I refer to the Austrade Paper “Islamic Finance” of February 2010.
I do not think the Australian government or its arm Austrade should be in the business of promoting any religiously-based financing. There are a number of seriously problematic areas with Islamic Finance, commonly known as “Shariah-Compliant Finance”.
Listen to the podcast here, and at left is the main interviewee, Fatima Elatik, Mayor of the Dutch town of Zeeburg.
My feedback to Auntie...
Congratulations on an interesting and well-balanced — well, relatively well-balanced -- story on “Muslims in Amsterdam”!
It was good to hear from Muslims who, for once, did not play the “victimhood” card too aggressively and did not try to foist on us the old furphy that “Islam is a religion of peace which has been hijacked by extremist elements”, or similar farragoes of nonsense. Thank goodness for such mercies...
I have a lot of time for Ross Douthat. He writes with insight and clarity. I want to make sure his article below is here in full, just in case it gets pulled. You never know these days. The South Park episode from pre-9/11, sometime in March 2001 as I recall, is now no longer available online because Comedy Central pulled it, in response to the bullying Islamist at revolutionislam.com. What was interesting about that is that the twerp at revolutionislam is noone really, just a guy and a website. Yet all he had to do was suggest that Matt Stone and Trey Parker might be killed, and Comedy Central stood by their guys' rights to freedom of speech .... "folded like Bedouin tents", says Mark Steyn, in his amusing take on the issue, here. "They censored 'South Park,' not only cutting all the references to Mohammed but, in an exquisitely post-modern touch, also removing the final speech about the need to stand up to intimidation."
A key para from Douthat's piece:
This is what decadence looks like: a frantic coarseness that “bravely” trashes its own values and traditions, and then knuckles under swiftly to totalitarianism and brute force.
One conclusion he has is that
Happily, today’s would-be totalitarians are probably too marginal to take full advantage. This isn’t Weimar Germany, and Islam’s radical fringe is still a fringe, rather than an existential enemy..
In this he may be underplaying the reality. For there are large majorities (over 70% in the UK) who are in favour of Shariah law and large minorities (in the 40s%) who support suicide bombing. It only took around 3-5% of Germans to be Nazi or of Russians to be Bolshevik, for those totalitarian states to take hold.
A truly egregious piece of apologia in the New York Times, known here in Hong Kong as the International Herald Tribune.
I wrote to the NYT, as below. There's no chance of their running this as a letter or as anything else, but there's always the hope that sub-editors will read it and something may stick....
Ingrid Mattson, head of ISNA, at left in full clobber.
"ISNA"?
Read on, and learn....
Bernie Planck has a post "Were all Nazis Evil?". This reminds me that I've been meaning for a while to post something about what I call "analysis by coffee shop". Which means: analysing what a country is like by who you meet at the coffee shop. Or in the taxi. Or whereever. That's all very well and useful, and right. But it's not really relevant to the ideology of the state.
At left, a portrait of Confucius from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). You can tell from the mug that he didn't get to where he did -- sage for the ages -- on his looks alone.
The calligraphy above him says, reading right to left, top to bottom
(my translation, so excuse the infelicities):
That the so-called "radicals" in Islam, the "extremists" who, we are told, "hijack" the Religion of Peace to the consternation of "moderate Muslims", are in fact nothing of the sort. They are mainstream pious Muslims who have read their scripture: the Koran, the Hadith and the Sirah (the life of Muhammad). The Prime Minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said the same thing, commenting about so-called "moderate Islam":
"These descriptions are very ugly; it is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate [sic] Islam. Islam is Islam and that's it." [Source: Milliyet, Turkey, August 21, 2007].
But back to "South Park"...
CNN reports that an outfit called RevolutionIslam.com has issued a thinly veiled death threat to the creators of the cartoon South Park, for making fun of Muhammad in Episode 200.
This time they did not -- as they did in pre-September 2001, shown above -- portray Muhammad; they had him dressed in a Bear outfit -- a sly reference to the "teddy bear" incident, when a naively innocent young English teacher, in Sudan as I recall, had her class name the teddy bear they'd been given, and she went along with the class's choice of "Muhammad", a move which incensed the good Imams of Sudan who called for her head. In the end her resignation and repatriation was the outcome.
In the current South Park case, Revolution Islam notes at the end of the vid that others have been killed for insulting Muhammad. There's also some pretty nasty stuff from Anwar al-Awlaki, the preacher who tutored Nidal the killer at Fort Hood. He quotes scripture and example, of why and when it is necessary to kill those who make fun of Muhammad.
The posters on CNN site include many Muslims, some of whom decry RevolutionIslam's call, saying that it's "unIslamic" or asking themselves "what would Muhammad do" and answering themselves: that he would turn the other cheek and show tolerance. Wrong. He would not. How do we know this? As I posted to CNN (though I'm guessing they won't post it; PS: they did, post # 230):
To: "Z" (Post No. 209). "....if the makers of South Park actually committed a crime..." ??
It is not a "crime" under any US law to depict Muhammad. It is only a "crime" to modern (and ignorant, willfully or otherwise) people, who do not know that Muhammad has been depicted down the ages by Muslim and non-Muslim artists alike. In fact, "South Park" itself showed Muhammad in a 2001 episode, with no repercussions, because that was before the Danish Imams beat up on the Danish cartoons.
As to "what would Muhammad do" if he saw "South Park" making fun of him and/or Islam? The answer is, just like "RevolutionIslam.com", he would call for their heads. Don't you know that Muhammad had a satirical poet Asma bint Marwan put to death because she made fun of him. Asked by the fellow who carried out the murder at Muhammad's request (Umayr b. Adiy al-Khatmi) if there would be any evil consequences Muhammad said "Two goats won't butt their heads about her". Read your own history! That's the example of the Prophet: kill those who make fun of you. Didn't you hear Anwar al-Awlaki on the video? He tells the story about the same thing: killing in the name of Allah and of Muhammad of those who make fun of Muhammad, of Allah or of Islam.
That's what we're dealing with here: RevolutionIslam.com is just being true to the teachings.
Another good link: Marisol Saibold, May 2006 English Review, Cartoon Wars.
And, if you're not sensitive enough to Muslim concerns, if you're not tolerant enough and you still come over all "Islamophobie" every now and then, you'd better take South Park's "Muslim sensitivity training".
Mary Sanchez has bought the Muslim Public Affairs Council line that it is anti-terrorist, a "misunderstood" representative of moderate Islam. Her full article is here, and my posting to it below.
Here's a job posting worthy of only the most stellar applicants. In fact, only those rare individuals with near-superhuman powers to untangle the crossed circuitry in the American mindset need apply.
The Muslim Public Affairs Council is seeking "high-energy candidates" for a communications coordinator. I'd love to eavesdrop on those interviews.
"What do you believe would be the best approach for unraveling the misperceptions and outright bigotry toward Muslims that goes virtually unchallenged daily in the U.S.?" .... (Rest of article here.)
My posting:
The MPAC is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in America. The Brotherhood has said:
"The Ikhwan [the Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."
References to confirm my statements are from MB documents and can be seen at http://thebattleoftours.blogspot.com/2010/02/muslim-brotherhood-in-us.html
Why would we want to play into the hands of MPAC and its supposed "calm, credible voice", when its aim is the overthrow of the US Constitution. Don't be naive, Ms Sanchez!
Every now and then, in response to claims by Muslims that their religion is misunderstood, that it's actually a "Religion of Peace", etc, etc, Robert Spencer repeats five points for Muslims to make it very clear to we "Islamophobes" that they are indeed serious about being anti-terrorist.
He ran the list again today, and I wanted to keep it for the record. It seems to me to be eminently reasonable. It's in response to an article by Mary Sanchez headed "Wanted: a calm, credible voice to soothe Americans' fear of Islam". As Spencer notes:
Just back from 1,200 miles on the South China Sea, a yacht race to the Philippines and back. So, thought I'd slide gently back into Jihad-watching, with a bit of light reading, in the course of which I came across the figures below. They are IQ per country, showing a high correlation between GNP and IQ (0.73).
To preempt howls of protest about the various biases of IQ tests, I direct readers to a thoughtful article on the issues here . These figures are from a study called IQ and the Wealth of Nations by Lynn and Vanhanen and there's a critique of this book here .
So: we live in the "smartest place in the world"! Hong Kong, whoopee!
There's another thing a veteran JWatcher can't help but notice: the high correlation between Islamic countries and poor IQ performance (these are marked in grey). This is nothing to do with race or ethnicity, as Islam is not a race. It does have to do, however, with the influence of Islam on the wealth of these nations: for in the doctrine on Islam, "innovation" is haram (forbidden) and the specific lack of -- or at least weakness of -- the rule of law (for the ultimate law is that of Allah), have surely contributed to their poor performance. Indeed, the Arab Development Report makes this point, though only touching lightly on the issue of Islam. For me, I can't see how it can't be relevant: when you discriminate against half your population (women), suppress free speech, are wary of democracy and free markets, and prefer the rule of Sharia to the rule of law.
Of course, I can see that not all the poor performers are Islamic countries. There are many reasons for poor performance. I just say that Islam is a key factor in those countries that are Islamic. Or: being a free non-Islamic country is a necessary, but not sufficient reason, for higher IQ scores.
BTW: I did not know that the average score in the world is not 100 but 92. Read the references above for a lot more about this complex and vexed topic of IQ scores, their strengths, weaknesses and biases.
