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Rheil Ghraibeh, a spokesman for Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood, demanded an apology from Denmark. ‘Holocaust denial is targeted by laws in Europe. Why can’t we have laws that protect all religions and prophets?’ he asked." -- from this article
But the "Holocaust" (perhaps "Nazi murder of European Jews," a formulation less abstract and less easily alluded to in pro-forma fashion) is an event in history. The denial of it is participated in only by the most sinister, those who show an obvious lack of sympathy for the Jewish victims (impliedly "exaggerators") and plenty of sympathy for the perpetrators (impliedly wrongly accused). Holocaust-deniers are simply lying about history.
But cartoons about this or that figure in this or that system of belief (in this case exhibiting some of the features of what we are accustomed to call a "religion") do not deny history. Isn't it true that in the Qur'an Believers are told to "strike terror" into the hearts of Unbelievers? Isn't the Qur'an full of Jihad-verses, about using violence to subdue -- to kill -- non-Muslims? Do those who have engaged in what we have no trouble defining as "terrorism" merely engaged in combat, or qitaal, as mentioned 27 times in the Qur'an -- that is, directly participating in Jihad through violence rather than through other means? If someone in the West (say, a Danish cartoonist or ten) wishes to express what an Infidel thinks of this, is he not entitled to?
Now, if Muhammad had never had sexual intercourse with little Aisha at the age of nine (she having been betrothed to him three years earlier, when she was six), and had Muhammad never taken part in the decapitation of the bound prisoners of the Banu Qurayza, and never attacked the inoffensive Jewish farmers (unaware of his existence) of the Khaybar Oasis, and never sanctioned the killing of Asma bint Marwan or Abu Afak, they might have a point. If he had never done any of these things and more, but Infidels insisted that all of these things had been done -- that is, if Infidels had invented all those details of Muhammad's life -- there might be a point, a point about a denial of historical events. But all the absurd play with history demonstrates that the denial and fabrication of historical events is happening on the other side -- from the attempts to invent the "Muslim discovery and settlement of Australia" to "Muslim members of Columbus' expedition" to backdating of Muslim arrivals in the West, to a highly fantastical reading of Western history by Tariq Ramadan and others to make the Western world forget its own past and attribute to the world of Islam everything that came out of that West and that could not for one minute have been produced in the Muslim world.
All peoples, non-Muslims as well as Muslim, are capable of mass illogic. There is always a readiness to believe in absurd conspiracy theories, or in the quasi-divinity of a leader who can do no wrong. And all peoples, non-Muslims as well as Muslims, can find it possible to blame others for their own self-generated woes. But that mass illogic, that mental confusion, that readiness to believe the most absurd conspiracy theories, is demonstrably much more durable, and widespread, among Muslim peoples today. And it is perfectly reasonable to find the explanation for that in the habit of mental submission that Islam encourages, and the absence of free and critical inquiry within Islam, an inquiry that Islam discourages.
Danish papers, in an intelligent and necessary show of solidarity and refusal to be intimidated, recently reprinted the Muhammad cartoons. But where was The Times (of New York, London, Los Angeles)? Where were the Washington Post, The Telegraph, Le Monde, Figaro, and a thousand other places? They should all have, on an agreed date, or perhaps in staggered fashion, have reprinted the cartoons. And kept it up, and kept it up.
Perhaps an international Committee For the Defense of Free Speech needs to be formed. Its purpose would be to explain the extent of free speech, and those limits on it that are proper, and those that are not. And among those limits that are not proper are those that Muslims demand.
Those cartoons should not be of note. They should be so common as to evoke the same yawn of indifference that any similar efforts, directed at any other target, would evoke.
Posted by Hugh at February 26, 2008 8:54 AM
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"Rheil Ghraibeh, a spokesman for Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood, demanded an apology from Denmark. ‘Holocaust denial is targeted by laws in Europe. Why can’t we have laws that protect all religions and prophets?’ he asked."
Well lets count the number of people that the "cartoon not the person that drew it but the paper ink drawing" killed .......zero.....now how many people have been killed by Hitler gee many million.....and who is killing/trashing things with the regards to the paper and ink drawing? gee the believers of mohead
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at February 26, 2008 9:05 AM
BOOM! Right on target again, Hugh.
Posted by: undaunted at February 26, 2008 9:09 AM
"Perhaps an international Committee For the Defense of Free Speech needs to be formed. Its purpose would be to explain the extent of free speech, and those limits on it that are proper, and those that are not. And among those limits that are not proper are those that Muslims demand."
From Hugh Fitzgerald above:
This worries me because it then allows for others to set free speech guidlines of which maybe quite different in other countries.
Example: Consider the countries that sit at the United nations Human rights table.
Posted by: Mackie at February 26, 2008 9:32 AM
Isn't Islam itself a monstrous slander on every other religion and their prophets?
The festering hypocrisy is world-historical in its ludicrousness.
Posted by: profitsbeard at February 26, 2008 9:33 AM
We need to introduce laws targetting denial of the Infidel Holocaust - the slaughtering and enslaving of some 100 million people during the 1400 years of the Islam's war against humans.
It would be perfectly consistent with the moral imperatives that made us outlaw the denial of the Jewish Holocaust.
Posted by: thomas. h at February 26, 2008 9:50 AM
These islamists are like the sneaky bad guy in the old fake 'professional' wrestling performances of one's memory - trying to distract you while they try to run behind the good guy and take a dirty shot to win the match.
Well, the Germans very efficiently robbed and murdered Jewish people to fund their national madness. Now they are history. Monkeyman is trying to get his hand on a nuke to become the king of the slime pit of islam.
Our job is to keep our eye on the ball.
And win.
And not by giving away the farm with slippery Hussein the Magical O.
Posted by: dgene at February 26, 2008 9:53 AM
Mackie, you hit the nail on the head.
'International' yes, but I think Hugh Fitzgerald has quite another understanding of these free speech guidelines than the utterly corrupt apes from the UN.
Posted by: sheik yer'mami at February 26, 2008 9:58 AM
You'd think the MusBros would hate Holocaust Denial laws, after all, they were Hitler's pals in the big one. Apparently it's okay for them to hate Jews and support Holocaust Denial hokum, but insult their bloody profit, and all hell breaks loose.
Posted by: Dumbo at February 26, 2008 10:00 AM
"1400 years of the Islam's war against humans"
I meant to say "1400 years of Islam's war against humanity".
On the other hand the first variant is not entirely out of place.
Posted by: thomas. h at February 26, 2008 10:02 AM
A comparison between the Holocaust and the Motoons. Good God!
No wonder the Mohammedans never invented anything and come to the West as parasites on their host countries.
The huge, huge disservice that Mohammed the Charlatan did to the non-Jewish semitic people of the Middle East cannot be overstated. They're told they're the "best of peoples" and so they never create anything of distinction (save perhaps "The Arabian Nights") while all the other people of the world are creating and inventing like mad. Then in modern times, realizing they haven't contributed to the world in any meaningful way, their inferiority complex is so great they march around destroying property and killing people and demanding to be "respected" when in fact they don't deserve any respect.
I consult "The Rage and The Pride" by Oriana Fallaci, which everyone regularly on this site should own a copy of and have read.
Pages 90-99 she contrasts the creations of the West with those of the Mohammedan world. Here's the section on Science:
"Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Pasteur, Einstein...the motor, the telegraph, the light-bulb...electricity, the photograph, the telephone, the radio, the television have not been invented by mullahs and ayatollahs, have they? The train, the automobile, the airplane, the helicopter, the spacecrafts...the heart and liver and lungs' transplant...
Tell me: what are the conquests of the other culture, the culture of the bigots with the beard and the chador and the burkah? Look and search, search and look, I can only find the Prophet with his sacred book that sounds preposterous even when it plagiarizes the Bible and the Gospels and the Torah. I only find Averroe, Omar Khayyam with his fine poetry, plus a few beautiful mosques. No other achievements in art or thought.
Concerning mathematics - Mathematics was invented more or less simultaneously by the Arabs, the Indians, the Greeks, the Mayans, and the Mesopotamians. Nor did you invent numbers, only a new way of writing them.
The Wrap-Up: I feel fully authorized to affirm that, apart from Averroe and some poets and some mosques, and your way of writing numbers (she is speaking to Arafat), your ancestors have left a book and that's all. I mean the Koran which for a thousand and four hundred years has tormented humanity even more than the Bible and the Gospels and the Torah together."
Anyway People, I urge you to get "The Rage and The Pride" - you will not regret it, I promise.
Posted by: darcy at February 26, 2008 10:14 AM
sheik yer'mami:
If there was an international committee on the guidlines of free speech, would it include representatives from the nearly 1/3 countries that are Islamic?
Even today countries that where considered bastions of free speech are setting guidlines under the perversion of mulitculturalism,namely the British who appear to be bending over so far when it comes to not offending a certain aggressive ideology. They are going to fall on their collective faces if they don't wake up and start standing up for their traditional values, and foundations.
No thank you! to some international committee establishing, or even recommending free speech guidlines of any kind.
Posted by: Mackie at February 26, 2008 10:18 AM
Hugh said
...engaged in combat, or qitaal, as mentioned 27 times in the Qur'an...
Which reminds me, I remember seeing the number of times that "love" was mentioned in the Qur'an. It wasn't many, it was less than the number of times that "behead", or "slay" was mentioned. Alas, I cannot find the reference, so I tried a search myself at www.quranbrowser.com, which found many occurances of the word "love", but they were all in reference to "love for allah", which is not exactly, or even remotely, the same thing.
Posted by: special_guest at February 26, 2008 10:20 AM
You're right Mackie,
f*kc international committees, we need to defend our rights, that's all.
Posted by: sheik yer'mami at February 26, 2008 10:31 AM
Good post Darcy...
Allah reveals his love many times in his book.
But like other Islamic renditions, the word love does not mean to them what it means to us, me anyway. Allah loves to hate, kill, torture and bluster around. He gets up in the morning in a foul mood. He is a lousy room mate, never does the dishes. You can't depend on him for anything, and he can't do anything for himself, always needs help.
Poor muslims help Allah as best they can, but he always wants more. They pour their heart and soul into them, and he won't even guarantee them a place in heaven, unless they martyr themselves in his name. Honestly, I don't know why muslim's stick with Allah. YHVH, or even Zeus, would treat them better.
I guess muslims who stick with it are just gluttons for punishment.
Maybe the poster Khokar could shed some light on the fatal and painful attraction to Allah...I can only define it as a form of mental illness and pathological deviation...
at February 26, 2008 10:39 AM
Thanks, duh_swami.
"I can only define it as a form of mental illness and pathological deviation..."
Posted by: duh_swami at February 26, 2008 10:39 AM
Masochism in the extreme. Sadism, too.
at February 26, 2008 10:51 AM
Hugh wrote:
"Perhaps an international Committee For the Defense of Free Speech needs to be formed. Its purpose would be to explain the extent of free speech, and those limits on it that are proper, and those that are not. And among those limits that are not proper are those that Muslims demand."
Statement by king george to welcome the king of jordan 2 years ago:
"We also talked about a topic that requires a lot of discussion and a lot of sensitive thought, and that is the reaction to the cartoons. I first want to make it very clear to people around the world that ours is a nation that believes in tolerance and understanding. In America we welcome people of all faiths. One of the great attributes of our country is that you're free to worship however you choose in the United States of America.
"Secondly, we believe in a free press. We also recognize that with freedom comes responsibilities. With freedom comes the responsibility to be thoughtful about others."
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/02/20060208-1.html
So it would appear that bush sides with the muslims on this issue, just as he seemingly does on many important issues, kosovo merely being the latest example.
Posted by: sheik yer booty at February 26, 2008 11:19 AM
Darcy...OT...Yesterday I posted a youtube item about the 'Black rock and vagina worship'. If you have not seen that, you might be interested. Run search for 'Islamshown'. Parts one and two...
Posted by: duh_swami at February 26, 2008 11:28 AM
...Nor did you invent numbers, only a new way of writing them....
nabi ZK wishes to remind all who read this that the decimal system is an invention of the Indian kuffar and not of the Arabs. Give me a break. Arabia had no high culture but was a collection of warring tribes prior to mohamet. So exactly how did they find time to be great mathematicians?
nabi ZK
...mohametan heaven...where the girls are....yeow!!!...believe it...
Posted by: zonie kafir at February 26, 2008 12:31 PM
When I look upon the face of this small girl filled with innocence and potential being chained & molded by the violent ideology of parents caught in the grasp of Satan himself, I am once again reminded of the prophetic words by Golda Meyer – Israel’s great stateswoman & Prime Minister: “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us” What monsters who would turn such innocents into weapons of Islamic conquest! God Help us!
Posted by: descendantofacrusader at February 26, 2008 12:37 PM
Sorry wrong thread!
Posted by: descendantofacrusader at February 26, 2008 12:38 PM
But all the absurd play with history demonstrates that the denial and fabrication of historical events is happening on the other side -- from the attempts to invent the "Muslim discovery and settlement of Australia" to "Muslim members of Columbus' expedition" to backdating of Muslim arrivals in the West, to a highly fantastical reading of Western history by Tariq Ramadan and others to make the Western world forget its own past and attribute to the world of Islam everything that came out of that West and that could not for one minute have been produced in the Muslim world.
the so-called Golden age of Islam always been a historical lie while some discoveries could come out of the Islamic world. They rarely were made by Muslims, other than those who had only been under Islam's cult for a generation or two
at February 26, 2008 1:10 PM
This holocaust denial is not only in respect to the Jewish holocaust but the Hindu one as well - the one where millions upon millions of Hindus were slaughtered mercilessly during the Middle Ages by people who couldn't be bothered to give a damn (the Muslims, of course).
Because we don't first hand experiences, we often rely on MUSLIM SOURCES for verification, where they glorify their achievements in the number of kaffirs they managed to kill in some small amount of time.
As far as I know, they do the same thing in India.
The cure? Be educated.
Blue
Posted by: Blue at February 26, 2008 2:15 PM
The Chutzpah that someone who embraces an ideology embracing another final solution (do I need to quote the Jew behind the rock, and remind people of the role of the Madhi) using the holocaust to impose his ideology on non believers.
Most Jews only expect non-Jews to follow the 7 noahide laws. And with the exception of the law regarding homosexuality, most of those are not very controversial. And those who do not believe in the Jewish God or Jewish prophets are not generally targetted by the Jews.
Christians based Christianity on the acknowledgment that people do not accept Jesus. Christians understand that nonbelievers do not If nonbelievers believed in Jesus, the whole concept of declaration, baptism, repentance, and communion would be pointless. They aaccept that non Christians do not believe in the New Testamaent (and sometimes Old Testament) prophets.
Folks such as Reil need to realize that intellectually honest non Muslims do NOT accept Mohammed as a prophet. His demand that nonbelievers legally recognize the prophethood Mohammed is something that cannot be appeased or negotiated with.
What he is attempting to do with this dishonest argument violates Articles 18 and 19 of the UN Bill of Rights as well as the the 1st ammendment of the US.
Posted by: sh217 at February 26, 2008 6:03 PM
sh217 writes:
"Most Jews only expect non-Jews to follow the 7 noahide laws...Christians based Christianity on the acknowledgment that people do not accept Jesus. Christians understand that nonbelievers do not."
I write:
Add to that, contrary to Islam, both Judaism and Christianity have made serious efforts to see how God might be present and at work in other religions. In addition to the Noahide Commandments, the Jew could also say that Muslim monotheism and halal, similar as these are to Jewish monotheism and kosher, are good things, even as he or she must reject Muhammed as a false prophet or Islam's rejection of Israel as God's one chosen people.
In the Christian world, the more or less official line of the Catholic Church, for instance, is that, insofar as Jesus is the incarnate Logos, Second Person of the Trinity, and insofar as this Second Person is the only way to the Father, then wherever one finds the Logos one finds something that points, however tenuously, towards the First Person of the Trinity. One finds the Logos wherever one finds truth, and thus wherever one finds truth one finds God pointing towards God. Thus, the Christian can say that, no matter what else might be wrong with Islam, its affirmation of God's oneness is a partial affirmation (partial because it denies God's threeness) of truth, and celebrate that truth along with the Muslim. Of course, this mutual celebration ought not obscure differences, as the Christian must recognize that the Muslim affirms much that the Christian thinks untrue, and rejects much that he or she holds sacrosanct.
Not all Christians would hold the view articulated above, of course, but the point is that many Christians have spent time thinking through its relationship to people with whom it disagrees. This includes some of our greatest thinkers of the post-WWII era (one might see Pope Benedict XVI's entire theological career, really, as an attempt to come to terms with two facts: one, that Christians believe many things to be true that others do not; two, that, nonetheless, we must live in the same world as these people). Admittedly, for Christianity this has largely been a post-Holocaust endeavour. However, the point is that Christianity, by and large, was horrified by what happened in the 30s and 40s, and took steps, by its own initiative, to address the perversions of itself that helped contribute to that catastrophe.
Islam, by and large, has not demonstrated a similar horror at al Qaeda or 9/11, but rather devoted its energies to denying that this violence has anything to do with Islam, while simultaneously calling for lethal violence against cartoonists. Yes, Christianity has a checkered past, but we owned up to that past, tried to make amends, changed our ways. Until Islam begins to do the same, it has little moral credibility in my eyes.
Posted by: FidesEtRatio at February 27, 2008 8:19 AM
Ummm....The Holocaust is a religion????
Posted by: Wookieelips at February 27, 2008 8:13 PM
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