Posted on 02/10/2005 5:51:09 AM PST by Pokey78
Come on, Abu Hamza is just the bogeyman of the moment. The tabloids had Winston Silcott in the 80's when they wanted to demonise the blacks and now they've got Abu to get us all quaking in our boots about Muslims. Once they've got us all good and scared of the hook-handed monster, we'll all sign up for ID cards and phone tapping.
*newsflash*
This Englishman is not scared of a one-eyed crank, with an odd line in anti-semetic bilge that's been done and redone by racists down through the generations. Sweet Jesus, the man's one step away from waving copies of the Protocols of Zion in the air at his meetings and claiming that Jews run the world! He's a joke!
He's got minimal support from the UK Muslim population, bar a rag-tag bunch of social misfits who hang on every one of bile-covered words. The vast majority are just embarrased by him. He sets us all back years.
I really don't understand why people are so happy to disregard the US Mainstream Media as rubbish, but happily take every UK tabloid and claim it as gospel!
And as far as women go, one woman of Muslim descent is sat about five foot away from me now, beavering away on a marketing project. She's five foot four, has big brown eyes and is wearing a very nice little black skirt. I'm very much looking forward to going to the pub with her after work.
*gets off soapbox*
And I didn't say it was. I, and Steyn, said that the Europeans behaved imperialistically. While colonization is imperialist, it is entirely possible to be imperialist without colonialist. The Europeans were imperialist towards the middle east. Even your claim that the Euros just adopted Ottoman borders is pretty bogus...for instance mashing the three provinces into Iraq. But it goes beyond borders...for instance the Brits installing foreign Hashemite (Arabian) dynasties in Iraq and Jordan.
And from another brilliant Steyn piece: Democrats are all exit and no strategy.
Hmmm -- I lived in East Ham in London for about a year and a half. There are definitely a lot of radical, aggressive Muslims in that area of London. Where do you live?
Hear hear. Nothing to add, but I agree completely. Well said.
The Indians do seem to have picked up the pub thing a lot quicker, but things are beginning to change. There's more Muslims/Muslim descendents in Levis than in Hajabs, it seems.
But yes, I concede that living in London could have a lot to do with it.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I know Hamza is bonkers, I know that there are small sects of Muslims plotting as we speak. But remember the old agage, "Napoleon couldn't conquer Russia, but McDonalds took it in a matter of days."
Capitalism, Liberty and Freedom will always offer more than hate politics. Eventually, the Mad Mullah and his like will be swept away like the irrelevant detritus that they really are.
Ooh, you found and posted the WHOLE THING!
Good on you; thanks!
Dan
For what it's worth, I'm in Cambridge and Gloucester and the Muslims I know are certainly not radical in any way- Hell, I'm meeting a Muslim friend of Pakistani descent down the pub tonight.
While several other Muslims I know don't drink (and fair enough), they are no less integrated into general society then anyone else is.
I live in North London, work in South East London and have lived in East London and South London.
Funniest thing I ever saw was a Muslim shop keeper in Leytonstone (about 2miles from East Ham) being fairly brisk with a couple of Eastern European kids. As soon as they left he turned to me and said, "Bloody immigrants! They come over here, they've got no money and they can't even be bothered to learn the language!"
read later
Maybe you got a point...
Which part of London? SAy, heard the joke abouthte Irish guy that gets tossed out of a pub in London into the gutter outside. He gets up and starts cussing in a rich Brogue. Two Sikhs walk by, one mumbles to the other "Bluidy furriners!"
Can I ask how familiar you are with American slang?
Ha! I think I know where this is going.
I assure you, I wouldn't be staring at the computer if that was going on behind me!
That sounds like a joke for Kilburn!
London has lots of zones where a particular nationality is heavily represented. Kilburn is the Irish zone and I think I may have seen that joke acted on more than a few occasions!
Ping
I must admit I was one who was calling for an Islamic reformation, and that this wasn't quite what I had in mind. Steyn is correct in that it is a wave of radical religious enthusiasm for what amounts to a death cult. It wouldn't be possible in the absence of oil money that might otherwise have funded an economic reformation in the Middle East, but it didn't, and we have what we have.
But this is anything but adapting islam to a modern political culture, it is a categorical rejection of modern political culture in preference to a legislative method that was showing its age in the 18th century and buried in the early 20th. That code is the precise reason the Ottoman Empire was the "sick man of Europe." It will not work in the 21st no matter how much oil money is thrown at it, and the grotesqueries of the Taliban in Afghanistan are proof.
But it's a lovely fantasy, and people will certainly die for their fantasy worlds. Is democracy a similar fantasy? I do not believe so. It is the modern political culture, and its results are a technology and economy that Islam can aspire to take over but cannot, and did not, create. They, like the communists before them, will plunder the fruits of democracy and when they're gone deny that they ever existed.
The Whig version of history sees Protestantism as leading to the Enlightenment and the modern age. But I'm not sure if that's entirely true. In its early stages, at least, Protestantism was pretty fierce. Martin Luther was not exactly a model of modernist toleration, nor was Melancthon or Calvin. The Reformation led to iconoclasm, then to the 30 Years War. The Enlightenment arose after the European world got tired of the wars of religion.
Maybe that will happen within Islam. Maybe Shia is their Protestantism, as has sometimes been said. But history never repeats itself exactly. And even if they have a reformation, it's unlikely that things will work out without going through a few good wars first.
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