Posted on 11/23/2004 8:17:30 AM PST by Land_of_Lincoln_John
Theo van Gogh and Margaret Hassan were murdered within days of each other -- indeed, since we don't know the exact date of Hassan's murder, they might both have perished on the same day. They were more than a thousand miles apart when they died: Van Gogh was murdered in Holland, Hassan in Iraq. And they were very different people. Van Gogh was a Dutch pornographer who sought to outrage respectable Holland and people of faith; Hassan was an aid worker inspired by faith who spent her life helping the poor.
Above all, they had very different attitudes about Islam. Van Gogh felt contempt for the religion and had filmed a documentary in which verses from the Quran were inscribed on the bodies of almost naked women to symbolize Islam's supposed hostility to women's rights. Hassan had converted to the Islamic faith of her Iraqi husband from the Christianity of her native Ireland. They would probably have disliked each other deeply -- and they would certainly have disapproved of each other. Van Gogh would have dismissed her as a foolish idealist with a masochistic streak; Hassan would have regarded him a heartless and shameless blasphemer.
But they died similarly brutal deaths at the hands of the same murderers, namely Islamist terrorists, and for much the same reason.
What reason is that? Not blasphemy -- van Gogh might have been killed on those grounds, but Hassan was a pious Muslim. Not hostility to Iraq or the Arab world in general -- van Gogh was not especially interested in the Middle East and Hassan loved Iraq, had opposed both U.S. invasions and had even gone to New York to plead for an end to the U.N. embargo of the country.
Van Gogh and Hassan fell victim to a sectarian fundamentalist cult within Islam. As the murder of Hassan shows, that cult is murderously hostile to other Muslims almost as much as it is to the adherents of other religions. Yet that same cult is destroying the good name of Islam throughout the world.
If proof of the first assertion is needed, it is to be found in Fallujah. The torture chambers that have been revealed there as a result of the Iraqi-American victory were used mainly to torment and murder Muslims. The mutilated bodies left on the streets were those of local residents. The women beaten by them were not Westerners with bare arms but Muslim women whose modest dress did not meet the cult's strict requirement that women should be neither seen nor heard.
If the cult is oppressing and murdering Muslims, however, how is it damaging the reputation of Islam? The answer is disturbing. Not enough Muslims will issue clear and unqualified condemnations of the cult and its murders. Some Arab media use their new-found freedom to glorify the murderers as "freedom fighters." And many Muslim clerics, in the Middle East and the West, echo some of the cult's themes -- notably, that Muslims owe no loyalty to "infidel" regimes in the West -- even as they cautiously distance themselves from its crimes with a general criticism of "violence."
If these horrors were happening only in Fallujah or Baghdad, most people elsewhere could dismiss them as exotic crimes in a faraway country -- the effects of a criminal regime that had taught its citizens hatred and killing. But van Gogh was murdered in his native Holland. And the cult is spreading everywhere.
People worldwide are realizing that the cult threatens them wherever they are -- in Baghdad like Hassan or in a European city like van Gogh. Like Americans after Sept. 11, Europeans are waking up to the fact that no one is safe. That makes them concerned about exactly who and what are threatening their lives. And when Muslims seem reluctant to condemn the cult and its murders, their neighbors wonder if Islam is compatible with the freedom and tolerance of a liberal society -- and therefore if Muslim immigration should continue unchecked.
In a multicultural society, the government, the politicians and the police are the last people to reach that conclusion. Their natural instinct is to blame the native-born majority -- which they fear as racist, sexist and homophobic -- for any ethnic or religious conflict.
Thus the first reaction of the Dutch police to the murder of van Gogh was to sandblast a mural near a mosque declaring "Thou Shalt Not Kill" in response to Muslim protests of racism. Exhibiting the same instincts, the European body established to counter ethnic prejudice had earlier suppressed a report concluding that young Muslims were the main perpetrators of anti-Semitic violence in Europe because it had conditioned itself to treat Muslims as victims and to assume that anti-Semites must be neo-Nazi whites.
But these sentiments are themselves prejudices -- and they are now yielding to reality. If anything, there is some over-reaction. So mainstream politicians in Holland and other European countries now argue for forced assimilation, an end to immigration, and the "repatriation" of Muslims who sympathize with the cult or who refuse their loyalty to the society in which they live (and in which some of them were born).
These policies are unlikely to be implemented in such an unqualified form. But the same kind of policies will continue to be pressed until the silent Islamic majority overwhelmingly rejects the sectarian terrorist cult without qualification, turns in its adherents to police, pledges allegiance to the countries in which Muslims live, and respects Western liberty. A start was made on Sunday in Cologne with a joint Christian-Muslim march of 20,000 people against such violence. But more needs to be done -- in particular, Muslim clerics must combine to condemn Islamist terrorism by name, and Middle Eastern news organizations must show the same self-criticism in reporting the crimes of the cult in Fallujah that the Western press has shown in reporting the Marine's shooting of a wounded man.
If these things do not happen, Europe and America will reluctantly conclude that Islam is incompatible with democracy. And they will not necessarily be wrong.
muslums give muslums a bad name....
Things might be different if muslims weren't so accepting of the bad name given to them.
IOW, their silence is deafening.
Islam is the cult!
Or changing an old lawyer joke:
It's only 98% of them that give the rest a bad name.
I don't understand the grammar here. Islam has always been a killer cult, so what distinction is there between the subject and the object in the headline?
Cordially,
Therefore......They're cool with it. Or at least don't mind it too much, after all they're only killing infidels.
The thing is, you never know when the "good" muslim is going to be "born again" and become a cult member himself. Thus, they are ALL suspect.
Owl_Eagle
”Guns Before Butter.”
Exactly my sentiment. Good insight.
I was thinking the same thing!
Yep.
> Killer cults giving Muslims a bad name
Thanks - I already have a bad name for muslims.
Nazis gave Germans a bad name. So? Muslims aren't victims here. They are all contributing to the butchery in their name.
There's nothing new about Islamic murder cults. I just finished reading a book about secret societies, many of which were murderous cults. The common link in almost all of them? They were from the Middle East and were started by Muslims. It was eye-opening.
Prediction: clashes, deadlier for the non-democrats, will continue until Islam in effect changes to be compatible with democracy.
The problem with Islam is that Muhammad was an illiterate pirate, not a holy man.
http://www.prophetofdoom.net/
Anyone who claims to be a Muslim must revere Muhammad or he is not a Muslim. Therin lies the fatal flaw.
Bah. Peaceful Muslims are the fringe. The jihadist Muslims are the mainstream.
Spend some time in a mosque after the doors close and I guarantee that every white Liberal will get over their illusion of "moderate Muslims."
"Killer Cults giving Muslims their Real Name!"
What book was that? I may want to read it also. Thanks.
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