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STEYN ON RAHMAN AND ISLAM
michellemalkin.com ^ | March 25, 2006 | Mark Steyn

Posted on 03/25/2006 12:34:52 PM PST by the anti-liberal

Mark Steyn:

The fragile Afghan state is protected by American, British, Canadian, Australian, Italian and other troops, hundreds of whom have died. You cannot ask Americans or Britons to expend blood and treasure to build a society in which a man can be executed for his choice of religion. You cannot tell a Canadian soldier serving in Kandahar that he, as a Christian, must sacrifice his life to create a Muslim state in which his faith is a capital offense.

As always, we come back to the words of Osama bin Laden: "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse." That's really the only issue: The Islamists know our side have tanks and planes, but they have will and faith, and they reckon in a long struggle that's the better bet. Most prominent Western leaders sound way too eager to climb into the weak-horse suit and audition to play the rear end. Consider, for example, the words of the Prince of Wales, speaking a few days ago at al-Azhar University in Cairo, which makes the average Ivy League nuthouse look like a beacon of sanity. Anyway, this is what His Royal Highness had to say to 800 Islamic "scholars":

"The recent ghastly strife and anger over the Danish cartoons shows the danger that comes of our failure to listen and to respect what is precious and sacred to others. In my view, the true mark of a civilized society is the respect it pays to minorities and to strangers."

That's correct. But the reality is that our society pays enormous respect to minorities - President Bush holds a monthlong Ramadan-a-ding-dong at the White House every year. The immediate reaction to the slaughter of 9/11 by Western leaders everywhere was to visit a mosque to demonstrate their great respect for Islam. One party to this dispute is respectful to a fault: after all, to describe the violence perpetrated by Muslims over the Danish cartoons as the "recent ghastly strife" barely passes muster as effete Brit toff understatement.

Unfortunately, what's "precious and sacred" to Islam is its institutional contempt for others. In his book "Islam And The West," Bernard Lewis writes, "The primary duty of the Muslim as set forth not once but many times in the Quran is 'to command good and forbid evil.' It is not enough to do good and refrain from evil as a personal choice. It is incumbent upon Muslims also to command and forbid." Or as the Canadian columnist David Warren put it: "We take it for granted that it is wrong to kill someone for his religious beliefs. Whereas Islam holds it is wrong not to kill him." In that sense, those imams are right, and Karzai's attempts to finesse the issue are, sharia-wise, wrong.

I can understand why the president and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would rather deal with this through back channels, private assurances from their Afghan counterparts, etc. But the public rhetoric is critical, too. At some point we have to face down a culture in which not only the mob in the street but the highest judges and academics talk like crazies. Abdul Rahman embodies the question at the heart of this struggle: If Islam is a religion one can only convert to, not from, then in the long run it is a threat to every free person on the planet.



TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Foreign Affairs; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: abdulrahman; afghan; afghanistan
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I have never listened to Mark Steyn, actually, I never listen to the radio - but I do visit Michelle Malkin daily and she has this posted.

"You cannot ask Americans or Britons to expend blood and treasure to build a society in which a man can be executed for his choice of religion. You cannot tell a Canadian soldier serving in Kandahar that he, as a Christian, must sacrifice his life to create a Muslim state in which his faith is a capital offense."

"At some point we have to face down a culture in which not only the mob in the street but the highest judges and academics talk like crazies."


1 posted on 03/25/2006 12:34:53 PM PST by the anti-liberal
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To: the anti-liberal

Nuke the poppy fields and move onto Iran.


2 posted on 03/25/2006 12:36:37 PM PST by CROSSHIGHWAYMAN (Toon Town, Iran...........where reality is the real fantasy.)
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To: the anti-liberal

--more Steyn--

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1602986/posts


3 posted on 03/25/2006 12:38:12 PM PST by rellimpank (Don't believe anything about firearms or explosives stated by the mass media---NRABenefactor)
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To: CROSSHIGHWAYMAN
What, and make them find some oter real means for production and economic growth?

Sure you jest, why - what ever will the Afgans do!? /sarc

4 posted on 03/25/2006 12:40:13 PM PST by the anti-liberal (Hey, Al Qaeda: Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent)
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To: rellimpank

Thanks - I hadn't really heard or read Steyn, but now that I have he seems to be an ok fellow.


5 posted on 03/25/2006 12:42:45 PM PST by the anti-liberal (Hey, Al Qaeda: Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent)
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To: the anti-liberal

The time has come to withdraw every Western troop from Muslim lands.

And the time has also come to deport every Muslim from Western lands.

Let them live their own way, in their own lands.


6 posted on 03/25/2006 12:43:35 PM PST by Sometimes A River (http://www.theonion.com/content/node/46031)
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To: Acts 2:38
I wish it were that simply, I really do - but they won't sssimply keep to themselves; they have a history, or should I say 'a record':

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.

7 posted on 03/25/2006 12:48:27 PM PST by the anti-liberal (Hey, Al Qaeda: Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent)
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To: Acts 2:38
Wrong. They plot and train in their own lands and then come and kill us in ours.

The time may yet come when Western Christendom decides Islam must be destroyed. That time is not yet. The toll on the destroyers will be only slightly less than that taken on the destroyed.

8 posted on 03/25/2006 12:52:40 PM PST by Cannoneer No. 4 (Our enemies act on ecstatic revelations from their god. We act on the advice of lawyers.)
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To: the anti-liberal

STEYN IS STILL ON CSPAN with Brian Lamb at this URL:
rtsp://cspanrm.fplive.net/cspan/project/ter/ter_wj022505_steyn.rm

Real Player only!

You have to copy and paste the above URL into you open Real Player

>> file >>> open >>> paste it then press OK and you'll get a one hour interview


9 posted on 03/25/2006 12:53:06 PM PST by dennisw (-Muslim's biggest enemy is the founder of Islam. Muslims are victims of this evil con artist-)
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To: Cannoneer No. 4

If we never let them into our lands, it would be moot.

Muslims simply cannot mix with the West.

They do not belong here, ever.


10 posted on 03/25/2006 12:53:31 PM PST by Sometimes A River (http://www.theonion.com/content/node/46031)
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To: Acts 2:38
How do you keep them out?

What do you do with the ones that are already here?

What rights would you allow to US citizens who practice Islam?

11 posted on 03/25/2006 12:57:26 PM PST by Cannoneer No. 4 (Our enemies act on ecstatic revelations from their god. We act on the advice of lawyers.)
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To: Acts 2:38
"If we never let them into our lands, it would be moot."

I understand what you're getting at, but realistically, we're having enough trouble keeping illegal immigrants out of our lands as it is. Add to that the fact of globalization and an interdependent economy.

12 posted on 03/25/2006 12:57:59 PM PST by the anti-liberal (Hey, Al Qaeda: Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent)
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To: the anti-liberal

If Islam is a religion one can only convert to, not from, then in the long run it is a threat to every free person on the planet.

Islamics are the BORG, you cannot reason with them, you
cannot relate to them, you can only destroy them or

YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED!


13 posted on 03/25/2006 12:58:03 PM PST by tet68 ( " We would not die in that man's company, that fears his fellowship to die with us...." Henry V.)
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To: the anti-liberal

Actually, we're not expending blood and treasure on behalf of the Afghans, but on behalf of our own citizens. We don't want another 3000 to die by letting the Muzzzie crazies use it as a training ground.


14 posted on 03/25/2006 12:58:05 PM PST by expatpat
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To: the anti-liberal

You know, I am almost to the point I could agree to the proposal to withdraw entirely from all muslim land IF we would also expel them from ours, the First Amendment notwithstanding. They can keep their oil, we'll drill our own. After all, we have machines to use the oil in and continue to grow, while they do not.

Fantasy? Yes, and not well thought out, but not much different a fantasy then thinking the Moslem World will change without our boot on their throat.


15 posted on 03/25/2006 12:58:39 PM PST by Guy in Bumblebee Suit
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To: dennisw

Thanks!


16 posted on 03/25/2006 12:58:43 PM PST by the anti-liberal (Hey, Al Qaeda: Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent)
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To: Cannoneer No. 4

You do not give them a visa.

The ones who are here, you ship them out.

US citizens who chose to be Nazis in WWII were hardly tolerated.

They should be shipped out too.


17 posted on 03/25/2006 12:59:01 PM PST by Sometimes A River (http://www.theonion.com/content/node/46031)
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To: the anti-liberal

Illegal immigrants are pouring into this country, not because we do not have the ability to prevent them.

Our politicians simply lack the will.


18 posted on 03/25/2006 12:59:49 PM PST by Sometimes A River (http://www.theonion.com/content/node/46031)
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To: tet68
Sounds like a good foundation for a movie script. I'd watch it!

(As long as we kick the BORGS @ss in the end)

19 posted on 03/25/2006 1:01:15 PM PST by the anti-liberal (Hey, Al Qaeda: Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent)
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To: Acts 2:38
"Our politicians simply lack the will."

And a large part of that is the liberal socialist idiotarians on the left - imagine the response of the ALCU/CAIR and all of the Sheehadis and Bennishes if we attempted such a thing!

We'd have to deal with them before we could take any meaningful steps in the direction you propose.

20 posted on 03/25/2006 1:03:57 PM PST by the anti-liberal (Hey, Al Qaeda: Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent)
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