An Indian reporter asks a Pakistani TV host, "As a believer, why are you afraid of shari'ah law?" His answer is illuminating in many ways. For one thing, it indicates how much violent intimidation underlies popular support for Sharia. Most people, given a free choice, would not choose to live under a draconian totalitarian system. They might choose to do so if they're convinced it is the will of the One who created them, and to whom they will be accountable. Or they might choose to do so if they know they'll be killed for choosing differently.
But that, of course, exposes the weakness at the heart of the jihad movement. They can win the hearts and minds of a few, but most will be going along because they're too afraid not to. That situation could be exploited by the non-Muslim West, but only by someone who had the courage to stand up to Sharia and declare explicit opposition to it. No such Churchill, however, is on the horizon.
"Islamists taking over Pakistan," from The Pioneer (thanks to Andrew Bostom):
Sushant Sareen, recently in Pakistan, explains the onward march of radical Islam in this first of a series of despatchesIf Pakistan is an Islamic country, what is your objection to imposing shari'ah as is being demanded by the mullahs? As a believer, why are you afraid of shari'ah law?" I asked a former editor of an Urdu daily and currently the host of a TV programme. His answer: "As an Indian, you obviously would like to see Pakistan go into the Stone Age". I persisted: "Isn't the ideal concept of state in Islam the city state established by the Prophet in which Islamic law was the basic law?" He replied: "That would mean going back into the stone age". I pushed a little further and asked: "Are you willing to say this outside the confines of your office, and stand up in public for what you believe". He looked horrified and said: "Do you think I am mad? I won't be alive an hour after I say this in public".
Clearly, the Islamists are winning the ideological debate on the role of Islam in Pakistan. The liberal, and moderate, sections of Pakistani society are unable to present any convincing argument against the Islamists. Partly because of this, and partly as a result of the persecution complex that Muslims around the world have developed, Pakistani society is getting more and more Islamised and radicalised.
Read it all.
Good article. This is really worrying.
But note how many will say "it's only a few extremists..." etc. A few extremists going on a country.
I feel really sorry for that Indian fellow. Similarly, if one were to stand on a street corner in Gaza and hand out pamphlets saying "suicide bombing is wrong and Hamas is a terrorist organisation" you can be guaranteed to be dead or seriously injured within minutes.
Goes to show that Islamofacism is spreading bigtime in Pakistian.
....Once upon a time in Germany, the doors of the Jews were marked with a yellow star.....one day the soldiers appeared at every house so marked and removed the occupants....about 6 million souls were permantly removed from the face of the earth....
....The Islamic thugs are carrying out a grander plan of extermination....
....Islam is a death cult....Ban Muslim Immigration...Muslim Immigration is pointless and harmful to the host nation...
What Sushant Sareen, the Indian reporter in Pakistan, witnessed was the typical cognitive dissonance that is so common within the educated muslim elites. On the one hand they claim that they are dismayed by the extremist element within their society and, yet, on the other hand they still cling to the extremist ideology of Islam that is responsible for the extremist elements within their society. You find this cognitive dissonance disorder within almost all the Pakistani leaders whether they be the ex-PM Benazir Bhutto (who, ironically was killed by the same jehadi elements that she herself had helped foster during her term as PM) or the current leader Musharraf.
....Once upon a time in Germany, the doors of the Jews were marked with a yellow star.....one day the soldiers appeared at every house so marked and removed the occupants....about 6 million souls were permantly removed from the face of the earth....
exsgtbrown
Just little update; Since the end of WWII eleven countries, including Yemen??, were the protectors of the Holocaust records. There were finally released in 2007.
Of course this is too late for many of the families who are no longer around to find out the fate of their loved ones.
In the article about what a monumental task researching these records would be the caretaker stated that there were records of over 17 million individuals! 17 million!
This is nothing new in Islamic history.
"Silencing" your opposition by killing them is a time honored tradition.
How many millions were killed in Islam's conquest of the Middle East? North Africa? Central Asia? India?
Might makes right.
"But that, of course, exposes the weakness at the heart of the jihad movement. They can win the hearts and minds of a few, but most will be going along because they're too afraid not to."
I wish this were true, but can see no evidence that "most will be going along because they're too afraid not to."
Given a choice, and in a free and secret election, most Muslims will vote for an Islamist party, knowing full will that their goal is to establish an Islamic state, Sharia and all.
Turkey is one fine example of this. The Turkish electorate had a clear choice between an Islamic and secular party, and they opted for the Islamic party (Masgurading as a secular party, of course, but Turkish voters knew this).
If ever Muslim countries cave in to U.S. pressure to introduce democracy into their political systems, you can be certain that no voter intimidation will be necessary to insure Islamist victories.
No believing Muslim will choose liberty, feedom and human rights over God's laws.
"Are you willing to say this outside the confines of your office, and stand up in public for what you believe". He looked horrified and said: "Do you think I am mad? I won't be alive an hour after I say this in public".
To the Pakistani host:
Enjoy the stone age. It obviously means more to you than your own principles. Don't say you weren't warned. Don't complain about the US "supporting" Musharraf.
It's getting old but it still applies:
You're choosing safety over liberty. You will get neither.
Did the Stone Age have prophets wandering around telling men they could have 4 wives and that they could beat them?
Maybe, just maybe, the Stone Age might have been more enlightened than.....................just a thought.
tanstaafl wrote:
"Maybe, just maybe, the Stone Age might have been more enlightened than.....................just a thought."
That's right, don't offend Cave Men by comparing them with Islamist fanatics.
I know, it's a really bad TV show based on the Geico "so easy a Cave Man can do it" commercials.
"Do you think I am mad? I won't be alive an hour after I say this in public".
The only people with the power to stop the march of Islamic radicalism and the creep of Sharia are the Muslims residing in the affected nations. If people, such as this television host, are not willing to lays their lives on the line, how will they defeat the legions that are willing to die to institute Sharia?
The “holy warriors” cannot be reasoned with. And except for very isolated cases, they cannot be reprogrammed. They can only be confronted with force by other Muslims. If the “moderate” Muslims refuse to fight this battle, all is lost in countries such as Pakistan.
Dying for a just cause is not madness. It is principled and it is brave.
Stone Age human culture was preferable to so-called Islamic civilisation.
How do I know?
Easy answer - stone age humans practised the visual arts and did not despise music making.
See the glorious paintings of animals in the caves at Lascaux; see the Neolithic sculptures of the naked female form, all belly and bottom. See the bone and ivory flutes that archaeologists have found.
The 'stone age' Australian Aborigines, without either metal or pottery, maintained into the 19th century a culture which was steeped in music, dance, and the visual arts both 'secular' [purely for fun] and 'sacred' or liturgical/ ceremonial.
Their art varies wildly from region to region, e.g. the awesome Wandjina and 'bradshaw' figures of the Kimberley, the hundreds of thousands of exquisite rock engravings of animals and humans on the Burrup Peninsula, the 'x-ray' art of Arnhem Land; the mysterious 'Quinkan' figures of Cape York); in eastern australia they sculpted mounds of earth into animal and human forms. Even the terribly isolated people of Tasmania, who'd been cut off from the rest of humanity for thousands of years, devoted time and energy to creating stone engravings of bird and animal forms.
Another thing in which traditional tribal stone age Aboriginal Australians were ahead of Muslims, at least, the Arab and Pakistani variety: in the eyes of such Aboriginal Australians, the custom of mating first-degree parallel cousins that Saudi or 'Palestinians' or Muslim Pakistanis engage in generation after generation (man's daughter to his blood brother's son, man's son to his blood brother's daughter) would be regarded with absolute horror, as tantamount to brother-sister incest.
So: stone-age human tribes, practising music (both secular and ceremonial), the visual arts and sculpture, and often carefully avoiding inbreeding, were *ahead* of Islam!
Even many Muslims, such as this Pakistani TV host, know just how wretched Sharia is. The wonder is that these same Muslims don't take that short step farther to a realization that all of Islam is nothing more than a draconian medieval cult founded by a very clever, very brutal inhabitant of the Arabian peninsula in the early seventh century A.D. After all, if one ascertains that Sharia is terrible, horrible enough to put a society into a Stone Age type world, why should that same person not conclude that anything else in Islam is suspect and thus not worthy of respect?
I wonder where 'david xavier' is? The poster who's been assuring us, over and over, in the last couple of weeks, that the Ummah is in general getting steadily better and better, freer and nicer, better educated, more and more westernised?
I wonder if he is going to explain to us in which direction Pakistan is heading?
Because it seems to me that Pakistan (which, with nearly 200 million people, and nuclear weapons, is no small part of the Ummah) - is Islamising, not westernising.
I am not so familiar with the minutiae of Pakistani history to know all the facts, but this notion that it is only recently becoming "radicalized" seems bizarre to me on its face. For example, upon partition, the religious composition of Pakistan certainly was not approaching 100% Muslim -- yet today, for whatever reason and by whatever means, the religious composition of Pakistan today is nearly 100 % Muslim. What happened to all the Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, Hindus, Christians, and others who lived there? Certainly those communities had existed in those regions of Pakistan (now Bangladesh & Pakistan proper) for hundreds or thousands of years, yet today they have disappeared. Genocidally cleansed and mass murdered? Driven from their homes through threats and violence? Forcefully converted? Peacefully "converted to Islam" (yes, I know -- completely absurd...)
Q: What happened to all of those millions upon millions of non-Muslims? If "moderate Pakistan" has eradicated virtually all non Muslims from their domain in 60 short years, -- how "moderate" could it have been in the first place?
jsla
The non-muslim % of pakistan in 1947 was 25%, now 2%
The non-muslim % of bangladesh in 1947 was 28%, now 8%
The muslim % of residual India in 1951 was 10.4%, now 13.4%