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"In 2006, Tufts' Hillel received part of a $1.6-million Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grant to promote 'inter-faith and intercultural dialogue.'" -- from this depressing article
Inter-faith Healers: it's the latest racket. Elmer-Gantries galore. Or worse. All Elmer Gantry wanted was money and women. But Muslims, wherever they conquered in the early centuries of conquest, certainly seized women and loot (just like their Model of Conduct, their Perfect Man), while nowadays they don't want just that. They want to remove all obstacles to the spread of Islam. And that means everything that makes the West the West, beginning with such things as individualism and the guarantees of freedom of thought and speech, and equal treatment, legal equality for women and non-Muslims, and freedom of artistic expression, and the free and skeptical inquiry which is punished in Islam, and encouraged in the post-Enlightenment West, and without which the enterprise of science cannot continue.
No doubt the Hillel rabbi referred to in that article was quite proud of himself for his "broad-mindedness." Yes, moral preening. But that word can cover a wide variety of things.
Right now I fondly recall a scene from the first version -- the one with James Mason -- of "Lolita." There he was, living at the house of Charlotte Haze, and attending the school prom, and Jean Farlow is dancing with him. And she explains, endowing the phrase with a meaning that her partner, world-weary Humbert, chooses to ignore, that once he gets to know Jean and her husband, he will find, Humbert, that "we are extremely broad-minded."
Perhaps the Hillel-House rabbis from sea to shining sea should put down their latest handouts from some Interfaith group, or whatever it is they picked up at their last visit on Outreach Night at a local Mosque ("What Is Islam Really All About" or "Is Something The Matter With Islam?" or "Can't We All Just Get Along?") or possibly that last issue of Tikkun with that "hopeful" piece -- positively riveting, wasn't it? -- by Cornell West, and do something really unexpected. How about this? How about reading, sitting down and reading, Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, and then reading the great Western scholars on Islam -- Joseph Schacht, C. Snouck Hurgronje, Arthur Jeffrey, Henri Lammens, St. Clair Tisdall, and so many others who studied and wrote before the age of the Great Inhibition?
And then there is one more thing these eager Interfaith-Healers (Hillel Rabbis Division) might do. They just might read what Maimonides wrote about Islam and the treatment of Jews under Islam (see "Epistle to the Yemen"), and then, to really do something wild and crazy, they might actually reread, or possibly read for the first time, Rabbi Hillel.
You know, the one who wrote "If I am not for myself, then who will be?” What a crazy idea. What a wild idea. Maybe it’s time, it’s long past time, not only for the Hillel-House rabbi and his charges at Tufts, but for the denizens of the entire Western world, to start thinking about, and then taking, that excellent advice.
But of course this malady isn’t limited only to Hillel-House rabbis. "I would hope that in the future, the way of dialogue would in fact increase and make inroads in the other parts of Islam," said Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the archbishop of Westminster, England, some time ago.
How has the "way of dialogue" so far made things easier, in the Middle East or anywhere else, for Catholics, or Christians, or non-Muslims generally? It has not. One of the things Bernard Lewis has said that might be engraved in one's memory is that compromise does not exist for Muslims; all concessions and aid and smiles from the Infidels, and promises of understanding, will be pocketed, and exploited. But there will be nothing in return; far from it. Instead, the assurance that Islam will triumph, that if Muslims are patient, very patient, a good deal of the non-Muslim world will fall into their lap, will be confirmed.
This is not understood by those in the Western world. They lack the imaginative sympathy, the real imaginative sympathy, to comprehend the psychology of Muslims -- which means, of course, most Muslims. They take the becks and nods and smiles as meaning something -- well, so they do, but not what the leaders of the Western world think they do.
Since "Dialogue" with "the moderates" has been such a smashing failure, why not indeed extend it to the "fundamentalists"? Is this not the policy urged by Alastair Crooke and his fellow "consultants" at Conflicts Forum? Of course it is. But at least he is getting paid for his services. No one is paying those Cardinals and rabbis who think that "dialogue" is the way to proceed.
And in any case, the idiocy of some in the Western world will be paid for, in unpleasantness, in expense, in danger, and in death, by the entire Infidel world. "Dialogues of civilization" are now all the rage, the Muslim rage. They keep down the amount of critical scrutiny. They buy time to further entrench Muslim populations in the Western world, aggressive, insistent, ever-more demanding and hostile populations.
The ability of people to deny the evidence is disturbing. About smoking's link to cancer. Obesity's link to heart disease. The nature of Islam. Some things are matters of individual survival, while other things....
Posted by Hugh at February 5, 2008 9:17 AM
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What is the point of dialogue if you dont know what you are talking about and the people you are talking to think it is an obligation to lie to you?
An Islamic Radical Forces Weapon: Muslim Misinformation As Required By Islamic Law
“’When it is possible to achieve…an aim by lying but not telling the truth, it is permissible to lie if the goal is permissible, and it is obligatory to lie if the goal is obligatory.
“’When, for example, one is concealing a Muslim from an oppressor who asks where he is, it is obligatory to lie about him being hidden.” [see text at note 15, infra]
“… ‘it is obligatory for a [Muslim] student to give a positive interpretation to every utterance of his [Muslim] brothers that seems to be wrong until he has exhausted seventy excuses. No one is incapable of this except a failure.’” [see text at note 22, infra]
http://www.faithfreedom.org/oped/AlexandraParis60203.htm
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at February 5, 2008 10:21 AM
YES it is depressing. The 'progressive intellectual left'is like watching mortally wounded flesh turn green with gangrene till it rots and stinks and putrefies.
Posted by: poetcomic1 at February 5, 2008 11:54 AM
I had a very intelligent, broad-minded and progressive Muslim interlocutor tell me recently that the West was "tired" and perhaps in need of rejuvenation from the youth and fervor of the Muslim world. He was speaking of the West's demographic and spiritual decline.
I marveled at both his perceptiveness and his chutzpah. Of course he's absolutely right about the West being "tired", but entirely wrong that the Muslim world can in any way "rejuvenate" us.
Let's face it....the Western world, in its affluence and abundance, chose to lose its way, betray the Enlightenment, and embrace cultural Marxism...at the very moment when the Islamic world - and the most conservative part of it at that - was endowed with unparalleled wealth due to an accident of geography...and the unparalleled historical opportunity to spread Islam without challenge.
Arab/Muslim penetration of the Western world is now proceeding apace, not just demographically, politically, and in terms of Dawa, but perhaps most telling, financially. Did anyone notice how the UAE and the Qataris have recently taken advantage of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown by buying interests in our largest banks and financial institutions? They are also buying controlling interests in high-tech and defense-related industries. Our Jizyah (aid) to the Muslim world will be small potatoes compared to the extent to which they will enrich themselves and ride on the backs of our own productivity in years to come. They - and the Chinese - are destined to own a huge chunk of America before long; this is the end result of living beyond our means (chronic balance-of-payment deficits).
I'm committed...so much so that my intellectual identity has become the anti-Jihad...(thank God I have my music to lighten things up). But those moments when I'm being objective, when I'm looking at the world through the prism of a dispassionate cultural observer....well, the writing is on the wall. By every objective criteria with the exception of the short-term military one, the trend is against the West.
Posted by: Cornelius at February 5, 2008 1:05 PM
The ability of people to deny the evidence is disturbing. About smoking's link to cancer.
Interestingly, a major and remarkable shift in cultural consciousness occurred, at least in North America, with regard to smoking, over the span of a mere quarter century.
While there still lingers a faint residue of the chic of smoking in North America (among a few Hollywood actors and some rock stars etc.), and while by no means has smoking ceased in North American society, it is far more marginal and furtive, while it used to be blatantly flaunted in the full sunshine. This is the result of a concerted campaign to change the cultural consciousness. And it worked. Hopefully, our mainstream cultural consciousness that currently protects Islam from all criticism as dearly as a mother bear protects her cubs will also become marginal in the coming decades -- before a few million of us get mass-murdered by Muslim attacks.
There's a paradoxical, ironic twist to my little lesson here: the attitudes and axioms that led to the successful marginalization of smoking derive from the same Political Correctness that continues to inhibit criticism of Islam; which in fact illuminates one of the reasons why it is so difficult for the West to be rational about the Problem of Islam: the West's irrationality is part and parcel of a larger process of beneficial and dynamic Progress (for no good thing is without flaws).
Posted by: cantor at February 5, 2008 2:32 PM
BACK OFF the Elmer Gantry bashing. The guy was nearly a saint! Anyone that has actually watched that movie would know that Elmer was the one transformed at the end, and the one with the best outlook on life...watch the movie for yourself if you don't believe me. Elmer would never have found it in his heart to cooperate with muslim sensibilities. He loved booze and broads and a good poker game, but he did know how to LOVE, and that alone seperates him from nearly all adult muslim males. He took damage to his own reputation willingly, and did it to keep from hurting a poor, misguided female further than he earlier had. He took responsibility for his own actions (again, something that seperates him from nearly all adult muslim males). Elmer Gantry was a type of Christ, and a true Christian in that movie.
Posted by: WC at February 5, 2008 3:27 PM
"By every objective criteria with the exception of the short-term military one, the trend is against the West."
-- from a posting above
The West has amazing powers of recuperatioin. The Islamic world only has its oil wealth. It has nothing else. Not a single Muslim country dependent on that wealth has created a modern economy; all are largely dependent on non-Muslim wage slaves; none are likely, despite all their efforts, to create modern economies based on something other than oil. It would require large changes in the educational system. It would require giving women something akin to the rights they possess in non-Muslim countries. It would mean a work ethic -- not a Jizyah-based ethic, of obtaining loot, by hook or by crook. It would mean discouraging, rather than encouraging, the habit of mental submission, and the deep belief in a kind of inshallah-fatalism. None of that is likely to happen.
As for the buying up of stocks and bonds, and real property, by Arab and Muslim interests, that merely offers a hostage -- a hostage to our desire, and felt need, to seize the assets of those whose funding of the Jihad, we will realize soon enough, has gone too far. Those assets can be seized, and kept. All that it requires is the intelligence, and the will, to do so.
The desire to preserve the environment, or at least to slow down or mitigate anthropogenic climate change, has the inevitable effect of forcing a switch from oil, and there is nothing the Arabs can do about this. Indeed, they will have to beg the oil-consuming nations not to impose new taxes (and I hope their imploring goes unheeded). Those who have not the slightest interest in the menace of Islam will, by working for the diminishing of reliance on oil, objectively be working against the Jihad. Accept, welcome, their efforts.
The non-Arab Muslims, who constitute 80% of the world's Muslims, may here and there begin to recognize that Islam has always been a vehicle of Arab imperialism, and some may fall away. In the West, the very best people born into Islam will jettison it. Their numbers are small, but their testimony valuable. The others, of course, will be a permanent threat and must be monitored, discouraged from long-term settlement, kept out if they are not already here, and if here, things can be done to make it more, rather than less difficult, for the conduct of an Islamic life, so that those who cannot bear all the "obstacles" that the Infidel West offers -- not to mention all the temptations to a Muslim, all those whisperings of Shaytan -- will in the end decide to return, or if born in the West settle within, Muslim lands.
It is not the West, if it keeps its wits about it, that will be disintegrating. It will be the world of Islam.
But it's that phrase that matters, and worries: "if it keeps its wits about it."
Is the trend favorable to Islam? Only if we allow it to be.
at February 5, 2008 4:21 PM
Kudos for your hopefulness Hugh. It's what we've come to expect from you. But where is the realism?
HUGH: "The Islamic world only has its oil wealth. It has nothing else."
On the contrary, it has its faith, it is has a detailed blue-print for action, it has numbers, and it has the gullibility of the West to feed off of.
Meanwhile, the Qatarese have erected a world-class university, bringing in the most gifted Westerners to teach natives medicine, engineering, etc. In other words, at least a portion of the Muslim world is being educated to lead them into modernity, the albatross of faith still securely fastened.
HUGH on financial penetration: "Those assets can be seized, and kept. All that it requires is the intelligence, and the will, to do so."
I pondered that idea a couple of days ago.
This is the great tragedy of foreign investment in America vis-a-vis foreign investment in the developing world: while we build new enterprises from the ground up elsewhere, they buy into existing concerns. Except for the infusion of cash (at fire-sale prices), we get nothing.
But as for your idea, America being a nation of laws, a free-trading nation, it's hard to imagine under any circumstances that we would start seizing property, destroying the investment climate here, and risking countless billions in investments abroad.
ON THE ENVIRONMENT, your point is well-made...the only caveat being that by all realistic criteria, this historic shift to alternative sources of energy is still at least a couple of decades away. In the meantime, the price of oil keeps climbing.
HUGH: "The non-Arab Muslims, who constitute 80% of the world's Muslims, may here and there begin to recognize that Islam has always been a vehicle of Arab imperialism, and some may fall away. In the West, the very best people born into Islam will jettison it. Their numbers are small, but their testimony valuable."
I agree with the last sentence. The rest of it is conjecture,...and to a degree, wishful thinking. How gratifying if it turned out to be true, but most of the evidence reveals the opposite: a strengthening of the religious identity of Muslims the world over.
HUGH: "It is not the West, if it keeps its wits about it, that will be disintegrating. It will be the world of Islam. But it's that phrase that matters, and worries: if it keeps its wits about it."
Precisely. And if the universities, the newsrooms and the good offices of our politicians and corporate leaders are any barometer, we lost our wits long ago.
Sorry to be so negative...maybe it's just a mood. But from time to time, it's imperative that we be honest with ourselves about our prospects.
at February 5, 2008 5:01 PM
Hugh - Cornelius;
It's also the fact that in times of relative peace, Western societies prefer to usher in Socialist governments, that by design, are far more inwardly looking and caring toward their own peoples.
Appeasement in the very souls of these individuals is a fundamental part of their being, and can therefore be pressurised into ceding ground by any threatening or malicious entities that claim to represent a cause or faction.
I must give Arabic leaders a begrudging respect on this point, for they have used their bargaining chip of oil to promote Islamic Wahhibism into many a Western society, with money for scholars, books and Mosques, which now intrude on the very fabric of the "Infidelia" to which we all belong today.
These Muslims are already among us in our own Lands. Why would they move to desolate Countries and regimes, knowing fine well it would induce nothing but hardship and woe for both themselves and their families?. They know and have been taught well that, to threaten, bully and intimidate Western socialist politicians, brings them concession after concession, and eventually, it will not be they that are forced to adapt and change, but that will be the obligation of their genial hosts.
The Arabic regions only hope of any long term advantages relating to their sudden oil riches, was to fund and promote a seventh Century death cult, in the hope that, by the time the wells had run dry, their "religion of peace" would be intrinsically rooted in the first world countries and indoctrination into this grouping would be, by then, well under way.
In this respect, it seems they have succeeded, and for every Muslim in the Western world, their spiritual home will always be Arabic lands of Mecca or Medina. Which in effect gives Arabia some reason of meaning and self importance in their coming future without oil.
at February 5, 2008 5:50 PM
The historical ebb and flow of Islam's sphere of influence is well-documented.
While Islam is currently enjoying a flow of sorts currently, it is correct by Hugh to assume that this latest surge is primarily a result of a geopolitical accident ofn oil wealth.
The danger is imminenet and worthy of discussion, but let's be real here. The "numbers" as a previous poster put forth are not adequate, and contrary to Naseem's bravado, Sharia will not dominate the US or any of the West for that matter without a long and bloody fight. We all know the result there...but that is another story.
Islam is ever the cavity-ridden tooth. Its extraction is inevitable. The only question is, how painful will it be?
Posted by: awake at February 5, 2008 10:07 PM
Stone Rose,
Agree with you, Muslims are very unlikely to ever reverse-migrate back to their own hell-holes.
AWAKE: "The "numbers" as a previous poster put forth are not adequate..."
Not here in the USA, but they are quickly becoming an irreversible factor in Europe. Look at the influence Muslims are exerting at 5% (Germany, England) and 10% (France, Sweden) of the population, and imagine the influence a decade from now, when fertility and immigration further skew the numbers.
Again, not trying to rain on anybody's parade, but every time I look at the equation as an un-impassioned observer, I see all the signs of decline and eclipse awaiting the West...and all of our venting and wishful thinking is not going to change that.
Posted by: Cornelius at February 5, 2008 10:40 PM
This DOES reveal widespread ignorance, and that is an atrocious failing of the American people (or in this case the American-Jewish community which is especially perplexing given the fact that the Kuran teaches Muslims to exterminate Jews). But I am personally not depressed. This calls for redoubled efforts to teach the (Malignant) doctrines of Islam to the masses (and the US government which evidently is STIll in the dark about Islam).
What Americans apparently STILL don't know about Islam includes the fact that the Kuran effectively bars any and all 'inter-faith' dialogues from EVER taking place between Islam and "infidel" (non-Islamic) faiths.
"Make friends with neither Christians or Jews" states the Kuran emphatically. Then there's "slay the idolaters everywhere they are found." Non people of the book ostensibly fare even worse than Christians and Jews under Islam.
What MUST take place in the US is greater efforts to teach EXACTLY what the Kuran teaches to the masses so that they will not be fooled by shams like this one.
NO INTERFAITH dialogues are possible with Islam or will ever be possible because of inherent, endemic beliefs taught by the Kuran itself. Any cursory reading of the Kuran will show that. The American people merely need to learn this and that is not impossible to change nor is it cause for depression.
Posted by: pythagoras at February 6, 2008 4:13 PM
Stone Rose and Cornelius: One reason why a number of "Muslims" won't migrate back home is that they'll be killed a murtad if they do.
Posted by: Kepha at February 7, 2008 11:58 AM
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