A window into Islamic Malaysia

 You'd never know, at first or second glance, that the Sze Zeng theology + life blog contains a wealth of interesting information about Islam in Malaysian politics, culture and society.  Ostensibly, the blog is about "theology in Southeastern Asia" and in addition its author, who currently lives in Singapore, also not unusually seems to meander on topics all over the map.  Quite by accident, I found my way there tracking down some lead on some Islamic issue.

For the reader who wants to go straight to articles on Islam proper on Sze Zeng's blog, a simple advanced search through Google yields this list of pages of links.

 

I haven't spent perhaps a sufficient amount of time vetting the anti-Islamic bonafides of Sze Zeng, but a transitory browse among a few of his articles shows that he respects Raymond Ibrahim as well as Bernard Lewis, and more generally from parenthetical remarks here and there one gets the sense that he is more or less antipathetic to Islam (which is not to say that his perspective in this regard may not suffer from common asymptotic flaws).  Nevertheless, his blog would seem to provide a fecund source for what Islam means in that supposedly "moderate" country, as noticed by an eye that does not suffer from the reflex tic of PC MC, as seems to afflict so many of our Western mainstream news media, academics and politicians.

To adduce one such story from literally hundreds one could pluck from a songkok, consider this one about a Malaysian female lawyer and former president of that country's Bar Association, Ambiga Sreenevasan, who has acquired quite a few international distinctions and honors (including the International Women of Courage Award, presented to her by Hillary Clinton in 2009).  Sze Zeng's blog provides a video showing how a large group of Muslim military veterans came to her private home and began to protest outside -- including very pointed "exercises" which were obviously calculated to have them stand facing their buttocks in the direction of her front gate (even gyrating their rear ends around at certain points), evidently a crude and reprehensibly childish (i.e., typically Islamic) way to insult her.  Their little stunt was also a calculated threat, as Ambiga herself notes when talking to a reporter on the scene.

One interesting glimpse into the OCD madhouse of Islamic psychoculture comes up in the video, which we have the blogger Sze Zeng to thank for translating and remarking upon in his own brief article introducing the video -- namely, that when Ambiga courteously offers her protestors some "100Plus" to drink (a cold carbonated sports drink, sort of the SE Asian version of Gatorade), one of the Muslim men says that according to Islamic law, Muslims can "only drink warm water"...!

Eqo Quoque

Once when mentioning my coinage, Ego Quoque, someone remarked that, technically, it should be Nos Quoque ("We Too").

Just as, however, there is the singular plural of the "Royal We", so too there could be said to be the singular plurality of the "Collectivist I".

Plus, I like to retain the "Ego" in the formulation, as a gently subliminal and ironic reminder of the paradoxical (and thus incoherent) egotism involved in the PC MC psyche.

Equivalencism, like a lot of the grave (yet deceptively creamy and sugary) errors of PC MC, is basically rooted in a virtue, but one taken to irrational excess. The virtue involved here is the sober reminder (often with paternalistic overtones) that "we too have done bad things in the past".

The excess involves the unhinged loss of perspective which results in a strange inability to appreciate massive distinctions and differences in degree, both quantitatively and qualitatively.  Thus, for example, the paltry number of killings and death threats involved with Christian "abortion clinic bombers" or the KKK is equated with the hundreds of thousands more -- nay, millions more -- perpetrated, planned and threatened by Muslims over a longer period of time.  Or, quite often, there is implied an appeal to a quantitative massiveness -- in terms of one of our historical sins -- to function as a substitute for the additional qualitative feature -- in terms of the ghoulishly grotesque nature of the inhuman crime against humanity of (not to mention the mass insanity of fanaticism displayed by) the Muslims du jour, in order for the former to obscure (if the Equivalencist is more or less a haplessly innocent dupe) or to camouflage (if a cleverer duplicity is afoot) the sufficiently pertinent difference that is the fucking point of the whole exercise of the recognition that:

1) We are better than them

and

2) They are our implacable incorrigible enemy.

Comprende?

What is "Political Correctness"?

Talk about a term bandied about! Political Correctness (PC) trips glibly off the lips and fingertips when people speak or type or text their minds about sundry matters sociopolitical.

But what exactly do we mean by it?

Probably a lot of different things, as with most terms current in pop culture.

In my experience, many people seem to have a basic misconception about the meaning and purport of the term.  They seem to think the "correct" part is straightforward and literal; rather than sarcastic and ironic.  They also seem to think that "correct" means what certain groups think should be the case; rather than what in fact has become the case through the massive effects of peer pressure consequent upon a sea change in cultural worldview.

Aside from those basic misunderstandings, some think mistakenly that PC is strictly limited to the "political" sphere; but in fact, it connotes a much broader sphere -- related to the political, to be sure, but not limited by it -- which could be termed sociological, or cultural, or both:  sociocultural.  The term sociopolitical is another way of widening the subject matter under discussion.

The most curious misunderstanding I have run across -- and it's a rather common misunderstanding -- is that PC is not Leftish-oriented.  In fact, PC represents a kind of pyrrhic victory for the Left throughout the West:  it has snuck in through the back door, so to speak, and has managed to win over the hearts and minds of the vast majority of Westerners on all points on the sociopolitical spectrum: but it has only been able to accomplish this through significantly diluting and decaffeinating its essence.  PC represents, in effect, a "Leftism Lite" -- bland and sweet enough to be swallowed, and regurgitated by innumerable people who otherwise wouldn't touch Leftism (or "liberalism") with a ten-foot pole; along with innumerable others less hostile to Leftism-cum-liberalism, perhaps, but still wary of it and still concerned to affect an allegiance to "conservative" bonafides.

The final point of my rather cursory -- and incomplete -- discussion of PC is that it is the larger, more amorphous phenomenon under which is fit the subcategory PC MC (Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism).  I.e., PC embraces a whole constellation of sociopolitical issues (which I will not get into here), while PC MC is more delimited by issues related to our Western interaction with "other cultures" and their wonderful rainbow of peoples.  It's safe to say that while most people who are more or less PC are also PC MC, not everyone who is PC MC will also be PC about everything.  

Thus, the phenomenon of the majority of conservatives throughout the West who, while otherwise maintaining their "conservative" legitimacy about certain other sociopolitcal issues, have swallowed the bullshit about multiculturalism.  I.e., that we have to "respect the Other" and hate ourselves through our "white guilt" about the "shameful chapters" in our history (colonialism, etc.) -- and therefore we have to swallow the latest and most powerful permutation of multiculturalism: the irrational respect for Islam and the almost willful myopia to the mountains of data indicating that Islam is unjust, evil and dangerous, and the almost willful myopia to what this reasonably means about the hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world (and increasingly aggrandizing in our own Western world) who enable Islam.

The Bell Curve, revisited

In a recent comment to an inquiring Jihad Watch civilian, Eric Allen Bell explained his stance of his being "against Islam but not against Muslims" thusly:

If I were against Nazism I would also be against all Nazis.

The same does not hold true with Islam and Muslims. Allow me to explain why...

Most Muslims are the victim of indoctrination. Many do not actually believe this stuff, but the penalty for saying so is too severe to speak up. Some are deeply brainwashed but totally harmless.

So for me, it would be irresponsible, when addressing an audience of 2 million people, to say I am against all Muslims - since in reality we must evaluate each person on an individual basis.

When I meet a Muslim who takes issue with my stance, I ask them if they will condemn the "prophet" Mohammed for having sex with a 9 year old girl, yes or no. I also ask them if they will condemn Hamas and Hezbollah as Islamic terrorist organizations, yes or no.

I'm sure you can imagine how most, but not all, respond to these very direct questions. If they will not immediately renounce these things, I tell them that they are not "moderate" but actually more radical that Nazis. I'm not mean about it. But I do believe in nonviolently and holding them accountable, especially in any public forum.

What I cannot support is saying that I am against an entire group of people - especially when so much of that group is comprised of innocent women and children who are in bondage to Islam. Let us not forget that no one is more victimized by Islam than Muslims.

I typed the following comment:

Bell wouldn't be the first person in the anti-Islam movement (such as it is) who remains laggard behind the bell curve with regard to waking up to the full, unique horror of Islam.

One of the retardant features of remaining unawake in this regard is the retention of the Equivalencist meme, by which all religions are deemed, axiomatically, to be equal to each other in nearly all significant terms of comparison. This is a prejudicial axiom assumed before one looks at the data; then, as more and more data comes to the attention of this kind of person, he tends to continue to fit the data to the pre-conceived model, inductively, and tends to resist the force of rational deduction from the data that would indicate -- more and more persuasively as more and more data is learned -- that Islam is unique, and cannot be compared with other religions, other cultures, other demographics.

One facet of its uniqueness is that most, if not virtually all, Muslims are fundamentalist radicals, and that the ones who don't seem to be that way are either 1) pretending to be moderate in order to deceive, or 2) are schizophrenically assimilating mannerisms that seem to indicate moderation but which don't really significantly actually moderate the fanaticism which their mind's other half (schizophrenically) still holds. A third possibility, of course, is a combination of 1 and 2.

The notion that all the Muslims who seem ostensibly, by superficial criteria, to be moderate are really actually moderate inside would be a reasonable inference were we examining the adherents of any other religion on Earth; but not Muslims. And again, there is a mountain of data and oceans of dots to be connected after which the reasonable person steps out of his box of assuming that "most Muslims" must be moderate -- not because they really are, but because our box of axioms about Religions in General tells us so.

Eric Allen Bell is still in that box on this -- as are many in the anti-Islam movement (such as it is). One hopes that it won't take several 911s to shake them out of this prejudice they have.

Update:

I later expanded on my comment above, adverting to the most important facet of the problem (which I have repeated here on this blog innumerable times over the years) -- namely:

...the crucial fact that we cannot tell the difference, with reliability sufficient to our #1 priority to protect our societies, between the putatively harmless Muslims (even if they do exist) and the deadly Muslims.

Such an inability to discern -- forced upon us by the factual circumstances of the matter -- could in certain situations cost us untold lives of men, women and children. And the only people to blame for such a horrible tragedy would be those who kept insisting that "there are moderate Muslims" or "there are Muslims who don't really know their Islam" or "there are Muslims who are victims of their own Islam" -- or any other permutation of essentially the same sweeping generalization which has the effect of exempting innumerable Muslims from our reasonable, and utterly legitimate, duty to -- now be careful folks and cover your children's eyes, for I'm about to type something horribly incorrect: discriminate against all Muslims for the purposes of our own safety.

Bell then responded to me:

I'm not a joining your hate party. Sorry. 

If utilizing abstract thinking is to... abstract for you, I can't help you. I refuse to bundle ALL Muslims together and be against them all.

When you go on the news, you can say whatever you want. If you say you are against all Muslims, that will be one huge step backward for the Counter Jihad effort.

I'm trying to help clean up the mess that radicals such as yourself have created.

I oppose Islam on the basis of human rights, liberty and national defense. But I am not uniformly against all Muslims. And that is where I will keep it.

And my counter-response was:

"I'm not a joining your hate party. Sorry."

Characterizing my position as a "hate party" is both tendentious and insulting.

The rest of your comment also implies that you persist in the straw man that my position entails the certitude that all Muslims are deadly. My position does not entail nor require the proposition that all Muslims are deadly -- only that we cannot tell the difference, with sufficient reliability all the time, between the Muslims who may not be deadly, and the ones who are. Until you can show me some magical key enabling us to tell that difference, I will reasonably assume you, along with everyone else, cannot. This isn't just an academic, abstract problem: it could have horrific consequences in the near future, and the lives of hundreds, even thousands or hundreds of thousands of our men, women and children could be on the line if your position (which is essentially the prevailing PC position throughout the West) continues to be insisted upon. Your position is, in this regard, little different from that of General Casey who, in the immediate aftermath of the Fort Hood massacre, proclaimed that preventing such horrific terror attacks is less important than "preserving diversity".

Aside from ignoring this important facet of the problem, you also seem to exaggerate the numbers of this magically putative group worldwide of Muslims who pose no danger to us. Your stance in this regard seems to remain afloat as valid in your mind by virtue of you apparently continuing to ignore Kinana of Khaybar's persuasive argument indicating that your assessment is, in fact, exaggerated. Kinana has not only presented his persuasive argument to you here in this comments field, but also if memory serves me correctly he did so at least twice before in other comments fields of articles featuring you, and where you similarly weighed in to respond to commenters, showing that you were reading the comments. Yet you have repeatedly ignored Kinana's argument, and in lieu of engaging it, just keep re-asserting your sweeping claim about Muslims.

At the end of the day, both positions cannot escape being generalizations, and being prejudiced (prejudice = inductively pre-judging the meaning of a body of data) -- if only because the data in question involves over a billion people, spread out all over the globe in nearly 100 countries (including increasingly within the West) in a complex diversity of societies and cultures. One either makes the sweeping, and generous, generalization that "most Muslims are harmless"; or one makes the sweeping, and cautious, generalization that "most Muslims are deadly".

Given what we know about Islam and about Muslim attitudes, behaviors and words, and given the danger of increasing, and increasingly horrific, terror attacks in the coming years, it would be prudent to err on the side of the latter generalization -- but reckless, if not outrageously irresponsible, to insist on the former generalization. Add to that the aforementioned fact (which has never been refuted by anyone) that we cannot tell the difference, with sufficient reliability all the time, between the Muslims who may not be deadly, and the ones who are, and our generalization becomes, out of the rational necessity of protecting our societies -- which, pace General Casey, you, and all the other PC MCs out there, is more important than "preserving diversity" and more important than avoiding tendentiously defined "hate parties" -- functionally (not ontologically) universal.

Update:

A more recent article by Eric Allen Bell on Jihad Watch has appeared since I first published this a few days ago, in which, of course, Bell repeated his asymptotic position about how Islam is horrible but, strangely enough, most Muslims are peachy keen.  I recommend the interesting comments section -- in which, of course, I weighed in, with Bell repeating his hyperbolic accusation against me (under my nickname there, "LemonLime"):

"You are grasping at straws, looking for reasons to justify hating an entire group of people. That is bigotry and I think you would feel right at home in a hate group."


Further Reading:

Bell's curve flatlined

April & May: isn't this the season for bluebells and marisols...?

The bluebells are back!

Help them out

She told a jury at Isleworth Crown Court that trouble began at the Tesco store in Kensington, West London, when she offered to help the woman, Mounia Hamoumi, and her husband unload their shopping trolley.

This was the explanation given by a recent prize-winning photographer in England, Cinnamn Heathcote Drury, who got into a scuffle-cum-kerfuffle with a Muslim family somewhere in or on the grounds of a Tesco store (the British version of Target, perhaps), and for her pains received not only injuries from the Muslims, but the insult added to those injuries of the legally rendered accusation (which, in the meantime, thank Allah, has been adjusted after a brief trial in her favor) that it was her fault.

Her only fault was to try to help Muslims.

For, her anecdote is an exquisite microcosm of the entire problem of the West vis-a-vis Islam:  nearly all our problems are due to "trying to help" Muslims -- whether to help them ameliorate their hellholes abroad; or to help them immigrate into our superior societies because we think that they want to escape their Islam and not rather invade us; or, finally, to help them "assimilate" into our societies once they are here.

And, of course, it need not be added that our macrocosm of this problem has far deadlier consequences than what befell Ms. Drury (though it could well have been far worse for her, too).  

The only "help" we need to extend to Muslims is to help them to the door -- out of our countries.

Interlude #4

My favorite from the marching band genre:  John Philip Sousa's march, The Washington Post, performed by the United States Marine Band.  

One reasonably expects that the institution it honors was, at the time of the composition in the late 19th century, not yet the PC MC rag it has become.

Jihad at First Bite

According to the hadiths (Sayings of Mohammed) collected by Sahih Muslim (one of the three most authoritative collections in Islam), Mohammed forbade anyone from going to the mosque if they had eaten garlic. (Also see this article on a recent fatwa by a Kuwaiti cleric.)

Then there was that incident back in Italy back 2003, when the Italian Muslim convert Adel Smith became so enraged at the crucifix on the mantle of his 70-year-old mother's room at a Catholic hospital (the San Salvatore hospital in Aquila), that he literally threw the crucifix out the window.

These make one wonder if there is some... let us say, consanguinity between Muslims and vampires.

Perhaps also of relevance in this regard, cited from the Wikipedia entry on "vampires" is an interesting detail from the book Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality by Barber, Paul (1988):

Other methods [of warding off vampires from graveyards] commonly practised in Europe included... placing poppy seeds, millet or sand on the ground at the grave site of a presumed vampire; this was intended to keep the vampire occupied all night by counting the fallen grains...

This indicates that vampires were strangely afflicted with a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder -- yet another feature in common with the Prophet Mohammed and his Mohammedan minions who, among 1,001 other insane benaviors they feel obsessively compelled to do, have in their rules of bathroom etiquette to enter bathrooms with their left foot and exit them with their right; to use an odd number of stones to wipe their anus after doing #2; and must, for both #1 and #2, face perpendicularly -- neither facing toward nor away -- in relation to the direction of Mecca.

And it may be apposite, if not ironic, in this regard to note that the original Dracula himself, Vlad the Impaler, was, in his capacity as a defender of the eastern West from Muslim invaders, perhaps more of a vampire hunter than a vampire per se himself.

Further Reading:

Satan and Islam: another reverberation

"It's like eating peanuts!"

My titular exclamation is what Diana West said in a radio interview with Frank Gaffney, when she described her interest in the Eligibility Issue.

After spending a few disparate hours reading from various blogs and among hundreds of comments reflecting innumerable angles on this issue by sundry civilians in the blogosphere, I can see what Diana means.  Not every one may be consumed with interest in this issue -- particularly not, of course, those ideologically inclined Obamawards -- but if you begin with an inkling of curiosity about it, and you dive into it, as I did, you may get hooked as if on crack (or peanuts).

If you want to plunge in the deep end, there's no better place to go than the "Butterdezillion" blog (don't ask me why she calls it that).

Less radical and traumatic than that, you can always see my recent article that helps break in the novice.

For a comprehensive source of articles and investigators who have tackled this issue, see this page published by World Net Daily, which includes this lengthy list of various individuals -- many of them holding various political offices from mayors to senators -- who remain skeptical or at least puzzled as to why Obama has refused to show his actual hard copy birth certificate and submit it for an unremarkable procedure of verification (hat tip to Diana West).

And to give you a small sample of what I have been wading through, consider the following (but remember, there are many more quotes -- both substantive and worthile, as well as repetitive and specious -- which I cannot provide out of sheer limitations of time and space) from the Gateway Pundit:

On the long form certificate of live birth issued by the White House in April of last year:

1)

I am an Adobe Certified Expert in photoshop, and also use Adobe Illustrator on a daily basis for almost 20 years. I’m also a college level instructor in both.

I can tell you this document is NOT a scan of an existing physical document. If opened in Illustrator, it shows a number of clipping masks and layers, areas blocked out to be replaced with different content. 

This is clearly a doctored image.

If it were simply a scan of an existing document, it would have a single layer, also called a “flattened” image, not multiple layers with separate pixels.

This reminds me of the fake memos indicating GW Bush didn’t fulfill his service in the armed forces. On the surface, both are fairly good pieces of art, but neither artist is technically astute enough to understand the underlying technology and make it pass muster.

The fake memos were typeset with a proportionally spaced font in a Word processor or desktop publishing program, not composed on a fixed-width typewriter. 1960′s typewriters were mechanical devices and each letter takes up a single, fixed width of space. Proportionally spaced fonts were first used in the 1980′s in comuterized typesetting equipment, and made popular in the late 1980′s with the advent of Pagemaker, the Apple Macitosh, the Apple Laserwriter, and Adobe Postscript printer description language. Not hiring an artist smart enough to understand this cost Dan Rather his job at Communist Broadcast System News.

2)

The reason for all the layers and apparent p-shop work is actually right out in the open: Director of the Hawaii Dept. of Health, one “Loretta Fuddy”, said the image is a “computer-generated certified copy produced outside their usual policies.

In other words, the photoshop work was done by the HDOH.

Question is, if the original BC exists, why go to all the trouble with P-shop? Why not just *photograph the original* and release a photocopy?

The most likely answer is that the original contains something different on it that would prove acutely embarrassing to Obama and company. Hard to guess what that might be, but one thing certain is that 

Obama was absolutely determined not to let the voters see the original.

3)

As far as the birth certificate, I don’t understand why the forgery. But it is a forgery.

 I professionally work with imaging and scanning technologies – I engineer them – and there is nothing genuine about the recently released birth certificate. There is no scanning technology that exists that would produce the PDF he presented to the world. It is as much a forgery as a $3 bill. In fact you don’t have to have my expertise to see it – just load it in Acrobat and zoom in.

It shocks me that he would release this shoddy work. He could have had them print it out and scan it in and it would be all over – no way to really tell either way. But instead, he released the PDF file created most likely by Adobe Illustrator.

PDF is not like image format simply containing pixel data. A 680 page document explains the format specifications for PDF version 1.3, which his birth certificate file states it is. It has data in it that explains what version of PDF, what objects to draw, where to draw them, how to draw them and in what order to draw them. And this document is full of picture objects.

The document he presented has instructions to draw numerous objects on top of each other that if viewed each result one by one, you’d see this document being built. These objects are artifacts of editing. A scanned image would have just one object: the whole image.

If I were hiring him for any administrative job, judging merely from this birth certificate, I would wonder what if any competencies he has.

4) 

In 1961 the BC forms were typed on a manual typewriter that was set for a left margin and tabbed to the form being filled in. Most documents were designed for tabbed typing, which is of course only sensible. I’ve done this many times.

With the Nordyke BCs we see that items, 1,6,8,10, 13,15 of the inserted information that’s typed is presented with a clean vertical left margin. The additional filled-in information is evenly spaced vertically in the provided fields.

On the recent Obama LFC we see that the left margin is not vertical and the information inserted into the same fields is high, low, moved to the right and all over the place, so to speak.

It appears that a person who may have altered this form was not familiar with old typewriters and forms and was not aware of this. Therefore, these discrepancies, raise a red flag.

Expert forensic examiners of course will have to study the offered document to be able to state if this doc is altered or not. So far, things don’t look too promising that this is an authentic unaltered document.

I’m not a total expert on document authentication but I am very well acquainted with old forms and manual typewriters. In my Navy days I filled in hundreds of similar forms and I always set the tab and margin to FIT the form.

*****

Then there's this one important sub-topic among many -- the question of whether Obama's certificate reflects the theft of someone else's birth certificate who died one day old in the same Hawaiian hospital on the same date of his putative birth (August 4, 1961).  This website has perhaps one of the best introductions to this sub-topic. Also see this synopsis on the same topic.

Us and Dem

The interior of the horse-riding school at the palace gardens in Paris -- la salle du Manège des Tuileries -- where, beginning in October of 1789, those who had concerns about the new and precipitant Revolution sat on the Right (le Droit), while those supporting the Revolution sat on the Left (la Gauche).

 Introduction:

A recent headline from Jihad Watch tells us that --

Texas Congressman calls for "hearing on the radicalization of Christians".

On closer inspection, we see that the Texas Congressman, Al Green, has a telltale "(D)" to describe his political affiliation; which should come to no surprise to us any longer.  It seems invariably to accompany the denotation of any American politician solidly and naturally rooted in PC MC stock when it comes to the problem of Islam and related issues; unlike the various "(R)"s who are unnaturally grafted in.

Discussion:

Think Bush, Giuliani, Rumsfeld, Huckabee, McCain, Romney, Beck, O'Reilly and Hannity  (and this is an incomplete list).

Thus we have George W. Bush:

“Islam brings hope and comfort to millions of people in my country, and to more than a billion people worldwide….

“Islam is a vibrant faith. Millions of our fellow citizens are Muslim. We respect the faith. We honor its traditions. Our enemy does not. Our enemy doesn’t follow the great traditions of Islam. They’ve hijacked a great religion.”

(No need for any citations for Bush on this; such asinine bromides -- and there were many, repeated ad nauseam over years -- were as plentiful and widely publicized as George Washington's famous confession about his cherry tree.)

And then we have the former New York City mayor Rudolf Giuliani, a conservative every anti-Islam person loves to love:

I have great respect for the Islamic religion. I have great respect for the Arab world, for the Middle East... and on the evening of September 11, 2001, the day my city was attacked, I got on television, and I said to the people of my city, “We’re not going to engage in group blame. This is a small group of people. This does not typify a great religion and a great people.”

And Republican Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee:

“This isn’t an Islamic problem. This is a jihadist problem.”

And Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld (how conservative can you get?):

Summing up our overall problem with Islamic terrorism:  

“It's a struggle between... there's an entire belt... it's a relatively small number of violent extremists, against a large, overwhelming majority of Muslims who are not extremist -- that are moderates!”

And McCain:

“I admire the Islam. There’s a lot of good principles in it…”

And Mitt Romney:

“I spoke about three major threats America faces on a long term basis. Jihadism is one of them, and that is not Islam. If you want my views on Islam, it’s quite straightforward. Islam is one of the world’s great religions and the great majority of people in Islam want peace for themselves and peace with their maker. They want to raise families and have a bright future.”

“…by no means [is Jihadism] a branch of Islam. It is instead an entirely different entity. In no way do I suggest it is a part of Islam….”

Then we have that staunchly conservative news pundit, Glenn Beck:

"I have read the Koran and can tell you that I unequivocally that Islam is a religion of peace."

(Not to mention this Jihad Watch story reporting that "Glenn Beck calls Geert Wilders a fascist, endorses ban on his entering the UK".)

Bill O'Reilly fares little better, as a perusal of this list of Jihad Watch articles suggests.

Nor does Sean Hannity seem to show sufficient progress on the learning curve with regard to the problem of Islam, as this 2009 notice from Jihad Watch reported.

Conclusion:

Notwithstanding the tendency for nearly all conservatives throughout the West (not just in America) to have various facial tics and twitches and elbow spasms of PC MC concerning Islam, they do nevertheless pull through on certain issues more often than do Democrats and other Leftists.  A recent notice on my blog called the reader's attention to an appallingly vivid demonstration of a divide between D's and R's in a recent Congressional roll call concerning whether or not the New York police program to surveil Muslims should continue to be funded -- with D's overwhelmingly opposing such funding, and R's overwhelmingly supporting it.  This seems to show a higher degree of rationality resident in the subculture of modern Western conservatism than is cultivated in more Leftist groups.

Still, as my litany on warm and fuzzy-headed Conservatives above ought to show us, we have no good reason to draw a hard and fast line separating Us and Dem; for such a delineation obfuscates the more important problem -- that PC MC would not exert the sociopolitcal traction and influence it does in fact enjoy, were it not for the co-dependently mushy acquiescence of Conservatives along with that large and influential demographic largely ignored, the Comfortably Apolitical, who if prodded from their pleasantly irresponsible comfort zone would prove to be pro-Western since it is the West which supports their comfortable lifestyle.

Interlude #3

The Coffee Cantata 

A short operatic comedy

by Johann Sebastian Bach

(Subtitled:  Schwiegt stille, plaudert nicht -- "Keep quiet, don't chatter")

Listen to Part 1 and then Part 2.

If you want to read along (German and English translation), here's the full libretto.

And here's a brief excerpt of the spry libretto (with German and English translation):

3	Recitative: Schlendrian [Bass], Liesgen [Soprano]
	Continuo
	Schlendrian:   Du böses Kind, du loses Mädchen, You bad child, you wild girl! Ach! wenn erlang ich meinen Zweck: Oh! If only I could have my way : Tu mir den Coffee weg! get rid of coffee!
	Liesgen:   Herr Vater, seid doch nicht so scharf! Father, don’t be so hard! Wenn ich des Tages nicht dreimal If three times a day I can’t Mein Schälchen Coffee trinken darf, drink my little cup of coffee, So werd ich ja zu meiner Qual then I would become so upset Wie ein verdorrtes Ziegenbrätchen that I would be like dried up piece of roast goat.
4	Aria: Liesgen [Soprano]
	Flauto traverso, Continuo
	Ei! wie schmeckt der Coffee süße, Ah! how sweet coffee tastes! Lieblicher als tausend Küsse, Lovelier than a thousand kisses, Milder als Muskatenwein. smoother than muscatel wine. Coffee, Coffee muss ich haben, Coffee, I must have coffee, Und wenn jemand mich will laben, and if anyone wants to give me a treat, Ach, so schenkt mir Coffee ein! ah!, just give me some coffee!
5	Recitative: Schlendrian [Bass], Liesgen [Soprano]
	Continuo
	Schlendrian:   Wenn du mir nicht den Coffee lässt, If you don’t give up coffee, So sollst du auf kein Hochzeitfest, you won’t be going to any wedding Auch nicht spazierengehn. and you won’t go out walking either.
	Liesgen:   Ach ja! Alright then ! Nur lasset mir den Coffee da! Just leave me my coffee!

"I saw the certified copy of the long form POTUS birth certificate today, [and I] felt the raised seal..."

Ever since April 27, 2011, questions have been growing: that was the day when NBC reporter Savannah Guthrie was blessed by the POTUS to experience for herself what few in history -- other than the Doubting Apostle Thomas and the unnamed lady in the Gospel of Mark 5:25-34 -- have been privileged to undergo:  her fingertips passed over the raised seal on the long form birth certificate and she felt the frisson of its reality.  

And she testified that it had come to pass. And for most in the mainstream who defend Obiblical Inerrancy, that's simply that.

For those who still have an open mind and a curiosity about the facts, however, it's not simply that.  

And for those, like me, still unfamiliar with most of the details, and who feel it daunting to wade into the deep end of all the various essays and interviews surrounding the "Eligibility Issue" (denigrated tendentiously by the mainstream as the crotchet of "Birthers"), the following radio interview on Peter Boyle's podcast radio show with Diana West is an excellent introduction.

It's a long interview and -- being radio -- is punctuated now and then with interruptions and announcements; but if the listener has patience to take in the whole conversation, he will come away with a better sense of an overview of the whole strange affair.

If the listener wants then to go a little deeper into the subject, another interview with Diana West by Frank Gaffney will serve him well.

For more in-depth nuts and bolts, see the three articles by Nick Chase published in the American Thinker online magazine:  

Oblivious to the Obvious,  

Birth Certificate Whac-a-Mole 

and  

Piercing the Cone of Silence 

-- the first two tackling the issue from a typographical focus, and the latter also including the sociopolitical problem of a collective self-censorship that seems to have fallen like a pall over the mainstream about this most curious issue.

Declarations of cyber-war against European nations

This past week has seen a couple of curious anti-European exhibitions:  Debbie Schlussel declaring cyber war on Poland, then Robert Spencer on Germany. What's next?  Are we going to see the Gates of Vienna blog take on France?  Or Lawrence Auster declare Italians to be the enemy of the free world?

First, Debbie Schlussel's blog was down for a couple of days, and it turned out that the entire nation of Poland, apparently, was all up in arms at her for her apparent condemnation of the Polish people as complicit with the Nazi extermination of some three million Jews in camps in Poland.  As of today, there are over 550 comments on that thread -- most of them largely insubstantial and emotional, on both sides of the issue.

Following on the heels of that was a rather odd publication by Robert Spencer on Jihad Watch of a rather verbose and evidence-flimsy essay by some guy named "Grim" who basically condemned the German people of today as guilty of essentially the same virulent anti-semitism that animated Nazi Germany.  When many of Spencer's readers began to express their concern about the appropriateness of such an essay, Spencer added an update to the post where he defended the essay on the grounds of his own anecdotal experience from some years ago in some pub in Austria, where some Austrian acquaintances after a few steins of beer apparently expressed a degree of anti-semitism that made Spencer uncomfortable.  He reiterated this preposterously paltry defense in a comment in the burgeoning comments thread, which tipped past 90 -- before the whole essay mysteriously vanished without a trace.

I'm not sure what this all means; except that some of our unofficial Leaders in the anti-Islam movement (such as it is) sometimes seem to get carried away with their opinions,  An official organization, with elected leadership, could help to supply a corrective to such silliness -- not in the form of censorship, mind you, but at least in the form of bringing such opinions out into the fresh air and sunshine of public discussion with we hoi ochloi; or if that's too taxing, a nice round table with the Glazov Gang.

I wonder why my comment is still "awaiting moderation" over 36 hours after I posted it on Debbie Schlussel's blog.

My comment was merely making note of an important factor in the discussion of the question of Poland's culpability with regard to the Jews mass-murdered on its soil during WW2.  I had posted my comment on Schlussel's blog under her story about the ugly reaction of some Poles to her implication (I'm still not sure exactly what she is supposed to have implied) about Poland's complicity with the German Nazis. 

I just now tested the comments there and posted a comment asking Ms. Schlussel why my comment was "awaiting moderation" -- and I also posted a comment under another name using another computer and different ISP -- and both comments appeared just fine within 60 seconds.  There have also been published several other comments by others in the meantime.

I would respectfully challenge anyone to find fault with what I posted there -- far less egregious an insult to our Western intelligence than many other posts (on both sides of the issue) which she allowed to be published on that gargantuan comments thread, now burgeoning at over 550 comments.  

Here's my comment:

Your comment is awaiting moderation.

The last busy poster seems to be forgetting that the Nazi Germans brutally conquered Poland and brutally occupied Poland thereafter. This would seem to lend credence to the theory that a minority of Poles at best were in collusion with the Nazis.

Hesperado on June 11, 2012 at 1:34 am

Two more Arabic words to learn from the global insane asylum called Islam

 Introduction:

The words are iqtiham and inghimas.

Why are these two recondite words from a medieval desert language important to us?

Because an influential Muslim scholar who lives in London (yes, in this 21st century, not the 18th, or the 13th, or the 7th) wrote:

"On the one hand, we use the proofs and the texts calling for bravery and penetrating [iqtiham] and storming [inghimas] enemy lines - but this without being foolhardy - and [this is permitted] even if it leads to one's being killed by the enemy, so long as there is in one's storming [enemy lines] an overriding benefit to the jihad, to Islam, and to the Muslims. On the other hand, we have the proofs and the texts that forbid one to kill one's self. The reconciliation [of these two groups of texts] is possible and easy, and there is absolutely no need to have recourse to limiting [the application of] or abrogating [texts]!"

Doesn't this Islamic scholar have better things to think about?

Of course he doesn't.  My apologies for that silly question.  Onward.

The words are, unfortunately, important because this modern Islamic scholar living in the West is parsing the proprieties and niceties of how and why to kill us.

Background:

A manual of Islamic law, Reliance of the Traveler, approved today in the 21st century (not in the Middle Ages) by the most prestigious Islamic university in the Muslim world, Al Azhar Madrassa in Cairo, states:

"There is no disagreement among scholars that it is permissible for a single Muslim to attack battle lines of unbelievers headlong and fight them even if he knows he will be killed." 
(q2.4(4))

Literally, the word inghimas, as we see in its Persian cognate, means:

Being plunged into water.  

And the word iqtiham, means:

Rushing headlong...

(From: A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary, ed., Francis Joseph Steinglass)

Both words, as used by our scholar of the Religion of Peace, seem to be rough equivalents, in terms of a particularly fierce and ferocious battle tactic.

The former, inghimas, then acquired the meaning of "plunging into", as an intransitive verb, denoting a person plunging into a crowd -- which, for non-Muslims, would mean in some happy, celebratory capacity (say, going moshing at a rock concert); but for Muslims, ever obsessed about the Enemy around them and how to kill them, is meant in the more deadly-serious way, as a plunging into a crowd of the Enemy in order to kill them with your sword (before the Infidels helpfully invented explosives, automobiles and planes for Muslims to pirate).

Discussion:

To get back to our mainstream Islamic scholar living in London.  His full Arabic name is Sheikh 'Abd Al-Mun'im Mustafa Halima, but he is known for short as Al-Tartusi, and that's what we'll call him, avoiding the unpleasant mouthful of his more official Islamic moniker.

As the excellent website Memri.org tells us, Al-Tartusi is a Syrian expatriate living in London (though perhaps more recently he has decided to plunge back into his homeland to help out with the Arab Spring there), "considered to be a prominent theoretician of the Salafi jihadist trend in Islam [i.e., mainstream Islam]. On August 24, 2005 he posted, on his eponymous website, an article that included a fatwa against suicide attacks."

Al-Tartusi's fatwa primarily deals with the analysis of the distinction between suicide (unlawful in Islam) and the aforementioned impetuous military tactic:  it is not suicide (intihariya), says the modern Muslim scholar, but rather martyrdom (istishhadiya) -- a-ok in Islam; indeed, a veritably honorable achievement, guaranteeing Paradise to the Mohammedan ever anxious about whether he will be sent to Hell to be tortured, or to Paradise to have sex and eat fruits and drink wine forevermore.

At first blush, when reading this fatwa, one gets the impression that Al-Tartusi is trying to delegitimize suicide bombing as... suicide.  However, on a closer reading, we see that when he is making this distinction,  he is not on Islamic grounds objecting to the headlong plunge into enemy lines that will result in the Mohammedan being killed as he valiantly kills the enemy: he only objects to the Mohammedan doing this in order to be killed -- i.e., when, that is, suicide unrelated to the jihad would be an ulterior motive for plunging into battle.

The primary guiding motivation, for the representative of the Religion of Peace, should be killing, with one's consequent death being fully accepted but not primarily sought out.  So, you see, Muslims are capable of complex logical arguments.  The problem is not that they are all stupid barbarians; the problem is that their religious and cultural authorities use their intellectual training and tradition to analyze questions and issues pertaining to concerns that are, to the non-Muslim, monstrously unethical and fanatically dangerous.

Thus, for example, Al-Tartusi writes of:

...proofs and the texts calling for bravery and penetrating [iqtiham] and storming [inghimas] enemy lines - but this without being foolhardy - and [this is permitted] even if it leads to one's being killed by the enemy, so long as there is in one's storming [enemy lines] an overriding benefit to the jihad, to Islam, and to the Muslims.

Al-Tartusi in his fatwa "against suicide bombing" goes on to more closely examine the distinction between "storming [the enemy's ranks]..., and killing one's self, as in suicide attacks...":

One who storms [enemy ranks] is killed by the enemy, whereas one who carries out a suicide attack kills himself, and so in this they are not equal.

At this particular juncture, Al-Tartusi is being a bit sophistically literal. At the very least, he would have to present an argument that proves that the death resulting in attack has to be directly inflicted by an enemy.

That the one who storms enemy ranks will be killed is probable, but not certain, since many of those who storm the ranks of the enemy disperse their army and succeed in their mission without being killed. There is no better witness to this than the history of jihad in Islam. In contrast, someone who blows himself up in a suicide attack has killed himself for sure, and so in this they are not equal.

I guess Al-Tartusi then would congratulate the Mumbai jihadists, for the fine Islamic example they demonstrated in killing the enemy the old-fashioned way.

...one cannot say that [this is because] our forefathers did not have explosives at their disposal so as to be able to draw the analogy, since there was no shortage of ways of killing one's self, and they are plentiful in every time and place.

Al-Tartusi is ignoring the precise difference between modern explosives (and airplanes), and what was available to pre-modern Muslims. Pre-modern devices and weapons were not conducive to simultaneously inflicting casualties on an enemy and killing oneself (we are not considering here malfunctioning catapults that may have fired backwards) -- whereas modern explosives are perfectly suited to the carrier of explosives doing so.  And this gains advantage when a human carrier of explosives is more capable of effectively penetrating enemy lines -- i.e., crowded areas where Unbelievers (= Enemies) are gathered (particularly Unbelievers who are glibly gullible in preening themselves about how multiculturally "tolerant" they are of the Other).

Al-Tartusi's main complaint with suicide-bombers is that they are not scrupulously following the stipulations in the Sunna (he also disingenuously tries to piggyback onto that a claim that suicide-bombings are not strategically effective, as well as the anxiety that they are bad for the image of Islam, and that they tend to foment discord among Muslims). And yet, he notes a fact that is "very discomfiting" -- namely, that over 90% of suicide attacks by Muslims are deficient in adherence, so he claims, to all the proper jots and tittles of the Sunna. Even if Al-Tartusi is correct about the Islamic unacceptability of suicide attacks, his own admission that over 90% of such attacks are not following his version of Islamic compliance shows that there is obviously a monstrous problem in Islamic education conducive to such a rampant culture of violence that is, of course, threatening us Infidels. If exploding Muslims aren't listening to Al-Tartusi, then what good is he? At any rate, he believes in killing the Enemy -- properly -- and that should be all we need to know.

Back in 2005, Walid Phares wrote in an essay published in The Washington Times (also reported by Jihad Watch) that: 

Sheik al-Qardawi went as far as linking today's suicide bombing to what he called "inghimass" (to throw oneself against the enemy). According to him, this has been permitted by religious teaching since the early days of Islam. A fatwa issued in the West or in the United States must respond to Sheik al-Qardawi and the jihadists theologically, and not state globally what international law and 52 Muslim countries subscribe to already.

And if the reader doesn't know how popular and mainstream Qaradawi is, this report from the mainstream media shows that Qaradawi was at the epicenter of the recent Egyptian Revolution, and in an unprecedented rally of over 200,000 in February of last year, he delivered the solemn Friday prayers to all those Egyptian “secularists” gathered there. The writer of that news article also notes that Qaradawi is “spiritual leader to the Muslim Brotherhood” in Egypt, and is “very much in the Sunni mainstream”.

And Memri.org has also documented how Qaradawi presided over a discussion at a major conference among Islamic clerics held in 2003 in Stockholm) in which he supported the following statement articulating the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims in the context of the justification for terror attacks:
  
It has been determined by Islamic law that the blood and property of people of Dar Al-Harb [the "Realm of War" -- i.e., all non-Muslim lands] is not protected. Because they fight against and are hostile towards the Muslims, they annulled the protection of [their] blood and [their] property…

Postscript:  "Running Amok"

I recall, a few years before 9/11 while working in a doctor's office, I was looking through a Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary (26th edition, 1985), my eyes happened to alight on the word "amok" (a word I never would have expected to see in a medical dictionary).  The definition provided an intriguing multicultural glimpse:

[Malay "impulse to murder"] a psychic disturbance seen chiefly in Malaysia, the Philippines,and parts of Africa, marked chiefly by sudden homicidal mania, screaming, and attacks on people and inanimate objects, tending to result in social retribution and leading to the death of the individual.

While I commend the 1985 Dorland's medical dictionary for being so "culturally incorrect", I suspect they, and the Western medical and anthropological community in general have not even bothered to consider the Islam factor in explaining this "psychic disturbance" -- particularly as the regions cited are all heavily influenced by Islamic demographics and historical conquest.

More recently, I checked the charming "Hobson-Jobson" reference, subtitled A Glossary of  Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and found some interesting entries for "amok" (and its older variant, "amuck").  We see that the problem of running amok also included India.  Hm; another place where millions of Muslims live.  Coincidence?

On pages 18-19, for example, we read:

 

A MUCK, to run, v. There is we believe no room for doubt that, to us at least, this expression came from the Malay countries, where both the phrase and the practice are still familiar. Some valuable remarks on the phenomenon, as prevalent among the Malays, were contributed by Dr Oxley of Singapore to the Journal of the Indian Archipelago, vol. iii. p. 532; see a quotation below. [Mr W. W. Skeat writes --

"The best explanation of the fact is perhaps that it was the Malay national method of committing suicide, especially as one never hears of Malays committing suicide in any other way. This form of suicide may arise from a wish to die fighting and thus avoid a 'straw death, a cow's death'; but it is curious that women and children are often among the victims, and especially members of the suicide's own family. The act of running amuck is probably due to causes over which the culprit has some amount of control, as the custom has now died out in the British Possessions in the Peninsula, the offenders probably objecting to being caught and tried in cold blood. I remember hearing of only about two cases (one by a Sikh soldier) in about six years. It has been suggested further that the extreme monotonous heat of the Peninsula may have conduced to such outbreaks as those of Running amuck and Latah.]"

The word is by Crawfurd ascribed to the Javanese, and this is his explanation:

"Amuk (J.). An a-muck; to run a-muck; to tilt; to run furiously and desperately at any one; to make a furious onset or charge in combat." -- (Malay Dict.) [The standard Malay, according to Mr Skeat, is rather amok (mengāmok).]

Sounds like inghimas to me.

Pages 19-21 have more on the Indian origins and incidences, as well as Javanese -- though of course never do the sources, even old ones before the dominance of PC MC, consider Islam as a root cause.  One even went so far as to conjecture that the Indian climate was to blame.  How can people be so dense?

Then we have this evidence from the Muslim history of the Philippines, concerning the 16th century (though can we doubt it continued to flare up in the following centuries...?):

With the possible exception of Japan's kamikaze pilots in the closing days of World War II, warfare has rarely known a more frightening phenomenon than the juramentados. Known as sabers by the Maranao and sabils by the Tau Sug, juramentados were [Muslim] fanatics who, believing that they would enter Paradise if killed in battle against infidels, would whip themselves into obsessed states of self-hypnosis and, kris [a dagger] in hand, charge blindly into the ranks of the enemy, be he Spaniard, American, Japanese or Filipino. In this semimystical trance the juramentados often raced directly into heavy volleys of rifle fire, shrugged off incredible wounds, and had to be killed on their feet literally, before their attack ended.

Sounds like inghimas to me.

The article adds that:

These slashing attacks kept the Spanish in a constant state of terror...

Yep.  That's the Islamic idea.

Interlude #2

This second installment of Interludes features pop muscian Al Stewart and his song "Constantinople", from his album 24 Carrots (1980):

I see the hosts of Mohammed coming

The Holy Sister bars her doors against the East
Her house has stood too long divided
The uninvited guests are breaking up the feast
She may not bid them leave again
So here in the night
Leave your home it's time for running
Out of the light.

I see the hosts of Mohammed coming
I dreamed I stood like this before
And I'm sure the words that I heard then
Were much the same
It's just an old Greek tragedy they're acting here
Held over by popular acclaim
So here in the night
Leave your home it's time for running
Out of the light
I see the hosts of Mohammed coming.

It's the Violence, Stupid

Introduction:

The lovely story which greeted my morning breakfast of scrambled eggs, sourdough toast with orange marmelade, OJ and coffee as I browsed the headlines at Jihad Watch (a morning ritual for a few years now):

Muslim shouting "Allahu akbar" beheads wife in front of their six children, throws her head off apartment roof 

Not in some Islamic hellhole in darkest Africa or the jungles of the south Philippines, mind you, but in the heart of Germany.

Discussion:

I would tolerate Muslims and their Islam -- and I would support our societies fully tolerating Muslims and their Islam on a legally-based equality with the practitioners of any other religion -- if Muslims were not physically violent. 

As repellant and ridiculous as I may find most of their ideas and texts, if they didn't act on them -- if they showed that they have learned like the rest of mankind has (with the usual exceptions based on human imperfection noted) how to modernize their religion and had long ago ceased to perpetrate physical violence as a relgiously motivated imperative -- I would defend their right to be equally tolerated in my society.

I sometimes think many in the anti-Islam movement start blurring the issue and deeming Muslims and Islam unacceptable even without the physical violence they perpetrate.  As though the mere act of wanting to wash their feet in airport bathroom facilities, for example, were intolerable.  Ewww, icky Muslims washing their feet in public sinks!  We must deport them!   No:  if Muslims perpetrated no physical violence, their desires for us to accomodate their odd Oriental practices should be tolerated.

Closely related to this, I think many in the anti-Islam movement don't realize that all laws require physical violence to maintain.  In freer, more orderly and progressive societies such as exist in North America and Western Europe (and Australia/New Zealand), authorities enforcing the law do not have to resort to physical violence nearly as much as they do in more corrupt and disorderly societies (with various countries in the Muslim world particularly egregious in this regard).  However, the basic principle is still operative:  Law requires physical violence to enforce.  And this principle is reinforced when some subculture is pushing for laws that go profoundly against the grain of the society into which they have immigrated.  Simply put, Muslims will never be able to implement their Sharia laws in the full-blooded way they want, without at some point the rubber meeting the road -- without at some point forcing us, through physical violence, to comply.  And Muslims will probably never enjoy that power, because they are too weak, and we are too strong -- with "strength" here including civilizational sophistication and all the technological and social infrastructure that brings along with it.  Even most of our PC MCs will wake up when the rubber is getting close to meeting the road.  They may not wake up in time to prevent horrific terror attacks to come in the decades ahead -- and for this grievously irresponsible recklessness they will have a lotta 'splainin' to do -- but they will at least wake up in time to prevent the Muslim dream of conquest from succeeding; namely, by doing what they should have done years or decades before that grim future we reasonably envision.

Conclusion:

Stories like the one that greeted my breaking of fast this morning, and thousands of other stories like this of various flavors of atrocity, should serve to keep our eye on the ball -- preventing the likelihood of increasing terror attacks in the coming decades.  And given the nature of the problem, there is only way feasible: extricating Muslims from our societies, simply because physical violence, often to a grotesque and ghoulish degree, is obviously an essential ingredient in their religious culture -- magnified to a level far beyond ordinary criminal violence by the supremacist expansionism which is at the heart of their religion.