Tag: Islam

First watch this ad

That was Dan Fanelli, Rep. Alan Grayson’s GOP opponent in this years election. He is, as of this report, still an asshole

Now read this

    On May 10th, a middle-aged man carried a can of gasoline and a pipe bomb into the Jacksonville Islamic Center of Northeast Florida during evening prayers and detonated it.

crooksandliars.com

Wait, May 10th? That was a week ago! Why am I just hearing about this now?

the Jacksonville Islamic Center of Northeast Florida

Oh, wait . . .

Video provided by the FBI shows a white, middle aged man carrying a gasoline canister around the islamic center.

More below the fold

As probably everyone has heard by now, the Swiss sovereign voted by about 57% of the popular vote and the assent of 22 of the 26 full and half-cantons (States) to write into our Constitution that the construction of new minarets is banned, and this despite opposition to this People’s Party-supported initiative from the government, from parliament, from all parties (except the People’s Party and the fringe Protestant Democratic Party), the unions, the churches, industry, banking – pretty much every establishmentarian institution.

I’m not happy about the ban – it was a pointless affront to a section of our population.  Swiss zoning laws are arbitrary and byzantine enough to stop virtually anything if the local population put their mind to it, so the ban was not necessary.  True, a minaret is not essential for a mosque, but it’s only the conservative fringe like the Wahhabis who are actually opposed to it.  The call of the muezzin is banned anyway (not consistent with noise regulations- and it would be drowned out by church bells).

The vote was in some elements misdirected, but in others it spoke to legitimate concerns.  Popular votes are a rum thing, and you’re only given the option of voting “yes” or “no”, there is no possibility of a nuanced response.  But I certainly don’t think it is any “crisis of democracy”, or “failure” of anything except the failure of the political elites to deal with the issues that led to the “yes” vote.  

We in Western society frequently latch hold of the concerns of the Third World in a laudable desire to reform, enlighten, and correct the injustices which exists in countries who do not enjoy our same basic freedoms.  Though this impulse is meant to bring light to the darkness, we must also be careful not to let our own biases and own paternalistic impulses overshadow the good work we seek to accomplish.  When the reform we seek thinly veils our own individual internal struggles, then we are not truly working for unselfish means.  However, rather than beating ourselves up when we fall short, we would be wise to forgive our shortcomings and strive to listen more and hector less.  It is only with listening and absorbing the complete picture that truly effective change ever comes to be.  If short-cuts guaranteed successful outcomes, we’d have colonized Mars by now, viewed a time where same-sex marriage was illegal as unspeakably barbaric and nonsensical, and learned to take for granted a single payer health care system.

The controversy over women who demand the right to wear the Niqab or the burqu despite laws banning it altogether has become a highly politicized issue in Western Europe and even in our own country.  Feminist activists, particularly female feminist activists, have grabbed hold of the head scarf and veil issue as a clear-cut visual example that shows conclusive evidence of brutal Patriarchal oppression.  When sexism and anti-feminist offenses are so often disguised and ingrained within a society, the head scarf has become an endearing image to invoke due to its unquestioned visibility.  If one takes into account a purely Western point of view, nothing could be a more suitable example of the malicious intent of men harshly imposing their will upon women.  In comparing their perceived interpretation of the custom to their own lives and their own hard-fought struggles as women, they have incorporated the practice into a Raison d’etre of a particular school of thought.  This endearing symbol pushes social justice and personalizes the lack of human rights rightly due to oppressed women through the world.  The cause has been so heavily politicized and eagerly embraced that few have felt any need to examine the subtleties that sometimes contradict and frequently complicate any resounding rallying point or slam dunk.  The reality, as it so often is, is full of subtle nuances that make any black and white reading much more complicated or even impossible.

The topic below was originally posted on my blog, the Intrepid Liberal Journal.

Building consensus within America’s body politic and national security establishment for a new way forward with Muslims worldwide is a formidable challenge. Many Americans still don’t appreciate the complex nuances of Muslim society and remain stubbornly Islamophobic almost seven and half years after 9/11. Equally formidable is earning the goodwill of Muslims worldwide following the Iraq War as well as American atrocities perpetrated upon Islamic detainees at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Hopefully, President Obama’s historic election has finally opened a path for constructive conversation about how America can most effectively engage the Muslim world.

The CIA’s former point man on Islam, Emile Nakahleh, has vigorously entered this conversation with his new book, A Necessary Engagement: Reinventing America’s Relations With the Muslim World (Princeton University Press). From 1991 to 2006, Nakahleh served as the director of the Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program in the Directorate of Intelligence at the CIA. He holds a PhD in international relations and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

When last we looked in on the history of Iran, the dust of Battle of al-Quadissiyah was just settling, and Zoroastrian Persia had fallen under the dominion of the armies of Islam.  As she has done with every other of her would-be conquerors, however, the culture of the conquered soon became inexorably tied to that of the new overlords; from Persian minds sprang some of the greatest achievements of the Golden Age of Islam.  Even gold won’t glitter forever, though, and the forces of time and history exerted themselves on a succession of kingdoms and dynasties for several centuries before one proved strong enough to make the unification thing stick.

Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, for a whirlwind tour of nearly 1000 years of Iranian history, from the Abbasids to the Safavids, by way of the Ziyarids, if you will – plus an important announcement (he said grandiosely) from your resident historiorantologist.      

At the conclusion of our last historiorant, we left off with the Sassanids in pretty dire straits.  It was 636 CE, little more than a decade after they had had their sasses handed to them by the Byzantines in a series of battles across Mesopotamia, and only four years removed from the passing of the Prophet Muhammad.  Now fierce men bearing the star and crescent had appeared on the Euphrates; to Yazdgerd III, the last Zoroastrian king of the Persians, fell the task of defending Ctesiphon and the gateway to Iran.

So join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, for a look at the beginnings of a clash of civilizations that continues to the present day, as well as the many Iranian contributions to what would become known as Islam’s Golden Age.  Along the way, we’ll also be taking a contextual side-trip to the Founding of Islam – but only after pausing to read the sign about how, imho, we should be approaching historiographic minefields.

This ought to really raise the ire of condemnation within the Fundamentalist Christian Community,

especially as practiced in the U.S..

Dialog already started

at site of this report, Story of Jesus Through Iranian Eyes

New Movie By Iranian Filmmaker Tells Story of Christianity From Muslim Perspective

You can also view their video report here.

I saw that on a bumpersticker recently, and thought it was a cogent reminder to so-called right-to-lifers that saving lives of real, whole people who actually exist and function as human beings should be at least as important as saving unborn fetuses or frozen embryos.

But to the religious right, and to the Catholic church, which I don’t lump in with the evangelicals, some “beating hearts” are more important than others.

When you go to Abortion Stops a Beating Heart website, you discover that Pro-Life Ministries “supports President Bush and our brave soldiers fighting Islamic terrorism.”  A link takes you to this explanation of Islam:  

Why you Need to Understand Islam and Islam’s False Religion of Hate, Intolerance and Errors Which Leads its’ Followers to Hell and Eternal Separation from God and Become a Follower of Jesus Who is the Christ, the ONLY Son of God, and sits at God’s Right Hand!

But are their Islamic hearts, and the hearts of Iraqi civilians, beating, or is it only the US military, whose hearts beat true for the red, white and blue?

What prompts this post not anything new from the fundamentalists, but a recent statement by the Catholic bishops.

There are two major classes of falsehoods the U.S. government uses to justify its incursions into the Middle East and occupation of Iraq.

The first is a contrived threat to the U.S., like Saddams’s cache of WMD’s or links to Al-Qaeda, desgined to invoke fear and patriotism in mainstream Americans. Though much discussed and long ago debunked in the liberal blogosphere, it’s being dusted off and reused for Iran.

The second class of lies is aimed at a different group – the Christian right-wing of America. This catergory of lie says that the U.S. must invade and occupy the Middle East because America’s Christian way of life is threatened by “Islamo-Fascists.” (Any liberal who objects is fascist too.)

The standard m.o. for this class of lie is to denigrate Islam by equating it with terrorism and to paint a picture that shows Muslims hate America for its Christian beliefs. This 2nd class of lies is designed to rally the Christian right to support war and the Republican party – and is the focus of this diary.

Like the first, it allows them to kill with impunity.