The Toronto Star (free registration) reports a sad incident from the marching morons.
| What began as an attempt to heal the wounds of Canada's Muslims and Jews has ended by inflaming them. | |
| At an evening of dialogue for Muslim-Jewish understanding, remarks by Israel's consul general have prompted the Muslim Canadian Congress to call for an apology, and it has asked Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew to investigate the statements and seek an explanation. |
| Muslims who attended the speech said they were hurt and shocked by his words. | |
| "I have been president of Muslims Against Terrorism, and I found his implication very hurtful," said Farzana Hassan-Shahid, an inter-faith activist. "It was that all Muslims are lumped together. We think he should apologize for that." |
These people need IQ tests. Immediately. Followed by a mandatory Logic 101 course.
Oy vey. What the situation needs is now is several hundred sympathy cards to the Israeli consul general. Whatever they pay him, it can't be enough.
Hat tip: The Last Amazon: as long as groups like the Muslim Canadian Congress demand apologies and attempt to persecute others for stating the painful facts on the ground, I consciously disconnect from the desire to even attempt a dialogue with the deluded.
7 comments:
This is the sort of imbecility that causes rational people to dispair of the possibility of dialogue with Muslims.
I suppose continuing to try in the face of such frustrations is a test of character....
pst314 -- you have to remember that the "Muslim issues" groups doing the complaining are not necessarily representative of Muslims in general. Like NAACP and La Raza, they do not have to respect the interests of those they purport to serve, only the institutional ends of their groups. As long as the knee-jerk media lavish attention on them and give them credibility, they can continue to fundraise and flourish.
I assume the groups in Canada are like CAIR and AIC in the US, and provide cover and apology for terror groups like Hamas.
Well, we are all deluded; it's just a question of degree. But since it is in large part our thinking about religion/religious thinking that reveals the degree, it would seem pretty difficult to point out delusions to people who righteously identify with their religion and its limits.
Reading between the lines, what seems to be going on here is an understandable desire among Canadian Muslims to dis-identify with those violent mad men who are giving their religion a bad name. But in some sense, and despite Islam's many sectarian differences, the very point of Islam is to "lump all Muslims together", all together in the submission to and recital of God's word. There is thus a contradiction that the bourgeois western Moslem is having trouble holding together, and, perhaps, this silly acting out against "the Jew" is the result.
We are often asked, is it possible for Islam to have a protestant reformation? Yet from certain perspectives, Islam has already had many protestant reformations - i.e. tribal fundamentalists coming in from the countryside and reforming the decadent religion of the towns. But Islam's reformations have not yet led to the equivalent of western modernity. The desire to lump everyone together in a reformed faith/submission is not the road to lumping everyone together in a free market or democratic polity. The two work at cross-purposes.
The democratic political and economic market needs people willing to go it alone religiously, seeing themselves (however delusively) as some kind of elect. Hence the attraction and fear of "the Jew" or his later approximations, e.g. the puritan New Englander, the Methodist Ontarian, for the Canadian Moslem trying to adapt to a relatively free market culture.
We can only hope that one day our Canadian Muslim neighbors will find the courage to modernize their faith (in service to the individual, alone in the market) for people like themselves, without having to demonize Jews as an alternative to facing up with the real problem: the violence among those with whom they are, according to the doctrines of their faith, lumped. How to get out of the lump without denying the lump, how to put the mosque in the individual, and not, so literally, the individual in the mosque?
It's a big one to swallow. We have to have the courage to point it out, without multiculti sweeping under the rug, and without engaging in overblown rhetoric. (It would be even more delusional, on our part, to expect all Moslems to convert to Christianity or secularism, or to think that the world can live in relative peace if the Moslem world doesn't undergo some significant modernization and participate, with something more than oil and violent rhetoric, in the global economy.)
Baron Bodissey: I agree with you completely. We know that those groups do not represent all Muslims but the mainstream media treat them as if they were. (Ah, but how many Muslims are actually in favor of liberty, with tolerance and equal rights for all? That is something I continue to worry about. It's not just the small number who actually throw bombs, but the larger number who sympathize with the goals of the bomb-throwers. How large a number??)
The June 2005 issue of the American Spectator has articles on the corrosive and sometimes deadly consequences of substituting PC agendas for rational decision-making.
Until journalists report the news honestly, it will remain very difficult to know the truth. We won't know how many reasonable Muslims there are, and those reasonable Muslims will feel isolated and voiceless.
Furthermore, Muslims need to be confronted with these questions of liberty versus tyranny, pluralistic secular government versus theocracy, jihad versus tolerance and respect, honest history versus islamist lies. Why does Egyptian TV broadcast month-long dramatizations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and report the blood libel as fact? Why does traditional Islamic law prohibit the building of new churches, or the repair of existing ones without special permission from the local Muslim rulers? How do the various Muslim genocides square with Islam's claim of absolute moral superiority? Like most Westerners, I do not wish to punish today's Muslims for their ancestor's crimes, but I do want them to face up to what has been done, repudiate those crimes without qualification and show that they are truly committed to the reforms that are so desperately needed. As long as journalists continue to shirk their duty to report the truth (aren't they supposed to be in the business of asking uncomfortable questions?) this necessary dialogue will be not occur, or at least will be seriously delayed.
I have read that these Canadian groups do indeed function as supporters and apologists for Islamic terrorists and tyrants. (And CAIR has people in Canada.)
True Peers--
It's not the degree of our delusion, it is our dedication to truth rather than dogma...the paradigm of scientic inquiry (leaving aside the extremes of scientism for the moment).
Good point about 'reformation' of Islam. It's not really possible -- and historically, they've hated the Jews since Mohammed. Originally, he attempted to syncretize what he understood of Judaism into his 'visions.' When the local Jews were dismissive of his ideas he was *deeply* offended. That's part of the reason he slaughtered them. Don't offend Mohammed.
Can the violent tribe ever turn in the direction of modernity? Good question...
...but thinking they'll 'convert' to any aspect of Western life would be delusional on our part, wouldn't it? They're merely playing their part in the battle of DNA...adapt or die.
A4g--
While Augustine and Aquinas are the foundations, we have long since gone on to reject some of their ideas...like Aquinas' belief that the fetus became female due to the agency of "an ill south wind."
But we are truth-seekers, not submitters. After all, that's what Islam itself means: to submit. My sarcasm re the lack of logic was merely a way of pointing to the underlying cognitive disconnect they must force on themselves and everyone else in order to maintain their shaky jello architecture.
Steve--
Thanks for the great story. The PC virus has totally infected the airports. The fact that nothing has happened is due to the disarray of the enemy, not our intrepid inspectors.
Yes, D, I think you're right that it's the dedication to truth that matters. I was once deep in delusions, and perhaps the thing that allowed me to survive, and get a little closer to the surface, was the quest for truth. On the other hand, it was perhaps the desire for truth that got me in a mess, unmoored from conventions and social rituals, in the first place.
I have a modern Canadian sister, ostensibly "liberated", educated and unreligious, who uses the services of a covered Muslim woman for daycare/babysitting. It puzzles me what kind of message they think they're sending to their boy. "People are different and that's ok..."? Anyway, the point is that this Muslim family runs a few small businesses in the neighborhood and they are successful, because hard-working, together in family. And of course there are many such examples of Muslims successfully adapting to modern western life, to a degree.
Nonetheless, the organized voices of Canadian Islam tend to participate in the PC culture that is against the free market in ideas/speech, and who knows in what else (though many Canadian Muslims are against the proposals for Sharia family law, and, in one revealing incident, when a university decided to call its new department "Islamic Studies", many local Muslims complained that this invoked the ideas of Islamicists and so they must change the name to Muslim studies, which they did... note, again, the fear of being lumped together with the crazies...) One can imagine a situation where a majority Muslim culture would become antagonistic to the liberal society to which they presently adapt. Though this seems much more likely in Europe than North America. Minorities have to adapt (but I'm not sure what you mean by this being a question of DNA and not culture...)
This is all to point out the mystery that there must be two kinds of truth. There are pragmatic truths that my sister and her babysitter's family clearly follow. And they make their neighborhood work, reasonably peacefully, on a day- to-day basis. But how committed are they to the inconvenient truths to which the health of a free society must be committed in the long run, the truth that comes from the marginal truth seeker and not from the PC or religious centres?
Our pragmatic truths can be a kind of delusion too. And so how do we encourage people to steer by the more fundamental truths of our humanity, e.g. that both women's and men's freedom is maximized when sexuality is neither hidden nor flaunted, that "liberal" values are not, in the long run, served by submission to any kind of dogma, idolatry, or belief in worldly victories over foes of the one true faith?
If Muslims don't want to be grouped together, why don't the "moderates" speak out against jihad? Because the Koran teaches that jihad is the certain path to Paradise!
The Free Muslims March, held in D.C. yesterday, May 14, garnered an attendance of about 50 people. If "the majority of Muslims are not themselves terrorists" (Toronto Star), where are the hordes to protest jihad?
Furthermore, I'm tired of these demands for apologies and investigations. This bending over backwards to avoid offending Muslims is dangerous, and we're well on our way to censorhip in the name of stopping alleged hate crimes. Besides, Islam is notorious for not accepting apologies. Arabic does not have a past tense in the sense which we understand, so nothing is ever over and done.
Yes, "marching morons"--the perfect term.
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