Saturday, June 23, 2007

Islam is the problem

The irrational response to Salman Rushdie's knighthood is sadly typical, says one Muslim

GROWING up in Vancouver, I attended an Islamic school every Saturday. There, I learned that Jews can't be trusted because they worship "moolah, not Allah", meaning money, not God. According to my teacher, every last Jew is consumed with business. But looking around my neighbourhood, I noticed that most of the new business signs featured Asian languages: Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Punjabi and plenty of Urdu. Not Hebrew, Urdu, which is spoken throughout Pakistan. That reality check made me ask: What if my religious school isn't educating me? What if it's indoctrinating me?

I'm reminded of this question thanks to the news that Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses and 10 other works of fiction, will be knighted by the Queen. On Monday, Pakistan's religious affairs minister said that because Rushdie had blasphemed Islam with provocative literature, it was understandable that angry Muslims would commit suicide bombings over his knighthood. Members of parliament, as well as the Pakistani Government, amplified the condemnation of Britain, feeding cries of offence to Muslim sensibilities from Europe to Asia. As a Muslim, you better believe I'm offended - by these absurd reactions.

I'm offended that it is not the first time honours from the West have met with vitriol and violence. In 1979, Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam became the first Muslim to win the Nobel Prize in science. He began his acceptance speech with a verse from the Koran. Salam's country ought to have celebrated him. Instead, rioters tried to prevent him from re-entering the country. Parliament even declared him a non-Muslim because he belonged to a religious minority. His name continues to be controversial, invoked by state authorities in hushed tones.

I'm offended that every year, there are more women killed in Pakistan for allegedly violating their family's honour than there are detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Muslims have rightly denounced the mistreatment of Gitmo prisoners. But where's our outrage over the murder of many more Muslims at the hands of our own?

I'm offended that in April, mullahs at an extreme mosque in Pakistan issued a fatwa against hugging. The country's female tourism minister had embraced - or, depending on the account you follow, accepted a congratulatory pat from - her skydiving instructor after she successfully jumped in a French fundraiser for the victims of the 2005 Pakistan earthquake. Clerics announced her act of touching another man to be "a great sin" and demanded she be fired.

I'm offended by their fatwa proclaiming that women should stay at home and remain covered at all times. I'm offended that they've bullied music store owners and video vendors into closing up shop. I'm offended that the Government tiptoes around their craziness because these clerics threaten suicide attacks if confronted. I'm offended that on Sunday, at least 35 Muslims in Kabul were blown to bits by other Muslims and on Tuesday, 80 more in Baghdad by Islamic "insurgents", with no official statement from Pakistan to deplore these assaults on fellow believers. I'm offended that amid the internecine carnage, a professed atheist named Salman Rushdie tops the to-do list.

Above all, I'm offended that so many other Muslims are not offended enough to demonstrate widely against God's self-appointed ambassadors. We complain to the world that Islam is being exploited by fundamentalists, yet when reckoning with the opportunity to resist their clamour en masse, we fall curiously silent. In a battle between flaming fundamentalists and mute moderates, who do you think is going to win?

I'm not saying that standing up to intimidation is easy. This past spring, the Muslim world made it that much more difficult. A 56-member council of Islamic countries pushed the UN Human Rights Council to adopt a resolution against the "defamation of religion". Pakistan led the charge. Focused on Islam rather than on faith in general, the resolution allows repressive regimes to squelch freedom of conscience further - and to do so in the guise of international law.

On occasion, though, the people of Pakistan show that they don't have to be muzzled by clerics and politicians. Last year, civil society groups vocally challenged a set of anti-female laws, three decades old and supposedly based on the Koran. Their religiously respectful approach prompted even mullahs to hint that these laws are man-made, not God-given. This month, too, Pakistanis forced their Government to lift restrictions on the press. No wonder my own book, translated into Urdu and posted on my website, is being downloaded in droves. Religious authorities won't let it be sold in the markets. But they can't stop Pakistanis - or other Muslims - from satiating a genuine hunger for ideas.

In that spirit, it's high time to ban hypocrisy under the banner of Islam. Rushdie is not the problem. Muslims are. After all, the very first bounty on Rushdie's head was worth $US2 million. It rose to $US 2.5 million. Then came higher reward numbers. The chief benefactor, Iran's government, claimed that the money had been profitably invested. Looks like Jews are not the only people handy at business.

Source



Hope for Old Europe?

At last, some signs of resistance to Islamist radicals

In September of last year, Robert Redeker, a French philosopher, went into hiding after getting death threats for an op-ed piece he wrote on Islam. In his short piece for the conservative daily Le Figaro, Redeker argued that while Jesus was a "master of love," Mohammed was "a master of hate." Islam, he noted, was the only major religion for which war was integral to its theology.

Outside of a handful of intellectuals, like Andre Glucksmann, and a stray politician or two, Redeker had no defenders. When famed Al Jazeera personality Sheik Youseff al-Quaradawi, scourge of the Jews and crusaders, took to the airwaves to denounce the blasphemer, Le Monde echoed his condemnations. Yet just ten months later, Nicolas Sarkozy has been elected French president on a platform of affirming France's Enlightenment heritage.

Sarkozy's road to the Elysee Palace was paved not only by the mini-Intifada in the Paris banlieues, but also by a memorable public exchange about Islam. An intellectually confident Sarkozy, then the interior minister, debated suave, articulate Tariq Ramadan, the grandson and heir of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. With 6 million viewers watching, Sarkozy asked Ramadan, famed as an Islamic version of a Euro-Communist, if he agreed with his brother Hani Ramadan--who had argued, in line with Muslim law, that adulterous women should be stoned to death. Pressed to agree or disagree without obfuscation, Ramadan, his Western facade crumbling, said he favored a "moratorium" on such stoning. Sarkozy responded with anger, "A moratorium?" He went on to mock the Islamists' leftist apologists. "If it is regressive not to want to stone women, I avow that I am a regressive."

Across the channel, the British elites went even further than did the French in abasing themselves before Islamic extremists. In the wake of the 7/7 London bombings, Prime Minister Tony Blair named the same Tariq Ramadan--hailed as a moderate by supposed liberals like Oxford's Timothy Garton Ash--as an advisor on Islamic matters. In a similar vein, London's mayor, Ken Livingstone, praised Sheik Quaradawi as a moderate and treated him as an honored guest. Many British intellectuals and pols had once rallied to the defense of Salman Rushdie when the Iranians issued a fatwa for his death, but in more recent years they've ignored or downplayed his plight. Similarly, the Danish cartoon affair, which raised the most fundamental issues of freedom of speech, produced a cowed response from the British press and pols about the importance of not offending Muslims.

But there are signs of a shift in England as well. Blair, who is about to leave office, has knighted Rushdie. A Pakistani legislator greeted the announcement with a call for suicide attacks on England. Blair responded in turn with aplomb.

Writing in the Observer, the jihad-friendly Guardian's Sunday paper, left-wing journalist Will Hutton has admitted that "the space in which to argue that Islam is an essentially benign religion seems to narrow with every passing day." "The West," he continued, "provokes Islam not by doing anything, although what it does is hardly helpful; it provokes at least some strands of Islamic thought simply by being." That means "the only way we can live together peaceably with Islam is if we don't compromise our own values." Hutton's argument buttresses the point made by repentant jihadi Ed Husain in the left-wing New Statesman. Husain, who has received veiled death threats, argues that "the most powerful weapon against Islamists and jihadists is to create public spaces in which former extremists can discuss why they entered Islamist networks and why they left." "This removes," he said, "the impenetrable mystique of these networks. It opens up their underworld." Here is a liberal ! answer to the problem of illiberalism.

In recent months, notes David Goodhart, the editor of the liberal journal Prospect, the British government has changed its attitude toward purportedly moderate Muslim spokesmen. Goodhart himself had previously defended Tariq Ramadan from criticism, including Paul Berman's recent piece in the New Republic. But he now has second thoughts about the Oxford philosopher, prompted by a recent Ramadan article in the Guardian advocating a different kind of moratorium--on asking Muslims to integrate into British society. It appears, says Goodhart, that the real Tariq Ramadan has instructed British Muslims to remain in social and intellectual isolation.

For the past decade, men like Ramadan have played a skillful double game. They have used Western liberal tropes to undermine Western values--extremism, they would suggest, was just another form of free speech. Aiding them in this game have been Western apologists for Islamic extremism such as Ian Buruma and Tony Judt, who brand courageous dissenters from Islamist orthodoxy like Ayaan Hirsi Ali "enlightenment fundamentalists."

The British have tried multiculturalism; the tolerant Dutch have allowed Muslims to create a separate "pillar" within their society; the French insist on the model of Jacobin uniformity; the Spanish have been merely craven. All have failed. But as Hutton argues, the best route for the West is to be true to its own heritage. If, like the courageous Danish prime minister Anders Rasmussen, Europeans unambiguously stand up to the Islamists, they will flush out double dealers like Ramadan while allowing the Ed Husains of the world to directly engage the extremists.

Source



Race As Social Construct With Factual Basis

Post lifted from Randall Parker. See the original for links

An unrealistic typical inside-the-dogma-boundaries debate about race, this one at The New Republic, ellicits a response from Razib at Gene Expression. Razib says race is not simply an ideological construct.

Race is a social construction. But it is not one constructed purely from human ideology. That many perceive Greeks as white and Turks as non-white is a reflection of social axioms (Christians are white, Muslims are brown). That may perceive Greeks as white and Thai as non-white is not a reflection of social axioms (Greeks exhibit physical characteristics of the white race, Thais do not). Humanists are well schooled in the interplay between ideology and facts in generating a narrative of the world. To pretend as if there is no factual basis in the outlines of an ideology is a denial of reality, which would less concerning if not for the fact that most Americans parrot this very line about race as if it was universally accepted.

I like to cite the example of dog breeds. Border Collies, Australian Shepherds, and Belgian Malinois are different breeds. Some dogs sit clearly inside the definition of Border Collie or Aussie or Malinois. Others are mixes. Just because mixes exist does not mean that the group average characteristics of each breed isn't unique. Just because mixes exist doesn't mean that breeds do not exist or that breed labels are not useful. Breed names have real world utility. If you are near Golden Retriever who is barking at you your odds of getting bit or even killed are a lot lower than if you are near a Rottweiler that is barking at you. Group average differences in behavior rationally should influence your choices about house pets, guard dogs, or defensive behavior when challenged by a stranger dog.

Responding to the same TNR discussion Steve Sailer repeats his common sensical definition of race: "a partly inbred extended family".

I've long felt my single biggest contribution was coming up with a definition of "racial group" that was both rigorous and common-sensical ("a partly inbred extended family"). Simply having a useful definition should do much to dispel the hysteria, bad-faith, status-seeking, and general air of nonsense surrounding the topic of race.

On the other hand, my definition hasn't exactly swept like wildfire through the intellectual world as Chowkwanyun's essay demonstrates. But that's the way it generally is. You don't persuade famous thinkers, like, say, Richard Rorty. You outlive them. A new generation then comes along that doesn't have their egos invested in bad old ideas.

So, I was pleased to see in TNR a reply to the article by Justin Shubow that demonstrates a good familiarity with state-of-the-art thinking on the subject.


Why is Steve seeing a sensible idea getting adopted more quickly? I think the internet has accelerated the speed at which ideas spread. New ideas (or previously marginalized ideas) get put in front of many more pairs of eyes and lots of people who do not have vested interests in the current conventional wisdom decide the current conventional wisdom is wrong.

My guess is that the gap between the conventional wisdom and empirical reality is going to get narrower because the gatekeepers of the conventional wisdom are experiencing a reduced ability to control what people read and hear. Some of the middlemen in the markets for ideas are getting automated out of existence just as distributors of many physical products have gotten replaced with computer systems that allow more direct shipments.

Some pessimists think the defenders of conventional wisdom are still holding the line and keeping everyone in line. But my sense of it is that the intellectual building they constructed to hold everyone inside of might still look strong but it has termites. A lot of people are still afraid to publically speak their minds. But a growing number are changing their beliefs in the privacy of their own minds (or hiding behind pseudonyms as bloggers and blog commenters) and they are waiting looking for signals for when to all start speaking truthfully all at once. Those signals for when honesty becomes possible are coming soon and will come in the form of scientific evidence from DNA sequencing studies.



Another attempt to solve Australia's most intractible problem

Nothing works well but Aborigines were safer and healthier under the old paternalistic system. It seems that a partial return to that is underway



Australia’s Aborigines were stripped of the right of self-rule yesterday after the Government declared the widespread sexual abuse of Aboriginal children to be a national emergency. John Howard, the Prime Minister, banned the sale of alcohol across an area the size of France and imposed restrictions on access to pornography. He also announced tight controls on welfare benefits, which will be cut if children fail to attend school. Aboriginal families will be required to spend at least half their fortnightly welfare on food and essentials.

In a statement to Parliament the Prime Minister said: “We are dealing with children of the tenderest age who have been exposed to the most terrible abuse from the time of their birth, virtually. Any semblance of maintaining the innocence of childhood is a myth in so many of these communities, and we feel very strongly that this kind of action is needed.” In what amounts to the end of a decades-long and largely failed path of self-determination for Aboriginal people, hundreds of extra police will be deployed in northern Australia to enforce the laws, which will apply on land that has been returned to Aboriginal ownership over the past 30 years.

The sudden move was prompted by the findings of an inquiry, released last week, that showed alarming levels of sexual abuse of Aboriginal children. The inquiry, led by a leading QC and an Aboriginal child expert, found that children were being abused in each of the 50 settlements that they visited in northern Australia. There are hundreds of such settlements, many with fewer than 100 people. The inquiry, established by the government of the Northern Territory, found that children were being abused by Aboriginal and nonAboriginal adults. It concluded that “rivers of grog” and a lack of education were great contributors to the levels of abuse.

It also found that very young Aboriginal girls had been taken into Darwin by nonAboriginal men, who traded sex for drugs. Girls aged between 12 and 15 years were being provided with cash and gifts for having sex with white mine-workers. Video and other forms of pornography were used widely by men in Aboriginal communities, and overcrowded housing conditions meant that children were exposed to sexual activity from a very young age, the inquiry reported.

Mr Howard said that he was concerned over what he considered to be the Northern Territory’s inadequate response to the findings, and that was why the Government was using its powers to seize control of the Aboriginal settlements there. He said that every child under the age of 16 would be checked by teams of doctors which would be sent into Aboriginal areas. Remote schools would receive more funding so that they could provide pupils with a meal every day. The settlements will be under federal control for the next five years; able-bodied unemployed will be made to repair houses and clean up communities in return for continued welfare payments.

The decades-long entry-permit system, under which Aboriginal people have controlled access to the 660,000sq km (255,000sq miles) of Aboriginal lands in northern Australia, will be largely scrapped.

The measures were condemned by leaders of Aboriginal communities. The lawyer Michael Mansell, an Aboriginal activist [Actually a white Leftist -- complete with blond hair] , said that the Government’s actions were an “immoral abuse of power” aimed at taking over people’s lives. “Mitch”, a member of a government board helping Aborigines who were taken from their parents under past assimilation laws, said: “I’m absolutely disgusted by this patronising government control. Tying drinking with welfare payments is just disgusting. If they’re going to do that, they’re going to have to do that with every single person in Australia, not just black people.” Mr Howard urged of Western Australia, Queensland and New South Wales, where the federal Government does not have the power to override local legislatures, to introduce similar bans on the distribution of alcohol.

Alan Carpenter, Premier of Western Australia, said that his government was addressing the issue of child abuse, and questioned why Mr Howard had declared it a national emergency after 11 years in office. Throughout his premiership Mr Howard has focused on practical measures to tackle Aboriginal disadvantage, often angering critics with his tough-love approach at the expense of symbolism, such as an apology for past injustices. There are about 470,000 Aborigines in the 20 million population of Australia. They are the country’s most impoverished community, with life expectancy more than 17 years lower than the national average.

Source

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.


For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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