Mythical Creatures: Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, Chupacabra, Moderate Muslim
Good article By Ayaan Hirsi Ali, you know, the Dutch Somalian woman that all the crazed jihadis want dead.
See, all my life I have been fascinated with things like the Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, Nessie, you know, all that unexplainable stuff that wild eyed villagers from remote parts of the world have their own name and statue for. Not mocking, the unknown is just that, unknown.
Like Bigfoot:
Or Nessie:
Or the dreaded Chupacabra:
And now…the Moderate Muslim.
Do they even exist? I want proof.
Islam’s Silent Moderates
By Ayaan Hirsi Ali
New York Times Opinion
The woman and the man guilty of adultery or fornication, flog each of them with 100 stripes: Let no compassion move you in their case, in a matter prescribed by Allah, if you believe in Allah and the Last Day. (Koran 24:2)
IN the last few weeks, in three widely publicized episodes, we have seen Islamic justice enacted in ways that should make Muslim moderates rise up in horror.
A 20-year-old woman from Qatif, Saudi Arabia, reported that she had been abducted by several men and repeatedly raped. But judges found the victim herself to be guilty. Her crime is called “mingling”: when she was abducted, she was in a car with a man not related to her by blood or marriage, and in Saudi Arabia, that is illegal. Last month, she was sentenced to six months in prison and 200 lashes with a bamboo cane.
Two hundred lashes are enough to kill a strong man. Women usually receive no more than 30 lashes at a time, which means that for seven weeks the “girl from Qatif,” as she’s usually described in news articles, will dread her next session with Islamic justice. When she is released, her life will certainly never return to normal: already there have been reports that her brother has tried to kill her because her “crime” has tarnished her family’s honor.
We also saw Islamic justice in action in Sudan, when a 54-year-old British teacher named Gillian Gibbons was sentenced to 15 days in jail before the government pardoned her this week; she could have faced 40 lashes. When she began a reading project with her class involving a teddy bear, Ms. Gibbons suggested the children choose a name for it. They chose Muhammad; she let them do it. This was deemed to be blasphemy.
Then there’s Taslima Nasreen, the 45-year-old Bangladeshi writer who bravely defends women’s rights in the Muslim world. Forced to flee Bangladesh, she has been living in India. But Muslim groups there want her expelled, and one has offered 500,000 rupees for her head. In August she was assaulted by Muslim militants in Hyderabad, and in recent weeks she has had to leave Calcutta and then Rajasthan. Taslima Nasreen’s visa expires next year, and she fears she will not be allowed to live in India again.
It is often said that Islam has been “hijacked” by a small extremist group of radical fundamentalists. The vast majority of Muslims are said to be moderates.
But where are the moderates? Where are the Muslim voices raised over the terrible injustice of incidents like these? How many Muslims are willing to stand up and say, in the case of the girl from Qatif, that this manner of justice is appalling, brutal and bigoted — and that no matter who said it was the right thing to do, and how long ago it was said, this should no longer be done?
Usually, Muslim groups like the Organization of the Islamic Conference are quick to defend any affront to the image of Islam. The organization, which represents 57 Muslim states, sent four ambassadors to the leader of my political party in the Netherlands asking him to expel me from Parliament after I gave a newspaper interview in 2003 noting that by Western standards some of the Prophet Muhammad’s behavior would be unconscionable. A few years later, Muslim ambassadors to Denmark protested the cartoons of Muhammad and demanded that their perpetrators be prosecuted.
But while the incidents in Saudi Arabia, Sudan and India have done more to damage the image of Islamic justice than a dozen cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, the organizations that lined up to protest the hideous Danish offense to Islam are quiet now.
I wish there were more Islamic moderates. For example, I would welcome some guidance from that famous Muslim theologian of moderation, Tariq Ramadan. But when there is true suffering, real cruelty in the name of Islam, we hear, first, denial from all these organizations that are so concerned about Islam’s image. We hear that violence is not in the Koran, that Islam means peace, that this is a hijacking by extremists and a smear campaign and so on. But the evidence mounts up.
Islamic justice is a proud institution, one to which more than a billion people subscribe, at least in theory, and in the heart of the Islamic world it is the law of the land. But take a look at the verse above: more compelling even than the order to flog adulterers is the command that the believer show no compassion. It is this order to choose Allah above his sense of conscience and compassion that imprisons the Muslim in a mindset that is archaic and extreme.
If moderate Muslims believe there should be no compassion shown to the girl from Qatif, then what exactly makes them so moderate?
When a “moderate” Muslim’s sense of compassion and conscience collides with matters prescribed by Allah, he should choose compassion. Unless that happens much more widely, a moderate Islam will remain wishful thinking.
Be respectful of others and their opinions. Inflammatory remarks and inane leftist drivel will be deleted. It ain’t about free speech, remember you’re in a private domain. My website, my prerogative.
If you can't handle using your real email address, don't bother posting a comment.
Imprisoned by the self serving degrees and twisted logic of a mad false prophet, there is no room for moderation in islam. As all are made in God’s image, one must reason that compassion is a God given trait. Therefore to ignore one’s own feelings for compassion for another human being is to ignore God.
December 8th, 2007 at 9:25 pmHad I been president on 9-11 I would have far fewer words than ‘ol bushy boy. I would have given the camera a nice Clint Eastwood stare and said, “Let the bug hunt begin…” Let’s face it people, like Glen Beck said, the war on Islam will be a CIVIL war, since obviously our government(s) are not up to the task of even naming our enemy, let alone fighting him…
December 8th, 2007 at 11:36 pmWe hear about ‘moderate’ Islam versus ‘radical’ Islam, as if they are enemies.
Bullshit. They’re two sides of the same coin. Their goals are the same: Islamic domination of the world and the imposition of sharia law.
They differ only in their tactics. Radicals employ jihad: naked violence. “Submit or die.” Moderates employ taquiyya: deception. “Islam is a religion of peace, you have oppressed us for centuries, it’s only fair to give us special treatment, or are you Islamophobic?”
Moderates also employ the demographic weapon. Their goal is to breed a new majority. Islam, when applied to democracy, means one man, one vote, once. Upon gaining power through the ballot box, they will dismantle the host state’s goverment, laws, and traditions, and replace them with sharia.
And with that, we will lose five thousand years of advancement. We will return to the days before even the Code of Hammurabi. The conscripts who built the pyramids had more rights, dignity, and respect that the average subject of the Caliphate. Hell, he had a higher standard of living.
December 8th, 2007 at 11:50 pmThey may be terrorists, but, they’re our terrorists. No snitch.
December 9th, 2007 at 2:35 amNice post, Bash. Just as a question, I’d like to know what “moderate” means when applied to the phrase “moderate Muslim.”
In ophthalmology, a person can have a case of iritis, and it is described as mild, moderate or severe. These terms have very specific meanings. Mild means 1-50 inflamed cells per square micrometer measured by specular microscopy. Moderate is 51-100 inflamed cells. Severe is 100 inflamed cells. These will correlate to the type of medical therapy the patient should receive.
A moderate Muslims is…what? Someone who kinda sorta believes that beheading infidels is okie-dokie? Someone who believes in Mohammed, but rejects certain traditions of the Hadith?
Everyone wants to believe in the existence of a moderate Muslim, as though the individual can determine for themselves what parts of the Koran, Bible, etc., they want to believe in and reject the others.
The plain fact is, you’re a Muslim or you’re not. You’re a Christian or you’re not. You believe in an all-powerful, supernatural force, or you don’t. All the schisms and digressions from classical theological thought only prove that people do disagree on what should and shouldn’t be regarded as the word of God.
But that still leaves us out in the cold as to what a moderate Muslim truly is.
Your thoughts?
December 9th, 2007 at 6:38 amJesus Says Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
December 9th, 2007 at 10:50 amJust think about that statement for a moment then fall on your knees and worship thw Savior of the world
This is how I see it. We didn’t make more Nazis by bombing them. We did not make more Emperial Japanese by bombing them. The problem is we have not killed enough bad guys to make an impression. In WWII we would have flattened Fallucia. Example: Dresden. The Arab’s penchant to deny accountablity boggles the mind. We have got to let the pussy moderate Mooslems know they are gonna loose big if they continue to ignore the extremists in their mists. Pat, the movie that has to be remade is Steven Decatur’s story. We had to pay tribute to those moderate mooslims for decades until…. we got a navy and… can you guess? shelled the guy’s home. Beautiful.
December 9th, 2007 at 11:38 amhttp://tinyurl.com/3xpda2
i met one once,an indian muslim[who also had the haj] owned an indian restaurant near to where i live a big place on the drinking circuit,used to stand behind the bar serving drinks to us “infidels” while his staff ran the business most of which were not muslims some hindu and christian and as long as it was not a friday he would accept a drink usually a small whiskey.they are out there just damned hard to find,there were some drunken discussions concerning religion[the content of which are lost in a fog of beer and whiskey fumes] which were taken with good humour and with very good hospitality[hic].the place is now appartments mores the pity
December 9th, 2007 at 12:22 pm[had done the haj] insert, brain fingers error error fail
December 9th, 2007 at 12:23 pmThe peaces of Islam are submission or death. The “moderate” just gives you a bit longer to choose.
December 9th, 2007 at 3:23 pmForcing people into a misguided religion just shows how wrong Islam is.
December 9th, 2007 at 7:47 pmmoderate in religiousity perhaps, but they are all fanatical when it comes to the ideology of islam which is to spread around the world at subvert the laws of freedom and democracy.
December 10th, 2007 at 7:16 pm