Posted on 09/15/2012 2:24:20 PM PDT by neverdem
Modernity requires the willingness to be offended. And as anti-American violence across the Middle East and beyond shows, that willingness is something the Arab world, the heartland of Islam, still lacks.
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In the narrative of history transmitted to schoolchildren throughout the Arab world and reinforced by the media, religious scholars and laymen alike, Arabs were favored by divine providence. They had come out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century, carrying Islam from Morocco to faraway Indonesia. In the process, they overran the Byzantine and Persian empires, then crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to Iberia, and there they fashioned a brilliant civilization that stood as a rebuke to the intolerance of the European states to the north. Cordoba and Granada were adorned and exalted in the Arab imagination. Andalusia brought together all that the Arabs favored poetry, glamorous courts, philosophers who debated the great issues of the day.
If Islams rise was spectacular, its fall was swift and unsparing. This is the world that the great historian Bernard Lewis explored in his 2002 book What Went Wrong? The blessing of God, seen at work in the ascent of the Muslims, now appeared to desert them. The ruling caliphate, with its base in Baghdad, was torn asunder by a Mongol invasion in the 13th century. Soldiers of fortune from the Turkic Steppes sacked cities and left a legacy of military seizures of power that is still the bane of the Arabs. Little remained of their philosophy and literature, and after the Ottoman Turks overran Arab countries to their south in the 16th century, the Arabs seemed to exit history; they were now subjects of others...
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President Obama has taken a different approach. He was sure that his biography the years he spent in Indonesia and his...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Christopher Stevens Feeds the Crocodile
An Act of War, Not a Movie Protest ... Mark Steyn
Some noteworthy articles about politics, foreign or military affairs, IMHO, FReepmail me if you want on or off my list.
From the article:
They know that more than 300 million Arabs have fallen to economic stagnation and cultural decline. They know that the standing of Arab states along the measures that matter political freedom, status of women, economic growth is low.
Muslims know their societies can't compete with the West. It drives many of them to rage. Islam is a very political religion and these people are taught they are the best and everyone else is a heathen, yet here they find themselves mired in stagnation and backwardness in virtually every majority Muslim country. It is very hard for them to face their failure.
But the minority who are.. how can centuries of Islamism's practice of consanguineous marriages be left out as a factor in their irrational, knee-jerk, extremely violent behavior? We freely recognize that European royal families suffered from consanguineous marriages.
There were studies prior to 2001 about Islamism's practice of consanguineous marriages; now such studies can be used to inflame the nut cases. People die and it's blamed on the study.
Moderate Arabs you would think would hasten to calm this but the Islamists world-wide have infiltrated and indoctrinated even in countries like Turkey which has almost a hundred years of reforming Islam and being a democratic Republic. Now the Islamists are back.
The film may have mocked Islam, but Mohammed really was violent. That’s their role model.
There is an orchestrated push on to try to make saying anything offensive against Islam. But it needs to be pointed out that Islam is very offensive to Christianity. They denigrate our God and accuse him of deception. They say our scriptures are full of errors. They say our apostles lied about Jesus. If there is going to be any banning of free speech, we should make it clear it needs to start with banning Islam.
The self hating muslims have accurately assessed the value of islamic culture and found it worthless. They are touchy on this subject because they themselves are the principle component of the worthless culture.
It is a truly odd psychosis.
Islam and it’s book, the quran is not subject to reformation.
Any efforts by the govt’s of Turkey et al. are meaningless.
Christian reformation is entirely different.
The quran is supposed to be “the word of God” as opposed to most of the new and old testament, being “inspired by God”
Therefore, the quran CANNOT be reinterpreted as it would contradict God, well beyond the many existing contradictions, to make it worthless.
Pride comes before the fall.
Mamzelle, you are absolutely correct about inbreeding. But there is much more to the demography.
Polygamy is a hideous social dynamic hardly ever discussed academically or religiously. Where it exists far too many men never have a wife or family, a recipe for violence/conquest. The wealthy men who do have wives acquire and dispose of women according to their fertile years. OBL had 53 brothers and sisters. This causes even more men to be useless, angry drones.
No father can properly raise several dozen children. Mothers must compete viciously for their child’s favorable outcome, so they inadvertently earn the distain accorded “trecherous” women.
In his Satanic wisdom, Mohammed designed an insatiable mercenary force with a sexual imperative to conquer, and if that is impossible they can have boys and female domesticated animals.
Criticizing polygamy should be acceptable due to genetics, anthropology and history. It’s been a colossal failure in other societies besides Muslim.
Fantastic set of videos !!!
This Government, our Government, seems hell bent on hiding what they know or refusing to recognize reality.
How common is it today?
They're offended for the same fundamental reason that a whole bunch of us conservatives are offended.
The modern world doesn't accept the beliefs they've had all their life, from infancy to adulthood.
I'm offended for the same reasons: PResident Obama has attacked and derided my fundamental beliefs in our justice and legal system, as based on our U.S. Constitution, that this Constitution is the basis of the laws we have today, establishing certain rights and freedoms, that he trashes every day through merely ignoring it and its precedents and/or authoring executive orders in contradiction to its specific language.
But I don't go around rioting, raping, and murdering people because of his actions.
If you search for “Middle East consanguinity” you find all sorts of scholarly articles on the subject. It isn’t pretty.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk did it.. at least he led the conversion from Ottoman Turkey to a secular democratic Republic of Turkey founded in 1923.
The Islamist AK Party has steadily undermined the secular government in Turkey for a decade with lots of help, some say, from American citizen Fethullah Gülen a Turkish imam operating in Turkey and worldwide from a compound in Pennsylvania.
So now one could say "Any efforts by to thwart the [Islamist government] of Turkey . . . are meaningless."
Or, maybe they’re merely jealous.
Because their “prophet” was an idiot they’re inclined to follow suit.
I would simply suggest that reform attempts are short lived and therefore meaningless as the logic of islam (flawed as it is), once extended to its conclusion make lasting reform untenable.
Amino-acid deficiency underlies rare form of autism
Why can't they buy a clue in the 21st century?
Thanks for the link.
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