Correct me if I’m wrong, but how can the banning of a paper that disseminates anti-Jewish and anti-Western propaganda be described as a "Hitler method". I would have thought the Hitler method would have been to fund and promote such a paper as he quite obviously hated Jews with a passion and his hatred of the west wasn't too much less. And how can Schily be compared to Hitler when he is trying to stop the spread of anti-Semitism as opposed to doing everything in his power to promote it as Hitler did.

Posted by: Earthling at April 12, 2005 9:06 AM

After Adolf Hitler, who wanted to create his own race and soaked the world in blood and fire, the German interior minister reintroduces these Hitler methods again and announces the ban of the newspaper Vakit without a court order.".

Welcome to the Orwellian 21st century.

The German interior minister is Hitlerian; Bush = Hitler; Israelis are the new Nazis. Anyone seeking to protect the Jews from another Holocaust is magically transformed into a fascist.

Oh and by the way, Jesus was a Palestinian Arab; Solomon's Temple never existed; and Abraham was a Muslim.

Furthermore, there was never an Armenian genocide; 2 million Hindus were most assuredly not murdered in East Pakistan; and the Mossad launched missiles into the WTC.

The perversion of history engineered by Islam, sponsored by Arab petrodollars and largesse, and disseminated by dhimmi "scholars" and the mainstream media is nearly complete.

Posted by: Charles Martel at April 12, 2005 9:15 AM

"For a democracy that is willing to defend its values..."

Ah, there's the phrase I've been waiting to hear out of Europe since September 12, 2001.

10 little words.

And, if they can spread throughout the EU, there may actually be some hope for the people of the Former Socialist Candyland of Europe to repel the 'guest-worker' tide of arrogant despots hidng in the mufti camouflage of multi-culturalism/racism/Islamophobia.

Deutschland, read your Goethe!

Faustian deals never work out well.

Defend your values.

Posted by: BigSleep at April 12, 2005 10:40 AM

...comparing Schily to Hitler and declaring German politicians to be in the hands of the "Jewish lobby."

A perfect example of RoP logic.

Robert, Hugh, wouldn't you agree: even if there were the will to revise the Koran through text-critical studies in the manner of the 19th-century German Bible scholars, they might have trouble finding anyone with the intellectual means of accomplishing it? I mean, given that most of their education consists of blind, rote memorization of said Koran and Hadiths?

Islam can't reform itself.

BigSleep, be careful mentioning Goethe in conjunction with Islam. He was a big fan. Some Muslims even claim he was one of them, secretly. (Of course they say the same of Shakespeare...)

In my view, he followed most Western apologists for Mahomet from the 18th and 19th centuries in that he mainly used Islam as a stick with which to beat the still-repressive European churches, but still - a man of his intellect should have smelled a rat.

And if Goethe couldn't, what chance to today's mental pygmies have?

Posted by: Cato the Elder at April 12, 2005 3:22 PM

Argh! "to" = "do"

PIMF

Posted by: Cato the Elder at April 12, 2005 3:23 PM

Hilarious that Islamonazi's have the chutzpah to play the Hitler card. After the Grand Mufti Husseini of Jerusalem, his Handschar (Handjar) Brigade of Bosnian Muslims and the Albanian Skanderbeg SS Division.

And wasn't Mein Kampf, a recent best seller in the Turkish book market?

Then again everyone plays that card, even Christian Fascists.

There use to be a very good article with some great pictures of Islamonazi's giving a Hitlerian salute,at http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/index.php/Islamonazism, but apparently CAIR got to it, since the info and pictures have been edited and removed.

Fortunately Robert has a picture of Hizbollah giving the Seig Heil salute at a swearing in ceremony
archived

Common sense calling Germany, cut your losses and save yourself while you can, by expelling all Turks. That would also save your economy, which is being destroyed by muslims on welfare, and create jobs for loyal German citizens, jobs that have been taken up by Turks and Muslims.

Germany has 20% unemployment in some regions, yet it continues to allow Turks to emmigrate, and even has an outreach program to recruit Arab and Turkish students.

Is there something romantic and compelling about cultural suicide? The Muslims don't think so.

Posted by: Giaour at April 12, 2005 4:16 PM

"Robert, Hugh, wouldn't you agree: even if there were the will to revise the Koran through text-critical studies in the manner of the 19th-century German Bible scholars, they might have trouble finding anyone with the intellectual means of accomplishing it? I mean, given that most of their education consists of blind, rote memorization of said Koran and Hadiths?"

Rote memorization of the Qur'an may be conducted among young boys, but there is much more to the education of Islamic scholars than Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira. They read commentators on all three. They try to understand just how each hadith has been assigned by the authoritative muhaddithin to one of the four levels of acceptance or authenticity. They would study the application of the doctrine of abrogation or naskh. There is a lot to study.

But it all comes down, in the end, to the question of authority, and the habit of obedience to authority, an authority that was established a long time ago. Even if there is slightly more interpretive freedom in Shi'a Islam, this is only relative.

Real scholarship on the origins of the Qur'an, and of early Islam, must necessarily be the preserve of non-Muslims -- even those who, for one reason or another, can be apologists or at least insufficiently disturbed by the object of their study. Sometimes when one puts in a decade or so of preparation -- linguistic and historical -- one naturally is inclined to see the object of one's study as intrinsically more interesting, more complex, more worthy of such study, than it may be.

Those schooled in Aramaic and in Arabic, and in the historical mattes discussed, for example, at the Conference on the Umayyad Era in Bilad al-Sham (Greater Syria), which took place at Oxford in 1993, can offer information about early Islam that will never be produced by Muslim believers (those born into Islam, who have managed to escape its mind-forged manacles, are a different matter). Christoph Luxenberg was not at that conference. Sydney Griffith was. ]
]

How Islam began, whether it originates in a Jewish sect, or a group of Nabatean Christians, or what, where, when, how -- surely if one is going into Islamic studies, that is where one should now go. And if one cannot then travel in safety to Muslim lands -- no great loss. Doesn't getting to the heart of the matter -- matter?

Posted by: Hugh at April 13, 2005 11:14 PM

Hugh, in a recent editorial by Dr. Charles Jacobs in the Columbia Spectator about the current disgraceful whitewash of that institution's Middle Eastern studies apparatchiks, he writes:

Palestinianism obscures—and is meant to obscure—any academically credible understanding of the region by discounting the plight of ethnic, religious and racial minorities in the Arab world. Professors hostile to Israel obstruct the study of and Americans’ natural instinct to help the Arab region’s victims and second-class peoples: the black Muslim slaves of Mauritania and the African Christian slaves of Sudan, the two million blacks slaughtered by the jihad in South Sudan, African Muslims now slaughtered and enslaved in Darfur, the Christian minority populations in Iraq, Sudan, Egypt and Lebanon, and the region’s oppressed women, gays, apostates, and dissidents. Palestinianism is a highly cultivated weapon of mass distraction.

If Palestinianism is the distractor, the teachings of the late Edward Said function as a gag order. According to Said, since Western scholarship was employed in the service of colonialism, Westerners have neither the right nor the ability to criticize anything in the Arab or Islamic realm. Said-ism enforces silence about the victims of jihad, dhimmi-tude, and Arab tyranny with threats to label people “Orientalists”—a curse akin to our culture’s most powerful insult, “racist.” Professors and students influenced by Said are under pressure to speak no criticism of anything done by Arabs or Muslims.

Said neutered the left. So powerful is this force that what seems an actual majority of Western progressives have been struck nearly dumb in the face of the mass murder, enslavement, oppression, and ethnic cleansing of precisely those groups they otherwise champion and defend: women, gays, apostates, dissidents, blacks, and ethnic, religious, and racial minorities. The victims of Said-ism are not only the Jews of Israel but all of these peoples whose narratives cannot be easily found in many Middle East studies departments. A reformed MEALAC would teach American students about these victims whose plights are now smothered by Palestinianism and blocked by Said-ism.

This is indeed the sad situation in which Western scholars of Islam find themselves. Toe the line of Saidism or don't get that tenure-track job. Or any job at all. The very fact that Herr Luxenburg has to hide behind a pseudonym says it all: either join the Saidist camp and sign on to the idea that a Western scholar per definitionem has no standing to critique Islam from an outsider's point of view (and hence must accept what is spoon-fed him by his Caliphate masters), or follow the route of so-called "orientalism" and be permanently ostracized from the profession, if not placed under a death fatwa.

It is disturbing to think in historical terms when one realizes that even in the 19th century scholars like David Friedrich Strauss were under threat, if not of beheading, then of ostracism and loss of their professions for writing critically of the life of Jesus. The textual scholars were more insulated by virtue of the obscurity of their labors, but within narrower circles just as controversial. It wasn't until Vatican II that the value of (in particular) New Testament textual research was recognized by the Catholic Church.

Even though the Church still maintains the divine inspiration of the canon, it always - from the beginning - recognized that the instruments of that inspiration were human beings. Dozens of them. Therefore despite conservative opposition textual criticism eventually won the day, as the Church realized that getting closer to the inspired text could only be beneficial.

What, then, of Islam? A religion whose holy book is not considered to be inspired but actually written by Allah, uncreated, eternal, flawless, residing in the seventh heaven on golden tablets. The proudest boast of the faithful being that not a jot or tittle has changed since Mohammed’s revelation.

That's why, as you say, the critiques have to come from outside. But how then to get them to penetrate the Muslim consciousness, when they are per se orientalist, infidel work, the insidious undermining of Western sappers?

Oh what a future.

Posted by: Cato the Elder at April 14, 2005 1:01 PM