Cherif El-Ayouty is a civil engineer who immigrated to Denmark from Egypt in 1968. He is a Muslim who has voted for the Danish People’s Party since the party was created. According to him, the DPP is the only party that defends his values.
Mr. El-Ayouty wrote the following essay in collaboration with Hans Erling Jensen, who has kindly translated it for Gates of Vienna.
When we meet creatures from space
by Cherif El-Ayouty
I’ve always been deeply fascinated by outer space. As a child, plowing my way through all the books I could lay my hands on, I discussed my reading with anyone interested — the neighbors, my professor at the university who had even received a Nobel Prize! Planets, stars, and galaxies were a big part of my life.
My dream is that man will one day find a way to travel in outer space, so we can meet other intelligent creatures, which I’m sure exist somewhere out there.
How will we behave in such a meeting? Will we expect that the species we are visiting on their planet are friendly and will embrace us, and if they do, how will we look at them in the long run? Can we accept their way of life, their view of what is beautiful and what is disgusting? How about faith and moral principles — relationship to life and death?
If everything goes according to plan, and our dearest wishes come true, this future meeting will be a gift to humanity. But what if everything turns out to be “The Opposite”? Our new friends are hostile. They possess an appalling morality, cheat and manipulate us, and in return, we look upon them with suspicion and discomfort, while we wonder if they’re going to destroy us if we do not do something drastic to them first?
A scene from “Star Wars”
It is somewhat easier to obtain diversity of intelligent beings when we watch a scene in Star Wars. There we can pair the ethics and morals with appearance and manner to confirm the stereotypes, which we believe reflects the evil and the good.
Here in the real world, on our own little planet, it is difficult to accept that two people who at first glance is created after the model, two arms, two legs, a head and a body can look at life from two completely opposite poles. It is like we are each standing on our own planet!
It is my philosophy of life that man has to understand that just as we do not have big problems understanding that extraterrestrials might be very different from us, even if they are equipped with an intelligence like ours, it is fundamentally important that we accept that the same circumstances exist here on Earth.
People have different cultures have different ways of living, of thinking. What deceives us into thinking otherwise is that we are so similar physically.
An example of what can happen
When Columbus decided to take the back door to India and “by accident”, you might say, landed in San Salvador, the Spanish sailors were met by curious Indians who smilingly welcomed the unknown and provided them with food and other necessities in exchange for various souvenirs.
The two groups might as well have come from different planets. Indians lived from hand to mouth by nature’s abundance. Columbus and his men were primarily looking for gold, and they unfortunately eschewed no means to obtain it. The Indians soon had enough of tyranny and hegemony of the Spanish gold-diggers so engaged they were in chasing of their “god”. Bloody conflict between the native peoples and the immigrants soon became more rule than exception.
Without making any indignation parallels between Columbus time and the present, I would just soberly point out that when you fly from our part of the world into a village in the middle of the Amazon, or Papua, or to visit the pygmies in Africa, the cannibals in New Guinea or the mountain Indians in Chile, it’s like visiting other planets. The same happens when a Westerner arrives at one of the thousands of villages in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Egypt, Libya, Nigeria, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and many other countries. The feeling of having landed on another planet is a popular description in the literature.
The difference is massive. It’s about life values, mindsets, knowledge, lifestyle, behavior, principles, philosophy, glory, religion, eating habits, and so on. Simply put, there is a universe of difference. For the Westerner traveling as a tourist, it is important to maneuver around the conditions and the rules that the communities visited have lined up for its own survival. Even as a tourist, this can sometimes be rather difficult.
Of course there are people on all these “planets” that have learned to communicate in global, or cosmopolitan terms, and are fully capable to complete commercial, political, social or scientific agreements and transactions with the rest of the world. But that does not mean that we in the West can change the foundation each of them stands on, just because we think our values have more content or are more universal than theirs, and vice versa.
We simply have to acknowledge that humans are different, cultures are different, and that some people go better together than others — and even go a step further and realize that certain things do not work if they are mixed together. The mixture will behave like oil and water.
Islam and the West
And now I am reaching the point. The values that are primary causes of the West’s development and prosperity are diametrically opposite to the values that prevail in most Islamic countries. Things are currently unstable in several of these states, and it looks like some kind of community revolution is in progress. But where does it end? What will be the result? In the West there is hope, and we think that the result is a turn toward democratic ideals. Unfortunately, these “planets” have too little understanding of what democracy is.
Countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and many other Islamic states are fundamentally different from the West, so to go to war against these nations or against groups in their countries — as we for example are doing in Afghanistan and did in Iraq — with the aim to build democracy, is from my point of view not to very constructive. It’s like a galactic war. They believe in theirs, we believe in ours. That ours obviously is better does not help much in this situation.
What is worse is that we have opened our borders to some of those who are most different from us. We have allowed them to sit in the midst of us to work against us, to spread propaganda against us and even to call for war against us, there (Afghanistan) where we are fighting for democracy, women’s right to schooling, and human rights for every individual rather than rights for government or priests.
The Islamists’ universe is not like ours
We Westerners can not expect those who are locked up in and chained to another universe, where family, tribe, and God determine everything, to embrace us and do what we do and live up to our form of democracy, our values, our lifestyle, our aspirations, and our standards — either back there among themselves or here.
It is my firm view that we would do better if we forget this naïve idea of democratizing the world to benefit everyone and instead concentrate on defending our own existence with new and better assets. The thought based on the idea that democracy allows everything, and permits everyone to express themselves the way they want, is damaging to our own existence, our human rights, and our individual freedom. Which community with just the slightest wish to survive would give the enemy the right and means to cross our borders and attack us from within? Which society would do that? Yes, ours would!
The Open European democracies can do nothing to fight the Islamists. It is no use to talk about human values (which we have set the standard for) in the fight against Islamists. Islamists have no respect for “man-made” laws and conventions in their conflict with us. We will not win a single game against the Islamists, although they are a minority and are far more poorly equipped than we are. We are slowly but surely to lose our freedom, our lifestyles, our property values — all that we have built and strived for centuries — and ultimately our own nation.
A pointless exercise
We have tried to negotiate with Islamists. We have tried to comfort them. We have tried to bribe them with gifts and billions in humanitarian projects. We’ve tried to tell them about life, the world, and the benefits of democracy. We’ve tried to give them asylum, security, and release them from their misery. We have tried everything to attain peace and security for our own, but unfortunately in vain. We have not come a single step forward in the war against Islamists.
Therefore, is it not time before it becomes too late to pull out of Afghanistan, to redirect our strategy in the fight against the Islamists, to audit the use of our democratic principles so they are not used by others to harm us, to stop our appeasement, special and blue-eyed gestures, saying loud and clear, to the harmful and inassimilable immigrants, that enough is enough?
Those who live on another planet in another universe will never — in the foreseeable future — be able to understand our Western lifestyle; they will always despise if not hate us, and no matter how much we have helped them, they will turn against us when we least expect it. Unfortunately, we are so burdened by our respectable positions that we do not have a chance to win this battle about values when we have both hands voluntarily tied behind our backs.
Let us liberate ourselves and accept that times have changed and will require a total restructuring of our ideas and thoughts.
18 comments:
"He is a believing Muslim who has voted for the Danish People’s Party since the party was created."
The Law of the "Secular" Muslim:
The more that a Muslim approaches the secular and remains a "believing Muslim", the more psychotic he becomes. Or, to put it more precisely (since Islam is psychosis no matter how you look at it): the more schizophrenic his baseline psychosis (Islam) becomes.
I.e., the more that a Muslim (such as Cherif El-Ayouty) glibly sounds like a Westerner -- and to the extent that we believe he is being sincere and not doing taqiyya through his teeth -- the more bizarre his psychosis becomes, not the less.
Given this law, I cannot take seriously any essay by a Muslim, unless insofar as he may be inadvertently revealing aspects of his psychosis of tactical or strategic value to our primary resonsibility, the safety of our (not Cherif El-Ayouty's) society.
I was just making the rounds today and I wanted to drop you a note to thank you for your continued work here. I appreciate your efforts and view GoV as an indispensible resource when debating with the deceived.
I know it takes an awful lot of effort to make this blog work. Thank you to all the translators and contributors as well.
Thank you! It's always nice to have Mom's approval. :)
Have to concur with HESPERADO.
Why is Al-Arouty a Muslim?
Why accept membership in a deathcult whose basic texts and beliefs and even taboos were stolen from his Hebrew and Christian neighbors and then distorted into a vicious and intolerant imperialism aimingto establish permanent theocratic gulag cum tyranny by a pedophile warlord slaveholding mass-murderer?
Why would anyone align themselves with this malign 'faith'?
It speaks ill of the mind behind.
OT Tangent,
The Mos Isley Space Station Bar Scene...
Two Jews walk into a bar...
The Droids are Jews, and the Bar represents the United Nations, a collection of representatives of different peoples from around the galaxy.
"We dont serve there kind here."
What say you?
"You will never see a more wretched hive of scum and villiany."
I found this...
The Country Teasers' 2006 album The Empire Strikes Back features a song titled "Mos Eisley". The opening lyrics satire those critical of the growing multiculturalism in Europe: "The world is much more like Star Wars than it used to be. But the world is no more like Star Wars than it should be. There is nothing wrong with a world a bit like Star Wars. I like Star Wars. London is a lot like Mos Eisley. It's a lot more like Mos Eisley than it used to be. For instance, in the fifties and the seventies, it was like the Death Star."
It is like we are each standing on our own planet!
We most definitely are! Non-Muslims are standing on the planet earth and Muslims are standing on conquered or unconquered parts of dar al Islam. Or, in other words, their planet which we kuffar are contaminating.
Muslims routinely treat unbelievers like subhumans and before this battle is over, the kuffar will be obliged to learn how to treat Muslims in the exact same way. Every passing day only reinforces this perception and further eliminates any alternatives that might once have existed.
We simply have to acknowledge that humans are different, cultures are different, and that some people go better together than others — and even go a step further and realize that certain things do not work if they are mixed together. The mixture will behave like oil and water.
Total rubbish! All over the world, people of different races and ethnic backgrounds coexist in relative peace. It is only when Muslims are inserted into the equation, and with very few exceptions, where things suddenly or quickly thereafter become immiscible.
What’s more, there is no leaving the situation alone. No matter how benignly Islam is treated it will always initiate hostilities against neighboring cultures. It is doctrinally mandated and only military weakness on Islam's part has ever provided any historical exceptions to this well-established fact.
The values that are primary causes of the West’s development and prosperity are diametrically opposite to the values that prevail in most Islamic countries.
One must wonder if this author realizes the full implications of what he has written. The diametric opposite to Western “development and prosperity” are destruction and impoverishment. More about this in another comment.
That ours obviously is better does not help much in this situation.
This is yet another example of abjectly fallacious thinking by the author. If this situation suddenly deteriorated into a nuclear exchange our obviously "better" arsenals would see us through splendidly even as the entire MME (Muslim Middle East) was turned, overnight, into a 24 hour glow-in-the-dark parking lot. The West’s superior culture only seems to be of insufficient help because of how callow and spineless our political leadership continues to be.
It is my firm view that we would do better if we forget this naïve idea of democratizing the world to benefit everyone and instead concentrate on defending our own existence with new and better assets.
First bit of good advice in the entire article.
We have not come a single step forward in the war against Islamists.
Palooka! If Bush 2.0 deserves credit for anything, it is the invasion of Iraq. However misguided and ill-thought-out the goals involved were, it was a supreme object lesson to the Islamic world.
Please try to recall that Iran and Iraq were at war for some EIGHT YEARS, killing almost ONE MILLION Muslims in the process. Almost a decade of fighting led to nothing more than a bloody stalemate.
America rolled up Iraq’s sidewalks in three short weeks.
What better message to send the entire Islamic world than that? Short of nuclear reprisal for the 9-11 atrocity, there was no better credible demonstration of strength that could have earned the grudging respect of Muslims.
That all of it was squandered in a subsequent and futile nation building exercise is another matter entirely.
… they will turn against us when we least expect it.
Another piece of solid advice.
Not much that is new in this article except that it’s appearing in a slightly mainstream media.
Profitsbeard: Why is El-Ayouty a Muslim?
This, per Hesperado, is the principle question.
How can anyone so thoroughly and appropriately indict Islam yet still remain within its withering embrace? Declaring Islam to be dysfunctional and not simultaneously rejecting it part and parcel can only reflect a degree of self-delusion that makes such an individual a danger to himself and others.
Cherif El-Ayouty could just as easily explode in a flare of SJS (Sudden Jihad Syndrome), as he could write another such seemingly conciliatory article. Somewhere within El-Ayouty is a ticking timebomb of unresolved diametric opposites that he has barely even addressed.
His otherwise appealing subtext of being a rational Muslim is incredibly dangerous to the untrained observer.
"How can anyone so thoroughly and appropriately indict Islam yet still remain within its withering embrace? "
Agree, somewhat of a mystery and paradoxical. To me it seems similar to a believing, but somehow 'moderate', NAZI working in the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.
@Hesperado
@Profitsbeard
@Zenster
Maybe, on some level, he would like to leave Islam, but he is afraid of being ostracized from his family and then killed.
But then, that conflict would be enough to drive a man mad.
Zenster (& 1389),
"His otherwise appealing subtext of being a rational Muslim is incredibly dangerous to the untrained observer."
That reminds me of a second "law" closely related to the first one above:
The more pleasingly modern a Muslim sounds, the more dangerous he is.
The danger would be one of two things:
1) he's either an undercover taqiyya Muslim
2) or, if he's sincere in his garbled schizophrenia, he performs a function of helping to make Westerners think that Muslims (like him) are assimilable and that it's okay to keep allowing them into the West. Whether he's doing this wittingly or not, doesn't matter: the effect tends to be the same. And multiply that by thousands who go around claiming to be sincerely Westernized.
As Zenster has pointed out, we can't tell the difference, so we should not factor that hypothetical difference into some kind of policy.
I know Cherif. He is my friend. When I read all these comments that are so filledwith conspiration theories, judgement and infatility, I am getting a little bit annoied over my self and my fight against islamists. If it is people, that are not able to see, that muslims are born muslimes as well as I am born christian - that in the same way as I are interested in to see christian fundamentalists behave democratic and decent, then there are many muslimns, that have the same wishes for their fundamentalists.
If you cant see that, the you are not grown enough to participate in any serious discours!
I see that you are all anonimus! That is not surprising.
Mr. Jensen,
Why do you say our anonymity is "not surprising"? Surely you can't mean to imply that people who criticize Islam might be in any danger of being attacked by Muslims? That would make seeking anonymity unsurprising, but would also make it irreproachable, thus contradicting your otherwise reproachful tone. Though perhaps I am misinterpreting the tone of your comment because of your poor English.
Sigh; here we go again (this probably numbers the 1,347th time, over the years, I've had to articulate this argument against mush like Hans Erling Jensen's).
First of all, Jensen's righteously aggrieved pique seems to center on one thing: personal friendship with a Muslim (in this case, Cherif).
No one (certainly not me) is denying that there do not probably exist decent Muslims out there. However, if they are indeed decent, their continuing allegiance to Islam presents at the very least a serious psychological problem -- or they are strangely stupid. I doubt Cherif is the latter. Therefore, he has serious psychological problems by the mere fact that he combines personal decency with support of Islam. That alone gives me pause about his ability to be a useful ally.
Secondly, their continuing allegiance to Islam tends to reinforce the prevailing problem the West is in, whereby it now has, unprecedentedly in history, millions of Muslims within its borders. And as we all know, too many Muslims are not nice guys like Jensen's friend Charif here. In fact, too many Muslims are so dangerous, they are causing major problems to our societies (and to the societies of many other countries outside the West). Just to take one example out of a fez -- every major airport, train station, government building, important utility stations, public venues and public events all over the West (and elsewhere in the world) have had to spend billions of dollars (and their Euro equivalent) since 911 merely on security: and all that money and security is mostly to protect us from Muslims.
The dangerous problem we face from Muslims, then, especially millions of them motile throughout our free societies -- that, unlike totalitarian societies, cannot keep tabs on everyone's movements all the time -- is a vast, complex and systemic problem. Unfortunately, anecdotal evidence about personal friendships with one Muslim (or a handful of Muslims) is not only worthless to help us protect our societies, it becomes positively harmful, because it tends to foster the false impression that we are able to discern the difference between the honestly decent (albeit schizophrenic) Muslim like Cherif, and the dangerous Muslims who we know (or should know) are innumerable, not easily identifiable, and dispersed in locations we cannot pinpoint most of the time -- dangerous Muslims who are so obsessed with their fanaticism about purity and hatred of the "impure" like us that they want to mass murder us in any way possible, and they want to die through some kind of twisted deranged religious ecstasy of suicide in order to reach a Paradise filled with sensuous delights including eternal pedophile sex with little girls (and probably also little boys, though the hadiths are less clear on that).
Thus, the micro level of personal friendship with a Muslim must regrettably give way to the macro level of protecting our societies, where the dangers are sufficiently complex and difficult to predict and control -- and horrific if successful -- such that we may well not have the luxury of considering Muslims in general as harmless just because some stranger on an Internet discussion forum claims Cherif is a swell guy.
Anyway, Jensen should know this. Shame on him for not knowing it.
As for anonymity: there is a good reason to be anonymous when you are critiquing Islam: Muslims are the only people who are killing, torturing and threatening violence against critics of their religion all over the world.
Well said, Hesperado!
Whether Cherif is nice or not will be totally irrelevant when Cherif is nuked along with the rest of us by his (we presume) more malicious Muslim compatriots....
Thanks Egghead, though I doubt Hans will pause to reflect.
Mr. Jensen,
You said:"that muslims are born muslimes as well as I am born christian"
I don't know what sect of Christianity you claim, but to the best of my knowledge and belief, no one is "born" a Christian or a muslim.
I understand that there are legal assignments in some nations, but that does not make such assignations true.
One's faith is a matter of choice, not one's birth.
Or are you saying that this author would be a Christian were he not legally relegated to the ranks of muslims and afraid to change because of the harsh measures that attend "conversion" in such nations?
You also said:"that in the same way as I are interested in to see christian fundamentalists behave democratic and decent, then there are many muslimns, that have the same wishes for their fundamentalists." At least you recognize that the violent muslims are not radicals, but fundamentalists.
There are at least three obvious problems with this statement. First, is that Christian fundamentalists cannot support violence against those who have done them no harm with the Bible-unless their version of choice has been seriously twisted. In fact there is the "turn the other cheek" scripture which should make it quite clear that violence is a regrettable and extreme last choice of behavior even against those who do us harm.
Islam, on the other hand, not only condones, but requires violence against those who have done it's followers no harm.
Secondly, you claim that many muslims oppose Islamic fundamentalists. Under their own standards, this makes those who oppose the fundamentalists not true followers of Islam.
Thirdly, since your "friend's" religion allows him to lie to you in order to promote itself,(which it does) then how do you know that he doesn't secretly approve of the actions of his fundamentalist brothers in Islam?
The short answer is that you cannot know his intentions and therefore, you cannot trust his disclaimers. The very fact that you claim him as a friend is a problem because the followers of Islam are commanded not to befriend non-beleivers. Unless they think it is a path to conversion for the "friend", or they are practicing taqiyya.
These points are not conspiracy theories, and the judgements offered herein are based on knowledge. I would urge you to investigate these points. If you can show me where I am mistaken in my analysis, I will gladly hear it.
As for my anonymity, I adopted a psuedonym while raising my family, because that was the responsible thing to do. To ensure that my comments on blogs such as this did not pose a threat to my family.
Now that I have been posting for several years under this psuedonym, I have become fond of it.
Hans Erling Jensen: I see that you are all anonimus! That is not surprising.
Why not ask Lars Vilks, Kurt Westergaard or Lars Hedegaard if they ever had any second thoughts about not having remained anonymous. Both Vilks and Westergaard have had attempts made on their lives by would-be Muslim assassins.
Your attempt to chastise those of us who are well aware that ISLAM KILLS ITS CRITICS makes you out to be a dangerously naïve individual.
It also calls into question your judgement of character to such an extent that I, for one, wonder if your pal Cherif might have sucked you into more of the usual Muslim propaganda that is being used to lull its intended victims into a false sense of security about so-called moderate Muslims.
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