Embarrassed

January 27, 2007 | AdamSmithWasRight

[Nathan Zachary]

"Tabari IX:113 "Allah permits you to shut them in separate rooms and to beat them, but not severely. If they abstain, they have the right to food and clothing. Treat women well for they are like domestic animals and they possess nothing themselves. Allah has made the enjoyment of their bodies lawful in his Qur'an."

Ok farm animals then.

Qur'an 4:47 "O you People of the Book[Jews] to whom the Scripture has been given, believe in what We have (now) revealed, confirming and verifying what was possessed by you, before We destroy your faces beyond all recognition, turning you on your backs, and curse you as We cursed the Sabbath-breakers, for the decision of Allah Must be executed."

Qur'an 4:160 "For the iniquity of the Jews We made unlawful for them certain (foods) in that they hindered many from Allah's Way, that they took usury, though they were forbidden, and that they devoured men's wealth on false pretenses, We have prepared for those among them who reject [Islamic] Faith a painful doom."Ishaq:240 "The Jews are a nation of liars.... The Jews are a treacherous, lying, and evil people."

Qur'an 33:26 "Allah made the Jews leave their homes by terrorizing them so that you killed some and made many captive. And He made you inherit their lands, their homes, and their wealth. He gave you a country you had not traversed before."

Ishaq:250 "The bestial transformation occurred when Allah turned Jews into apes, despised."

Qur'an 17:7 "We shall rouse Our (Muslim) slaves to shame and ravage you (Jews), disfiguring your faces. They will enter the Temple as before and destroy, laying to waste all that they conquer."

shaq:264 "The Jewish rabbis knew that Muhammad had brought them the truth, but they denied that they knew it. They were obstinate. So Allah revealed, ‘People of the Book, believe in what we have sent down in confirmation of what you had been given before or We will efface your features and turn your face into your ass, cursing you.'"

Bukhari:V4B52N177 "Allah's Apostle said, ‘The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. "O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him."'"

Try actually reading Islamic scripture.

[rlmorel]

Agreed. Again, I asked the key question in Post #47...can you be a secular muslim and still be a muslim?

The issue is, that if I am a Muslim, and say "I am a Muslim, but I do not believe that Jews or Christians are less worthy of my respect or consideration because they believe in a different God" I may well get along with my fellow moderate Muslims as well as the Christians and Jews I associate with, but...I that makes me an apostate in the eyes of a not insignificant number of Muslims who do not believe that one can take that point of view and be considered a Muslim.

And the problem is...those extreme Muslims, in many parts of the world, control the thought process of the moderate ones who must kowtow to them or die. Anyone who reads this and thinks I am being melodramatic doesn't know what is going on in many places around the world where this is not just an intellectual exercise, but a blood drenched issue with the lives of you, your family and your friends at stake. If you speak out as a genuine voice of moderation...you may be murdered as a result.

In Brigitte Gabriel's book, she talks at length about this to butress her claims. Sure, she says, people in Egypt (for example) HAVE to knuckle under and keep quiet, but what about this country? Her question is: If MY religion was being hijacked by a few bad apples, I would be shouting it to the world...where is the "Million Muslim March" in this country where moderate muslims would make their voices heard on this issue?

Just for the record, for those who have not read her book, she was an Arab Christian (now an American citizen) who lived through the civil war in Lebanon and takes the view that you CANNOT be a muslim and be secular.

[Nathan Zachary]

oops, Misread your post. But Poly can still benifit from Islamic "scripture"

[rlmorel]

Just so everyone understands, this is a vanity post, I am pretty sure. It is not an article...the poster wrote it. AdamSmithWasRight will correct me if I am wrong here.

Note to AdamSmithWasRight:
You are new here, so you don't know, but if it is indeed a vanity post (you wrote it yourself) it is considered to be proper ettiquette to put the word VANITY in your title somewhere so people know...we know you are new, though, so not a big deal here.

[-=SoylentSquirrel=-]

"As an American but also as a Muslim"

You cannot be an American and also a muslim.

HOWZABOUT:

"As a Jew but also a Nazi",

"As a fox but also a chicken"

"As a socialist but also a free-market capitalist"

"As a novella and yet also grafitti"

[Nathan Zachary]

LoL! That is a good set of equaly rational statements.

[Pietro]

"...rather the very community itself that has failed to deliver or even show an attempt to remedy this nihilistic ideology within their ranks."

I'm glad that at least one moslem gets it. Until there is wide spread outcry w/i the moslem community muslims (whether they deserve or not) will be suspect.

[rlmorel]

"...The question I have is do we want to emulate that, or would it not be better to perhaps fight this in another way..."

The problem is, as we found out on 9/11, that they are going to take the fight to us, regardless if we want to let things work themselves out or not. The question is...are we going to defend ourselves aggressively, or are we going to find "another way".

It is worth noting, that the people who we are expected to find another way of working it out with are not interested at all in finding another way. They have already told us how it should be.

In this order: Conversion, Subjugation, Banishment or Death.

Obviously, in a global "Small World" environment, banishing someone to a remote geographical location does not remove the influences, so I am guessing that is not going to be an option for those of us who don't want to Convert or Submit. The last option is pretty clear.

As I quoted Brigitte Gabriel in a previous post, and it seems to apply aptly..."Hiding your head in the sand only makes a big, fat target out of your rear end."

[pollyannaish]

First of all, you probably ought to spend a little time really reading the Old Testament. Jesus was a tremendous moderating force in the world so the perspective in the New Testament is completely different. The Old Testament contains a lot of things that could be construed in the same way as we perceive the Koran. That is not, of course, how we perceive them now. We understand the changes of interpretation, the personalization of salvation that Christ brings us. That doesn't mean we don't take the OT literally, because we certainly do. It's just that we look at that information through the paradigm shift of Christ.

My second point is that of course you agree with the fundamentals of the constitution because it is based on Western ideals, some of which are derived from Judeo-Christian principles. It was created with the ideals of your religion. My question was simply a means to get you to understand how another group of people might look at that differently, and why it is essential for us to work with Muslims that both respect the constitution AND still hold fundamentally Islamic beliefs.

If the Constitution disagreed with what you believed God's law was, which would take higher precedence? Let's say for instance, that the Constitution was changed to say that all couples would be limited to two children, and additional children would have to be aborted. Then what?

The fundamental point I am trying to make here is that this is a clash of civilizations based in religious doctrine. It is Judeo-Christian values vs. Islamic values. Our only chance of winning this thing is to understand the culture of Islam, support and protect and push forward the moderated viewpoints so we can all live together under some basic live and let live principles.

That is obviously a somewhat audacious task. We are essentially fighting a religious war in a humanistic way...which is weird. But what 9/11 taught us is that we can no longer ignore that clash. We have to find our way through the conflict, and while war is certainly one aspect of that conflict, finding ways to help those interested in moderating Islam is another.

To be honest, I am not sure we can actually do it and my personal Biblical approach to this suggests that we probably can not. In many ways, wars about God are not our wars, but struggles between good and evil. But as a Christian, I must fight this , while at the same time remain true to my fundamental belief that all human beings be free to make that choice.

I hope that explains my position clearly.

[GraniteStateConservative]

It is statements like that one that the rest of the world will hold up as evidence that FR is a little more than a gathering place for intolerant bigots.

You'd be surprised at the results of a FR poll that was worded much like what he said.

[dynoman]

I look at your home page and saw the American flag with the words E Pluribus Unum - Out of many, one.

If you understand what that means you are a true American.

America is the only country in the world where anyone can come and no matter where you came from you can be an American. I cannot go to France and become a frenchman, I cannot go to to the UK and become an Englishman, I cannot go to Iraq and become an Iraqi.

The first Muslim Mosque in America was in Ross, North Dakota. Most Americans don't know that because those Muslims became Americans - they didn't go around preaching death and destruction on non-Muslims or blowing up their fellow man. If they had, Americans would have heard about it.

The basic problem in Iraq, Iraqis say, I am Sunni, I am Sheite, etc. instead of I am a human, I am an Iraqi. If they were dedicated to the human race and then Iraq instead of factions there would be far less problems.

If they could believe in, if they would believe in E Pluribus Unum - Out of many, One, there would be far less problems.

So best wishes from one American to another.

[Eva]

I don't agree with the poster that said that you can't be an American and a Muslim. I do agree with your remark that apologies are too little, too late, unless the apologies are followed by action by more than a few scattered Muslims. Where are the statements from whole Muslim communities, apologizing to America, instead of accusing Americans of abusing their rights. I'm so tired of Muslims demanding special treatment, not just in the US, but all over the world.

I just read in the WSJ that the Muslims in China are demanding that the Chinese remove all references to the year of the pig from all tv ads.

[jackibutterfly]

"My neighbor is a Muslim born Iranian who abandoned his faith, sent his kids to Catholic schools, works hard, is faithful to his wife and is as fine and upstanding American citizen as there can be."

Well, he's NOT muslim, then, is he? Kinda proves edcoil's point. What he was saying is, it's a contradiction to be a muslim AND an American.

[pollyannaish]

I've heard Brigitte and her story is compelling and important. And I want to make sure that you understand I DO know what we are up against. I just think that we have a moral obligation to try to find a way to not make this tit for tat for the next thousand years if we possibly can.

It's a much harder thing to do. But the folks like the one at the top of the thread give me some hope that there is an opportunity for moderation...even if it is minuscule. I think it is incumbent that we try that first. Not negotiation between us and them, mind you because that won't work. But support of the moderating internal forces within Islam. They are there.

[Trailerpark Badass]

"The geography of islam--and of the Islamic imagination--has shifted in recent years. The faith has become portable. Muslims who fled their countries brought Islam with them. Men came into bilad al kufr [the lands of unbelief], but a new breed of Islamists radicalized the faith there, in the midst of the kafir [unbeliever].

"The new lands were owed scant loyalty, if any, and political religious radicals savored the space afforded them by Western civil society....You would have thought that the pluralism and tumult of this open European world would spawn a version of the faith to match it. But precisely the opposite happened. In bilad al kufr, the faith became sharpened for battle....

"'A Muslim has no nationality except his belief,' wrote an intellectual godfather of radical Islamism, the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb (who studied in Davenport, IA, BTW), who was executed by Nasser in 1966. While on a visit to Saudi Arabia, I listened to a caller from Stockholm [!] as he bared his concerns to an immensely popular preacher. He made Qutb's point: We may carry their nationality, he saidbut we belong to our own religion...." --Fouad Ajami

How do you feel about that observation?

What troubles me, personally, the most is the phenomenon of young Muslims, particularly in England, but in America, and Europe as well, who, exposed to Western "tolerance," decide they want no part of it and become willing foot soldiers of the radical cause. Curiously, it seems radical Islam has much greater freedom of expression in the West, than it does in many Arab Islamic countries (Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc.). It's almost as if the leaders of those countries know something we in the West don't.

From Mohammed Bouyeri to Mohammed Atta to Ramzi Youssef, the list is quite long of Muslims who, far from assimilating Western, Christian ideas of tolerance, endeavor to destroy it. What do you think is behind this phenomena?

[pollyannaish]

I've read the entire Koran...albeit only once. FWIW.

[Nathan Zachary]

"The Old Testament contains a lot of things that could be construed in the same way as we perceive the Koran."

I am so sick of hearing this LIE repeated. Please post them. The OT does NOT command man to kill God's enemies for all time. Only ONCE does God tell the Jews to destroy another evil tribe, which they did NOT do.

[jackibutterfly]

"The document that gives the original poster the freedom to practice Islam in this country is the same document that protects your right to be an a-hole."

You misunderstood edcoil - he was saying it's a contradiction to be both - not that a muslim is not allowd to be an American, but that HIS "religion" won't let him IF he's a true muslim. EVERYONE - THAT's what edcoil was saying. So, please get off his case.

[jcb1379]

Ya got me. Some of us can appreciate it for its allegorical value--it is a beautiful tale of a loving God creating everything. Lots of us realize that, for the majority of the illiterate masses, storytelling was the only way to spread a message and a concept. So, for those early Jews who couldn't read or write, stories were told to make the point that YAHWEH is behind the whole Universe, period. The hows are up to us to discover.

[jcb1379]

Wait, do you want to ask the question everyone else has asked? I'm not too clear on that...