The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Founder of "Ex-Muslim" Organization in Germany receives Death Threats
I saw this link from Glenn Reynolds today and it struck me that the real impact of stories like these is still not being fully appreciated by a society that gets most of its news from leftist elites. Here is an excerpt of the actual news story:
But what I think people don't get is that this story is not about some people doing something "over there"; this is about us. By their cooperation with and skillful manipulation of the elites in the Western "PC" left--Islamists are working tirelessley to blur the lines between religion and state so as to "dumb down" objections to behavior that would otherwise be considered outrageous, if not barbaric. Indeed the real irony is that many on the left--whose visceral hatred of the religious right and anything having to do with the word "Christian"--so clouds their judgment that it helps to engineer the very thing they claim most to fear: namely the merging of "church" and state. Only in this case "church" is Political Islam, not the more benign Christianity it has spent decades being so fearful of.
A perfect example of this phenomenon was the Danish Cartoon episode. Taken by itself, the political reaction of the Muslim world to the characterature of Mohammed was illustrative of just how great the divide is between the Islamic world and the West--and of why the West is a much more civilized place to live. But it was the shameful reaction of Western governments and publishers that was the real scandal: rather than defend the rights of any individual or newspaper to publish any opinion or cartoon they wanted, the West--by its cowering before all this blathering Islamist "emotion"--instead granted Animal Farm-like privalaged class to Islam: i.e. "all the Animals are created equal, but some are more 'Equal' than others..."
By uniformly condemning the Cartoonists and the behavior of the Western publishers for their "insensitivity"--instead of criticizing the clearly well-orchestrated (and well-televised...) burning, rioting, and destruction taking place throughout the Muslim world--the cowards in the Western intelligensia have only served to encourage more egregious violations of Western Civilization's norms in the future. What will be next: the need to "understand" the honor killings of women as "part of their faith'? The need for all women to wear burquas so as not to offend those who belive it is called for?
It was the betrayal of the West since 9/11--illustrated by this and many other documented examples of Western "submission" to Islamists by its own "leadership"-- which prompted Italian Oriana Fallaci's continent-shattering epitaths before her death, i.e. The Rage and the Pride and The Force of Reason. But I see very little evidence that anyone is listening to Fallaci's powerful words.
It can be argued that the very genesis of the idea of America the nation was the notion that there should be a place where refugees from religious persecution anywhere could be free to worship (or not worship) as they pleased, without fear of governmental interference or retribution. In 18th century England--where faith had been allowed to bleed over into political life--the faith du jour had long became a function of the belief system of the monarch in power. If your faith happened to be different than the faith in power, your chances of persecution--economic and otherwise--rose dramatically. This of course led to the mass exodus of religious refugees from the UK to the New World; a trend which continued even through the 1930s-1940s with the Jewish refugees fleeing Naziism.
Because of the historical context of this religious persecution preceeding the migration to America, the Founders went out of their way to when writing the Constitution to ensure that religion be protected--but I think it is also clear that to the founders the idea of "religion" was more grounded in the Christian notion of "worship" than the Islamic notion of a political way of life.
As a result the Constitution--still to this day revolutionary in all of human history--separated religious faith from the political, the famous "separation of church and state". It is this idea which made the American experiment so extraordinary--and so transformational in a society of immigrants from all over the globe. Democracy had already been tried, but never with guarantees of religious freedom and the freedom to speak your mind.
Since that dramatic experiment, millions of Americans have died fighting to defend the rights of Americans to choose their own faith and to speak freely. This is not a trivial thing. Generations of Americans have been raised understanding how and why we were so different from all the "great civilizations" which had preceeded us. But in today's "PC" world, we seem to be losing that understanding in favor of a lazy and deadly tolerance of the intolerable.
Islam as it exists today presents a huge problem for secular democracies, because unlike the Christian concept of religion as a "personal choice for worship", Islam is both a political and spiritual entity. Islam is not merely "worship", it is steeped in political law of how adherents must live. A majority of predominantly Muslim states have adopted this Sharia law as part and parcel of their political organization--to the great detriment of any non-Muslims in those countries, and obviously, to the detriment of former Muslims as well.
The political aspect of Islam is very much a part of its history and even scriptual basis (i.e. the Quran and the Hadith). Therefore--especially for that fundamentalist strain of Islam being so heavily promoted by so-called "moderate" nations like Saudi Arabia--there is no separation between religion and the political state. And so: when a Religious mass-movement that is also a Political movement clashes with secular societies where religious freedom and freedom of speech are protected, something has got to give.
If America is to maintain a society where all of its citizens are free to decide, write about, or even to draw pictures illustrating what they believe or what faith they do/do not adhere to; then that society must make a firm stand for its founding principles. "All Men are Created Equal..." means nothing unless it means everything. Which is it?
There are many who say that Islam is like the Mafia: you can opt in, but you can never opt out. If you listen to guys like Robert Spencer and Bernard Lewis, it is not even a matter of interpreteation--it is a undeniable tenet of Islamic religious teachings that Apostacy is punishable by death. And this "convention" certainly appears to be en vogue in Germany...The founder of a group in Germany for former Muslims has sought police protection after receiving death threats.
Mina Ahadi, a native of Iran living in Cologne, said about three dozen people have joined the Central Council of Ex-Muslims.
"I happened to be born in a Muslim family, and I have decided not to be a Muslim," she told the magazine Focus.
Ahadi said she and other members of the group have been "terrorized" and have received death threats, most of them sent via e-mail.
In many Muslim countries, people who abandon the faith face the death sentence under Sharia law. ...
But what I think people don't get is that this story is not about some people doing something "over there"; this is about us. By their cooperation with and skillful manipulation of the elites in the Western "PC" left--Islamists are working tirelessley to blur the lines between religion and state so as to "dumb down" objections to behavior that would otherwise be considered outrageous, if not barbaric. Indeed the real irony is that many on the left--whose visceral hatred of the religious right and anything having to do with the word "Christian"--so clouds their judgment that it helps to engineer the very thing they claim most to fear: namely the merging of "church" and state. Only in this case "church" is Political Islam, not the more benign Christianity it has spent decades being so fearful of.
A perfect example of this phenomenon was the Danish Cartoon episode. Taken by itself, the political reaction of the Muslim world to the characterature of Mohammed was illustrative of just how great the divide is between the Islamic world and the West--and of why the West is a much more civilized place to live. But it was the shameful reaction of Western governments and publishers that was the real scandal: rather than defend the rights of any individual or newspaper to publish any opinion or cartoon they wanted, the West--by its cowering before all this blathering Islamist "emotion"--instead granted Animal Farm-like privalaged class to Islam: i.e. "all the Animals are created equal, but some are more 'Equal' than others..."
By uniformly condemning the Cartoonists and the behavior of the Western publishers for their "insensitivity"--instead of criticizing the clearly well-orchestrated (and well-televised...) burning, rioting, and destruction taking place throughout the Muslim world--the cowards in the Western intelligensia have only served to encourage more egregious violations of Western Civilization's norms in the future. What will be next: the need to "understand" the honor killings of women as "part of their faith'? The need for all women to wear burquas so as not to offend those who belive it is called for?
It was the betrayal of the West since 9/11--illustrated by this and many other documented examples of Western "submission" to Islamists by its own "leadership"-- which prompted Italian Oriana Fallaci's continent-shattering epitaths before her death, i.e. The Rage and the Pride and The Force of Reason. But I see very little evidence that anyone is listening to Fallaci's powerful words.
It can be argued that the very genesis of the idea of America the nation was the notion that there should be a place where refugees from religious persecution anywhere could be free to worship (or not worship) as they pleased, without fear of governmental interference or retribution. In 18th century England--where faith had been allowed to bleed over into political life--the faith du jour had long became a function of the belief system of the monarch in power. If your faith happened to be different than the faith in power, your chances of persecution--economic and otherwise--rose dramatically. This of course led to the mass exodus of religious refugees from the UK to the New World; a trend which continued even through the 1930s-1940s with the Jewish refugees fleeing Naziism.
Because of the historical context of this religious persecution preceeding the migration to America, the Founders went out of their way to when writing the Constitution to ensure that religion be protected--but I think it is also clear that to the founders the idea of "religion" was more grounded in the Christian notion of "worship" than the Islamic notion of a political way of life.
As a result the Constitution--still to this day revolutionary in all of human history--separated religious faith from the political, the famous "separation of church and state". It is this idea which made the American experiment so extraordinary--and so transformational in a society of immigrants from all over the globe. Democracy had already been tried, but never with guarantees of religious freedom and the freedom to speak your mind.
Since that dramatic experiment, millions of Americans have died fighting to defend the rights of Americans to choose their own faith and to speak freely. This is not a trivial thing. Generations of Americans have been raised understanding how and why we were so different from all the "great civilizations" which had preceeded us. But in today's "PC" world, we seem to be losing that understanding in favor of a lazy and deadly tolerance of the intolerable.
Islam as it exists today presents a huge problem for secular democracies, because unlike the Christian concept of religion as a "personal choice for worship", Islam is both a political and spiritual entity. Islam is not merely "worship", it is steeped in political law of how adherents must live. A majority of predominantly Muslim states have adopted this Sharia law as part and parcel of their political organization--to the great detriment of any non-Muslims in those countries, and obviously, to the detriment of former Muslims as well.
The political aspect of Islam is very much a part of its history and even scriptual basis (i.e. the Quran and the Hadith). Therefore--especially for that fundamentalist strain of Islam being so heavily promoted by so-called "moderate" nations like Saudi Arabia--there is no separation between religion and the political state. And so: when a Religious mass-movement that is also a Political movement clashes with secular societies where religious freedom and freedom of speech are protected, something has got to give.
If America is to maintain a society where all of its citizens are free to decide, write about, or even to draw pictures illustrating what they believe or what faith they do/do not adhere to; then that society must make a firm stand for its founding principles. "All Men are Created Equal..." means nothing unless it means everything. Which is it?
Labels: Islam, Islamic Fascism, US Politics
