah mocked him for this.
"He's a mufti too? He is takfir."
The word "takfir" signifies an "unbeliever" and the sheik is right — Tony Abbott is no authority on Islam.
For more than a decade governments have replaced the word "Islamist" with "terrorist" to avoid offending the religious or fuelling bigotry against innocent Muslims.
Sheik al-Wahwah said the police even asked him to wipe "blessed" from the meeting title "War to end a blessed revolution".
Euphemisms such as "death cult", "hate preacher" and "un-Australian" have further debased the dialogue. It is contemptuous of the public to suggest they aren't smart enough to be told the truth with accurate words — or to guess it without.
From sloppy words comes sloppy thinking. not "moderate" versus "extremist". It is "secular" versus "theocrat"
The war on "terror" is a war on Islamist fascism.
As a secular state it would not even be our business except the Islamists are here, colonising us.
Islamists want holy men to dictate what you can eat, what you can wear, and when you will be lashed or stoned to death. They want any criticism of their political and religious ideology outlawed.
And they are winning.
In the 1970s, secular Muslim women in Iran could choose western clothes; in Afghanistan they attended college — freedoms now unthinkable.
In March 2007, a global group of prominent Muslims and former Muslims signed the St Petersburg declaration in Florida demanding the separation of religion from state. It called on all governments to reject Sharia law, fatwa courts and clerical rule. It was signed by people like Sharia law expert Hasan Mahmud of the Muslim Canadian Congress whose activism helped ban all faith-courts.
The St Petersburg declaration calls for Islam to be expressed as either a religion or a political philosophy, but not both.
By contrast Hizb ut-Tahrir wants a caliphate with a Koranic constitution ruled by Sharia law where Muslims cannot leave.
During question time, I asked Sheik al-Wahwah what the penalty was for Muslims who no longer believed in Allah. Four times I asked, but he would not answer. He did not want to publicly admit the penalty is death. People are killed for apostasy. It is a "religious crime".
A faceless woman pressed my arm kindly with a gloved hand.
"When people join Islam, they find such peace they never want to leave," she said.
Hizb ut-Tahrir may never openly encourage violence, but they are dedicated to furthering the Islamist goal. They are another political expression of the ideology that spawned IS, al-Qaeda, al-Muhajiroun and a thousand others.
When I asked the sheik why a secular country such as Australia would not want to ban his group, he brought up freedom of speech.
The point has merits; freedom is measured by views you don't agree with. Even Hitler was in favour of views he liked.
But Hizb ut-Tahrir imposes a system that strips people of inalienable human rights: liberty, gender equality, freedom from religion, freedom of expression, equality for homosexuals, universal suffrage.
And Sheik al-Wahwah does not extend his concept of free speech to criticising Islam. People were murdered for "insulting Islam" over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed and Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses.
It is not Hizb ut-Tahrir that needs banning but the ideology behind it: Islamist fascism.
The federal government should adopt the principles of the St Petersburg declaration and ban Islamist fascism without delay.
Coming soon after Sweden’s recognition of a non-existent state of Palestine, the British Parliament’s 274-to-12 resolution to recognize “Palestine” flags a sea-change in European sentiment towards Israel. France is thinking of following suit. The European Community bureaucracy, meanwhile, has readied sanctions against Israel. One remonstrates in vain. The Gaza War should have taught the world that Israel cannot cede territory to Mahmoud Abbas, now in the 7th year of a 4-year term. Hamas has the support of 55% of West Bank Palestinians vs. just 38% for Abbas, and Hamas openly brags that it could destroy Israel more easily from firing positions in the West Bank. Only the Israeli military keeps Abbas in power; without the Israelis Hamas would displace Abbas in the West Bank as easily as it did in Gaza; and a Hamas government in the West Bank would make war on Israel, with horrifying consequences.
To propose immediate Palestinian statehood under these circumstances is psychotic, to call the matter by its right name. The Europeans, along with the United Nations and the Obama administration on most working days, refuse to take reality into account. When someone tells you that Martians are transmitting radio waves into his brain, or that Elvis Presley really is the pope rather than an Argentine Jesuit, one doesn’t enquire into the merits of the argument. Rather, one considers the cause of the insanity.
The Europeans hate Israel with the passion of derangement. Why? Well, one might argue that the Europeans always have hated Jews; they were sorry they hated Jews for a while after the Holocaust, but they have gotten over that and hate us again. Some analysts used to cite Arab commercial influence in European capitals, but today Egypt and implicitly Saudi Arabia are closer to Jerusalem’s point of view than Ramallah’s. Large Muslim populations in Europe constitute a pressure group for anti-Israel policies, but that does not explain the utter incapacity of the European elite to absorb the most elementary facts of the situation.
Europe’s derangement has deeper roots. Post-nationalist Europeans, to be sure, distrust and despise all forms of nationalism. But Israeli nationalism does not offend Europe merely because it is one more kind of nationalism. From its founding, Europe has been haunted by the idea of Israel. Its first states emerged as an attempt to appropriate the election of Israel. As I wrote in my 2011 book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too):
The unquiet urge of each nation to be chosen in its own skin began with the first conversion of Europe’s pagans; it was embedded in European Christendom at its founding. Christian chroniclers cast the newly-baptized European monarchs in the role of biblical kings, and their nations in the role of the biblical Israel. The first claims to national election came at the crest of the early Dark Ages, from the sixth-century chronicler St Gregory of Tours (538-594), and the seventh-century Iberian churchman St Isidore of Seville.
As I observed on the First World War anniversary, Saints Isidore of Seville and Gregory of Tours were in the Bialystock and Bloom of the Dark Ages, the Producers of the European founding: they sold each petty monarch 100% of the show. Europe’s nationalisms were not simply an expansion of tribal impulses, but a nationalism refined and shaped by Christianity into a ghastly caricature of Israel’s Chosenness. In turn, each European country asserted its status as God’s new people: France under Richelieu during the 17th century, England under the Tudors, Russia (“The Third Rome”) from the time of Ivan the Terrible, and ultimately the Germans, who substituted the concept of “master race” for the Chosen People.
The flowering of Jewish national life in Israel makes the Europeans crazy. It is not simply envy: it is a terrible reminder of the vanity of European national aspirations over the centuries, of the continent’s ultimate failure as a civilization. Just as the Europeans (most emphatically the Scandinavians) would prefer to dissolve into the post-national stew of European identity, they demand that Israel do the same. Never mind that Israel lacks the option to do so, and would be destroyed were it to try, for reasons that should be obvious to any casual consumer of news media.
Europeans cannot live with their past. They cannot live with their present, and do not plan to have a future, for they do not bear enough children to forestall demographic ruin at the hundred-year horizon. With its high fertility, national spirit, religiosity and unabashed national self-assertion, Israel reminds the Europeans of everything that they are not. Much worse: it reminds them of what they once desired to become. The idea of Israel as well as the fact of Israel are equally intolerable to them.
It remains to be seen whether Germany–the one European country that has made a vigorous effort to come to grips with its dreadful past–will allow anti-Israel sentiment to turn into diplomatic isolation. One hopes that Angela Merkel, Germany’s talented and well-intentioned chancellor, will stand in the way of this. Europe may not be quite a lost cause for Israel, but it is at grave risk of becoming one.
#1
Europe, collectively, has always been irrational and bigoted toward the Jews, not just their home nation of Israel. Europe did not fight Hitler to free the Jews. Europe fought Hitler because he invaded them. Europe stood by with their collective hands in their pockets as Hitler's goons rounded up the Jews. As nation states, they did not care, or if they did, they stood by watching silently in shame.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
10/15/2014 19:33 Comments ||
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#2
"stood by watching silently in shame"
They stood by watching, but no shame was involved. More like glee. >:-(
Posted by: Barbara ||
10/15/2014 20:46 Comments ||
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#3
Europe stood by with their collective hands in their pockets as Hitler's goons rounded up the Jews.
Turkey has worked to improve relations with the Kurds in Iraq but now risk blowing any progress that has been made with their refusal to intervene in Kobani.
The situation has escalated to [such] an extent that [the] Turks [have] felt compelled to take up air strikes again against the PKK, for the first time since peace talks began, two years ago. Kurds are rioting in Diyarbakir, Mardin, Siirt, Mus, Van and Batman provinces.
If ISIS finally takes Kobani and [massacre] the Kurds, the situation in Turkey could explode. Turkey wants to take down pencil-neck but due to their own actions (e.g. cutting military ties to Israel) have a limited ability to strike Assad.
#1
Not high enough a price. Im looking for ;oss of Cyprus, a civil war, partition, and a Free Kurdistan as the ultimate price paid by Erdogan and his bunch that seems to be an Islamist version of Hugo Chavez.
#3
Erdogan has not yet paid any much of a price for the past 8 years of being an egomaniac islamist.
He has been rewarded with election victories and someone is subsidizing Turkey's import loans to inflate the economy. The entire Obama admin has essentially been praising him for insignificant actions and overlooking major provocations.
Posted by: lord garth ||
10/15/2014 9:37 Comments ||
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#4
Mark Steyn had an interesting article on birthrates. Basically the Turks are done in a decade or so and the Kurds will take over.
That leaves Turkey a few options. 1. Betray the Kurds and hope ISIS does a bit of the old Armenian on them. 2. Establish a Kurdistan outside of Turkish territory and hope the Turkish Kurds move and they get along. 3. Suck it up and be nice to the future overlords.
Clearly Turkish pride has trouble with 2 options so they are rolling the dice on option 1.
Great editorial piece from Gabe Malor at Ace of Spades. As they say, read it all.
Posted by: Steve White ||
10/15/2014 08:30 ||
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#1
From the original NYTimes article: "The United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. "
Tell your friends.
[Iran Press TV] Recent US "negotiations" regarding the use of military facilities in Turkey and Soddy Arabia ...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in the Soddy national face... to train "moderate" opposition forces is further proof of the kabuki theater and misinformation that continues to be propagated across Western media.
To those of us who have been closely following developments in the Middle East region, it's incredibly obvious that there's been a longstanding relationship between NATO
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
10/15/2014 00:00 ||
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#3
Even the most inexperienced military analyst can easily determine that coalition “airstrikes” in Syria were deliberately limited in number and effectiveness
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
The situation has escalated to [such] an extent that [the] Turks [have] felt compelled to take up air strikes again against the PKK, for the first time since peace talks began, two years ago. Kurds are rioting in Diyarbakir, Mardin, Siirt, Mus, Van and Batman provinces.
