User:Cesar Tort/subpage

(The following is the continuation of what I said in my user page:)

...or what Geert Wilders says in the same website about how the West is committing suicide with its multiculturalist approach to Islam. (Robert Spencer’s defense of Wilders is viewable as well, as is Pamela Geller’s interview.) The “clash of psychoclasses” has been discussed in the talk page. For a more conventional critique see Who’s Sleeping More Deeply — Europe or America? by Bruce Bawer or this article by Pascal Bruckner, and the section of Paul Berman’s long article in The New Republic after the first mention to Ayaan Hirsi Ali: an heroic woman who truly deserves a Taj Mahal if something ever happens to her...

More useful links

• "While Sweden Slept" - this piece of journalism and the readers' debate is an eye-opener in line of what Roland Huntford wrote in The New Totalitarians, a study of Swedish Socialism (see also Sweden: the Middle Way).

• But "An Anatomy of Surrender" is the most shocking piece by Bawer on the absolute lack of spine among Westerners in general and Europeans in particular.

• "Facing the Islamist Menace" - very explainatory book review of America Alone by Christopher Hitchens.

From Hitchen's review:

“ Some denounced me as cynical for saying at the time that Osama bin Laden had done us a favor by disclosing the nature and urgency of the Islamist threat [...]. But at least the long period of somnambulism is over, and the opportunity now exists for antibodies to form against the infection [...].

The Islamist threat itself may be crude, but this is an intricate cultural and political challenge that will absorb all of our energies for the rest of our lives.

”

From Bawer's article:

The above-mentioned article by Bruce Bawer hits the nail about what is happening in Wikipedia on this subject due to its so-called "reliable sources" policy:

“ While books by Islam experts like Bat Ye’or and Robert Spencer, who tell difficult truths about jihad and sharia, go unreviewed in newspapers like the New York Times, the elite press legitimizes thinkers like Karen Armstrong and John Esposito, whose sugarcoated representations of Islam should have been discredited for all time by 9/11. The Times described Armstrong's hagiography of Mohammed as "a good place to start" learning about Islam; in July 2007, the Washington Post headlined a piece by Esposito "WANT TO UNDERSTAND ISLAM? START HERE" [...].

So it goes in this upside-down, not-so-brave new media world: those who, if given the power, would subjugate infidels, oppress women, and execute apostates and homosexuals are "moderate" (a moderate, these days, apparently being anybody who doesn’t have explosives strapped to his body), while those who dare to call a spade a spade are "Islamophobes."

”

In the article he also wrote:

“ These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.

Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission.

”

And what about this splendid example of Newspeak in same article?:

“ When, years after September 11, President George W. Bush finally acknowledged publicly that the West was at war with Islamic fascism, Muslims' and multiculturalists' furious reaction made him retreat to the empty term "war on terror." Britain's Foreign Office has since deemed even that phrase offensive and banned its use by cabinet members (along with "Islamic extremism"). In January, the Home Office decided that Islamic terrorism would henceforth be described as "anti-Islamic activity." [my bold-type] ”

And this one pretty much demonstrates that some Europeans are relly idiots and criminals trying to destroy Europe:

“ Western legislatures and courts have reinforced the "spirit of appeasement." In 2005, Norway's parliament, with virtually no public discussion or media coverage, criminalized religious insults (and placed the burden of proof on the defendant). Last year, that country's most celebrated lawyer, Tor Erling Staff, argued that the punishment for honor killing should be less than for other murders, because it's arrogant for us to expect Muslim men to conform to our society's norms. Also in 2007, in one of several instances in which magistrates sworn to uphold German law have followed sharia instead, a Frankfurt judge rejected a Muslim womans request for a quick divorce from her brutally abusive husband; after all, under the Koran he had the right to beat her. ”

The West —sleeping in the Matrix

Just as in the 1930s Western Europe was committing suicide with its blindness toward Stalin and the communist threat, presently Westerners —including many wikipedians— are doing basically the same with the Islamic threat. While the prolific writer Robert Spencer could be an antidote for this generalized blindness, he's not being taken seriously, not even in Wikipedia. Spencer wrote:

“ Instead of witnessing «moderate» Muslims resolutely taking back their faith-tradition from extremists and murderers, the world has grown numb to endless apologetics and polemics explaining away «jihadi» politics as a misguided, though inexcusable, response to the wrongs inflicted upon Muslims by the West [...].

The truth is there does not exist an identifiable body of Muslims, substantive in number or an outright majority, who could be described as «moderate» by their repudiation of Muslim extremists [...].

Consequently, what might pass for «moderate» Muslims, the large number of Muslims unaccounted for as to what they think, in practical terms constitute a forest within which extremists are incubated, nurtured, given ideological and material support, and to which they return for sanctuary.

”

And in his FAQ page he stated:

“ It is not an act of hatred against Muslims to point out the depredations of jihad ideology. It is a peculiar species of displacement and projection to accuse someone who exposes the hatred of one group of hatred himself. ”

The film Islam: What the West Needs to Know explains fairly what exactly do we mean. (What Martin Gilbert said in the section «The Culture of Denial» in this video is also relevant.) —Cesar Tort 20:20, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Ibn Warraq

In Free Inquiry Ibn Warraq wrote:

“ Qur’anic criticism, on the other hand, has lagged far behind. But surely, Muslims and non-Muslims have the right to critically examine the sources, the history, and dogma of Islam. The right to criticize is a right of which Muslims avail themselves in their frequent denunciations of Western culture, in terms that would have been deemed racist, neocolonialist, or imperialist had they been directed against Islam by a European. Without criticism, Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress: ossified, totalitarian, and intolerant. It will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality, originality, and truth.

Western intellectuals and Islamologists have totally failed in their duties as intellectuals. They have betrayed their calling by abandoning their critical faculties when it comes to Islam. Some Islamologists have themselves noticed this appalling trend in their colleagues. Karl Binswanger has remarked on the «dogmatic Islamophilia» of most Arabists. Jacques Ellul complained in 1983 that «in France it is no longer acceptable to criticise Islam or the Arab countries.» As early as 1968, Maxime Rodinson had written, «An historian like Norman Daniel has gone so far as to number among the conceptions permeated with medievalism or imperialism, any criticisms of the Prophet’s moral attitudes and to accuse of like tendencies any exposition of Islam and its characteristics by means of the normal mechanisms of human history. Understanding has given way to apologetics pure and simple.»

Patricia Crone and Ibn Rawandi have remarked that Western scholarship lost its critical attitude toward the sources of the origins of Islam around the time of the First World War. Many Western scholars of the 1940s were committed Christians, such as Montgomery Watt, who saw a great danger in the rise of Communism in the Islamic world and thus welcomed any resurgence of Islam. They were insufficiently critical of the Islamic, Arabic sources. John Wansbrough has noted that the Qur’an «as a document susceptible of analysis by the instruments and techniques of Biblical criticism . . . is virtually unknown.» By 1990, we still have the scandalous situation described by Andrew Rippin: «I have often encountered individuals who come to the study of Islam with a background in the historical study of the Hebrew Bible or early Christianity, and who express surprise at the lack of critical thought that appears in introductory textbooks on Islam. The notion that "Islam was born in the clear light of history" still seems to be assumed by a great many writers of such texts. While the need to reconcile varying historical traditions is generally recognised, usually this seems to pose no greater problem to the authors than having to determine "what makes sense" in a given situation. To students acquainted with approaches such as source criticism, oral formulaic composition, literary analysis and structuralism, all quite commonly employed in the study of Judaism and Christianity, such naive historical study seems to suggest that Islam is being approached with less than academic candour.»

There is among many well-meaning Western intellectuals, academics, and Islamologists the belief that Islam will somehow reform itself without anyone anywhere ruffling any feathers, disturbing Muslim sensibilities, or saying anything at all about the Qur’an. This is wishful thinking. If one desires to bring about an Enlightenment in the Islamic world or among Muslims living in the West, at some stage someone somewhere will have to apply to the Qur’an the same techniques of textual analysis as were applied to the Bible by Spinoza and others, especially in Germany during the nineteenth century.

In recent years, Saudi Arabia and other Islamic countries (for example, Brunei) have established chairs of Islamic Studies in prestigious Western universities, which are encouraged to present a favorable image of Islam. Scientific research, leading to objective truth, no longer seems to be the goal. Critical examination of the sources or the Qur’an is discouraged. Scholars such as Daniel Easterman have even lost their posts for not teaching about Islam in the way approved by Saudi Arabia.

In December 2005, Georgetown and Harvard Universities accepted $20 million each from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal for programs in Islamic studies. Such money can only corrupt the original intent of all higher institutions of education, that is, the search for truth. Now, we shall have only «Islamic truth» that is acceptable to the royal Saudi family, a family that has financed terrorism, antiwesternism, and anti-Semitism for over thirty years. Previous donations from various Saudi sources have included gifts of $20 million, $5 million, and $2 million to the University of Arkansas, the University of California at Berkeley, and Harvard, respectively.

”

And in another article:

“ After this parade of quotations, some readers will object to my reliance on Western scholars, some firmly in the camp that bears the much-feared label «Orientalist.» Of course, the influence of charlatans like Edward Said—and the pernicious academic climate of relativism and multiculturalism that he did so much to engender—has made cross-cultural judgments well-nigh impossible. (For more on this, see my Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism, Prometheus 2007.) ”