A fanciful piece by Mark LeVine, an old friend of Jihad Watch writing in, quite appropriately, NPR, tries to explain how Muslims are open to rock and heavy metal, and that that may be why they are so “radical.” As asinine as this may be, the importance of this article lies in showing just how mainstream it is to think of “Islam” as just another “ethnicity.” Let us remember: “Islam” means “submission”; a “Muslim” is one who has submitted. The all important question then becomes: submit to what? Mainstream answer: the will of Allah as revealed by his messenger in the Koran and Hadith.
Now, if a “Muslim” decides to eat pork, drink alcohol, and befriend infidels, guess what? He is not a “Muslim”—that is, one who submits to the revealed will of Allah, at least not according to all the major schools of Islamic jurisprudence. When Muslims engage in heavy metal, and carry on as Westerners—digging on swine and wine-imbibing—they prove but one thing: they are only human. However, their actions are not in the least bit indicative of what Islam clearly commands and clearly forbids—of what Islam is all about.
As for music, there are a number of hadiths, all of which have led the major fuqaha and ulema to ban music and musical instruments altogether—even something as minor as the bell (due, no doubt, to its “Christian” overtones) is considered haram.
“How Heavy Metal Is Working Its Way Into Islam,” by Mark LeVine for NPR, July 10:
That the possibility of a Muslim heavy-metal scene came as a total surprise to me only underscored how much I still had to learn about Morocco, and the Muslim world more broadly, even after a dozen years studying, traveling, and living in it. If there could be such a thing as a Heavy Metal Islam, I thought, then perhaps the future was far brighter than most observers of the Muslim world imagined less than a year after September 11, 2001.[…]
And so began a five-year journey across the Muslim world, from Morocco to Pakistan, with a dozen countries in between, in search of the artists, fans, and activists who make up the alternative music scenes of the Muslim world. My journey was long, and sometimes dangerous [why, I wonder?]. But the more I traveled and the more musicians I met, the more I understood how much insight into Islam today could be gained by getting to know the artists who were working on what might seem to be the edges of their societies. Their imagination and openness to the world, and the courage of their convictions, remind us that Muslim and Western cultures are more heterogeneous, complex, and ultimately alike than the peddlers of the clash of civilizations, the war on terror, and unending jihad would have us believe.
It might seem counterintuitive to Americans, whose images of Islam and the contemporary Muslim world come largely from Fox or CNN, but an eighteen-year-old from Casablanca with spiked hair, or a twenty-year-old from Dubai wearing goth makeup, is as representative of the world of Islam today as the Muslims who look and act the way we expect them to. They can be just as radical, if not more so, in their religious beliefs and politics as their peers who spend their days in the mosque, madrasa, or even an al-Qa'eda training camp. In fact, if we think of what "radical" really means— to offer analyses or solutions that completely break with the existing frameworks for dealing with an issue or problem— then they are far more radical than are the supposed radicals of al-Qa'eda, Hamas, or Hezbollah, who are distinctly reactionary in their reliance on violence and conservatively grounded religious and political imaginations.
I saw a clip about a metal band in Iraq that has been dogged by the 'religious' 'police' or bands of militia who think that is what they are. It was interesting and they were against Islamic interference, and just wanted to rock. :) I hope they are still rocking out and not murdered.
It is odd that they conveniently leave out the last 1,400 years of islamic jihad. 1,400 years that are witness to the fall of many beautiful and advanced cultures. Cultures totally erased and written over in the bloodshed of islam.
Parading about in the costumes of Western youth is all well and good, but these young muslims reject the 5,000 years of cultural development that precede these expressions and replace them with the outright violence of islam.
Islamic Rock: The size of a fist and made for stoning to death.
New meaning to the terms:
Bang your head
and
Careful with that ax
God, he's dumb, isn't he?
Is Mark LeVine really a professor at Irvine? With an office? And a computer? And tenure?
Many offenses have been committed against the intellect, and good taste, by American universities, and many crimes, in the case of state universities, against long-suffering taxpayers as well. The appointment of Mark LaVine manages to include all of the offenses, and all of the crimes.
I started listening to that NPR program but I figured it would be more of the usual and turned it off. Maybe it's time for a note to NPR. Those people are ridiculous with stuff like this.
Here's something I wrote about Mark LaVine a while ago. I don't think a word needs changing:
"Mark LeVine's own description of himself states:
'Mark LeVine is an emerging leader of the new generation of historians and analysts of the modern Middle East and Islam.
... taught Qur'an to Muslim Brothers,
LeVine trusts no one, is suspicious of all sources and all authority. He is not afraid to tell the truth based on the facts and data he can personally confirm, and will challenge the actions and opinions of rulers and ruled, oppressed and oppressor alike.
His wide and deep knowledge of the politics and history of the entire region (from North Africa to Afghanhistan), its religions and its cultures, gives him unique insight into the broader dynamics that have produced the events that constantly dominate the news.'
Need anything else be said?
Perhaps you thought that reading Qur’an and hadith and sira, accompanied by hundreds of articles and dozens of books, might help one to understand a belief-system that, unlike Mark LeVine, is not “suspicious of all sources and all authority” and indeed, is based entirely on “sources” and “authority.” From what do Sheikh Tantawi, Qaradawi, the “Sunni scholars” of Anbar Province, Ayatollah al-Sistani, Ayatollah Khomeini, and the imams with their khutbas in Saudi Arabia, receive their authority, if not from their familiarity with, and understanding of, the canonical texts? When, on a thousand websites, inquiring Muslims write in, asking for opinions on taxes and hairstyles and avoiding interest and the calculation of zakat and the possibility of permanent peace with Infidels, on what do those offering their opinions and formal rulings base them – if not the authority of the texts, and the commentators on those texts? Yet someone like Mark LeVine, who rushes about the wide world, who is a great believer in his own experiences – teaching Qur’an to Muslim Brothers, interviewing Hamas members, and whatever else it is that he has done (no need for boring book-learning in the stacks) – discounts all that. He, after all, is part of the “new generation of historians and analysts” who are suspicious of “all sources” and “all authority.” One wonders by what criteria he decides to stop being suspicious, and to accept any scholarly work by anyone. At what point, for example, would he say that Snouck Hurgronje or Antoine Fattal, to take two disparate examples, have passed all of Mark LeVine’s tests and need not be read with such a total refusal to accept “all sources” and “all authority”? It appears that Edward Said and Noam Chomsky are among those who, as “sources” and “authority,” have passed some Mark-LeVine-tests. What tests would those be? Perhaps others can apply the same criteria?
And who else meets the test? Does John Esposito? Does Ibn Warraq? What does Mark LeVine think, since he reads German, of Christoph Luxenberg? And since he reads Italian, this polymath, what does he think of the cofanetto of four works by Oriana Fallaci, all on the subject of Islam, and the Islamization of Europe? Anything? Nothing?
Mark LeVine believes that “the West” – or more specifically, America, or Amerika, is also guilty of “terrorism.” It is things that America has done that explain hostility to it. It has nothing to do with America being perceived as an Infidel power. Nor do the world’s Muslims bear any animus to anyone outside the West, such as Hindus and Buddhists (or the Zoroastrians of Persia), with whom they have always gotten along so swimmingly. And if a handful of historians, such as K. S. Lal or Sita Ram Goel or Francois Gautier, suggest otherwise, they are simply puppets of the BJP and Hindutva fanatics.
He believes that we all need a cooling-off period. There is nothing in Islam itself, as a belief-system, to worry about. Nothing about the behavior of Muhammad, and then of Muhammad as a model, to worry anyone. Nothing in the hadith, and of course nothing in the Qur’an, that might, just might, cause Believers to behave in a way that might represent a permanent danger to Infidels.
That is because Mark LeVine doth bestride the world like a colossus. He knows languages – many many languages (just try him out in a debate – try speaking to him in French, or Turkish, -- and of course he can also make out Ottoman script as well as modern Turkish – and Italian, and of course Arabic and Hebrew and Persian. A. K. S. Lambton, Bernard Lewis, S. D. Goitein – these people have nothing on him, and he is not about to submit to their “authority.” Goitein spent a few decades trying to understand the weight of the jizya on the Jews, and finally felt he had done so, after a lifetime of underestimating it as a burden. But Mark LeVine doesn’t have to know what Goitein learned, because he has traveled to the Middle East, and spoken to Hamas members, and even “taught Qur’an to Muslim Brothers.”
Did Goitein, did Snouck Hurgronje, did Margoliouth, did Joseph Schacht do that? Can anyone who hasn’t wandered through North Africa and the Middle East really and truly undrerstand it? Books are so overrated. The study of the past is so overrated. The study of immutable doctrines, and the hapless attempts by some “reformers” to overcome the immutability of those doctrines, is so overrated. What counts is Experience.
It is a little like Nabokov. He once regretted that he had, in his life, only been a writer, whereas so many American writers had been lumberjacks, soda jerks, oil field hands, taxi drivers, and short order cooks, amassing all those experiences which, of course, had caused their prose to be immortal and his prose – well, you can forget about him. And didn’t James Joyce also have a dozen different occupations as well?
So Mark LeVine indeed does represent the newest stage in scholarship: the scholar who doesn’t have to bother with scholarship. There is no past. The past exists only if we let it. Say No to the Past. Stick with the present. See what you can see. And since you cannot see into the minds of men, and do not know what it is – what texts, what sermons and societies and atmospherics and attitudes that are based on, or emerge from, those texts – that forms their minds, they will always be a mystery.
Did Arafat mention on at least four occasions the Treaty of al-Hudaibiyya? So what? What is that supposed to mean?
And so what if Majid Khadduri wrote a book which many consider to be the last word on the subject – “War and Peace in the Law of Islam” – in which he sets out clearly the impossibility of any Muslim people or polity making a permanent peace with any Infidel people or polity. Khadduri explains that a “hudna” is to be used only in order to strengthen the Muslim side, or to rescue it from a currently untenable position. For example, it is clear that some members of Hamas believe that the Israeli counter-offensive has been quite damaging, and that Hamas needs a timeout. Yes, but why should Israel give it to them?
And it is also clear that many Muslims are now worried about Infidels learning just a bit too much, and becoming a bit too alarmed, about Islam – about its doctrines, about what Muslims believe, and about the future of Infidel countries where there are large and growing Muslim immigrants. Transparent attempts to protect Islam and Muslims from critical scrutiny, such as the invention, and widespread use, of the scare-word “Islamophobia,” are evidence of this fear.
The “Conflicts Forum” of Alistair Crooke, Patrick Seale (who has been in the business of supplying every – and I mean every – desire of Arab paymasters since he was throwing parties for important Arabs, and inviting some attractive young English girls of a special sort to his house in Eaton Square in the 1970s), and the propagandist and public relations adviser to Arafat & Co., Mark Perry, discussed elsewhere at this website, is another example.
And now comes Mark LeVine to embody this new mode of anti-academic academics, where deep familiarity with the texts can be dispensed with, as one can learn so much more from real life, in Beirut and Gaza, in Cairo and Damascus. Scholarship without scholarship – that is the new motto for a new age. And why not?
Perhaps you prefer Mark LeVine to Schacht, Margoliouth, and Antoine Fattal. Perhaps you think Mark LeVine’s understanding of the “hudna” is superior to that of Majid Khadduri. But why?
Mark LeVine must really tell us what it is about Snouck Hurgronje on Mecca and Islam in the Dutch East Indies, what it is about Fagnan and Dufourcq and Bousquet and Bat Ye'or on Jihad and dhimmitude, what it is about the Indian historian K. S. Lal and about Francois Gautier, Haish Narain and Sita Ram Goel and a dozen other historians of India under Muslim rule, and what it is about Rumanian historians of Islam (Maria-Matilda Alexandrescu-Dersca Bulgaru) and Bulgarian students (Bistra A. Cvetkova; Snegarov) and Greek historians (Speros Vryonis Jr. and Apostolos E. Vakalopoulos and Vassiliki Papoulia), and Serb historians (including the celebrated writer Ivo Andric, whose Ph.D. thesis, "The Development of Spiritual Life in Bosnia Under the Influence of Turkish Rule” has recently been published in English) that makes him so distrustful of all of them. Is it some internal inconsistency? Is it that they did not know the relevant languages? Is it that they had not had the life experiences, talking to Hamas members, teaching Qur'an to members of the Muslim Brothers, that Mark LeVine has had?
And how well, really, did Majid Khadduri know Arabic? And what did he know about how Muslims think of war, and peace, with Infidels? Did he talk to Hamas members? Or lecture members of the Muslim Brothers? Just how long had Majid Khadduri been studying Islam before he wrote his own book on “War and Peace in the Law of Islam”? Did he get on "Nightline"? Why not? And for that matter, did Elie Kedourie? Or J. B. Kelly? What about his views on Saudi Arabia? Do they have any resemblance to reality? Doesn't the Aramco Handbook tell us so much more, being written as it was for the edification of the real-life oil workers and engineers who spent years right there in Saudi Arabia -- even more time in the midst of Arab Islam than Mark LeVine, and so, presumably even greater experts than he?
And since Mark LeVine is apparently impressed with Edward Said and Noam Chomsky, those two lifelong students of Islam, could he explain what it was about each that made him trust in them as sources, and in their authority? Was there something about Said’s "Orientalism" that escaped the historian of British India Clive Dewey? Or that Ibn Warraq failed to notice in his own review of Said's work? Or Keith Windschuttle? Or Bernard Lewis in his celebrated reply to Said, “The Question of ‘Orientalism’”? And what was it that caused Mark LeVine to have such confidence in Said’s own “The Question of Palestine”? For example, was it the way Said used, or did not use, the testimony of Western travellers, beginning in the late 18th century, to the area known to the West as "Palestine"? Why, for example, does he quote Volney in his "Orientalism" but for some reason leave Volney out of "The Question of Palestine"? Anything about the use of sources there that got Mark LeVine's antennae quivering? What about the quotations, or lack of quotations, from the eyewitness accounts of the Holy Land, of which there were so many? Does Mark LeVine find at all strange the difference, for example, in how Lamartine and Chateaubriand and Mark Twain and Melville are quoted, or not, in Said's book, and how they are quoted in a book of equal length, Katz's "Battleground"?
And as for Chomsky, what with the Sandinistas and syntactic structures, has Chomsky ever had time to study Qur'an and hadith and sira -- or to take seriously a belief-system, and attempt to understand what prompts Muslims to see the universe as many do, by actually looking at the texts upon which that belief-system is so thoroughly based? Does Mark LeVine worry the least bit about a belief-system that offers a Total Explanation of the Universe, and divides that universe mainly into two groups -- Believers and Infidels? Or is this all a fantasy of Donald Rumsfeld, aided and abetted by such neo-con Likudniks as Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and the late Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, right-wingers all?
Yet, these criticisms surely must be unfair. For otherwise, how could Assistant Professor Mark LeVine possibly have concluded the following about Assistant Professor Mark LeVine: "His wide and deep knowledge of the politics and history of the entire region (from North Africa to Afghanhistan), its religions and its cultures, gives him unique insight into the broader dynamics that have produced the events that constantly dominate the news."
Mark LeVine is an updated academic version of Dickens' Mr. Podsnap in "Our Mutual Friend":
Mr. Podsnap was well to do, and stood very high in Mr. Podsnap’s opinion. Beginning with a good inheritance, he had married a good inheritance, and had thriven exceedingly in the Marine Insurance way, and was quite satisfied. He never could make out why everybody was not quite satisfied, and he felt conscious that he set a brilliant social example in being particularly well satisfied with most things, and, above all other things, with himself.
Thus happily acquainted with his own merit and importance, Mr. Podsnap settled that whatever he put behind him he put out of existence. There was a dignified conclusiveness – not to add a grand convenience – in this way of getting rid of disagreeables which had done much towards establishing Mr. Podsnap in his lofty place in Mr. Podsnap’s satisfaction. “I don’t want to know about it; I don’t choose to discuss it; I don’t admit it!”
Perhaps you trust Mark LeVine, who doesn’t want to know about all those scholars, doesn’t choose to discuss them at length, doesn’t admit the justice of their decades of scrupulous research. He knows better. He has been to the Middle East. He has talked to Hamas members and Muslim Brothers. They tell him things. What more does anyone need?
Perhaps you agree as well with Mark LeVine’s guiding motto, that mental bumper-sticker which tells him always to “Question Authority.”
Why should you?
[Posted by Hugh at December 13, 2004]
Not only an office and a 'puter, but perhaps also a secretary and other staff who get him coffee and type this trash for him.
>Now, if a “Muslim” decides to eat pork, drink
>alcohol, and befriend infidels, guess what? He
>is not a “Muslim”—that is, one who submits to
>the revealed will of Allah, at least not
>according to all the major schools of Islamic
>jurisprudence.
It should be added that whenever a "Muslim" plays music, he is engaging in unMuslim activity.
What about the Muslims who conquered India and left all those polytheists alive because it's no fun to conquer a country if you don't get slaves to do your work for you? Has there been any explicit condemnation of their neglect to commit mass murder from the schools of Islamic jurisprudence, or has some rationalization been worked out?
>Now, if a “Muslim” decides to eat pork, drink
>alcohol, and befriend infidels, guess what? He
>is not a “Muslim”—that is, one who submits to
>the revealed will of Allah, at least not
>according to all the major schools of Islamic
>jurisprudence.
It should be added that whenever a "Muslim" plays music, he is engaging in unMuslim activity.
What about the Muslims who conquered India and left all those polytheists alive because it's no fun to conquer a country if you don't get slaves to do your work for you? Has there been any explicit condemnation of their neglect to commit mass murder from the schools of Islamic jurisprudence, or has some rationalization been worked out?
Remember to print out, and then cut out, and then save for refrigerator-door immortality, Mark LaVine's own description of Mark LaVine from Mark LaVine's website:
"Mark LeVine is an emerging leader of the new generation of historians and analysts of the modern Middle East and Islam.
... taught Qur'an to Muslim Brothers,
LeVine trusts no one, is suspicious of all sources and all authority. He is not afraid to tell the truth based on the facts and data he can personally confirm, and will challenge the actions and opinions of rulers and ruled, oppressed and oppressor alike.
His wide and deep knowledge of the politics and history of the entire region (from North Africa to Afghanhistan), its religions and its cultures, gives him unique insight into the broader dynamics that have produced the events that constantly dominate the news."
Why would this surprise anyone? Islam has always Islamized infidel culture by first adopting it, then swamping it and edging out the natives, to finally claiming it as their own. What we know today as "Arabic" musical modes - ie, the makamat - existed long before the Arabs took over the middle east, and was found throughout the Byzantine and Persian Empires. Indeed the earliest book on Arabic music theory was just a translation of an earlier Greek thesis, but like so many early scientific works the Arab translator claimed to be the author (today we call this plagiarism). Had copies of the original not survived, he would have got away with it, just like many of his breathren did.
Many young Muslims today go for the most radical and aggressive sub-culture styles around, because among the disenchanted angry young men is where Islam finds it's most willing and gullable new converts and recruits to jihad. Hip-hop, Rap, Drum 'n' Bass, Dancehall reggae, and of course jazz have long had their radical Muslims (particularly converts) using them as a medium for da'wa so why shouldn't Heavy Metal. Indeed, Heavy Metal has long had a fascination, perhaps even an obsession, with death cults so isn't it fitting that the Earth's largest death cult (over a billion adherents their continually remind us) should at least have a few followers who reciprocate the interest?
I think it was Tom Friedman who commented some years ago that the attractions of Western mass culture (as evidenced by backwards baseball caps, baggy jeans, etc) were undermining traditional Islamic society throughout the Middle East, and, thus, so his argument ran, bringing us all closer together. The argument, of course, is nonsense. Kids wearing hip-hop gear (and playing and listening to heavy metal) are not ipso facto revolutionaries. They may be expressing rebellion against their culture, or, again, they may not. Mass Western culture is not very political and stands for very little. Yet another example of "one-worldism," which in its treaclier forms is based on "We're all human beings after all" - and therefore identical. Not so. We differ enormously by culture and core beliefs and principles, and should not forget this for an instant.
From article: but an eighteen-year-old from Casablanca with spiked hair, or a twenty-year-old from Dubai wearing goth makeup, is as representative of the world of Islam today as the Muslims who look and act the way we expect them to.
Yes, and we can expect spiked hair, and goth clothing and make-up to become the rage in Iran.
It won't be long until Beasty Boy Ahamdinijad will be sporting his own spikes. He already has two, one on each side of his forhead.
Islam will cease to be a problem when they trade in those burka's for Goth, turn up the volume on the heavy metal rock, light up a doobie and 'rock out'.
It's almost impossible to jihad and rock out at the same time, especially while stoned.
I'm all for it...
Duh_swami wrote:
It's almost impossible to jihad and rock out at the same time, especially while stoned.
I'm all for it...
Sadly, not true, the mujihadin have a long history of smoking hashish. How do you think places like Marocco, Lebanon and Afganistan have long had reputations in the stoner community for supplying the best hash? The tradition of getting "well charged" before a battle didn't start in Vietnam...
If Muslims everywhere could freely choose to ignore parts of the Koran and if Sharia law was merely a guidebook, LeVine would have a point. Islam would just be another religion with some old, rather embarrassing baggage, not unlike most religions.
Unfortunately, the balance of Islam is not spiritual, but political, which means real laws, codified and enforced by Islamic government, and overseen by power-hungry mullahs and imams. Equally unfortunate, those laws themselves are a magnitude more barbaric and irrational to the normal human mind than the "baggage" of other religions.
http://www.bravenewsworld.blogspot.com
This is really nothing new, metal & hip-hop artists here in the U.S. have written lyrics promoting the "struggle" for years. Check out some of the song lyrics of Rage Against the Machine, or Public Enemy, for example. It pisses me off, because I kinda dig the beats & guitar parts, but, I just can't agree w/ the lyrics. I go to the shows if I score a free pass, It pains me to give money to anyone I feel might be aiding my death. Because judging by the booths that are usually set up @ these shows, well, You gotta wonder. UknowhatI'msayin?
My journey was long, and sometimes dangerous [why, I wonder?].
.............................
Why, indeed? Would it be dangerous to look into the heavy metal scene in the U.S., or Europe, or Australia, or Japan? Probably not.
more:
Their imagination and openness to the world, and the courage of their convictions . . .
.............................
How much "courage" would it take around much of the world to get into heavy metal? Well, you might piss off your parents--although, since heavy metal has been around for twenty-five or thirty years by now, even they might not be all that taken aback.
..............................
more:
It might seem counterintuitive to Americans, whose images of Islam and the contemporary Muslim world come largely from Fox or CNN . . .
..............................
Again, the real problem is not the actions of so many Muslims, all over the world, violently rioting, calling for the death of Infidels, and blowing sh*t up--no, it is Western media, reporting on such things, and the narrow-minded Americans who might be alarmed by them. (/sarc)
Marjane Satrapi, in her book "Persepolis", illustrates her own youthful rebellion. She was ten at the time of Iran's Islamic revolution, but grew up in a very liberal, intellectual home.
As a young teenager, she was--in her own estimation--"punk rock". After school, she wore an acid-washed denim jacket and Nikes (bought for her by her indulgent parents on a trip to Turkey), and a button of her favorite musician, Michael Jackson--along with full hijab. (Okay--we might not consider this very "punk rock", but you work with what you've got. The coolest boys wore their hair like Rod Stewart).
Once when she was out, she was suddenly accosted by a van full of female religious police, all dressed in full chadors. They viciously shoved her around and called her a whore (she was a thirteen-year-old virgin at the time). She tried to pass off her Michael Jackson button as an image of Malcolm X, "leader of the Black Muslims of America", but the grim religious police weren't buying it.
When they tried to push her into the van, she became completely hystrical. This was only partially feigned--she knew that she could be beaten, raped, even murdered, and her parents might never even know what happened to her. She caused such a commotion that it started to attract attention, and the flustered religious police let her go with a warning.
It was terrifying. Satrapi also made it clear that all of those cute boys with the Rod Stewart hair cuts were liable to a severe beating and a forced buzz-cut if they caught the attention of the wrong people.
When she was just fourteen, her parents decided that their outspoken daughter was in too much danger in Iran, and sent her to boarding school in Europe.
Now, you might indeed find “an eighteen-year-old from Casablanca with spiked hair, or a twenty-year-old from Dubai wearing goth makeup", but chances are they are taking their lives in their hands.
But 1 thing I failed to mention, on the positive note. I have met Metal & Rap musicians of all faiths & races, and it is cool that music really is the 1 place where your accepted for your differences. This is why I have hope for humanity.
For god's sake, there was even American jazz in a few places in Nazi Berlin, even though jazz was officially, and widely, condemned as "Jewish-Black decadent music." What did the existence of a handful of places where such stuff might be heard, even in the middle of World War II, mean in the larger scheme of things?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXu4P6KpoLU&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHunO4EUfRc&feature=related
But that did not mean that the people who listened or danced to these songs stopped believing in the Nazi ideology, or in at the very least, as loyal citizens of the Reich, constituting part of the Nazi War Machine, and thus a menace to the Allies, and of course to the United States, the source of that "decadent black-Jewish music."
LaVine is beginning to sound like Mildred Gillars. Not just a fool. A dangerous fool.
Adam Gadahn was a metal fan too.
http://michellemalkin.com/2004/10/27/all-about-adam-gadahn/
Sadly, not true, the mujihadin have a long history of smoking hashish. How do you think places like Marocco, Lebanon and Afganistan have long had reputations in the stoner community for supplying the best hash? The tradition of getting "well charged" before a battle didn't start in Vietnam...
Posted by: Tziona
You're right about drugs but heavy metal is only understood by a heavy mind. Are there any muslim rappers in the world? That takes a heavy mind also. Muslims are too light headed to really 'rock out', or rap. Of course that does not stop some from being attracted to it. Heavy metal is like fire walking. If walking in it is beneficial, think how much more beneficial it is to roll in it. A little 'walk and roll'. And then there is the spikes and the Goth. Has there ever been a Islamic terrorist attack by anyone with spiked hair? Or dressed as a Goth?
By the reference to Vietnam and tradition, are you referring to American soldiers smoking pot, as a way to get 'charged up' for battle? Some Americans did smoke pot in Vietnam, but I don't think they did it to pump themselves up, nor did it become a 'tradition'...
Its always interesting to me that the older you are, the more learned you are in Islamic scripture, and the more dedicated you are to a career in the Islamic clergy, the less you know about true Islam.
Young, secular Muslims who have not read the Koran are the representatives of "true Islam," apparently.
"Sadly, not true, the mujihadin have a long history of smoking hashish"
Read John Roy Carlson who, in 1948 snuck in among the Egyptian volunteers heading for Palestine to butcher the Jews. Hashed up all day and effing each other's behinds all night and working up a lunatic blood lust, their military stupidity (thank God) was awesome.
Un-heavy-but-with-mettle music :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftYSMk4BLto&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJnKVH6V7kw
Mark LaVine should tell us how many of these Goth and spiked-hair swell fellows he met, in his all-expenses-paid five years of academic research on the wilder shores of Muslim life – he actually met. Do Muslim cities and towns, from Rabat to Ramallah, from Ramallah to Rawalpindi, simply teem with these fellows, with their electric gibsons and their defiantly-haram tattoos, not to mention those de rigueur piercings of lips, nipples and parts south, including the presumably painful hafada (the varieties of ways that people willingly inflict physical but apparently fashionable pain on themselves never ceases to amaze).
Yes, I await a scholarly article by Mark LaVine on how piercings, and tattoos, of which he no doubt found some evidence in those Muslim lands through which, over five years, he dutifully traveled in the interests of his disinterested “scholarship,” demonstrate the loosening-up, the changing, of Muslims and hence, it doth follow as the night the day, of Islam. A heavy-meteal band over here, in Morocco, and a hidden tattoo parlor over here, in Ramallah, and a piercings studio in a dusty alley in Karachi, all adds up to this: we can stop worrying about Islam, and learn to love Jihad. It’s nothing at all. They’re just like us. So true. And of course, “us” are all like… well, like Mark LaVine. Please give me a minute, do, to adjust my scrotum ring, before continuing to post. Yes, and let me turn up even higher the heavy-metal music I love to play. And that’s what makes the whole world kin in the worldview of Mark LaVine: the heavy-metal, the tattoos, the piercings.
And just think. Californian taxpayers, supporting the University of California system, paid for all that heavy-metalling backpacking through the lands of the Muslims. Five years of it, on and off. The next time you want to suggest cuts in the California state budget, you could do worse than to start with the likes of Mark LaVine, and his “research project, “ and other, similarly idiotic endeavors, money lavished on it when half the members of the incoming freshmen class can’t read or write. We now know about Mark LaVine. Are there others like him, or is he sui generis, to a fault?
And when, having completed his “research,” LaVine shows up on NPR to tell a waiting nation about the fact that he found here and there some heavy-metallers in Morocco, or Pakistan, and that this is all very significant, he reminds one of people who only outwardly appear to be of a different type, because they wear suits and ties, and know nothing about heavy-metal music, and their manner smacks of Lawrence Welk, or possibly the Muzak that chloroforms you in the elevators of tall and powerful office buildings,.
Yes, Mark LaVine is just a variant cultivar of the same species, one that appears to grow particularly well in sunny California, and the species consists of all those who keep being fooled, who practically fool themselves, about Islam, or the Arabs, or Saudi Arabia, or the “Palestinians.”
Think of how many American officials, striding down their corridors of power – this way the banana peels, gentlemen! – have allowed themselves to be fooled -- by the agents of Saudi Arabia. Yes, so many American officals, including National Security Advisers, and Secretaries of State -- see James Baker, see Colin Powell -- have been led to believe or allowed themselves to pretend to believe, that the "real" Saudi Arabia is not that of the grim clerics, or of the hate-filled textbooks, or the mutawwa beating men and women with sticks for the slightest infraction, or of the slavery in which so many foreign workers are essentially held, or of the fantastic corruption by a thieving family, or of the unbelievable laziness of the Saudi Arabs, or of the primitive nature of the country, that continues because of the loyalty of the Al Saud, or rather the buying-off of clerical opposition, by the Al Saud, through their unwavering support for the most retrograde version of an already retrograde Total Belief-System.
No, for these officials, many of whom have received little gifts from the Saudis, ranging from the Jaguar given to the wife of the "incorruptible" Colin Powell by Prince Bandar, to the many millions of dollars lavished by the Saudis on James Baker directly and indirectly (including donations to his modestly-named "James Baker Institute" at Rice University, and the millions earned by Baker & Botts for Saudi-connnected legal business, the "true" Saudi Arabia was for decades to be found in those port-and-cigars gatherings that Prince Bandar offered, where they could all be worldy men together, and Bandar, with a forgiving if pained expression on his face, could explain that "of course my country is corrupt. And your country is corrupt. But it is always a question of degree. We are not really that corrupt. We are doing the best we can, to modernize our country. We are doing the best we can to be your true friends, and to keep the price of oil moderate." Und so weiter.
Yes, under the heavy-metal facade, Mark LaVine is just one more dreary corridors-of power Republican on the make, or on the take. (In this particular case, it hardly matters which). They allowed themselves to believe that the siren songs of Prince Bandar offered the truth about the "real" Saudi Arabia. And Mark LaVine believes that the existence of a a handful of heavy-metal bands, in Morocco or Pakistan, with the musicians possibly sporting or hidinig their haram tattoos (which are haram),l and even possible piercings, mean something, even mean a lot.
But he’s the one who’s a musician in heavy-metal bands himself, a “heavy-metal musician.” An artist.. And he’s the one who can’t sit still long enough to read those big heavy tomes about Islam. And he’s the one who has instead been gallivanting about, spending his time gaily listening to, or even taking part sessions of these unrepresentative representatives of Islam, or what he takes to be a conceivable Islam, these heavy-metallists. I can just imagine the sounds he and his Muslim brothers must have produced. My dear – the noise, the people!
And now he’s had the mad idea to actually endow all of his self-indulgence and silliness with portentous meaning, a Meaning For All Of Us who wish to avoid “a clash of civilizations.”
God, he’s dumb, isn’t he?
God, he’s dumb, isn’t he?
Posted by: Hugh
Is LeVine really that dumb or does he just think the rest of America is and that we are looking for someone to tell us everything will be all right? Don't forget his NPR audience: primarily Democrats and liberals.
Shallow kumbayah stuff.
No, he's dumb, and also quite comical. Look again at the piece I did based on what he puts up at his very own site, describing himself. That's not a clever man. That's a dope.
"Charged up" from smoking pot?
All I ever wanna do is watch TV and eat!
Jeez,
Dhimmi's will blame anything - as long as it's not Muslims and the Qur'an!
Wow, what an amazingly positive influence Islam has on our culture!
(Heavy) Metal was never political. Despite the appearance, all metalheads are the most friendly people you will ever meet.
I wonder if how many Moslems will recognise the true "Metal God" Rob Halford who is Gay?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Halford
Reading about as a guy whose into music this gets my goat up (pardon the pun know what I'm saying?), I don't know the guy nor do I care but when he equates Metal with politics then I do. Look at the basic web search wiki.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_LeVine
He tries to equate (Heavy) Metal to a political movement (Islam, musn't forget the captial I) with Heavy Metal? What about Judas Priest, Saxon, Iron Maiden (Paul Di'Anno period, even the Bruce Dickinson period wasn't political), Manowar, Black Sabbath, Twisted Sister, Dio etc etc. He's jammed wi rubber lips, makes him an expert? Get a grip.