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| Ha ha |
Like everyone else in
the world I am stunned by the Charlie Hebdo affair. I have been reading
everything on the matter in English, Spanish, and French and there’s a lot to
digest. Here are a few of my preliminary thoughts.
I’m really sick of
people talking about the horrors French Muslims now face in the backlash of this massacre. It
looks to me that what we need to do is to protect people from Muslims.
Even before the the horror was over another Muslim had targeted innocent French
Jews for slaughter. There have been dozens of assaults on European Jews by
Muslim youths and a few murders as well, like the attack on the Jewish museum in Brussels.
Ibrahim Negm, the
spokesperson for the Dar Al-Ifta Institute in Egypt, called on the
French government to protect Muslims living in France from retaliatory attacks
following the attack.
We already do protect Muslims in the West, just like we try to protect everyone.
“En ce moment y a une haine infinie contre les
musulmans j'aime même plus rester en France." (At this moment there is infinite hatred against
Muslims, I don't even want to remain in France," tweeted one user from
Paris).
There are flights out of France every day. What are you waiting for?
Another wrote, “Qui sont les vrai perdant de tous ces
attentats ? Nous les musulmans de France on est stigmatiser les gens nous
craignent pour rien." (Who are the true losers from all these attacks? We,
French Muslims. We are stigmatized, people fear us for no reason)
Really? You think you have lost more than the people slaughtered in the attacks?I didn't see a bit of hate in the street demonstrations across Europe following the executions at Charlie Hebdo. All that I saw was solidarity and compassion.
Violent acts by Muslims
in Western society are hardly the work of a few crazies but represent
sentiments seething in the minds of a whole hell of a lot of Muslims. In this video from London after the publication of the Danish
cartoons in 2006 you can see more than a handful of blood-thirsty assholes who
would gladly kill someone over a cartoon. And how many would attend a similar
protest in a Muslim nation?
I would venture to say
that quite a few Muslims worldwide are in
agreement with tenets of their faith that are in direct contrast to Western
values. Most Muslims agree that death is the consequence of apostasy. The
treatment of women in Muslim society is disgraceful to any educated,
enlightened citizen.
“In 10 of 20 countries
where there are adequate samples for analysis, at least half of Muslims who
favor making sharia the law of the land also favor stoning unfaithful spouses.”
“Taking the life of
those who abandon Islam is most widely supported in Egypt (86%) and Jordan
(82%). Roughly two-thirds who want sharia to be the law of the land also back
this penalty in the Palestinian territories (66%).”
In this episode of Democracy Now, which has a whole lot
of hand wringing about the poor, downtrodden, victimized Muslims of France, no
one on the show pointed out the irony of what they reported earlier in the
program about a Saudi kid who was condemned to 10 years in prison and 1,000
lashes for blogging about politics.
I have read a ton of
incredibly stupid shit regarding the Charlie Hebdo affair. Mostly from Muslims
claiming that they are the real victims in all this and that the magazine
attacked a powerless minority in France, or as one writer put it “France’s incredibly marginalized, often attacked, Muslim immigrant
community.” I doubt that all of the Jews in France who have been
harassed, terrorized, and killed by Muslims there would say that these people
are marginalized and without power. The Muslim mobs often are bullies when they
have the upper hand, even in countries where they are a small minority and they
expect others to live under their harsh views of how women and gays should be
treated.
Where Muslims need
protection is in Islamic countries. Political systems guided by Islam control
the lives of perhaps a billion people and in none of these countries is there
anything much resembling a free press, nor is there much in the way of human
rights, equality for women, freedom of religion, et cetera so please stop
telling France that they need to protect Muslims there. The Muslims living in
France have it much better than those living in Islamic nations. The “backlash”
of the Charlie Hebdo affair in France couldn’t possibly be worse than the horrors
many Muslims face every day in countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria,
Libya…should I name them all?
Instead of calling on
France to respect their Muslim population people should demand that French
Muslims respect French Jews or protect our free press institutions, like the German newspaper that was firebombed
for reprinting the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.
“The journalists at
Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom
of expression, but…” writes highly acclaimed ignoramus David Brooks in the
New York Times. There are no “buts” in this story. Charlie Hebdo was engaged in
legal satire so either we defend it 100% or we can’t say that we have free
speech. We have freedom of religion in the West but that doesn’t mean that I
have to respect your silly and often dangerous beliefs, and I don’t.
This comment by a
reader named Mor in this idiotic op-ed in the New York
Times is, without a doubt,
the wisest thing that I’ve read in the past week—and I’ve read everything in
English, French, and Spanish. I believe that most Muslims aren’t insulted by
the cartoons and don’t really give a shit but it’s hard to keep that stance
when so many in the Islamic world are telling you to be outraged by childish
and unfunny scribbling on page, as if it’s part of your religious duty to
become homicidally enraged.
“The values of the
Enlightenment are incompatible with a fundamentalist religious belief of any
kind. An evangelical Christian who believes that the Universe is 6000 years old
will feel like an alien in Europe and/or the Silicon Valley. A cultural Muslim
who appreciates the poetry of Sufism but does not view the Koran as a literal
message from God will feel fine in the West. But if you believe that insulting
your prophet merits death, then you have forfeited your place in free society.
The West is not a place but an idea. The fact that most Western countries have
failed to live up to their own ideals of intellectual freedom and political
liberty is regrettable but does not invalidate these ideals. If you want to
join the West and keep your cultural identity, while embracing its core values,
wonderful. If not, you are not part of Europe and never will be.”
Los
valores de la Ilustración son incompatibles con una creencia religiosa
fundamentalista de ningún tipo. Un cristiano evangélico que cree que el
Universo es de 6000 años se siente como un extranjero en Europa y / o el
Silicon Valley. Un musulmán cultural que aprecia la poesía del sufismo, pero no
considera el Corán como un mensaje literal de Dios se sentirá bien en el
Occidente. Pero si usted cree que insultar a su profeta merite la muerte,
entonces usted ha perdido su lugar en la sociedad libre. El Occidente no es un
lugar sino una idea. El hecho de que la mayoría de los países occidentales han
fracasado a la altura de sus propios ideales de la libertad intelectual y la
libertad política es lamentable, pero no invalida estos ideales. Si quiere
unirse al Occidente y mantener su identidad cultural, mientras abraza sus
valores fundamentales, maravilloso. Si no es así, usted no es parte de Europa y
nunca lo será.
19JAN15 - For the first time
in recorded human history people have the right to turn their backs on the status
quo of religion. I have read opinions that the ancient Greeks’ lack of
total reverence for their gods was one of the determining factors in the
development of democracy—they had less fear of their gods than in other
civilizations. As one historian put it, thumbing their noses at the heavens was
more align to prodding a bull than sacrilege. 2,500 years later people finally
can state publicly that they don’t believe in god or gods, at least we have
that privilege in the West and no small privilege it is. The closer you get to
the ground zero of Islam (Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi doctrine) the less this is so.
As I said before,
Charlie Hebdo’s biggest crime in my book is that they aren’t funny. What Muslim
find insulting to their core beliefs doesn’t really interest me unless it
intersects with our secular laws. They wanted Salman Rushdie dead over a
novel that none of them read. All that I am sure of is that matching violence
with violence is stupid, something the American military leadership never seem
to figure out.
This writer finds room
for optimism:
“In the recent horror,
the two Muslim victims of the two Islamic terrorists were a cop and a copy
editor, and this immersion in upwardly mobile ordinariness is likely to be more
typical of the Muslim future than the apocalyptic fantasy of a fundamentalist
triumph.”
“…French Arabs are just
as divided, from violent fundamentalists to secular republicans, and just as
open to the world’s influences, as everybody else.”
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