| Thursday, May 30, 2002 |
18:27 - It is with a heavy heart that we raise the scaffold...
http://frontpagemag.com/columnists/glazov/2002/glazov05-23-02.htm
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I'm going to have to pay closer attention to Cold Fury, because without it I would have missed this article by Jamie Glazov, from which I'll quote a few paragraphs that I hope will not dissuade readers from going and reading the whole thing.
The problem here, therefore, is that Islam is inherently oppressive and violent. Yes, I know about all of those verses here and there in the Koran that talk about peace and love. Very heart warming indeed.
But the problem is that Islam forbids the separation of Church and State (Surah 2:193), as well as the right of dissent (Surah 4:59). And that is what Sharia Law, the religious law of Islam, holds in place. It makes no distinction between spiritual and temporal life. In other words, it covers not only ritual, but every aspect of life. In so doing, it makes sure to dish out severe punishments for any transgression of the rules.
It is obvious, therefore, that the very notion of Islam allowing democracy is simply ludicrous. If this occurred, then a majority of people might just decide that women don’t need to wear veils and that starting an official opposition party to the established Islamic structure is a good idea.
In these circumstances, how long do you think Islam would remain Islam?
And Mike's response:
A while back, I wrote a column-length piece about whether or not the war on terror could truly be said to be a war on Islam itself. I was pretty reticent at that time about the proposition of making war on an entire religion and not just its fundamentalist crazies - the libertarian in me simply abhors the idea of denying anyone's right to worship whatever the hell they want to worship, no matter how ass-backwards and intellectually disjointed their beliefs might seem to me. I said at the time that what the world most needed to hear from Muslims everywhere was a blanket condemnation of terrorism as a means of pursuing any political goal whatsoever, a no-nonsense and unequivocal expression of outrage over the hijacking of their religion by their so-called brothers; that the intentional targeting of innocents was wrong at all times and in all circumstances.
Well, the world has waited in vain for that denunciation. What we've gotten has been flaccid apologia, always coupled with the usual rationalizations and moral-equivalency arguments, and even so discouraging a response as that has been somewhat exceptional. The silence from Muslims in the face of suicide bombings in Israel and continued threats of terrorism elsewhere actually speaks volumes, and I find myself less and less willing to make excuses for it.
Now, only now-- months after 9/11, and years and decades after Islamic terrorism first became a global issue-- are people starting to put out the first careful feelers into the waters of scholarly criticism of a major religion or culture. See, ever since World War II, the world-- well, particularly America-- has shied away so violently from any kind of blanket criticism of any people or its customs that now we're deathly afraid to say anything bad about a culture which has repeatedly demonstrated that such criticisms are valid.
The Jews always used to be the whipping boys of the world-- right up until Hitler. After the concentration camps were opened, we were so horrified as an "enlightened" world that such a thing could have happened that we supported Israel's colonization and war efforts, desperate to prove that we were the antithesis of Nazi anti-semitism. And then it branched out. We launched and carried out complete broad-based civil rights movements for blacks and for women. We vehemently opposed our own military actions in Vietnam. We made movies and wrote history books that glorified Native American cultures, and an entire "New Age" subculture of rejection of modern convenience and the upholding of indigenous peoples throughout history and all over the world was born. We discovered fusion music. We watched PBS and Discovery Channel series. We all but exterminated the KKK. We created "affirmative action" in universities. We invented a new term: Political Correctness.
It's been a fifty-year backlash, and we're still discovering new ways to compensate for the global cultural guilt we feel for what the Nazis did.
So now, after the Twin Towers have fallen in a monstrous fireball and plume of smoke and ash that rose to the heavens for an entire month, and after our embassies have been blown up and our ships have been attacked in their harbors and our planes have been hijacked and our interests have been threatened all over the world with still more and greater destruction, we are still loath to consider criticizing the culture that every single one of these attacks has come from.
We're deathly afraid of saying "Down with Islam", lest someone make political cartoons showing the American flag with a swastika in place of the stars.
What is wrong with this picture? For thousands of years the Jews have been universally hated by almost every culture on earth, and it's only in the latter part of this century that they've finally gotten a break-- only to have the fight continue to be brought to their doorstep in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem today. But why? Never in history have the Jewish people ever been demonstrated to be guilty of any transgressions against other cultures beyond vague grumblings about how they "control the media" and "control the stock market" and "killed Jesus". Where in history is the Jewish-led conflagration that has justified their being persecuted and tarred with blood-libel and blamed for every kind of evil straight on through to the present day? Where is their historical 9/11? Where is the Holocaust that they perpetrated against their neighbors? Hell, even Germany has been forgiven for Hitler a scant fifty years later, and is again a leading world power. Whence this implacable, unquestioned hatred for the Hebrew race?
And yet, even after it's been demonstrated that Islam-- the vociferous but impotent protests of its blog-reading adherents notwithstanding-- is by its very nature incompatible with any other world than one in which it is all-encompassing and totalitarian and tyrannical, we still can't bring ourselves to utter any of the same criticisms about it that anybody in the pre-WWII world ever uttered about the Jews or any other downtrodden scapegoat race.
After all, the Jews have in fact been scapegoats: a convenient entity on which to blame things, whether deserved or not. But the Islamofascists aren't scapegoats, because they are responsible for the terrorism they continue to threaten.
It's wrong to stereotype, we're now taught from birth. Never say such things as They're evil or They're a dangerous race or Kill 'em all. No, we still try to find the good in Islam. We admire their architecture, we laud their medieval mathematical achievements, we write term papers about the life of the Prophet and the terror and injustice of the Crusades. We desperately comb through the Koran to see for ourselves what a peaceful, gentle, freedom-loving, self-confident religion the true Islam is.
And how horrified we are to discover that it's nothing of the sort.
Is it time, finally, to admit that there is some evil in the world that does not lie within the hearts of isolated, individual madmen? Can we conclude that an entire major religion fits the definition of "evil" just as well as any fantastical Dark Lord ever did?
Have fifty years of mounting political correctness softened us too much, or do we have the sack to stand up and declare war on a corrupt people?
And if not, how many more September Elevenths will it take before we can?
Oh, and if anyone disagrees with these statements that there's something rotten in the state of Islam, then I'd like to hear a good, plausible explanation for why the Islamic Council of Victoria wants to stop people from quoting the Koran on the grounds that it makes Islam look bad.
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