Or as the great Shaidle puts it, “It’s all YOUR fault for being morons, you stupid infidels!”
An update on this story. “Address on niqab not meant to be offensive: Imam,” by Charles Lewis in the National Post, October 23 (thanks to Kathy Shaidle):
A Toronto imam said on Friday he did not intend to insult non-Muslims during an address at his mosque on those who want the niqab and burka banned.
Said Rageah, the imam at Toronto’s Abu Huraira Centre, said that only someone who did not understand Islam would have come away from last Friday’s prayers thinking that anyone at his mosque hated members of other faiths.
He was specifically addressing an article that appeared in the National Post on Thursday in which some critics said the language he used was inflammatory.
Imam Rageah used a prayer last week that, in part, said “Allah destroy them from within themselves, and do not allow them to raise their heads in destroying Islam.” And in another part of he asked Allah to “damn the infidels.”
Right. Destroy them, damn them, but don’t hate them. Got it.
Imam Rageah on Friday said in a brief interview that in both references he was not literally meaning “destroy” but rather to confound or weaken those that would infringe on their rights.
In last week’s address, he used the word “kuffar” repeatedly, a word some say is highly derogatory of non-Muslims, especially Christians and Jews….
But on Friday, Imam Rageah said the word is mentioned more than 500 times in the Koran and it would make no sense for Allah to have used a word repeatedly that was so offensive.
“The word has more than one meaning,” he said. “It’s not always negative but it can be negative. Now if the suggestion is, ‘Why don’t we avoid the word,’ that’s an excellent suggestion. But until this issue was raised we didn’t think people found the word insulting.”
Nonsense. In the Koran, it is always negative. To dismiss this by saying that Allah would not have used an offensive word is simply to demand that non-Muslims accept Islamic perspectives and norms. And that is, of course, what this is all about.
When the word is used negatively, he said, it can apply to Muslims who are liars or non-Muslims who are active enemies of the faith….
Imam Rageah said no one group should try to trample the rights of others. For example, he said no Muslim should ever walk up to someone with multi-coloured hair and say that they object to that person’s style.
He acknowledged that many countries, including Muslim countries, restrict free speech, and said it was important that Muslims in Canada exercise their rights by writing to MPs and the media to protest those that would restrict their faith.
So you see, free speech is to be used to strengthen Islam in the West, while it is restricted in Muslim countries in order to…strengthen Islam.