Posted on 04/06/2005 2:01:49 PM PDT by CHARLITE
Throughout the West, Muslims are making new and assertive demands, and in some cases challenging the very premises of European and North American life. How to respond?
Here is a general rule: Offer full rights – but turn down demands for special privileges.
By way of example, note two current Canadian controversies. The first concerns the establishment of voluntary Shar'i (Islamic law) courts in Ontario. This idea is promoted by the usual Islamist groups, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations-Canada and the Canadian Islamic Congress. It is most prominently opposed by Muslim women's groups, led by Homa Arjomand, who fear that the Islamic courts, despite their voluntary nature, will be used to repress women's rights.
I oppose any role for the Shari'a, a medieval law, in public life today, but so long as women are truly not coerced (create an ombudsman to ensure this?) and Islamic rulings remain subordinate to Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, I see no grounds on which to deny Muslims the right, like other Canadians, to revert to private arbitration.
On the other hand, Muslim demands for an exclusive prayer room at McGill University in Montreal are outrageous and unacceptable. As a secular institution, the university on principle does not provide any religious group with a permanent place of worship on campus. Despite this universal policy, the Muslim Student Association, a part of the Wahhabi lobby, insists on just such a place, even threatening a human rights abuse filing if it is defied. McGill must stand firm.
The key distinction is whether Muslim aspirations fit into an existing framework or not. Where they do, they can be accommodated, such as in the case of:
Schools and universities closing for the Eid al-Adha holidays. Male employees permitted to wear beards in New Jersey. The founding of an Islamic cemetery in Tennessee. Adherents of other minority religions may get a holiday off, wear beards, or dispose of their dead in private burial grounds – so why not Muslims?
In contrast, special privileges for Islam and Muslims are unacceptable, such as:
Setting up a government advisory board uniquely for Muslims in the United States. Permitting Muslim-only living quarters or events in the United States and Great Britain. Setting aside women-only bathing at a municipal swimming pool in France. Banning Hindus and Jews from a jury hearing a case about an Islamist in Great Britain. Changing noise laws to broadcast the adhan (call to prayer) in Hamtramck, Michigan. Allowing a prisoner the unheard-of right to avoid strip-searches in New York State. Exploiting taxpayer-funded schools and airwaves to convert non-Muslims in the United States. Allowing students in taxpayer-funded schools to use empty classrooms for prayers in New Jersey. Deeming the "religious vilification" of Islam to be illegal in Australia. Punishing anti-Islamic views with court-mandated indoctrination by an Islamist in Canada. Prohibiting families from sending pork or pork by-products to U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq. Requiring that female American soldiers in Saudi Arabia wear U.S. government-issued abayas. Applying the "Rushdie rules" – or letting Muslims shut down criticism of Islam and Muslims. The dividing line in each instance is whether Muslims accept to fit the existing order or aspire to remake it. Working within the system is fine, taking it over is not. In U.S. terms, Muslims must accept the framework of the Constitution, not overturn it.
This approach implies that Muslim demands must be judged against prior actions and current practice, and not in the abstract. Context is all-important.
It is thus fine for the Alsace regional council in France to help fund the Grand Mosque of Strasbourg, because the same body also helped pay for renovations to the Strasbourg Cathedral and the city's Grand Synagogue. It is quite another when the City of Boston, Massachusetts sells land for an Islamic complex at well below the market price, a benefit unheard of for other religious groups in that city.
Western governments and other institutions urgently need to signal Muslims that they must accept being just one religious group of many, and that aspirations to dominate will fail. Toward this end, governments need to enact principled and consistent policies indicating precisely which Muslim privileges are acceptable, and why.
Daniel Pipes (http://www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).
Islam is a cancer that wants to take over everything. It will kill freedom and civilization.
If private parties want to go to a private Islamic court to settle their differences, that is their business. If the court requires a penalty or remedy that violates the civil rights of others, common law or is violent it has no place in modern society.
On the other hand, Jewish courts (beis din) have coexisted for milennia inside other societies without incident. They have even been encouraged by various countries as they took weight off of the court systems of those countries.
This is fine as long as the specialized court is applying law consistent with the law of the land. But take divorce for example. If Muslim courts tried to override the community property laws of a state, that should not be permissible.
Would a white guys only event at Yankee stadium be legal?
It's worth considering, that (I know dogma here is that climat change doesn't exist, but science says otherwise) that the people most affected by climate change are the people nearest the equator. Which is where most the moslems are. When they are dying in the hundreds of millions, you can reasonably expect them to be angry with the west about it. So terrorism is likely to get much worse as their lives get worse and their families starve and drown.
It's worth considering, that (I know dogma here is that climat change doesn't exist, but science says otherwise) that the people most affected by climate change are the people nearest the equator. Which is where most the moslems are. When they are dying in the hundreds of millions, you can reasonably expect them to be angry with the west about it. So terrorism is likely to get much worse as their lives get worse and their families starve and drown.
Do you mean warming or human-driven warming? If you mean human-driven warming, I'm in the modeling business and I know that the models being used to justify the notion of human driven climate change have a single data point to validate them. You cannot even draw a straight line with a single data point let alone have a large enough sample to draw any valid statistical conclusions. This is particularly damning when the folks who theorize that solar activity drives warming and cooling have hundreds of data points and a highly significant correlation and when one of the principal mathematical bases of the claim of human-driven warning (the hockey stick) has been demonstrated to have been based on a laughably inappropriate application of principal components analysis, so inappropriate that the methodology will find a hockey stick in any randomly generated data set.
If your argument is just that the globe is warming but that it is not human-driven, then the real problem is the political agenda of wrongly blaming the West for the warming--thereby giving your hypothetical dying Muslims an excuse for more ignorance-driven jihad.
Nonsense!
Correct except for tense, it IS killing Freedom and Civilization.
Even when muslims aren't flying planes into towers they destroy our way of life. They don't care how they destroy us. And the "peaceful" muslims continue to remain silent [partners].
It will only get worse, much worse, as the cancer continues to grow.
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