Republican presidential nominee John McCain has friends who want to see Islam destroyed. Yes, he’s a moderate man:
Tag Archive for 'islam'
Peter Manning, Sydney Morning Herald, April 29:
Australia’s a remarkable country. Cambodian, Yugoslav and Vietnamese Australians who once shot at each other now live in the same city, sometimes the same suburb. The same goes for Arab and Jewish Australians. There are Jewish fighters from 1948 who successfully established the state of Israel and there are Palestinian refugees living in Sydney who were driven from their homes.
But you should have heard the groans of disapproval when Kevin Rudd’s paean of praise for Israel’s 60 years of democracy in Federal Parliament on March 12 was mentioned two weekends ago at the Arab Film Festival in Parramatta. In this swinging federal seat, the largely Arab-Australian audience was not impressed.
I suspect it wasn’t disapproval of Rudd’s perceived romance with Israel (they’re used to that with John Howard and Bob Hawke). It was the seeming insensitivity of a new Prime Minister so intent on collecting brownie points.
The face of Iraq in 2008, an explosion of honour killings:
In the latest such case, it was reported yesterday that a 17-year-old girl, Rand Abdel-Qader, was stabbed to death last month by her father for becoming infatuated with a British soldier serving in southern Iraq.
In Basra alone, police acknowledge that 15 women a month are murdered for breaching Islamic dress codes. Campaigners insist it is a conservative figure.
Violence against women is rampant, rising every day with the power of the militias. Beheadings, rapes, beatings, suicides through self-immolation, genital mutilation, trafficking and child abuse masquerading as marriage of girls as young as nine are all on the increase.
Reconciliation is the word on many lips, but a fundamentalist brand of Islam has been unleashed in the occupied nation.
Global Village TV, co-created by Baha’is and Muslims, aims to provide a forum for inter-faith understanding.
One can never have enough debate between the major and minor religions.
Robert Fisk, in the Palestine Chronicle, discusses the similarities and differences between the war against Iraq and the 1990s battle in Bosnia:
“Bosnia was in Europe, so eventually, we wanted to switch the war off. Iraq is a different matter – we’re in Iraq for oil. If the national product of Iraq was asparagus, we would not be there, I promise. There are parallels with Bosnia, not least indifference towards the Muslim victims – we did nothing for them until the war had consumed a quarter of a million of them – and we don’t care about the Iraqis. But I think there are big differences with Bosnia. There are more parallels, I think, between the NATO-Serb Kosovo war, because that is where we got people used to the idea that bombing civilian trains on railway bridges, bombing hospitals, bombing TV stations was OK. So when we hit lots of civilians in Iraq, it was “well, we were doing that back in Serbia, weren’t we?”. We bombed Aljazeera in Kabul, they bombed Aljazeera in Baghdad, which was not even an Iraqi station. So I think the Kosovo war started off the acceptability of doing these things.”
Egypt is currently in political chaos - and this recent post by a Muslim Brotherhood member is revealing - but the following behaviour is utterly counter-productive:
Egypt has ordered the seizure of a special edition of the German news magazine Der Spiegel after it was deemed to be insulting to Islam and the Prophet Mohammed, newspapers reported today.
Information Minister Anas al-Fiqi took the decision “to defend Islamic values and confront attempts to damage the prophet, the Muslim religion and religion in general”, the state-run daily Al-Gomhuriya said.
Foreign Policy presents, “The World’s Worst Religious Leaders.”
(Thankfully, a rabid, rabbinical racist is on the list.)
Maryam Yasmin Hussain, Bitterlemons International, April 10:
A very common example of western misinterpretation of Islamic terms is that of the word “fundamentalism”. Among the critics of Islam it is often used to describe faith-justified terrorism, the brutal treatment of women and abrasive behavior. But in an Islamic context, “fundamentalism” very simply means adherence to and faith in the five basic tenets of Islam, i.e. the beliefs that there is only one God and that Muhammad is his prophet, and the performance of prayers, fasting and the hajj or pilgrimage. The fundamentals of Islam are clearly devoid of any kind of violence yet the inaccurate use of the word has caused a certain amount of Islamophobia to spread among non-Muslims.
My latest New Matilda column is about the need to talk to Hamas and speak honestly about Israel’s ever-expanding occupation:
The international isolation of Hamas has failed. This is not merely the opinion of those who believe that the democratically elected Palestinian Government should be engaged, but includes a number of prominent Israelis, including Yossi Alpher, the former adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
Life in Gaza, suffering under an economic and military blockade, remains tough. Security has largely been restored due to Hamas security services, although some Gazans complain of a loss of individual rights, press freedom and women’s mobility. Hamas-controlled media continues to broadcast incitement against Jews.
Despite these challenges, Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal reiterated last week his group’s commitment to a two-state solution and the need for the establishment of a sovereign state within the 1967 borders. His call was ignored throughout the world. Even the New York Times recently intimated that forever shunning Hamas was counter-productive.
The OpenNet Initative recently reported the following disturbing development in relation to Google:
YouTomb, a project of the MIT Free Culture group that studies takedown notices by the video-sharing website YouTube, has identified a mechanism used by Google to restrict video content in specific countries. This appears to be the method YouTube is using to filter videos on behalf of governments and private actors that request it.
And now this latest news from Indonesia:
Indonesian Internet providers have started blocking websites or blogs posting an anti-Islamic film that has sparked widespread protests, a report said Saturday.
Internet Service Providers Association chairwoman Sylvia Sumarlin told news website detikcom that access to YouTube has been blocked but could not guarantee it would be totally unavailable for national viewing.
She said there were other routes that Internet service providers (ISPs) could access that were currently not being used.
The film, “Fitna”, could still be accessed on YouTube from some providers on Saturday.
Earlier this week, the government wrote to YouTube asking it to take down the film, made by the far-right Dutch MP Geert Wilders.
Is Google assisting the Indonesians in its request? Like in China, it appears increasingly likely that YouTube is more than happy to keep certain, major markets happy (not the people, mind you, but the authorities.)
It takes a certain kind of Jewish publication - such as New York’s Forward - to publish an article by the Muslim Brotherhood’s political bureau chief. They should be commended for opening the lines of dialogue:
The Muslim Brotherhood is not pushing for radical change in Egypt. Aware of political realities, we decided to contest only 10,000 of the 52,000 seats the government announced are up for grabs in the local councils, so as not to provoke the regime into fixing the final results and to allow for coordination with other opposition groups. Realizing our responsibility as the country’s largest opposition group to defend the rights of minorities and vulnerable groups in Egyptian society, our lists included candidates from different economic and social classes, as well as women and Copts.
The ruling National Democratic Party, however, has clearly not seen our campaign this way. The government took its crackdown on democracy a step further than it had in previous elections. Instead of just rigging elections as it traditionally has, the regime banned opposition candidates from registering to run for election at all.
The controversy over Dutch politician Geert Wilders’ film on Islam, Fitna, is not hard to understand. It’s a crude, embarrassingly racist compilation of the most extreme Islamic statements and anti-Semitic rants. The clear attempt is to argue that all Muslims share the al-Qaeda view of the world and want to kill all non-Muslims. Please. It’s about as sophisticated as a weekly rant by a Murdoch columnist who’s just returned from an all-expenses paid trip to Israel.
The short film is worth watching, however (hence my posting of it below.) Wilders has the right to make his film and the right to compare Islam to Nazism. It’s defamatory, false and offensive - and conveniently ignores the many racist outbursts by Jews and Christians - and will only inflame racial tensions. But it’s vital to understand that this virulent strain of Islam-hatred is alive and well in the West:
..Over one third of all media reports in Germany see Islam as primarily a terrorist threat and security risk (36.6 % of coverage in German in 2007).
Alastair Crooke, The Guardian, March 24:
Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, in a recent interview with a German magazine, embellished Rusi’s complaints of naivety and “flabby thinking”. Radical Islam won’t stop, he warned, and the “virus” would only become more virulent if the US were to withdraw from Iraq.
The charge of naivety is not limited to failing to understand the concealed and duplicitous nature of Hamas and Hizbullah, Iran and Syria; it extends to not grasping the true nature of the wider “enemy” the west is facing. “I don’t like the term ‘war on terror’ because terror is a method, not a political movement; we are in a war against radical Islam,” says Kissinger. But who or what is radical Islam? It is those who are not “moderates”, he explains. Certainly, a small minority of Muslims believe that only by “burning the system” can a fresh stab at a just society be made. But Kissinger’s definition of “moderate” Islam sounds no more than a projection of the Christian narrative after Westphalia, by which Christianity became a private matter of conscience, rather than an organisational principle for society.
If radical Islam, with which these experts tell us we should be at war, encompasses all those who are not enamoured of secular society, and who espouse a vision of their societies grounded in the values of Islam, then these experts are advocating a war with Islam - because Islam is the vision for their future favoured by many Muslims.
Mainstream Islamists are indeed challenging western secular and materialist values, and many do believe that western thinking is flawed - that the desires and appetites of man have been reified into representing man himself. It is time to re-establish values that go beyond “desires and wants”, they argue.
Israel is a rogue state but boycotting its writers seems futile:
Opening the Paris Book Fair should have been a low-key cultural event during the state visit to France of President Shimon Peres of Israel. Instead, it was charged with Middle East tensions.
Several Arab countries are boycotting the prestigious annual fair, where Peres was speaking Thursday, because it honors Israeli writers.
The Nobel Peace laureate’s appearance at the book fair comes near the end of his five-day state visit to France - a sign of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s effort to rebuild frayed ties with Israel.
Besides, the Arab countries have enough of their own human rights abuses to worry about.
Welcome to the modern face of the Republican Party.
What will the future of the Middle East look like?
Harsh words were exchanged Wednesday as Knesset Member Effie Eitam (National Union-NRP) addressed remarks made by a number of Arab lawmakers during a rally in the northern town of Umm al-Fahm in protest of IDF activity in Gaza.
“The day will come when we will banish you from this house (Knesset) and the national home,” Eitam said during his speech, “no sane democratic nation can ignore such treachery at a time of war. We must expel you and all those who participated in the unruly and treacherous rally against the State of Israel that took place at Umm al-Fahm. “You should be expelled to Gaza, where your people, who are fighting us, dwell; that is where you belong,” the MK said.
Eighty-one percent of Israelis support the Jewish National Fund’s long held policy of selling land only to Jews, according to a poll released Thursday. Only 10% oppose the policy while 9% are undecided or refused to answer.
Mitchell Barak, managing-director of the KEEVOON Research and Strategy company that conducted the survey, said, “This poll shows that when it comes to the actual land of Israel - Israelis are definitely not liberal. It is clear that JNF’s 100-year-old policy of raising money from Diaspora Jewry and selling only to Jews in Israel, is widely supported by all sectors of the Israeli Hebrew-speaking population.”
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel’s (ACRI) report on civil rights in Israel paints a bleak picture: Increasing racism, restriction of personal freedoms and discrimination even within the Knesset walls – and that’s just scratching the surface.
Published Saturday, the report revealed that Israeli youths are bombarded with stereotypic, racist imagery, and their opinions have developed accordingly: Over two-thirds Israeli teen believe Arabs to be less intelligent, uncultured and violent. Over a third of Israeli teens fear Arabs all together.
