"Nice to know that all our soldiers' efforts and U.S. funds are being negated by a powerful remnant of the Taliban, not (why?) replaced by Karzai."
What's really going on over there?!
Posted on 03/21/2006 2:17:22 PM PST by the anti-liberal
Italy and Germany have raised their voices:
Italy has joined with Germany in protesting a death threat reportedly hanging over an Afghan who became a Christian in Germany and is now charged under Afghanistan's religious laws .
The sharia laws, which rule many Muslim countries, forbid conversion to other religions on pain of death .
Italian Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini on Tuesday said Italy would raise the case of Abdul Rahman with the Afghan ambassador in Rome, European Union diplomatic representatives in Afghanistan and EU human rights bodies .
Fini said he would voice to the ambassador "the thorough disapproval" of the Italian government if there was a "possibility" of Rahman being sentenced to death. Italy is the de facto EU diplomatic chief in Afghanistan because Austria, which holds the EU's rotating presidency, does not have a mission there .
Italy has some 2,000 troops in the 10,000-strong NATO-led International Security and Assistance force (ISAF), which began peacekeeping operations in and near Kabul a year after a US-led coalition drove out the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime in 2002 .
Rome held ISAF's six-month rotating command until last month. It is leading the reconstruction of the Afghan judicial system and has also contributed to other reconstruction projects such as roads, hospitals and schools .
Germany said Tuesday it would appeal directly to Afghan President Hamid Karzai and "do everything in its power" to save the life of Rahman, who returned home from Germany when the Taliban was overthrown.
President Bush had nothing to say about the case today at his press conference.
And no member of the White House press corps thought to ask.
***
Reader Daniel H. e-mails:
After reading your post I got off my duff and made a call to the Afghan embassy in Washington: (202)483-6410. After being put on hold for 3 minutes an embassy staffer got on. I explained to him that I think that the prosecution and threats against Abdul Rahman's life are outrageous and that if he is executed this will have severe consequences for Afghan-U.S. relations.
Maybe believeing that I am someone important, someone with clout he was very apologetic, agreeing with my point, dismayed over what is happening, insisting that this is not the EMBASSY's policy, that freedom of conscience and religion ought to be respected. Now this is where it gets interesting/scary/encouraging: he said that he had been on the phone with Kabul, with someone in their foreign ministry, about this and that this person said something to the effect of "What is wrong with you? Aren't you a good Muslim. The man deserves it (meaning death)."
The embassy staffer said that he tried to reason with the Kabul official, and he once again asserted his own opinion that this prosecution is unjust and barbaric. I thanked him for his time and suggested he contact the American media about this and make his efforts known.
Now this conversation with the embassy staffer tells me a few things: 1)there are people in Kabul who are serious about prosecuting and executing Rahman, 2) this probably is not the opinion of the people in the Washington embassy, 3) the people in the Washington embassy are sensitive to pressure and will get the message through to people in Kabul (even if our own president and state department won't), 4) that concerned people should call the Afghan embassy in Washington and let it be known, without ambiguity, that if this man, Abdul Rahman, is harmed then the caller will do all that is possible to see the end of U.S. involvment in the reconstruction of Afghanistan and we will let the chips fall as they will. So, the short of it: Abdul Rahman's life is in serious danger.
You and everybody else can do something by calling the Afghan embassy - here is the phone number (202) 483-6410, please post it on your site; be polite but let them know that if Rahman is not freed and his life secured then this will be the end of your, the caller's, support for U.S. involvment with Afghanistan and you the caller will do everything possible to bring the end of this support about.
Oh, and when I called the White House and the State Department all I could
get was a recording. I suggest that callers contact their Senators (particularly Democratic ones; they will delight in making Bush and Rice squirm, but, hey, a life is at stake so I don't care about their, the Democratic Senator's, motives. Saving the life of Rahman and others like him is what counts.)
Thanks for providing the info.
Debbie Schlussel e-mails:
After reading the letter from your reader, I, too, called the Afghani Embassy. The man I spoke with said that they got 50 calls about this today, and that they have no authority to save the man. They said there are only two people who can stop this: Mr. Shinwari, the Chief Justice, who is an old man and an intolerant Taliban remnant; or President Karzai, who can--but has not--removed him. Nice to know that all our soldiers' efforts and U.S. funds are being negated by a powerful remnant of the Taliban, not (why?) replaced by Karzai.
"Nice to know that all our soldiers' efforts and U.S. funds are being negated by a powerful remnant of the Taliban, not (why?) replaced by Karzai."
What's really going on over there?!
Ops, Wrong Rahman.
concerned people should call the Afghan embassy in Washington and let it be known, without ambiguity, that if this man, Abdul Rahman, is harmed then the caller will do all that is possible to see the end of U.S. involvment in the reconstruction of Afghanistan and we will let the chips fall as they will.I'm not sure "end of US involvement" is the right ultimatum to deliver. That is probably what the executioner desires.
I suggest using back channels to "make it personal."
Modern Islam is everything Liberals fear Christianity is.
This is an irrational fear of Christianity and an intentional ignorance of Islam's modern day barbarism. If a Christian country prosecuted and executed a man for converting to Islam the broohaha would be enormous. Unfortunately for the victim in this case he chose to convert to Christianity in a Muslim country.
As for the degree to which we should be worried for this man's life, we should be very worried if this is all true. In fact, the word should get out and hopefully put international pressure on Afghanistan to continue to moderate itself.
We cannot expect Afghanistan to suddenly turn into a model for tolerance and democracy. It will take time for the ideas to sink in and gestate. In the early years of the newly born American republic many of the ideas held forth in the Declaration of Independence took years, decades, and scores of decades to come to full realization. The Civil War was fought over one of those issues that gestated from the inception of the country to the outbreak of the war.
When all you're used to is tyranny and corruption, tolerance for both is remarkably high. Given a few generations, Afghanistan will be a completely different country from the one we observe today. The same goes for Iraq. Freedom does something to the outlook of the country, and the only thing we have to prevent is either country backsliding into the throes of tyranny and oppression, which are regressive environments that have a negative impact on the growth and actualization of basic, decent human impulses. There is a reason why the United States is the most generous country in the world, and it has nothing to do with the fact that we're a rich country. It is because basic humanity is fostered by an environment of freedom, opportunity, and hope.
In fact, the socialists and communists approached this issue backward by assuming that human decency is fostered by having one's basic needs met. It is a quirk of human psychology that decency is brought about most in people who are free to work hard, keep what they earn, and hope for future opportunities to grow their wealth. Miserliness seems to be common among those who are pessimistic and feel as if they are oppressed and have no hope of either spiritual salvation or freedom from oppression.
Give generations of people freedom, opportunity, and hope and they will prosper and be generous.
Yeah...and where is Jesse Jackson???
Isn't he the one that LOVES to go to foreign countries to rescue people...
Where IS Jesse??
But as it is, if the response here on FR is any indication, not even FR will rise to his defense.
I'll be waiting to see how the MSM responds - will they supprot the the muslim right to abide by Sharia law, or will they assert the rule of democratic law? Hmmm.
Of course Bush hasn't said anything. He repeatedly says that Islam is a religion of peace and a noble religion which is hijacked by an extremist few. Should we include the law makers and judge/s in the "extremist few." When will Bush stop believe his own PC lies.
The Godless Europeans will do nothing, nor will The United States.
Afghanistan is a third world piss hole, their sole use to us being a staging ground for Iran.
Maybe someday we can take the time to civilize these peoples, but not today.
Few in the western world can conceive of faith, never mind the bravery of a man given the opportunity to face death, who is willing to accept the consequence in order to prove that there is indeed light.
If I was a major over there I would liberate this man in a second with a squad of Marines; but then I would be jailed by my masters here in the US.
Nor can the MSM ask, their template is USA=Evil, Islam=Good.
I would love to hear Yale on this. Can you imagine?
How can this death cult be referred to as a religion?
It's a primitive, totalitarian ideology.
The bad news is that this virus is replicating
under the guise of "religious freedom" and there
is apparently nothing that a liberal democracy
can do to stop it.
Everything they have they stole. This letter spells it out pretty well, I think:
~
What Arab Civilization?
This letter was sent to Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett Packard Corporation, in response to a speech given by her on September 26, 2001.
November 7, 2001
Carly Fiorina
Hewlett-Packard
3000 Hanover Street
Palo Alto, CA 94304-1185
Dear Madame Fiorina:
It is with great interest that I read your speech delivered on September 26, 2001, titled "Technology, Business and Our way of Life: What's Next" [sic]. I was particularly interested in the story you told at the end of your speech, about the Arab/Muslim civilization. As an Assyrian, a non-Arab, Christian native of the Middle East, whose ancestors reach back to 5000 B.C., I wish to clarify some points you made in this little story, and to alert you to the dangers of unwittingly being drawn into the Arabist/Islamist ideology, which seeks to assimilate all cultures and religions into the Arab/Islamic fold.
I know you are a very busy woman, but please find ten minutes to read what follows, as it is a perspective that you will not likely get from anywhere else. I will answer some of the specific points you made in your speech, then conclude with a brief perspective on this Arabist/Islamist ideology.
Arabs and Muslims appeared on the world scene in 630 A.D., when the armies of Muhammad began their conquest of the Middle East. We should be very clear that this was a military conquest, not a missionary enterprise, and through the use of force, authorized by a declaration of a Jihad against infidels, Arabs/Muslims were able to forcibly convert and assimilate non-Arabs and non-Mulsims into their fold. Very few indigenous communities of the Middle East survived this -- primarily Assyrians, Jews, Armenians and Coptics (of Egypt).
Having conquered the Middle East, Arabs placed these communities under a Dhimmi (see the book Dhimmi, by Bat Ye'Or) system of governance, where the communities were allowed to rule themselves as religious minorities (Christians, Jews and Zoroastrian). These communities had to pay a tax (called a Jizzya in Arabic) that was, in effect, a penalty for being non-Muslim, and that was typically 80% in times of tolerance and up to 150% in times of oppression. This tax forced many of these communities to convert to Islam, as it was designed to do.
You state, "its architects designed buildings that defied gravity." I am not sure what you are referring to, but if you are referring to domes and arches, the fundamental architectural breakthrough of using a parabolic shape instead of a spherical shape for these structures was made by the Assyrians more than 1300 years earlier, as evidenced by their archaeological record.
You state, "its mathematicians created the algebra and algorithms that would enable the building of computers, and the creation of encryption." The fundamental basis of modern mathematics had been laid down not hundreds but thousands of years before by Assyrians and Babylonians, who already knew of the concept of zero, of the Pythagorean Theorem, and of many, many other developments expropriated by Arabs/Muslims (see History of Babylonian Mathematics, Neugebauer).
You state, "its doctors examined the human body, and found new cures for disease." The overwhelming majority of these doctors (99%) were Assyrians. In the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries Assyrians began a systematic translation of the Greek body of knowledge into Assyrian. At first they concentrated on the religious works but then quickly moved to science, philosophy and medicine. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Galen, and many others were translated into Assyrian, and from Assyrian into Arabic. It is these Arabic translations which the Moors brought with them into Spain, and which the Spaniards translated into Latin and spread throughout Europe, thus igniting the European Renaissance.
By the sixth century A.D., Assyrians had begun exporting back to Byzantia their own works on science, philosophy and medicine. In the field of medicine, the Bakhteesho Assyrian family produced nine generations of physicians, and founded the great medical school at Gundeshapur (Iran). Also in the area of medicine, (the Assyrian) Hunayn ibn-Ishaq's textbook on ophthalmology, written in 950 A.D., remained the authoritative source on the subject until 1800 A.D.
In the area of philosophy, the Assyrian philosopher Job of Edessa developed a physical theory of the universe, in the Assyrian language, that rivaled Aristotle's theory, and that sought to replace matter with forces (a theory that anticipated some ideas in quantum mechanics, such as the spontaneous creation and destruction of matter that occurs in the quantum vacuum).
One of the greatest Assyrian achievements of the fourth century was the founding of the first university in the world, the School of Nisibis, which had three departments, theology, philosophy and medicine, and which became a magnet and center of intellectual development in the Middle East. The statutes of the School of Nisibis, which have been preserved, later became the model upon which the first Italian university was based (see The Statutes of the School of Nisibis, by Arthur Voobus).
When Arabs and Islam swept through the Middle East in 630 A.D., they encountered 600 years of Assyrian Christian civilization, with a rich heritage, a highly developed culture, and advanced learning institutions. It is this civilization that became the foundation of the Arab civilization.
You state, "Its astronomers looked into the heavens, named the stars, and paved the way for space travel and exploration." This is a bit melodramatic. In fact, the astronomers you refer to were not Arabs but Chaldeans and Babylonians (of present day south-Iraq), who for millennia were known as astronomers and astrologers, and who were forcibly Arabized and Islamized -- so rapidly that by 750 A.D. they had disappeared completely.
You state, "its writers created thousands of stories. Stories of courage, romance and magic. Its poets wrote of love, when others before them were too steeped in fear to think of such things." There is very little literature in the Arabic language that comes from this period you are referring to (the Koran is the only significant piece of literature), whereas the literary output of the Assyrians and Jews was vast. The third largest corpus of Christian writing, after Latin and Greek, is by the Assyrians in the Assyrian language (also called Syriac; see here.)
You state, "when other nations were afraid of ideas, this civilization thrived on them, and kept them alive. When censors threatened to wipe out knowledge from past civilizations, this civilization kept the knowledge alive, and passed it on to others." This is a very important issue you raise, and it goes to the heart of the matter of what Arab/Islamic civilization represents. I reviewed a book titled How Greek Science Passed to the Arabs, in which the author lists the significant translators and interpreters of Greek science. Of the 22 scholars listed, 20 were Assyrians, 1 was Persian and 1 an Arab. I state at the end of my review: "The salient conclusion which can be drawn from O'Leary's book is that Assyrians played a significant role in the shaping of the Islamic world via the Greek corpus of knowledge. If this is so, one must then ask the question, what happened to the Christian communities which made them lose this great intellectual enterprise which they had established. One can ask this same question of the Arabs. Sadly, O'Leary's book does not answer this question, and we must look elsewhere for the answer." I did not answer this question I posed in the review because it was not the place to answer it, but the answer is very clear, the Christian Assyrian community was drained of its population through forced conversion to Islam (by the Jizzya), and once the community had dwindled below a critical threshold, it ceased producing the scholars that were the intellectual driving force of the Islamic civilization, and that is when the so called "Golden Age of Islam" came to an end (about 850 A.D.).
Islam the religion itself was significantly molded by Assyrians and Jews (see Nestorian Influence on Islam and Hagarism: the Making of the Islamic World).
Arab/Islamic civilization is not a progressive force, it is a regressive force; it does not give impetus, it retards. The great civilization you describe was not an Arab/Muslim accomplishment, it was an Assyrian accomplishment that Arabs expropriated and subsequently lost when they drained, through the forced conversion of Assyrians to Islam, the source of the intellectual vitality that propelled it. What other Arab/Muslim civilization has risen since? What other Arab/Muslim successes can we cite?
You state, "and perhaps we can learn a lesson from his [Suleiman] example: It was leadership based on meritocracy, not inheritance. It was leadership that harnessed the full capabilities of a very diverse population that included Christianity, Islamic, and Jewish traditions." In fact, the Ottomans were extremely oppressive to non-Muslims. For example, young Christian boys were forcefully taken from their families, usually at the age of 8-10, and inducted into the Janissaries, (yeniceri in Turkish) where they were Islamized and made to fight for the Ottoman state. What literary, artistic or scientific achievements of the Ottomans can we point to? We can, on the other hand, point to the genocide of 750,000 Assyrians, 1.5 million Armenians and 400,000 Greeks in World War One by the Kemalist "Young Turk" government. This is the true face of Islam.
Arabs/Muslims are engaged in an explicit campaign of destruction and expropriation of cultures and communities, identities and ideas. Wherever Arab/Muslim civilization encounters a non-Arab/Muslim one, it attempts to destroy it (as the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan were destroyed, as Persepolis was destroyed by the Ayotollah Khomeini). This is a pattern that has been recurring since the advent of Islam, 1400 years ago, and is amply substantiated by the historical record. If the "foreign" culture cannot be destroyed, then it is expropriated, and revisionist historians claim that it is and was Arab, as is the case of most of the Arab "accomplishments" you cited in your speech. For example, Arab history texts in the Middle East teach that Assyrians were Arabs, a fact that no reputable scholar would assert, and that no living Assyrian would accept. Assyrians first settled Nineveh, one of the major Assyrian cities, in 5000 B.C., which is 5630 years before Arabs came into that area. Even the word 'Arab' is an Assyrian word, meaning "Westerner" (the first written reference to Arabs was by the Assyrian King Sennacherib, 800 B.C., in which he tells of conquering the "ma'rabayeh" -- Westerners. See The Might That Was Assyria, by H. W. F. Saggs).
Even in America this Arabization policy continues. On October 27th a coalition of seven Assyrian and Maronite organizations sent an official letter to the Arab American Institute asking it to stop identifying Assyrians and Maronites as Arabs, which it had been deliberately doing.
There are minorities and nations struggling for survival in the Arab/Muslim ocean of the Middle East and Africa (Assyrians, Armenians, Coptics, Jews, southern Sudanese, Ethiopians, Nigerians...), and we must be very sensitive not to unwittingly and inadvertently support Islamic fascism and Arab Imperialism, with their attempts to wipe out all other cultures, religions and civilizations. It is incumbent upon each one of us to do our homework and research when making statements and speeches about these sensitive matters.
I hope you found this information enlightening. For more information, refer to the web links below. You may contact me at keepa@ninevehsoft.com for further questions.
Thank you for your consideration.
Peter BetBasoo
Web resources:
Brief History of Assyrians
Assyrian International News Agency
Assyrian American National Federation
Assyrian Academic Society
Zinda Magazine
Beth Suryoyo
Nineveh Online
World Maronite Union
Maronite Research Council
World Lebanese Organization
Coptic Web
Hosted here.
Please FReepmail me if you would like to be added to, or removed from, the Michelle Malkin ping list...
"Modern Islam is everything Liberals fear Christianity is."
Bears repeating.
Man - people - were designed to 'work' and he is happiest when doing work he believes in. Believing in what you do makes a big difference - pride in one's work - and working for something greater than one's self goes a long way toward that, IMO.
There are actually quite a few threads on this topic, but using different titles, which is why you didn't find them :):
And Ms. Malkin's previous thread: Malkin: A Christian on Trial (Faces Death in Afghanistan for rejecting Islam)
:)
I would have thought 'ABDUL RAHMAN' would have been a common 'keyword' for those threads and that a search would have turned them up, regardless of the headline. I was mistaken, but I've learned something.
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