Afghanistan Parliament bans dancing on TV as "un-Islamic"

"there is no fun in Islam"
- Ayatollah Khomeini

Why again are we there?

Another reason to fall on the floor, congratulating ourselves cause we brought freedom to these poor oppressed people. God Bless America, Land that I love!

Heaven,
We're in heaven.
And we'll 'splode a vest
Whene'er we get the chance.
And cavort with chicks in Paradise perchance.
But on Earth it is "haram" to have a dance.

What do expect from Islam and the Mohammedans. Mohammad told his followers not to play chess. I mean no music, no art. Just go and emulate him by robbing, pillaging, raping, murdering and destroying other cultures. Over 1400 years that is all Islam has done. The only contribution to humanity is possibly the architecture other than that wholesale slavery, child bombers, mass murder, mass raping and sex slaves, looting and bigotry, racial and cultural hatred for all non Muslims. It is a culture born from the harsh and waste lands of the desert and it is equally and brutally barbaric and violent.

This is what makes me sick that there are no sanctions by our leaders on these gross violations of human rights and we keep sending boat loads of aid. While they laugh and get their jizya. I mean in some ways Islam is ruling the world. A mass protest in Indonesia and our leaders start to buckle. UN, UNESCO all condemn fitna, but everything else as mentioned above is just fine. What a sick state of affairs. It seems they have been sold to the carnal and booty ideology of Islam, they have become the Mohammedenbots.

Dear Mr. Spencer,
In order to tweak the Muslims, I decided to dance on my new Panasonic 65" Flat-Panel Plasma HDTV.
It broke.
Please send me a check for $8,999.98.
Yours very truly,
Anne

One part of the large, well-financed, but little-noted propaganda effort by the American government, aimed at unsettling and demoralizing the Camp of Islam, is the obscure Radio Free Kabul, with transmitters in Gujarat and southern Kazakhstan. The station, originally the brainchild of Vinod and Anil Khosla, is beamed into Afghanistan, runs for 18-hours a day, and carries programs of varied content but emphasizes. There is a daily discussion group, led by Wafa Sultan, with apostates from Islam on their personal histories and reasons for leaving Islam. There is a lecture series on comparative religion and the early Qur'an, organized by Ibn Warraq. There is a program devoted to the growth of the American republic, with speakers chosen by Sean Wilentz. One very popular feature is an entertainment program that consists of excerpts from American song-and-dance movies of the 1930s, the brainchild of Paula Abdul, who upon the advice of ASCAP members, chooses every excerpt herself. And there is much, much more.

All of the programs are, of course, dubbed into the four major languages of Afghanistan, except for the song-and-dance video numbers, which are merely subtitled.

The material broadcast by Radio Free Kabul is then dubbed into a dozen different, major, languages, and uploaded onto the Internet. Much of it can be readily retrieved at YouTube. The annual cost of the entire operation known as Radio Free Kabul is approximately $120 million; the total cost to the American government, for all fourteen similar stations being operated world-wide comes to less than $2 billion or, as its supporters point out, "less than one-one-thousandth" of the total cost of the war in Iraq alone. Some in Congress remain unconvinced, however, for as Senator Leghorn has famously trumpeted, “you don’t fight wars without boots on the ground."

Of all that has been broadcast on Radio Free Kabul, one particular segment, now known as the “Whatcha” clip, has, as The New Duranty Times laconically reports, "drawn the special ire of Muslims." By this the Times means that the clip been denounced in 14,348 separate khutbas, or sermons, by Afghani imams, who have described it as equivalent to a "nuclear attack" that is "one million times worse than the World Trade Center attack." There have been mass demonstrations against NATO and government forces -- so far, however, only 143 people have been killed, along with considerable destruction of buildings and Bradley fighting vehicles -- from Herat to Jalalabad. In the wider Islamic world, the film clip has been described as "Satanic" by Sheik Al-Qaradawi. Numerous Saudi clerics have, in similar fashion, denounced the three-minute segment as "the whisperings of Shaytan." (See MEMRI for samples of the sermons). In the United States, both John Esposito and Noah Feldman have been particularly alarmed, describing the clip as both "offensive" and "unacceptable" and they have written and circulated a petition, with an impressive list of signatories (Carl Ernst, Rashid Khalidi, Nihad Awad, Ward Churchill, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sean Penn, Ali Abunimah, Keith Ellison, and 253 others), that calls on the American government to shut down not only Radio Free Kabul, but all of the other fourteen stations world-wide whose publicly-funded contents are aimed at Muslim audiences, and cited this segment as a major reason for shutting such stations down. In addition, the U.N. has passed a resolution announcing its "profound displeasure and regret" that such clips are shown on the Internet. The Security Council is still debating a reolution that demands the removal of all such "malicious" material that contradicts the "letter and spirit of one of the world's great religions, and also its fastest-growing " and that further describes the "continued dissemination of such material as constituting nothing less" -- in the words of the Security Council resolution drafted by the O.I.C., which has been granted a special seat on the Council --"than a permanent obstacle to understanding among peoples and therefore a serious threat to world peace." The Security Council is expected to vote on the Resolution before April 2.

But what about that clip?

You be the judge:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAwvAuSWCr8

What is the point of invading these countries when we don't write their constitutions for them?

If they complain just show them the example of Japan.

Over 1400 years that is all Islam has done. The only contribution to humanity is possibly the architecture other than that wholesale slavery, child bombers, mass murder, mass raping and sex slaves, looting and bigotry, racial and cultural hatred for all non Muslims.

It has some interesting calligraphy too.
The music is repulsive though.

"Over 1400 years that is all Islam has done. The only contribution to humanity is possibly the architecture..."
-- unattributed statement quoted in a posting above

No, there were poets. Before there were the propagandistic wasteland of today, with the likes of Mahmoud Darwish, there were others. Love poets, poets of panegyrics to patrons and then of denunciations of those same powerful patrons when they failed to live up to their presumed side of the implied bargain -- see the celebrated Mutanabbi, after whom that celebrated bookseller's row in Baghdad is named. There is the author of "Table-talk of a Mesopotamian Judge." There are many other works, some of them wonderfully quirky and without Western equivalents, written by people who called themselves Muslims, or have been claimed for Islam because they lived in lands ruled by Islam and wrote in Arabic, or in Persian.

Some of those claimed as "Muslim poets" no doubt, especially Persian poets, wrote verses in which we might have trouble discerning anything Islamic about them, and in fact might find a most un-Islamic spirit, or a spirit determined to resist the linguistic and cultural arabization that accompanied, so often, islamization -- see Firdowsi, Sa'adi, Hafiz, Omar Khayyam. But not everything can be ignored, or belittled. It makes no sense.

Though the squinch and much else -- see Grabar's "The Formation of Islammic Art" -- was indeed borrowed by Islamic architects from Byzantine models, mosque architecture at its height can and should be admired. Why should we deprive ourselves of that pleasure, that appreciation? Means of artistic expression waere limited, and the artistic impulse necessarily channeled into such things as architecture and calligraphy. The artistic impoverishment over 1350 years is a matter for regret (see the holdings of any major museum -- and walk through the handful of rooms devoted to "Islamic art"), but there was something. Why should non-Muslmis deprive themselves of recognizing what was achieved in those areas, narrow as those areas may have been?

Similarly, even if the claims made for science under Islam have been greatly exaggerated, why not, here and there, recognize the observatory at Maragha, or developments in optics? This doesn't mean one must accept such terms as "Arabic science" (Saliba) or "Islamic science" (Ihsanoglu) or acquiesce in their exaggerated claims for either, and their comical attempts to explain away why some things did not develop under Islam (for example, Ihsanoglu's attempt to explain why horology did not develop in Islamic lands, despite the careful timing of those five daily canonical prayers) but rather in the West.

Dismissal of everything done by those millions of people who lived within, or called themselves, Muslims, merely invites ridicule. It does not convince. It does not open others up to the possibility of being convinced. And that is what is needed.

Dismissal of everything done by those millions of people who lived within, or called themselves, Muslims, merely invites ridicule. It does not convince. It does not open others up to the possibility of being convinced. And that is what is needed.

Hugh: Okay

The dismissal seems to be in response to exaggerated claims of greatness and claiming everything as their own. It says something about expanding and so they got General Relativity, and so on. So we adopt a knee jerk dismissal of all claims. Not correct. But correct most of the time.

ZK

Some in Congress remain unconvinced, however, for as Senator Leghorn has famously trumpeted, “you don’t fight wars without boots on the ground."
really he needs to look at the history of the voice of America and what it did to aid the defeat of the USSR and communism, as of that clip they're objecting to Afghanistan I can see why it shows totally normal behavior we would accept the West but they cannot accept because it shows a man and a woman alone together and there sewer like minds probably think they're going to jump each other's bones I find it amusing in a way because how many of you took your girlfriend out for a drive just to enjoy her company with no thought rather would know firm plans to get into her pants it looks like Afghans and Muslims just have a dirty mind and cannot get it out of the gutter

Why are we supporting this government. Let's spend our money on countries which are not following a toxic religion. Thailand could use our help, so could the Congo.

Hugh said

One part of the large, well-financed, but little-noted propaganda effort by the American government, aimed at unsettling and demoralizing the Camp of Islam, is the obscure Radio Free Kabul [...] There is a daily discussion group, led by Wafa Sultan, with apostates from Islam on their personal histories and reasons for leaving Islam. There is a lecture series on comparative religion and the early Qur'an, organized by Ibn Warraq.

Fantastic! I knew Bush was just pretending to be a dullard, while he's actually a brilliant tactician. I knew that our leaders could not possibly miss the danger the danger that Islam presents. We are finally reaching out in the only way we should: not by giving them billions of dollars in the hope of winning their hearts and minds, but by educating them about the alternatives to Islam. This is the best news I've heard in a ... wait a minute ... what's the date today?

From the article:

Last year gunmen entered the home of Zakia Zaki, the female owner of a radio station, and shot her to death in front of her 8-year-old son. Zaki had apparently criticized local warlords who warned her to change her station's programming.

Where would the jihadis get an idea that it was acceptable to murder an unarmed mother in her home in front of her child just for criticizing a Muslim?

Ishaq:676 “‘You obey a stranger who encourages you to murder for booty. You are greedy men. Is there no honor among you?’ Upon hearing those lines Muhammad said, ‘Will no one rid me of this woman?’ Umayr, a zealous Muslim, decided to execute the Prophet’s wishes. That very night he crept into the writer’s home while she lay sleeping surrounded by her young children. There was one at her breast. Umayr removed the suckling babe and then plunged his sword into the poet. The next morning in the mosque, Muhammad, who was aware of the assassination, said, ‘You have helped Allah and His Apostle.’ Umayr said. ‘She had five sons; should I feel guilty?’ ‘No,’ the Prophet answered. ‘Killing her was as meaningless as two goats butting heads.’”

Muhammad is the Perfect Man, the example to be emulated for all time. Whatever he said is beyond reproach. Whatever he did is by definition virtuous.

American and Western soldiers were killed and maimed so that there could be a "Taliban Lite" government in Afghanistan.

I'm beginning to think that it is 1968 all over again. Nothing has changed since; the US Government has a new generation of lucking fiars just like 40 years ago.

We have had three Presidents since Reagan; all three have been worthless. The next election will be between two Democrats; however, one Democrat will have Republican clothes.

Have we won the hearts and minds of the Afghans (you know, our good friends who hosted Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as they trained for the 9/11 attack) yet?

Do their new roads, schools, powerplants, bridges, and water treatment plants meet their expectations? Are they sufficiently satisfied with what we've built for them?

Have we saved them yet? Have we done our good deed? Can our men and women please come home now?

I don't understand how this works. Afghani's love to watch Bollywood. Now what?

Blue

I am feeling blue-

Burka Blue.

Rock out to the Burka Blues.

Here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8fCXUKLQyg

How to date a Burka:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPb06bg7A3s&feature=related

Hugh, nice April Fool's joke.

Religious militias and jihadists, and other totalitarians, attempt to hijack the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan. They intend to impose repression on free societies. But the rights of individuals include minority tribes. Elected representatives must separate religious law from state law.

Western bolsheviks, elected as representatives of free people, also attempt to reinterpret, live free or die, with; individual rights apply only to the wards of the state, and, state regulation trumps individual freedom. But free people practice individual responsibility and decision-making; you reap what you sow. Along with mental freedom, free people search for attractive markets; ownership rights to private property, competition between firms, and low taxes.