Here is the cached version of the page for Utham Badar’s (now canceled) talk at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney.
For most of recorded history parents have reluctantly sacrificed their children—sending them to kill or be killed for the honour of their nation, their flag, their king, their religion. But what about killing for the honour of one’s family? Overwhelmingly, those who condemn ‘honour killings’ are based in the liberal democracies of the West. The accuser and moral judge is the secular (white) westerner and the accused is the oriental other; the powerful condemn the powerless. By taking a particular cultural view of honour, some killings are condemned whilst others are celebrated. In turn, the act becomes a symbol of everything that is allegedly wrong with the other culture.
That’s some high-class moral relativism there. Yup we funny people who insist that it’s wrong to murder family members or anyone else for having sex, we’re the secular white western meanies, and the people who think it’s right and good to murder family members for having sex are the oriental other. Shout out to Edward Said! Although I seriously doubt he would be much flattered by the homage of Uthman Badar.
But “the powerful condemn the powerless”? Is that fair? I think the victims of honor killings – the people murdered – are the powerless and the people doing the murdering are the powerful. I honestly don’t think that people who murder their daughters or sisters or mothers or wives get to claim to be the powerless victims.
Notice, also, the pretentious pseudo-literary word-juggling, the “critical theory” airs and graces, the palaver about symbols and the epigram about condeming some and celebrating others – notice it and feel nausea at the cynical frivolity, the vanity, the having it both ways, the showing off. This isn’t some fucking game. This is girls and women like those of the Shafia family, pushed into a canal in the family car. This is a girl like Banaz Mahmod, brutally murdered by her father and uncle. This is real girls and women murdered by their real fathers and brothers, it’s not something to preen about and bandy words about on the stage of the Sydney Opera House.
What a piece of scum, this Utham Badar.
The problem is the difference between a culture of honor and a culture of law:
What’s odd about the so-called “honor killings” is that these serve no purpose but to further impoverish the family (which views its females’ sexuality as an asset). It has no deterrent effect on anyone outside the family; it truly is cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face, but taken to the nth degree.
[quoted passages shortened – OB]
Agreed Ophelia. So sick of people prancing around with abstract bullshit while people actually suffer and die.
*so sick of some people prancing around with abstract bullshit while other people actually suffer and die
Blanche @1,
Not that odd; I think it’s reasonable to believe that it very probably does have a deterrent effect — for example, should a young man be considering courting a woman contrary to the family’s desire in such a culture, both that man and woman know that severe retaliation by proxy (that is, retaliation against the woman) is on the cards if she is suspected to reciprocate in any way.
(Perhaps it should be called a culture of fear rather than an honour culture)
Thank you.
Indeed, they are frequently terrifyingly powerful, within their ambit. Licensed to suppress, to silence, to compel orthodoxy, to maim, and, of course, to kill. This being, I presume it is entirely redundant to add, no fucking exaggeration whatsoever.
It can make one a mite unsympathetic, seeing them protest their powerlessness, their victimhood, their abject prostration before imperial might, this dreadful bigotry they face. And then plead their (apparently divine) right to stone to death those beneath their thumb who dared dissent, or who merely made love to those they loved.
Okay. Right. I lie.
As I didn’t start real sympathetic.
Hell, half these assholes who are protesting it’s this dreadful ‘imperialism’ they’re being criticized for their brutalities, they live in places where they represent a solid twenty steps backward from what it’s been. Besides which, there are indigenous movements pushing for secularism and progressive penal codes in most of these jurisdictions, but at the drop of a hat, the local reactionaries will smear every voice within these, too, as stooges of the west. Let’s cast every push toward a humane civil code in this light: those pushy secularists from beyond our borders, trying to tell us what to do.
But oh, his rationalization is noted. And yes dear, it’s all very othering, I’m sure. My sympathy is so immense, here, let me pass you the jagged bit of concrete for which you were reaching. No doubt because others have drones and missiles, it is perfectly just you should bludgeon more powerless, still, beneath you, with these lesser weapons. Have at it, then, Insha’Allah.
Some people seem to think that the only evils in the world are Western elitism, cultural imperialism, etc. Often we see these kinds of arguments. “It’s all just an excuse to assert power over the other.” “You fear them and thus want to weaken them by imposing your sense of right and wrong.”
But as you say, the truly vulnerable and marginalized are the victims of violence. This pseudo-liberal guilt trip is used to try to stifle criticism of the worst aspects of other cultures. Opposing nuclear proliferation is keeping “them” stuck in 1944. Supporting universal human rights is really meant to undermine the self-determination of emerging nations.
Western neo-imperialism is indeed a problem, but it isn’t the only problem. A young woman being executed for a ludicrous reason probably isn’t thinking “oh well, at least my death shows those damn Americans and Europeans that they can’t boss my people around.”
Isn’t it even more racist and imperialist to encourage a culture stagnate at this level? To define them by this behavior as if the West should be permanently defined by witch hunts and Protestant vs. Catholic wars!
On the conflict between a culture of law and a culture of honor, I always liked this scene from the movie of To Kill a Mockingbird. Where Atticus is spat upon, wants to throw a punch, but things better of it and walks away.
I’ve forgotten nearly everything else about that movie from when I watched it in highschool. But that scene stuck with me.
Always think of it when someone tries to provoke me into a physical confrontation. Helps me walk away.
Blanche Quizno
I used to wonder why Honor isn’t defended by going after the man in the “loss of chastity”. I think one motive is simple cowardice – the man is much more likely to defend himself with deadly force. The second is the cost of killing a female relative is much less than for killing a man from an outside the family, since that would invite retaliation and could result in an ongoing blood feud. Just as dueling was an institution created to prevent insults from escalating into ongoing blood feuds this perverse form on non-deterrent violence serves the same purpose, especially when the lives of women are devalued.
I think this vile doofus should have been allowed to give his talk in order to demonstrate just how reprehensible his culture is, to show where tolerate intolerance can lead, and to make the organizers face the full consequences of their stupidity.
But their power is only within that ambit- which is often very narrow anyway: they are likely to live in a society where their social superiors have enormous power over them- and only if they do what is required of them. Even within the ambit they do not have the power not to do what is required of them: “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”, but saying “No.” isn’t a valid choice.
Falstaff sums up honour best. “Thou owest god a death.” Prince Hal tells him, but Falstaff thinks it out:
It’s the objectification of women.
The bullshit view that ‘justifies’ the double standard is that sex is something that is done to women (objects) by men (subjects).
The woman who has unsanctioned sex has been dirtied up and her value as a uterus for the purpose of sanctioned impregnation by a man for the purpose of bearing children has been undermined. That is her only purpose as a female, and thus she is now a valueless mouth to feed.
Also: Failing to kill the daughter means the family sends an implicit message to the community that the other daughters out there could have sex and live. Killing her sends the message to the other daughters that they too will be killed if they think about having sex before marriage. Thus, the community will shun (dishonor) the family that allows their daughter to live, but will accept them back again once their daughter has been killed.
The men however don’t carry the stain of sex with them, because sex wasn’t something done to them. It was something done by them to someone else. So they’re just dandy.
It’s hateful bullshit.
The requirement to put myself into the mindset of people who can do this so I can understand why their actions make sense from their own perspective leaves me, in this case, with an urgent need to wash out my brain with chlorine and bleach. It’s a repulsive way to view women and sexuality.
It quite often is.
There’ve been several famous cases where a couple have been murdered for honour. It’s likely that a man can more easily run away than a woman. Also. the man coming from outside the community makes it harder to get hold of them. In the cases where the man was killed it could have been because he’d stayed with the woman and so could more easily be caught.
The appropriate venue for Badar is the Festival of Repugnant Ideas, that such a moral imbecile was ever invited is deeply disturbing.
Freezepeach arguments aside, isn’t one of the universally-held acceptable limits on free speech that one is not permitted to incite violence? This talk, had it been allowed to proceed, would seem to me to be almost a textbook example of incitement to violence.
Yes, it’s hypocritical to condemn killing for the honor of the family, while applauding killing for the honor of the flag/nation/monarch/whatever. But that shouldn’t lead to a discussion about the morality of honor killings, but to a discussion about the immorality of the other killings.
Also, I’d like to add that in these “liberal democracies of the West”, it’s not generally the most liberal elements of society that are pushing the nationalist or interventionist agendas, or advocating violence as a solution to anything.
Can we PLEASE stop calling them “honor killings?” The veneer of respectability with which this term veils the despicable acts is wholly undeserved. How about calling them “vanity murders?”
Vanity murders it is (I’ll have to remember that…)
I think where he’s gone wrong is in thinking that those of us who are angered by family ‘honor’ killings are actually okay with all that other stuff. Also it should be noted that it wasn’t usually parents who required these sacrifices of their children. They were imposed by other authorities such as the state, subject to punishment. The families may have been willing or not, depending on their lights and the circumstances.
Incidentally, Uthman Badur is a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, which favours execution for blasphemy or insults to Mohammed.
It isn’t honour killing he objects to, just whose honour is defended by killing.
There’s an interesting contradiction in the fact that Ophelia has done what the Festival of Dangerous Ideas decided not to do, namely place this guy’s ideas before us. It it was too dangerous there, why not here, where it is accessible to potentially anyone? Was it the veneer of status a conference speech might give him which was dangerous? Was it the risk that his views would become accepted by a wider audience? Was it the possibility of an anti-Muslim backlash?
Start with this: I think the practice of honor killings is awful and needs to stop.
But I’m going to throw out a bit here about the way human cultures work. In many parts of the world where we see “honor cultures” (I kind of hate that term but whatever) it isn’t just a matter of proving one’s manhood. It’s also a matter of keeping one’s word. With no real law enforcement trust is all you have. That’s why hospitality and the rules thereof are so important to Bedouins, for instance, or the Maasai, or even medieval European nobles. (George RR Martin harked to this in Game of Thrones, but if you read Barbara Tuchman’s work A Distant Mirror, about 14th century society, there’s a lot there too).
One reason control of female sexuality is important is because you want to know that the kids you are providing for are yours (or your relative’s, or whoever). Anyhow, the whole practice and appearance of patriarchal societies is because these cultures work. If they didn’t the local group wouldn’t survive at all. People tend to come up with survival strategies that fit where they live. And cultural memory doesn’t disappear overnight. After all look at the US– how much of our basic framework for dealing with each other (especially white people) has its roots in slavery? A lot, I would say. It shows in tropes and stereotypes that we no longer even think about. (Until we do, and then what happens? The reactions you get are usually not good). Our school calendars are based entirely around an agricultural cycle that for 90% of families in the US has little relevance.
If you want to stop honor killings, it seems to me that what has to happen is offering the people in those places something better. You can’t just say “your culture is a bunch of primitive shit.” You have to offer up something to replace it with that works for people. Cultures are integrated systems, after all. We assume that law enforcement will be there when we call the cops. If the people in say, Pakistan can’t assume that, what do you tell them? Trust has to be earned. Our systems here in the US– cops, courts, all that — was painstakingly built over centuries and they have earned our trust. It did not happen in a day — recall that the very idea of a police force is only about 150 years old, and in the US especially there simply wasn’t one in most places until after the Civil War.
And before we get too self-congratulatory, I remind you that duels were still practiced in the US in the 19th Century, especially in the South. Abraham Lincoln was almost killed in one. Alexander Hamilton was not so lucky.
Anyhow, I stress that I’m not saying murdering a woman for sex is justified in any way. But unless you can offer people an alternative system that works, you’re going to have a tough time eliminating it.
Practices we’d consider barbaric now do disappear. Duels in the South no longer happen. We don’t marry off daughters at 13 anymore (I might point out that in the US the legal ages for marriage with a parent’s consent were frighteningly young until the 1960s in some states, and it’s no accident that it was places like Utah and Kansas – rural areas). That changed because people had alternatives to farming, and it’s no longer necessary to have as many children as possible to provide labor.
There’s a reason that birthrates drop after a generation when people move to cities — again, what you have is a system that works. At least most of the time, you’ve offered up an alternative. (The reason that i many developing nation cities you have huge birthrates is that a) people do not de-acquire children when they move there and b) it takes a generation for habits to change).
And a good example is the campaign against FGM. In the places where it has been successful, it’s because locals (Africans) led the effort– the change was theirs. They didn’t try to impose something from above, they essentially went door to door. (Yes, laws were altered but the door to door campaign made it so the practice wasn’t just driven underground)
Last bit: while our friend Badar is certainly appropriating the critical-theory speak, he does have a point: we do look at horrible practices differently when the “other” does them. We decried torture for decades and then did it, and treated captives in terribly inhumane ways. So part of his question is a valid one: why should we trust you? Until we address that question — and give a better answer than “we’re democracies and just self-evidently wonderful” then people like Badar are going to have an audience.
Notice how he says the accuser and judge is the secular white westerner whereas the accused is the oriental “other”; the powerful condemning the powerless.
An adherent of a murderous Manichean ideology that has the ‘other’ as its principle object of hate, lectures us on the evil of seeing people as the ‘other’.
He’s attempting to frame the criticism and condemnations of this barbarity, this medieval obscenity, as racism, as neocolonialism.
Notions of white privilege and intersectionality in the service of murders misogyny.
Progressivism, intersectionality and post-modernism hoisted on its own petard.
I know, the ‘petard’ this is cliché.
The Guardian:
‘A Sydney-based Muslim speaker has said the public outcry that prompted the Opera House to cancel his lecture called Honour Killings Are Morally Justified reveals the “extent and depth” of Islamophobia in Australia.
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‘The public face of Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir, Uthman Badar, held a press conference on Tuesday in response to his lecture being withdrawn from the Festival of Dangerous Ideas lineup, just hours after the program was announced.
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‘Along with a public outcry largely fuelled by social media, senior political figures were among those criticising the talk.
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‘Badar said people had jumped to conclusions about his views before he had a chance to speak.
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“Things were assumed and outrage ensued,” he said. “That is the way Islamophobia works. The assumption is ‘we know what the Muslims will say’. This a very instructive case as far as that goes.
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“I think the hysteria says a lot about Islamophobia and about the extent and the depth of it in this country.’.
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If Badar was going to give a lecture entitled “Honour Killings Are Morally Justified”, then I think it is reasonable to deduce from that that he believes that ‘honour’ killings are morally justified. Not justifiable (by someone, in their opinion). Justified. Absolutely. And a google search under ‘Islam, honour killing’ yields plenty of holy text in support of it “Honour Killings Are Morally Justified”. For example, the second URL below.:
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So yes, we know what some Muslims will say. “By the beard of The Prophet! Can’t we Muslims stone an adultress without Islamophobes crawling out of their holes and persecuting us?”
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http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/jun/25/cancellation-of-muslim-speakers-lecture-reveals-deep-islamophobia
http://voicesofthefaceless.com/2012/01/31/islam-is-honor-killings-allowed-yes/
jesse @#20: “Anyhow, I stress that I’m not saying murdering a woman for sex is justified in any way. But unless you can offer people an alternative system that works, you’re going to have a tough time eliminating it.”
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How about this for an offer? While you are in our country, you obey our laws.
It frustrates me how easily they ignore the fact that so many accusers are in fact oriental others.
@jesse
It’s also a matter of keeping one’s word.
Like the ones about protecting their families?
Anyhow, the whole practice and appearance of patriarchal societies is because these cultures work.
Work for whom? I suppose you mean that such cultures survive. But humanity has survived for quite awhile now with various strategies – we survived when religion was in its most destructive form – so what?
If you want to stop honor killings, it seems to me that what has to happen is offering the people in those places something better.,/i>
You seem to have bought into the fact that these other cultures dont know any better – A good majority of people are already aware that honor killings are fucked up, even in this culture – They dont need any substitute. people talk about pakistan as if its some homogeneous fundamentalist country where the people are just waiting to murder other people. The reality is more like the American Tea party – a small vocal visible fraction , but which is somehow courted/abetted by those in power. The majority keeps its mouth shut because of the real possibility that you will be made an example of.
@Omar Puhleez
How about this for an offer? While you are in our country, you obey our laws.,/i>
this line of thinking is incorrect. You’d then have to support people who take their children to other countries for FGM because that countries law allows it.
Yes exactly! The alternative systeme is our brand of jurisprudence founded on human reason.
Pen @ 20
Well, no. That’s a slightly devious way of putting it. What the FODI decided not to do was host a guy defending “honor” murders. I’m not defending “honor” murders.
The problem is not mentioning them. I mention them often in sharing news reports on them.
How about this for an offer? While you are in our country, you obey our laws.,/i>
this line of thinking is incorrect. You’d then have to support people who take their children to other countries for FGM because that countries law allows it.
Yes, and so it logically follows that once back in our country, they ‘d have to be severly prosecuted.
The laws against FGM apply whether the mutilation was done inside or outside the country. The only way to escape prosecution would be to never return.
Blanche don’t just dump in great long quoted passages.
Just to be clear, I meant in the countries where it is practiced, not here or in Australia. Of course people should obey the laws in the systems they are living in.
@deepak — it’s not that people “don’t know any better”. Various customs don’t appear in a vacuum. Nor do they change in a vacuum. That doesn’t mean that honor killings are morally justified in the US or anywhere else. But they didn’t appear by magic either, or as some dastardly plan by a bunch of mustache-twirling villains. So you need I think a bit of cultural judo to get rid of it.
Cultures adapt to the environment they are in, and they come up with sometimes jury-rigged systems to make social relations work. One example: in some African polygamous societies thy send young men off to do what is something like military service; they attach prestige to defending the village territories and such. This gets rid of surplus young men for a while, and smooths things over in the village. Meanwhile they encourage the young men to come back to have sexual relationships with some women, and in one case I recall, even to make fun of the older men at the wedding who marry those women. None of this is all that great for the women involved, but the whole thing is a solution to a set of problems they happen to have. They aren’t good solutions all the time, but they work.
In that sense cultures can be a bit like technology. People will keep on using certain technologies because they are “good enough.” Internal combustion engines are good enough, and they work, and there’s a whole infrastructure now to support them. So it’s hard to get people to change. I recall the old joke about a guy who invented a hand warmer for bicycle handlebars, and someone noted that people already had something that worked just as well: gloves. Some customs are “good enough” and then they stop being such, because the context changes. But it’s not always easy to change it because cultures have a lot of moving parts, as it were.
The key is finding better solutions, and that requires some work. It required a lot of work in the West to disabuse people of the notion that a husband had absolute rights to the body of the wife. The law didn’t catch up until the 70s and 80s. It took a lot of work (political and otherwise) to reform divorce laws. Cultural change is hard sometimes. The campaign within India to stop honor killings has a very good chance of complete success — in the relatively near future I think — precisely because it comes from within India and not as an imposition from elsewhere.
jesse, what you’re saying would make more sense if countries where “honor” murder happens were sealed off in impermeable bubbles, but they’re not. Granted there are more or less permeable bubbles like region, low technology, low density of population, all that – but there are very few really isolated enclaves where no one ever encounters the shocking idea that murder is wrong.
But also, honestly, it’s a bit annoying to see you comparing the murder of daughters and sisters and wives with the internal combustion engine.
It seems to me it ought to be blindingly obvious that there are many important senses in which the murder of close relatives doesn’t “work” at all.
Yes, ferocious policing of women’s genitalia may “work” to guarantee paternity, and yes that can be very important in patrilineal societies, but it “works” at a huge cost.
Plenty of nonwhite people in the Middle East oppose honor killings. This guy’s speech pretending only white westerners oppose them is really quite insulting and racist in itself. And for one thing, I’m pretty sure most middle eastern girls oppose honor killings, but those views aren’t “real” Middle East culture I suppose?
Force is force, irrespective of any honor.
Indeed, use of overwhelming, or unfair force, is dishonorable. What’s odd is that those who espouse some of these views of “honor” are not at all concerned with a fair contest of strength. They’re interested in exerting authority, which is a whole different thing from honor. Supporting authority is a bad idea because eventually it will be used against you.
Arguments in favour of ‘honour’ sound more convincing in the original Klingon.
I start to tune out when I hear the word ‘other’ now because its usually the sign someone is doing intersectionality wrong.
Power is a network, not a hierarchy, and just because someone’s culture is considered defective by white liberals doesn’t mean that culture isn’t ‘othering’ some less powerful subgroup within it.
Shit rolls downhill and there’s a lot of shit and a lot of hill.
The moral depravity displayed in the original. The prefabricated pseudo-intellectual babble!
This is an especially clear and blatant piece of goal-post moving, ‘privilege’ evoking, moral decadence. Watch for the same tendency in other zones. Perfectly reasonable positions can be reduced to caricature when this verbiage starts corrupting the thinking.
The argument “you just don’t respect our culture” *always* comes up when unfair but widespread practices are criticized.
In the 19th century, it was fine, upstanding Englishmen protesting their right to put eight-year olds to work in their mines and factories. In the 20th, it was lily-white American Southerners talking about their “traditional” culture, and how it really needed anti-miscegenation laws and separate-but-equal schools (with, of course, highly unequal school budgets.) In the 21st, it’s the right of “free speech” to encourage parents to risk letting their children die of polio or diphtheria, based on nothing but bogus scare tactics from bunko artists.
And that is far, far from an exhaustive list.
Uthan Badar is no different from ten thousand other exploiters– full of concern for his own rights, but utterly oblivious to the rights of the people he’s trampling on. He thinks he’s being seen as different, as the other. Not by me. To me he looks just like every other exploiter who comes down the pike, wanting their own, special exceptionalism recognized by everyone else, including their victims.
There’s almost the beginnings of a good idea there, mixed in with shit that goes completely off the rails.
“For most of recorded history parents have reluctantly sacrificed their children—sending them to kill or be killed for the honour of their nation, their flag, their king, their religion.” Ok, yeah. This is true… although not always so reluctantly. Also, one nation has always been happy to sacrifice the children of other nations as “collateral damage” in wars and such.
“But what about killing for the honour of one’s family?” Well… that’s an entirely different thing, isn’t it? Even ignoring the fact that the first quoted bit is a tragedy to be avoided, we’re now in apples and screwdrivers territory. There’s a world of difference between “go fight in a war to save our country/culture” and “hold still while I stab you for being embarrassing.”
“Overwhelmingly, those who condemn ‘honour killings’ are based in the liberal democracies of the West. The accuser and moral judge is the secular (white) westerner and the accused is the oriental other; the powerful condemn the powerless.”
Nooooo… we also condemn/imprison/execute white people who murder their children for breaking family/religious rules.
“By taking a particular cultural view of honour, some killings are condemned whilst others are celebrated. In turn, the act becomes a symbol of everything that is allegedly wrong with the other culture.” Well… yes and no. Maybe your first mistake is in saying that ANY killings should be celebrated? Because I’d be totally on board with a level of killing approaching zero if at all possible. What kind of batshittery is “you Westerners get your kids killed in stupid wars, why can’t I throw acid in my kid’s face if she dates the wrong guy”??
Yeah, we in the West are as a whole racist and violent beyond anything you folks can ever hope to achieve. The answer is for us to knock it the fuck off, not for you to add to the violence.
“Overwhelmingly, those who condemn ‘honour killings’ are based in the liberal democracies of the West. The accuser and moral judge is the secular (white) westerner and the accused is the oriental other; the powerful condemn the powerless.”
That’s just a postmodernist whinge wrapped up in a crescent flag.
You must admit Badar knows his Woody Allen Sartre and Derrida.
Great stuff Butterflies.
More on this (on Yassir Morsi): http://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2014/06/26/islamophobia-and-australian-honour-killings-talk-cancellation/
‘Islamophobia’ is a dodgy concept purpose-built to conflate critical opposition to Islam (to which I plead guilty, Your Honour) with hostility to Muslims.
Islam is a political ideology all too similar to fascism. The Koran by Mohammed is arguably the original and most durable fascist text we have, and certainly more marketable today than say, ‘Mein Kampf’ by A. Hitler.
On the other hand, Muslims are people: human beings who have been born into societies in which Islam has fought its way to supremacy, suppressing all ideological competition as it has done so.
Wherever the word ‘Islamophobia’ is found, it should be thoroughly sprayed with fungicide. Its propagators likewise.
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(c) 2014, O. Puhleez
Deepak @#26:
“‘@Omar Puhleez: ‘How about this for an offer? While you are in our country, you obey our laws.’
this line of thinking is incorrect. You’d then have to support people who take their children to other countries for FGM because that countries law allows it.”
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Wrong. If I were to go to Pakistan (say) I would obey Pakistan’s laws. That would not mean that I would endorse each and every one of them. I would just be avoiding trouble, and fights with police etc that I could not win. As a matter of fact, in Australia where I live, taking a girl to a country where FGM is legal and practiced is itself illegal under Australian law, and those who do so are liable to prosecution when they return to Australia.
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And as far as I know, no country where FGM is legal has lodged an official objection to this with the Australian Government.
@ 42 Omar Puhleez
Sorry, but this is such bigoted bullshit. I find it ironic that one sentence after deriding the concept of Islamophobia, you can say something so blatantly Islamophobic.
Please tell me one objectionable concept in the Koran, that does not also appear in the Hebrew Bible, written one to two thousand years earlier. What have you got?
– Unquestioning subjection to religious authority?: found in the Hebrew Bible.
– Death for blasphemy?: found in the Hebrew Bible.
– Death for apostasy?: found in the Hebrew Bible.
– Death for homosexuality?: found in the Hebrew Bible.
– Women treated as property?: found in the Hebrew Bible.
– The massacre of unbelievers sanctioned by God?: found in the Hebrew Bible.
– Intricate laws governing every aspect of your life that you are required to follow?: found in the Hebrew Bible.
What is this unique thing about the Koran that you believe qualifies it as “the original fascist text”?
Silenbob:”…Please tell me one objectionable concept in the Koran, that does not also appear in the Hebrew Bible, written one to two thousand years earlier. What have you got?”
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The Koran is one book, with one author, while the Bible is more like a small library with many authors. Although the Bible is also an Islamic holy book, in disputes the Koran always trumps it. However, you appear to believe that I am coming from a position of belief in the authority of the Bible. I am not. So your list:
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Unquestioning subjection to religious authority?: found in the Hebrew Bible.
– Death for blasphemy?: found in the Hebrew Bible.
– Death for apostasy?: found in the Hebrew Bible.
– Death for homosexuality?: found in the Hebrew Bible.
– Women treated as property?: found in the Hebrew Bible.
– The massacre of unbelievers sanctioned by God?: found in the Hebrew Bible.
– Intricate laws governing every aspect of your life that you are required to follow?: found in the Hebrew Bible.
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is a 12- bore shotgun blast into your own foot. It is as if you think that I believe that the wildest and most bloodthirsty bits of the OT are not there. They are. But the OT with Deuteronomy, the Psalms etc is not much of a fascist motivational handbook. And the NT is a dead loss from that point of view.
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The OT and the Koran are both texts attempting to unite semi-nomadic peoples of the ME into an invincible army. So the population of the world is divided in both texts into the Good and the Evil, the saved and the damned, the chosen and the accursed by God. And with God’s help and a wonderful leader, we The Chosen will win by conquest what is rightfully ours, but wrongfully in the custody of others. To achieve this we must submit to His Leadership. Ring any bells?
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This scheme best fits the Koran rather than the OT. Some books of the latter are as bloodthirsty as the Koran, but not all. Google Islam and violence if you don’t believe me. Or Islam and jihad, Or Islam and terror….
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http://www.answering-islam.org/Terrorism/islam_and_violence.html
@45 Omar Puhleeze,
Agreed, there are similarities between the OT and the Koran, both are the products of primitive tribal cultures and both are contradictory gibberish, they are best left to theologians.
The difference between Islam and any other major religion is that it was invented by a murdering bandit and spread by violence from its creation, unlike Christianity or Buddhism. The concept of Holy War was alien to early Christian believers, however it has been an essential component of Islamic ideology from the 7th century to modern times.
RJW: Silentbob said of my post @#42: “Sorry, but this is such bigoted bullshit. I find it ironic that one sentence after deriding the concept of Islamophobia, you can say something so blatantly Islamophobic.”
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That’s one of the problems of the term ‘Islamophobia”, defined as “A hatred or fear of Islam or Muslims, especially as a political force.” (Oxford) See also below.
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All religions bar none are moral and political philosophies invoking the supernatural as their justification, with perhaps the exception of Buddhism. But the supernatural element (the divinity of it all in the eyes of the adherents is set up as a ring-fence to insulate this philosophy from criticism. Shorn of the supernatural verbiage, it is left bloody vulnerable to criticism; to which its more militant adherents commonly reply with bombs, knives and bullets.
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It is not about ‘peace’, but is a terrible religion whose central idea is submission. Thus every society where it has taken root has experienced the sort of tribal warfare we see today in Iraq and Syria. The best it can offer is fascism of one degree or another where dissenters are silenced by mob action or the executioner., And if that is ‘Islamophobia’ then I am guilty as charged, Your Honour.
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“Islamophobia is a contrived fear or prejudice fomented by the existing Eurocentric and Orientalist global power structure. It is directed at a perceived or real Muslim threat through the maintenance and extension of existing disparities in economic, political, social and cultural relations, while rationalizing the necessity to deploy violence as a tool to achieve “civilizational rehab” of the target communities (Muslim or otherwise). Islamophobia reintroduces and reaffirms a global racial structure through which resource distribution disparities are maintained and extended.” (Runnymede Trust)
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But the best IMHO is at: http://www.billionbibles.org/sharia/islamophobia.html.
@ 47 Omar Puhleez,
The Runnymede ‘definition’ is essentially verbal diarrhoea and an example of how the ‘left’, such as it is, these days, has painted itself into a corner over ‘race’ and cultural relativism. Those that accuse others of ‘racism’ often seem rather patronisingly racist in their continual accommodation to Muslims’ demands, why the double standards? The inventors of the term are probably Muslim propagandists.
The Islamic ideology is as much a threat to democracy as Communism ever was, particularly since it’s sprinkled with the sanctity of religion—there’s no absolute right to religious freedom.
Many non-Muslim apologists for Islam are totally ignorant of Islam’s history, cultural practices and totalitarian ideology, why wouldn’t anyone who values the achievements of Western civilisation be ‘Islamophobic’?
RJW @#48: Yes I just threw that in as yet another example of a loaded definition. (The best I could find is the second in the pair below.) The conflation of Muslims and Islam is an important part of this three card trick. If you are against Islam, it follows that you must be hostile to Muslims, and be regarded therefore as a racist, bigot, xenophobe and whatever else.
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We just had tonight on SBS TV a doco about the Cronulla riots. Worth watching with this issue in mind. I have strong issues with the story it tells, btw.
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http://www.sbs.com.au/programs/onceuponatimein/
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http://www.billionbibles.org/sharia/islamophobia.html