I got an email this morning from someone who asked me: "Are you religious? Do you have a hidden agenda? Are you a christian, budhist, whatever?...I'm curious about your deepest motives."
I responded that there is nothing in the way of a hidden agenda about my religion. It is quite open, as anyone can see who takes a look at the Jihad Watch Book page, but that is a separate question from what I am doing at Jihad Watch. As I have said many times, Jihad Watch is for all those who are resisting jihad violence: Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, whatever. The Vice President of the Jihad Watch Board, Hugh Fitzgerald, and another principal member of the Board, Ibn Warraq, are atheists. I have no interest in the theocracy that many fantasize that Christians want to establish here. I am just trying to stimulate resistance to jihadist violence among all people.
My column below from Human Events should be read with that in mind: I am not engaging in religious triumphalism, but am noting clear distinctions when they actually exist. The resistance to jihad cannot prevail as long as this befogged moral and theological equivalence keeps attention from being paid to the real source of the problem.
Are all religions equal in their capacity to inspire fanaticism and violence? In the wake of the Koran flushing scandal, Tom Regan of the Christian Science Monitor blog wrote a piece to that effect. Even though that scandal has faded from the headlines, the attitudes Regan expressed remain—and interfere with our ability to resist the global jihad. Taking issue with the assertion by Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe that “Christians, Jews, and Buddhists don’t lash out in homicidal rage when their religion is insulted” and “don’t call for holy war and riot in the streets,” Regan wrote that Jacoby had made “an interesting point. There’s only one problem with it—it’s wrong.”“Unfortunately,” declared Regan, “even a cursury [sic] scan of the headlines from the past few years, or even this past week, shows how wrong it is. Shall we talk about the religious leaders in Israel who have threatened violence and riots, and perhaps worse, to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his supporters, if he goes ahead with his disengagement plan?”
Did Ariel Sharon flush a Torah? Of course not. These people are angered because they think his plan threatens Israel’s survival, not because they think Sharon has insulted Judaism.
Regan goes on to mention the “Jewish religious zealot, who believed in 1995 that there was ‘a religious commandment’ to kill Yitzhak Rabin,” the “whole decades-long situation in Northern Ireland,” the “Christian militias who murdered hundreds of people in the Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1982,” and “Serbian Christians who murdered 20,000 Muslims in 1995.” Not one example, in other words, of Jews or Christians murdering innocents because they believed their religion had been insulted.
The question here is not whether or not Jews or Christians commit violence. Of course they do. Human nature is everywhere the same. The question Regan is obfuscating is whether or not Islam as an ideology exhorts people to violence. Manifestly it does, and violence committed by members of other religious traditions does nothing to mitigate that fact: Islam is unique among world religions in having a developed doctrine mandating violence against unbelievers. This has spawned in our day a global network of Muslims dedicated to jihad. Are Jews targeting non-Jews, or Christians non-Christians, on a global basis? Of course not. Until the Muslim and non-Muslim world are ready to acknowledge the role of Islam in inspiring people to violence, that violence will continue.
Regan goes on to invoke those who threatened death to Michael Schiavo, and the murderers of abortionists. Yet no violence actually occurred in the Schiavo case—except that done to Terri Schiavo—and the murder of abortionists has been condemned by all mainstream Christian traditions. Where are the mainstream Muslim traditions that condemn jihad violence? The Free Muslims March Against Terror drew 50 people. Fifty. Why?
Our need to answer this question is not just Judeo-Christian boosterism, a chant of “Yea, team! The West is Best!” The nature of jihad violence has serious consequences for the Bush policy of attempting to destabilize terrorism by establishing democracies across the Middle East. It shows how difficult it will be to export the live-and-let-live attitude necessary to make for a society that enacts the will of the majority while protecting the rights of the minority. Thomas Jefferson said: “If my neighbor believes in one god, or twenty, is of no concern to me, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” But is that exportable as a political credo to societies in which the legal tradition includes death for blasphemy and apostasy?
All religions are not the same, and do not have the same capacity to inspire violence. As un-PC as that is, it is the truth. It must be faced. Regan reflects conventional PC wisdom, to be sure—views that are held across the spectrum from Left to Right—and until this wisdom is seen for the hollow and deceptive thing it is, we are all that much more vulnerable.
Im an athiest, so i guess i look to how religious adgendas in my country affect my well being and the rights of us all in a political sense..The Christians stoped burning witches years ago where as Islam hasn't! To me its as simple as that......
PS
How many Christians behead, burn , bomb or sue you for making fun of Jesus ...... really we should all have the right to flush the Koran if we so feel like it......
It seems Dr. Spencer's detractors haven't had enough success in muzzling his free speech with wild accusations of 'racism' and 'bigotry'. So now thay've to add a zionist-conspiracy or evangelical-fanatism story to spicen things up even more....!
Me, I'm an agnostic. God knows I tried really hard to believe in Him. I tried different religions while growing up. Am now a Buddhist by conviction. But one thing I know - I will never be a moslem. Ever.
The overly zealous in any movement, political, social, or religious will always go overboard. Islam is one that is consistent in its zeal to press forward at the expense of others. The problem is Islam and will be Islam because there true Islam is zealous, fanatical, and extreme, and unlike all other religions.
Fellow JW/DW bloggers: you might want to check MEMRI.org's site for the newest post -- an Egyptian "historian" told his Saudi TV audience that the US is acting as a proxy for the Vatican in the war against Islam and that the US staged 9/11 on the order of the World Council of Churches. I know we have some nutty conspiracy theorists in the west, but they really take the cake in the Muslim world.
"Regan goes on to mention the “Jewish religious zealot, who believed in 1995 that there was ‘a religious commandment’ to kill Yitzhak Rabin,” the “whole decades-long situation in Northern Ireland,” the “Christian militias who murdered hundreds of people in the Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1982,” and “Serbian Christians who murdered 20,000 Muslims in 1995.” Not one example, in other words, of Jews or Christians murdering innocents because they believed their religion had been insulted."
--- from the article above
Regan's "bad faith" is demonstrated in the absurdity of his examples. He does not mention the millions of victims of Muslim religious fanaticsim, the fanaticism that, in a previous age, everyone from Montaigne and Spinoza and Hume and Diderot, to John Quincy Adams and Tocqueville and Winston Churchill (see his famous paragraph on Muslim fanaticism in "The River War")noted.
Instead, he finds a handful of examples that supposedly support his view that "religious fanaticism" is an equal-opportunity employer, and there is nothing about Islam as a belief-system that should make us think its adherents are particularly susceptible to fanatical fits of murderous hatred. Well, let's take Regan's adduced examples in turn, and see if he is right about Islam, or if Spinoza and Hume, Tocqueville and Winston Churchill, and thousands of visitors to Muslim countries who reported on what they saw, in the bad (or good) old days when no one felt so profoundly as Mr. Regan so obviously does not to make distinctions, to insist on symmetries and likenesses or even identities of behavior, when none exist, and where analysis of what makes Islam so very different from other religions (Islam depends entirely on the distinction between Believer and Unbeliever -- that is the core of this belief-system that originates as a doctrine, composed of pagan Arab lore as well as stories and figures appropriated, and distorted, from Judaism and Christianity, to justify and promote Arab conquest of, precisely, those larger, richer, more advanced and settled populations of Christians and Jews whom the Arabs encountered, conquered, subjugated).
Regan's first example is the assassination of Rabin. This had nothing to do with Rabin's religious beliefs or lack of them. It was a political assassination, and it was prompted by a series of political undertakings by Rabin that his killer believed inimical to the survival of Israel. In this respect, the killer -- who believed him to be a foolish appeaser -- did not behave differently from, say, a Czech student who might have taken a shot at Chamberlain when that smiling appeaser returned home from Munich with his umbrella, and his complacency, and his "Peace in Our Time."
The next example Regan offers are the killings at "Sabra and Shatila." Actually it is amusing to see him mention the Christian killers, for one suspects that he is of the camp that likes to ignore that little fact and continue to allude to the "Israeli" massacres at Sabra and Shatila (by the way, there were killings only at one of the camps, and those killed were 1) almost entirely men of military age and 2) included Jihadists from as far away as Pakistan who had come to fight the good fight against the Christians of Lebanon. Those Christians who, under Elie Hobeika, who killed were not prompted by Christian doctrine, but by revenge -- the revenge for the mass killings of Christians up and down the land, from Damour (a far more premeditated ooperation) where the PLO slaughtered Lebanese Christians, as they did in so many other places (simply go to any of the Maronite websites for the grisly details and lists). There was nothing specifically "Christian" and no doctrine at all -- this was war, and this was revenge. Muslims, on the other hand, are taught that they can do whatever they feel like to any non-Muslims who, in the Muslim view, stand in the way -- merely stand in the way, even in their own, Infidel lands (because there are no "Infidel" lands -- the world belongs to Allah, and to his people)-- of the spread of Islam.
The third example Regan adduces is that of those Serbs who killed Bosnian Muslims. But this, too, was a war about power. The Serbs felt, with considerable justification, that Izetbegovic was intent on bringing back something like the Ottoman period, for Izetbegovic had written, explicitly, that he intended to reinstate the Sharia. This may not have been taken seriously in the Western capitals; in Serbia it caused shudders. The explanation for some Serbians behaving unacceptably (by no means all, though the Western world has treated Serbia, and Serbs, as pariahs -- without bothering to investigate the historical record, and memories of everything from the devshirme (levy of Christian children over the centuries of Turkish rule) to the Bosnian S.S. formed of Muslim volunteers, and even memories of Jasenovac, Operation Kozara, and a thousand other more recent things). And what the Serbs feared -- the destruction of venerable and ancient Orhtodox churches, the driving out of hundreds of thousands of Serbs by Muslims -- all that did, in fact, come to pass.
But back to the massacre of Muslims. Was that religious in nature, or was it a political reaction to the threat, as Serbs saw it, of a renewal of the possiblity of something like what had been endured for centuries, since the Battle of Kosovo (in what on old even non-Serbian maps is shown as "Greater Serbia" which extends far beyond modern Serbia), under Muslim rule.
It is curious. Islam is not only a religion but a geopolitical system, and contains rules for warfare, rules for how to treat the enemy once conquered, how to divide the loot, and so on. Yet when people who are non-Muslim fight back against Muslim threats, or take revenge on Muslims, Regan would have us identify that revenge-taking, or that preemptive attack, on Muslims as "religious" in nature. But the Christian Lebanese, and the Orthodox Serbians, were not prompted by religion -- or rather, they were prompted by fury, and fears, of what those who were prompted by their own religion (Islam) to act as they did in massacring Christians at Damour or as the Muslims (both Turks and locals) did to Orthodox Serbians over centuries, whenever those Serbians seemed not to accept their inferior status, in their own lands.
One is still free to condemn these acts. We can disapprove of what Elie Hobeika (later an ally of the Syrians) and a few Christians maddened by the years of mass killings of Christians, particularly Maronites, did; one is still free to condemn, not Serbia and "the Serbs" but those who massacred civilians.
But what Regan does is illegitimate, though as noted by Robert Spencer above, entirely representative of the vulgar "they all do it" school of apologetics. The history of Islam, over 1350 years, shows something unique. There is nothing in any other religion like the religiously-prompted and justified mass killing of 60-70 million Hindus in Hindustan by Muslim invaders.
How much easier to pretend that "everyone is alike," and "everyone does it" and so on. Of course one can be a Christian or Jewish or Buddhist fanatic. But it is a question of frequency, of degree, of likelihood. There is something about Islam that many people, over many centuries, have noticed. Look at the crazed, hate-filled faces of those all-male Muslim groups shouting for murder in Gaza, or Ramallah when those two Israeli reservists had their eyes gouged out (and that was just the beginning of the fun for the whole crowd assembled below) and then were killed, or those primitive mobs shouting in Pakistan. Are we not to see those faces, nearly demented with hate, day after day, week after week, year after year, and come to no conclusions?
None?
Hugh - Bravo. This is what I like to see -- an disciplined analysis backed up with facts.
Would that our our esteemed political and religious leaders, historians, and journalists have a similar knowledge base and analytical ability. It seems they lack the will to become informed and educated, and the will to follow through in a disciplined and logical manner.
I know we have some nutty conspiracy theorists in the west, but they really take the cake in the Muslim world.
Posted by: waterdragon52 at June 10, 2005 08:43 AM
Waterdragon et al.,
Thanks for pointing out MEMRI'S new post--that's such a great site!
The "conspiracy" method of cognition has been mentioned in a couple of posts today. It's a curious way of thinking, quite puzzling to most of us, and some of you might be interested in another article that talks in some detail about the Muslim dependence on conspiracy to assuage their feelings of incompetence and dependency, and to justify their universal habit of "blaming others" for all their problems.
It is an article by Richard Landes (I referred to it before, maybe even yesterday) who teaches at Boston University and specializes in the origins of European society around the turn of the first millennium. The name of the article is "Jihad, Apocalypse, and Anti-Semitism."
The address is: http://www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-24.htm.
Verrrrry interestink!
That link doesn't work (thanks, CGW!). I think this one does. I have been getting about 4 hours of sleep a night for the last two weeks, which may account for many of the really dumb things that I've done here lately!
http://www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-24.htm
Regan needs to do what he ignored before writing- read the Koran, and read the Hadiths. If you don't know the handbook, you can't interpret the results correctly.
What would he say to gems Like:
"It is an honor that the first thing down a baby's throat was the saliva of Mohammad."
-Bukhari vol 5, book 58 #248.
Or:
Assassination is okay. "Atik and some other Muslims were sent to assassinate Abu Rafi the Jew. He was attacked in the dark when he was sleeping." (An assassin broke his leg while escaping.)"Mohammad miraculously cured the assassin's broken leg." -Bukhari vol 5, book 59, #371.
Or:
Religious intolerance and inequality"No Muslim should be killed for killing a disbeliever."
-Bukhari vol 1, book 3, #111.
Telling flattering lies is okay. "He who makes peace by inventing good information or saying good things is not a liar."
-Bukhari vol 4, book 49, #857 .
Deception for gain is okay. "Mohammad reneged on his treaty with the Jews."
Bukhari vol 3, book 50, #890 .
Escape clause for any Muslim to ever be a sinner or for any Muslim to have ever been guilty of sin. "One is not a Muslim while stealing, being immoral, or drinking." (But becomes a Muslim again once they stop.)
-Bukhari vol 3, book 43, #655.
Injustice is okay. "Women get one half of the inheritance of a man."
Bukhari vol 4, book 52, #10.
Religious intolerance and hypocrisy. "Kill apostates."
Bukhari vol 4, book 52, #260. VERSUS: "There is no compulsion in religion." -Koran.
Science. "A she-monkey was stoned to death by other monkeys for illegal sexual intercourse."
Bukhari vol 5, book 58, #118 .
'Holy' Book deception. "There are no abrogated verses -except where something better is given."
Bukhari vol 6, book 60, #8.
Regan is clearly playing a game whose rules he doesn't grasp.
A deceptive schmuck himself.
"US is acting as a proxy for the Vatican in the war against Islam and that the US staged 9/11 on the order of the World Council of Churches."
STOP THE PRESSES....NEW HEADLINES....
"ISLAMO GRASSY KNOLL SOCIETY RELEASES JEWS FROM 9/11 SUSPICIONS"
Hugh:
All I can say is thank heavens Regan is unaware of that nutbar sect of Orthodox Jews who lobby for Israel's destruction because there can't be a Jewish state prior to the Messiah's appearance, not to mention all the secular Jewish fanatics like Noam Chomsky, his even more mentally-afflicted and less talented acolyte Norman Finkelstein, or the contingent of similarly disposed Israelis like Ilan Pappe and his grad student who was found to have libelled, in court, some Israeli army vets who the grad student accused of ethnic cleansing or something in that order.
Cubed:
As Chris Hitchens once said of Michael Moore, most of the people who subscribe to conspiracy theories see them everywhere except where they actually exist.
As a non-religious person, I, of course, worry about the jihadist mentality but I can see the vast doctrinal differences between the religions. It’s clear that Islam is unique threat.
However, let me note the cheap tactic – an ad hominem – that tries to discredit, intimidate and suppress the criticism of Islam by my Christian (and Jewish) friends. When I argue about Islam it is usually assumed that I’m religious and that I’m not logically entitled to criticize Islam without being a hypocrite or bigot. When it’s clear that I’m not religious, I seem to get treated like an impartial observer.
I’ve often exploited this for the sake of argument but it occurred to me that this is grossly unfair and disenfranchises the vast majority of Americans from the debate. Since anyone can face the facts, a religious background shouldn’t be a question in the assessment of the facts and arguments. As I’ve said, this is an ad hominem.
A few times I’ve tried the following argument for size: as a non-believer, I have to fight for my life but I’m grateful that Christians choose to fight along side of me instead of living in dhimmitude. This usually leaves my interlocutor speechless.
Jason is exactly correct. I am a Christian, and I'm proud to stand with my friends who aren't Christians as we expose the ideology of Islamism. To be effective, one needs to know the many fact and arguments (religious and nonreligious) which lead to the truth: Islam is first a geopolitical ideology, entwined with religion.
All of us, of whatever religious convicton or of no religious conviction, must not fall into divide-and-conquer tactics and we need to be able to respond rationally to the "ad hominem" attacks. Dhimmitude is most dangerous.
JasonP:
Today's frontpagemag.com featured a symposium on honour killings. One of the participants, a psychologist from Israel, attributes the general predisposition towards violence among Muslim males that may manifest either as terrorist, suicide bomber or "honour killer" arises from their own sense of powerlessness over their own lives as they are so indoctrinated in the notion that they may not question authority, religious or the quasi-secular/religious when it's convenient Baathist variant of Arab/Muslim totalitarianism. She also notes the way it infects females and predisposees them well towards nurturing suicide bombers and the like.
I think she's right on the money when she says these killings, whether of women or unarmed civilians, are not about honour, but about their own sad sense of powerlessness. I think she's absolutely spot on.
Of course religions aren't created equal. As an Evangelical Christian, I say there's the religion that God announced, of salvation through Christ, his righteousness, atonement, and victory of death; then there's a host of man-made ones. Of the latter, perhaps some are better than others.
But not all ways of disagreeing are equally disagreeable. Sometimes, you can disagree strongly, yet still walk away with a bit of mutual respect and willingness to at least live together. Granted, the jihadis are not people like that, but when I see the relativist left walking around calling me a Nazi abd a racist simply because I believe there's such a thing as truth, I'm not sure if an alliance is possible. And, quite honestly, I doubt that the secular left will stop making its moral equivalences only when it finds itself in Theo van Gogh's position.
But, with all due respect to Hugh, Ibn Warraq, and even KJ, who've provided a lot of informative posts, I'm not enthusiastic about a crusade. If "the West" is going to stand for free abortions, homosexual marriage, tax-subsidized "Piss Christs", and the right of a hormone-charged adolescent to rail against his parents who are justly afraid his raging hormones will get him in trouble, then the West simply isn't worth saving--and God has made it crystal clear since the days of Sodom and Gomorrah what He thinks of such things.
Excuse me for noticing, the secular liberals of the MSM decided to label Khomeini and Co. as "fundamentalists" in order to make Christians like me look un-American and to insinuate we're making bombs in the basement, too. The dopes in the U.S. Government (and State and the CIA are chockablock full of liberals, folks, not rock-ribbed reactionaries) pick up on it; and the next thing we know, half of Malaysia and three-quarters of Turkey decide that the US Government sees them as enemies for abstaining from pork and hoping to make the hajj.
Then, when the jihadis attack us, the same MSM who'll breathe fire on me simply for daring to vote my convictions gets cold feet. The feminists, who have the most to lose should the jihadis win, start telling me that maybe we'll just have to give up a few liberties to accommodate Islam. And, there's a whole swathe of the secular left which would rather shake hands with the jihadis who've made it plain they want to slit all of our throats than to truly respect my freedom of speech. And, I have a sneaky suspicion that the secular left, when it collectively sees the jihad for what it is, will still think that my place in the fight is to sacrifice my son to ensure that Hollywood and the NYSlimes may continue defaming me.
All I can say is thank heavens Regan is unaware of that nutbar sect of Orthodox Jews who lobby for Israel's destruction because there can't be a Jewish state prior to the Messiah's appearance,
Posted by: waterdragon52
Jesus ALREADY built a new Israel - made without hands.
King David gave a prophecy about it:
Psa 149:6 Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, and a twoedged sword {Word of God] in their hand; To execute upon them the judgment [already] written: this honour have all his saints. Psa 149:9
Mic 1:2 Hear, all ye people; hearken, O earth, and all that therein is: and let the Lord GOD be witness against you, THE LORD FROM HIS HOLY TEMPLE {which temple ye are} 1Cr 3:17
Jeremiah also told of the new temple:
Jer 31:33 But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.
1Cr 3:16 Know ye not that ye are the temple of God?
Mat 12:37 For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.
I am not proselytizing - just giving the facts.
And if the Jewish and Christian religions of this world would unite with the actual truths - they'd have the power to take down the stronghold called Islam.
And that is what makes Islam so powerful - They are united.
"I doubt that the secular left will stop making its moral equivalences only when it finds itself in Theo van Gogh's position"
Kepha? I do believe - that day is right around the bend.
Watch - and see