Occupied Israel: "Muslim gunmen in the Gaza Strip tried to kill another Palestinian Christian over the weekend, sources in Gaza City told The Jerusalem Post....
"
Occupied England: "Sofia Allam simply could not believe it. Her kind, loving father was sitting in front of her threatening to kill her. He said she had brought shame and humiliation on him, that she was now "worse than the muck on their shoes" and she deserved to die...."
Occupied Greece: "Turkey has launched an investigation into alleged collusion between police officers and at least one of the suspects charged with killing three Christians earlier this year at a publishing house that produces Bibles, an official said Saturday...."
There's something not quite right in the lead sentences of the three stories above. Let me think oh I get it.
It would be that three random stories all have to do with Muslims killing people. What kind of Muslims? The tinyminorityofextremist Muslims? Noooo. The Muslim religious scholars who don't understand their religion as well as the
New York Times editorial staff do? Maybe definitely noooo again. It seems to be that all three stories are simply about Muslims. Good, ordinary, Shari'a-abiding Muslims. I can live with it. Muslims do what Muslims do, not what I think they should do. It's not up to me to tell Muslims how to be Muslims. They know.
The question of import is what kind of relationship should we have with Muslims, practical relations, real and day-to-day relations. Forget about what kind of relationship I would like to have with Muslims, forget about what Muslims say to us about getting along. Let's look at the possible.
No matter how we slice it, there are simply no mixed families of Muslims and others. No one can go to a mosque and claim to be a convert to Christianity from Islam without expecting to be murdered, and no Muslim woman is allowed to marry a non-Muslim man, because if she does, she will b killed according to the rules of Islam. Muslim men marry non-Muslim women who convert to Islam. Maybe there are practical exceptions but there are no religiously valid Muslim ones. Those practical exceptions? They are in effect apostates, and hence must be murdered. So, our relationship with Islam is never going to be a family one. Not ever.
As often as we hear "racism" in regard to Islam, it ain't no race. The closest Islam come to being a race is in that Muslims are the world's ultimate losers. It means that I can eye any girl on Earth with the idea of having kids with her, of making her and me and the babies a family. But not with Muslims. They are not, cannot be family.
If I must I can dig out the sura and the hadiths prohibiting friendship between a Muslim and others. If a Muslim tells you he's your friend, either he's lying to you, taqiyya, or he's an apostate who isn't practicing his religion. Not my opinion, sorry to say, but canonical Islam. Here's a start:
Sura (5:51) -
"O you who believe! do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends; they are friends of each other; and whoever amongst you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them; surely Allah does not guide the unjust people." There's more
here. If you do things that fundamentally betray your religion it's a long stretch to claim you're specifically religious. Betray Islam, you're not a Muslim. Not my opinion. We ain't gonna be friends. I can be a friend to anyone I like, but no Muslim can be my friend without ceasing to be a Muslim. We might possbily have something like friendly relations, but not really. Islam doesn't allow for it. There are Muslims, "the best of all people," and there are dhimmis and pagans and the dead. It's not a basis for a lasting relationship. Not one we would care for, at least. No friendship. Even friendly relations can only last for a short and practical period (hudna) before Muslims are required by law to convert us to Islam, enslave us and make us pay protection money (or in some cases ones children,) or we can just be killed. It isn't a really friendly relationship when you look at it in that light.
Khaled Abu Toameh, "Muslim gunmen target Christian in Gaza," The Jerusalem Post. 8 Dec. 2007
Muslim gunmen in the Gaza Strip tried to kill another Palestinian Christian over the weekend, sources in Gaza City told The Jerusalem Post.They said four masked gunmen tried to kidnap Nabil Fuad Ayad, who works as a guard at a local church. Nabil's cousin, Rami, was kidnapped and murdered two months ago by the same group, the sources said.
The sources identified the gunmen as members of the radical Islamic Salafi movement.
"They were dressed in the traditional Salafi clothes," said an eyewitness. "They were also carrying guns."
[....]
Salafism represents a Sunni Islamic school of thought whose followers argue that Islam was perfect and complete during the days of Prophet Muhammad, but that undesirable innovations have been added due to materialist and cultural influences.
The Salafis, who have become very active in the Gaza Strip in recent months, are totally opposed to common Western concepts like economics, constitutions and political parties. They refer to the 2,500 Christians in the Gaza Strip as Crusaders and have vowed to drive them out of the area.
Hamas denied any involvement in the attack, saying its security forces had launched an investigation after receiving a complaint from the victim.
Christians living in the Gaza Strip told the Post that they were very worried about the increased attacks on members of their community and religious institutions. "The latest incident is aimed at sending a message to all the Christians here that we must leave," said a Christian leader. "Radical Islamic groups are waging a campaign to get rid of us and no one seems to care."
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1196847287392&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Oh, those guys are salafi, puritans, not real Muslims. We can have a business relationship with most Muslims because they are Human like all others. We can engage them in the marketplace and eventually bring them into the world of trade and profit and monetary exchange wherein all sides gain and no side loses. Except that that's not going to happen.
Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, writes: "It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet."
Al-Banna writes: "God is our purpose, the Prophet our leader, the Quran our constitution, jihad our way and dying for Allah our supreme objective."
Just because al-Banna wrote the lines above doesn't mean they're true to Islam. No, the're true to Islam and that's why al-Banna wrote them. He isn't making up stuff to piss of Americans. Any Muslim who doesn't believe fully that Allah is the supreme everything on Earth and beyond is a Muslim in the same way as is the man who doesn't believe in God or in the divinity of Jesus a Christian. Take some advice from the movies while movies are still allowed, from
All That Jazz: "Never bullshit a bullshitter." There is no business to be done between one who is into sharing a profit and a product or service or so on and one who wants it all and is willing to kill to get it. That's not business. There are other words for it. Islam is one of them.
[No By-line], "Muslim apostates threatened over Christianity,"
The Telegraph.U.K .
09 Dec. 2007
When Sofia Allam left the Muslim faith for Christianity, the response from her family was one of persecution and threats. Alasdair Palmer explores the dangers facing Islam's apostates
Sofia Allam simply could not believe it. Her kind, loving father was sitting in front of her threatening to kill her. He said she had brought shame and humiliation on him, that she was now "worse than the muck on their shoes" and she deserved to die.
And what had brought on his transformation? He had discovered that she had left the Muslim faith in which he had raised her and become a Christian.
"He said he couldn't have me in the house now that I was a Kaffir [an insulting term for a non-Muslim]," Sofia - not her real name - remembers.
"He said I was damned for ever. He insulted me horribly. I couldn't recognise that man as the father who had been so kind to me as I was growing up.
"My mother's transformation was even worse. She constantly beat me about the head. She screamed at me all the time. I remember saying to them, as they were shouting death threats, 'Mum, Dad - you're saying you should kill me… but I'm your daughter! Don't you realise that?'?"
They did not: they insisted they wanted her out of their house.
After three weeks of bullying, and just before her parents physically threw her out, Sofia left. "They put their loyalty to Islam above any love for me," she says, her voice faltering slightly.
"It was such a shock. I remember thinking when they brought all my uncles round to try to intimidate me - all these men were lined up telling me how terrible a person I was, how the devil had taken me - I remember thinking, how can this be happening? Because this isn't Lahore in Pakistan. This is Dagenham in London! This is Britain!"
Religious persecution of the kind Sofia suffers, however, is increasingly common in Britain today. It is hard to get an accurate notion of the scale of the problem, not least because very few of the people who leave Islam are willing to complain to the police about the way they are treated.
"Intimidation is very widespread and pretty effective," says Maryam Namazie, a spokesperson for the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain. She believes that many of the deaths classified as "honour killings" are actually murders of people who have renounced Islam.
"I get threatened all the time: emails, letters, phone calls," she says. "When I returned home this afternoon, for example, there was a death threat waiting for me on my answering machine…" She laughs nervously.
"A lot of them aren't serious, but occasionally they are. I went to the police about one set of threats. They took a statement from me but that was it - they never contacted me again."
That treatment is in sharp contrast to the seriousness with which the Dutch and German police responded when members of the Council of Ex-Muslims in those countries made complaints to the police about death threats.
"The heads of the Dutch and German organisations are today both living under police protection," Ms Namazie explains.
Last week, it was reported that the daughter of a British imam was living under police protection, after receiving death threats from her family for having left Islam.
But it is not only extreme Muslim families that believe it is their religious duty to threaten, and even kill, members who renounce the religion.
"My father could not be described as an extremist," insists Sofia, who is now 31. "We read the Koran and prayed regularly together, but he never insisted on my wearing Islamic dress and he was quite happy that I went to the local comprehensive, which was all girls, but not by any means dominated by Muslims."
There were conflicts when Sofia's parents tried to arrange a marriage for her at the age of 18, but they seemed to accept her decision to continue her education.
"They even let me go away to university," she explains. "I appreciated how difficult it was for them to grant me that freedom, and I was very grateful for it. In the event, though, I only lasted three months - I just got so homesick that I had to come back to Mum and Dad."
Sofia got a job in a hotel and quickly became a manager. Her interest in Christianity was entirely self-generated. She acquired a Bible, which she hid in her bedroom. But four years ago, her mother found it.
"She confronted me one morning with, 'Are you still a Muslim?' I had to tell the truth: I didn't think I was. From that moment on, she basically disowned me. My father was shocked and saddened. But the reality was that my parents behaved to me as if they thought it would be much better if I was dead."
Most leading Muslims in Britain are unequivocal in their denunciation of British Muslim parents who threaten to kill their children for leaving Islam.
Ibrahim Mogra, of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), says that it is "absolutely disgraceful behaviour… In Britain, no Muslim has the right to harm one hair of someone who decides to leave Islam."
Inayat Bunglawala, also a spokesman for the MCB, insists that such behaviour in Britain is "awful and quite wrong. The police should crack down on it."
And yet a significant portion of British Muslims think that such behaviour is not merely right, but a religious obligation: a survey by the think-tank Policy Exchange, for instance, revealed that 36 per cent of young Muslims believe that those who leave Islam should be killed.
There is considerable support, from the Koran and other sacred Islamic texts, for that position - which may explain why, out of the 57 Islamic states in the world today, seven have a legal code that punishes Muslims who leave the religion with death.
That number may soon increase: Pakistan is currently considering a Bill that would make apostasy a capital crime for men and one carrying a sentence of imprisonment for women.
As it is, ordinary Pakistanis take the law into their own hands and kill Muslim apostates. The same thing happens in Turkey where, earlier this year, two people were killed for "having turned away from Islam".
Patrick Sookhdeo was born a Muslim, but later converted to Christianity. He is now international director of the Barnabas Fund, an organisation that aims to research and to ameliorate the conditions of Christians living in countries hostile to their religion.
He notes that "all four schools of Sunni law, as well as the Shia variety, call for the death penalty for apostates. Most Muslim scholars say that Muslim religious law - sharia - requires the death penalty for apostasy.
"In 2004, Prince Charles called a meeting of leading Muslims to discuss the issue," adds Dr Sookhdeo. "I was there. All the Muslim leaders at that meeting agreed that the penalty in sharia is death. The hope was that they would issue a public declaration repudiating that doctrine, but not one of them did."
The reluctance to condemn sharia law is widespread. I asked Mr Bunglawala, for instance, to condemn the Islamic states that imposed the death penalty for apostasy. He did not do so, merely commenting that "it was a matter for those states".
Given the acceptance by some that Muslim religious law does indeed require that apostates be killed, it is hardly surprising that many ordinary Muslims think that it is their religious duty to carry out that punishment - or at least to threaten it.
"There can't be freedom of religion in Britain while so many British Muslims take that attitude," Sofia says. "It frightens me, because attitudes have hardened over the past decade."
Still, won't her parents eventually just recognise that she has chosen to change her religion? Won't they, in 10 years' time, accept her back? "No," Sofia says, her eyes full of tears. "That will never happen. I know it. They will never accept me the way I am."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/12/09/nmuslim109.xml&page=3 In the field of engineering, something our Muslim cousins seem attracted to for devious reasons, there is a description of change: it is, six alterations make a new thing.
Am I claiming that Islam cannot be reformed? Yes, but let's ignore me for a while. Hey, I'm used to that.
A believing Muslim, a legitimate Muslim according to Islam, is one who believes he and his co-religionists are "the best people." Islam is perfect. Allah is the only god to worship. The Koran is immutable and perfect. Mohammed was perfect. Yadda, yadda, yadda perfect. "Kill the unbelievers wherever you find them...." Perfect. There is, according to the multiple thousands of canonical primary Islamic texts, i.e. The Quran, ahadith, and sira, no getting along with non-Muslims. It's clear and it's not changeable without making Islam into something not Islam. So, if no getting along is possible, what kind of adversarial relationship can we have? I know! How about sports?
Here's the deal with sports: we agree that we are playing a game. We agree on the purpose of the game, i.e to do this and that and keep score till one wins and the other loses. If we aren't sort of evenly matched one side will handicap itself to make things fairer. And we'll agree to play by rules.
I'm your coach. You hear me say this in the locker room before you head out to play:
"We're not here today to win or lose but to play the game in the hope that both sides can sit down and come to some kind of mutually satisfactory agreement about who should have which score and who should get which rewards. We're going to play by the rules but we have to accept that our opponents will possibly come over to us and shoot us. That's OK because a few generations ago the other side claimed to have had a great team and we beat them. Now it's their turn to beat us, even if it means killing some of us and stripping us of our freedom and even our wives and children. Now, I know some of you are going to resist this, maybe claiming you don't have any relatives from some colonial nation or something but not to worry, we are all guilty anyway in some metaphysical sense. The other players have rules that we might not agree with, like murdering us and raping our wives and selling our children into slavery, but hey, we aren't perfect either. So go out there and give 'em one for the ... well, whatever his name was. Rah, Rah, Rallah!"
I'm thinking a sporting relationship isn't all that likely.
[No By-line], "Turkey investigates alleged ties between police and alleged killers of Christians," Canadian Press. Dec. 8, 2007
ANKARA, Turkey - Turkey has launched an investigation into alleged collusion between police officers and at least one of the suspects charged with killing three Christians earlier this year at a publishing house that produces Bibles, an official said Saturday.
Two senior police inspectors will be assigned to investigate whether any officers provided assistance to the suspects, an Interior Ministry official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. He did not provide further details.
The three Christians - a German and two Turks - were killed in the southern city of Malatya on April 18. The killings - in which the victims were tied up and had their throats slit - drew international condemnation and added to Western concerns about whether Turkey can protect its religious minorities.
Five people were arrested and charged with murder. The trial opened last month, but was quickly adjourned until Jan. 14 because defence lawyers requested more time to prepare their arguments.
The Interior Ministry decided to open an investigation after several newspapers published stories Saturday alleging co-operation between police and at least one of the suspects.
Radikal newspaper quoted two of the suspects, Abuzer Yildirim and Salih Guler, as saying in their testimonies that a third suspect Emre Gunaydin told them that he had met with police officials and learned about the locations of Christian churches in the city.
"I asked him who are the police chiefs that you are speaking to, he said: 'Don't ask, take it easy,"' Radikal quoted Yildirim as saying.
Similar allegations have also emerged after the January killing of an ethnic Armenian journalist, Hrant Dink, who was detested by hardline nationalists because he described the mass killings of Armenians in the early 20th century as genocide.
Turkey denies the deaths constituted genocide, insisting those killed were victims of civil war and unrest.
Critics have accused authorities of failing to act on reports of a plot to kill Dink but there has been no evidence that directly implicates any police or government officials in the slaying of Dink outside his office.
Many Turks are convinced that a so-called "deep state" - a network of state agents or ex-officials, possibly with links to organized crime - periodically targets reformists and other perceived enemies in the name of nationalism.
Christian leaders have said they are worried that nationalists are stoking hostility against non-Turks and non-Muslims by exploiting uncertainty over Turkey's place in the world.
The uncertainty - and growing suspicion against foreigners - has been driven by Turkey's faltering EU membership bid, a resilient Kurdish separatist movement and by increasingly vocal Islamists who see themselves - and Turkey - as locked in battle with a hostile Christian West.
http://canadianpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5i0dFwJSorCCb0mNLFpDOuSdmtfFA
There are roughly a billion or so Muslims in the world today. What kind of practical relationship are we going to have with them? The title suggests I'm going to end this post with the idea of war. Well, yeah.
Islam, according to those who don't understand it, is a religion. As a religion it can adapt and change into anything its practitioners wish it to. If Islam were a private and individual thing about worship, even if it were done communally at a mosque, we wouldn't care much, and we wouldn't be feeling the need to go to war against Islam. But Islam is not a religion. It is a poligion. It is a public war programme. Take away six parts of the Quran and there will still be countless other canonical and legitimate elements that will require the legitimate practitioner to go to war. Islam is a seventh century tribal code dressed up as a revealed religion. It isn't any such thing. And to make it into a religion at this late date would mean to make it what it is not and what it has never been, and to make it into not-Islam.
Is every Muslim a war-mongering jihadi? No. But those who are not are required to aid and abet those who are. Shirkers go to Hell, according to Islam. Go ahead and change that. Change the other things to do with Islam as a war cry. Then you have nothing left of Islam as it is and has been. "Not-Islam."
What kind of practical relationship are we able to have with people we can't marry, can't be friends with, can't do business with, can't expect fair-play from?
We can hope they change.
Back to the real world.
We are going to see extermination campaigns against Muslims in Europe. We will see a continent fed up and frightened and enraged. The people of Europe will rise up and retake their native lands, and rightly so. Muslims want the universe for themselves, and to get it they have to take from those who have already. It is only reason and nature that those who have will resist losing to those who come to take. Looking at history tells us that the United States of America waged war on two fronts in World War Two against two highly sophisticated empires, Germany and Japan, and that we beat them both till they surrendered unconditionally. The Western world has advanced technologically in the past 60 odd years since the end of WWII. Has the Islamic world matched our feats of weaponry and war? You say the Romans could beat the Muslims today? You say the Europeans were disgusting in the past war? You say they'll act differently now because they have outgrown Human nature since the end of the war?
I don't see any hope for a peaceful resolution of our conflict with Islam. They don't want one.
We can't rightly decide that all people are just like us. There is no "us." There is a Muslim world, and it's made up of millions of individuals who act like a rock falling off a mountain side. Everything they believe in is a failure in terms of life as it is among others all around them. Those who give it up and defect to the rest of the world will possibly survive. Those who cling to the ways of Islam will be forced to die to maintain their Islamic identity. The Muslims have an identity. Westerners do
not have such a thing. Westerners do have an inheritance, a grasp of Humanness that they haven't let go of because they are Human. Westerners have a sense of family, hence the nativist movements brewing across the land. Westerners have a sense of friendship with others that the tribalists of the ummah do not have. Westerners have a concern for business that keeps us alive and healthy and more or less content much of the time. We have a sense of fair-play that extends to others who play fair and by the rules. We have the proven nature of the world's greatest killers. We are not we, though. We are individuals. We in the West are a long beast: We have a head, a middle, limbs, and a long tail. The tip is not the opposite tip. As a mass we are a killing beast. Not a rock falling into space to crsh and stall. We are a moving thing that kills and eats. We do it better than any others. We do everything better than others. We do so because we are not we. We can think: Is this good for me? We don't blow ourselves up for the sake of translucent virgins. We drop atom bombs on cities and blow them up instead because it's good for each of us to win. It's good for me, good for my family, good for my friends, good for business, good sport, and the enemy had to die.
Muslims are fucking with us badly. Something has to give. We have to resolve an unbearable relationship. "What's it going to be then, eh? A bit of the ol' ul-tra Vi Oh Lence, oh my brothers?"
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[Dawkins in blue, seated center, caroling, Xmas, 2006.]
