The House just passed a statute, the “Combatting International Islamophobia Act” to make speech about Muslims illegal. You can read about it on American Thinker, “Has the Democrat Party Converted to Islam?”, by Peterson. it’s stalled in committee in the Senate , but that’s only because of the present 50-50 split, which determines the composition of committees. (so yes Georgia DOES matter, but sadly I don’t see how Walker can win, do you?)
So, after 9/11 we had a Never Again moment and set up all these laws and institutions designed to keep US safe from Islamic terrorism. And 2 decades later, they have all morphed int keeping Muslims safe from any kind of criticism. Protecting Islam from US.
In the decade after 9/11, the number of mosques in our country increased by 74%. And continued apace in the ensuing decade.
Do we get any credit for our unprecedented soul-searching after 9/11, for the fact that instead of persecution and deportations, we all read the Koran, (it sold out in bookstores) and “interfaith” institutions prospered?
Nah. We get the Combating International Islamophobia Act (Ilhan Omar, sponsor.)
These lines by Pope come to mind to describe our country:
“Created half to rise,and half to fall:
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all.
Sole judge of truth, in ceaseless error hurled:
THE GLORY. JEST, AND RIDDLE OF THE WORLD! “
In my years at Columbia University, I’d often venture into Harlem’s Little Senegal. Once, after a Senegalese meal, I managed to drop my wallet in the middle of 116th Street, not noticing it, I walked away. The waiter from the restaurant saw it, ran out, picked up the wallet and ran after me. He gave it to me, and refused my offer of a $20 thank-you.
It was a quite unusual act, especially with all the recentmishapsaround Harlem, so I dug deeper, finding out about the Mourides. They’re entrepreneurial, dedicated to ethics and faith. Their shops and restaurants are very good, and many of them run excellent French-style bakeries. One of my favorites is Touba coffee.
Religions will continue to evolve, and I want to bring up what counts as a truly modern prophet that started the Mouride movement:
Thank you for calling our attention to this. I could tell from the caption whose post it is.
If they pass this, let the lawyering begin, because it strips First Amendment protections away from anyone who dares to criticize the Islamicists, or criticize Islam, or criticize a Muslim.
I fear we have passed any amendment’s protection long ago. This will not be settled quietly, nor gently. Expect the courts to weigh in on both sides as there are both conservative and progressive judges on the bench.
As the islamists wish, this will be settled with blood. It cannot be otherwise; 1500 years of warfare to conquer the world say so. There is nothing quiet and gentle and loving in islam. There may. be individual muslims who are decent people, but the ideology is far from it, and always will be - it is its nature, and things don’t go against their nature. Of the 190-some wars going on around the world at any given moment, fully 90% are islam vs someone else.
I read somewhere that the UK allowed or encouraged a lot Of Sufi Muslims, especially women, to enter the country to prop up the fabric industry. Y’know, British tweeds and all. They knew it was on the way out, but they wanted to keep it going for another few decades. And Sufism, IMHO, represents the Golden Age of any religion, in which it is a contemplative, the-kingdom-of -God-is-within-you kinda philosophy. Problem is, they bred (Duh!) and their children werent so inward looking.
Yes, Sufis are.or were literally “cool”: they aren’t trying to burn down the society. But religions are growing, multi-tentacled. Even Buddhism became a formidable creed if of conquest, culminating (for the time being) in the “Imperial Buddhism” ( oxymoron alert!) of WWII Japan.
Islam was from its inception both a system of government and a creed. And militant: remember the Khybar missile, named for the very early massacre of Jews at the Khybar oasis? In his lifetime Mohammed led, like, 15 military campaigns; he makes Napoleon look like a piker.
But let’s look: where did Islam come from? It is the bastard child of Judaism and Christianity. If they are Western religions, then so is Islam, the other Abrahamic creed. There is plenty of inspiration for merciless conquest in the Old Testament. The Israelites are directed to kill every last man, woman, child and animal of a vanquished tribe. At least Islam offered the vanquished its famous choice: submission or the sword.
Just riffin’ here: it is funny, innit, : by Mohammed’s lifetime, Christianity was firmly ascendant as a temporal power, despite Jesus and His disciples having lived as itinerant mendicant preachers , and Jesus’ complete abnegation of any earthly power and glory: as I mentioned above, insisting that Gods kingdom is within each believer. In a way the Mohammedan conquests of the 7th century on foreshadowed the awe-ful era of the “Church Militant” which later ravaged Europe.
Eventually, , at Lepanto, at the gates of Vienna in 1683, the combined forces of militant Christianity won out—decisively, it seemed—until OUR lifetimes, when the Islamic world discovered its Holy Oil, and we all had to tremble before the capricious deity OPEC.
?What exactly were “the awe-ful era of the “Church Militant”.
I am a lousy historian but I seem to recollect that Charlemagne created what HE called the Holy Roman Empire. But that was really Charlemagne’s euphemism for HIS empire, in which he used the RCC to help keep people “unified”. Meanwhile, during much of this period the Church did much good, establishing numerous universities that still stand today, among other things,. Following Charlemagne’s death there was a general decline into feudal anarchy, but the Church (both Roman Catholic and Orthodox) remained. And while there were Borgia’s, there were also Martin Luther;s (whose demand for restoration of the Church to its founding principles may well have saved it).
If you speak of the Crusades, those are probably more properly viewed as a last minute response to the broad conquering approach of islam. Had the Church not “responded” we would probably have had an islamic Europe long ago, with all the attendant backwardness.
As for islam being a bastard child of Judeo-Christianity, IMO it was satanically-inspired. Mohammed was a caravan raider, torturer, chili’s molester, robber, and rapist - hardly tthe perfect man although he may well have been “the perfect muslim”. The version of Christianity he took as example was a weird, small, heretical sect somewhere in Africa. And the ideology he built, around a “religious sense”, is diametrically opposed to Judeo-Christianity The Lord is a loving, forgiving God, whereas allah is none of that. The Lord cares for ALL his children whereas allah cares for none. “Vengeance is Mine,” sayeth the Lord; “Vengeance is ours” sayeth the muslims. Love your neighbor sayeth the Lord; conquer your neighbor sayeth the muslims. There is no correlation but a negative one between the two “religions”.
I can accept you are “riffing”. It’s just that it seems you focus on some of the smaller details and fail to encompass the whole picture. But then, that’s my opinion - we all have them.
If that is so, then the outcome is clear. This thread started with Hypatia noting that the majority of “Representatives” among the Democrats & RINOs in the House voted to give Islam a special, supra-Constitutional status. Very few of those “Representatives” are Muslims. Those are the same incompetents & sheep who would have to drive any future war to repel Islamicists. Sadly but clearly, we have lost before the war has even begun.
Most of us have memories of events we thought at the time were significant. One of my memories is pre-Covid Abu Dhabi, back when Friday was the day of prayer. The sight was scores of fighting-age Muslim males who had overflowed the capacity of the mosque and spread their prayer mats on the street. Another memory is the many fine old churches in the UK which have been converted into restaurants and apartments, despite the massive rise in population since those churches were built - a definite lack of fighting-age males going to churches in the UK.
As the old saying goes, you can’t beat something with nothing. We need to look at ourselves first if we are to resist the tide of Islam.
You are exactly right about the Crusades. Don’t get me started on that! People today think they were about oil. When what they were, pure ‘n’ simple, was a protective strike so Christian pilgrims could have access to our holy sites. And the flower of Europe’s nobility gave up their wealth and their safety in that cause. It was a terrible pilgrimage, marked with sacrifice, violence, starvation, disease, death And um,oh yeah, we lost, eventually. If we hadn’t there would have been no Lepanto, no battle of Vienna.
I was thinkin’ of the Wars of Religion,the wars after the Reformation., Thirty Years’ war, etc.
if you’ve read the Koran, you know it reads like somebody read the Old and New Testaments straight through, then wrote it down in a fever-dream. Which, seems to be pretty much what happened.
If you believe Islam is Satanically inspired, okey-dokey. And indeed there is and always has been plenty of Muslim on Muslim violence. But, in light of the Christian on Christian conflicts I mentioned above, I’d hafta say EITHER that Satan can work through both creeds, OR that the failure to love thy (co-religionist) neighbor isn’t really a very meaningful measuring stick for either creed. Even the Jews had their internecine wars.
Highly recommended reading – “After the Prophet: The epic story of the Shia-Sunni split”, by Lesley Hazleton, ISBN 978-0-385-52394-3 (2009), 211 pages. A sad tale of human greed, foolishness, & incompetence. Ms. Hazelton even explains the incident which led eventually to the requirement that all Moslem women should cover themselves.
A story about veiling from the Hadith: after Mohammed was deceived by Iblis into writing that there was also a goddess, Allat (the “Satanic verses) he was worried he wouldn’t be able to tell if future visitations were really Gibreel, or the deceiver. So Khadijah offered to sit with him, unveiled. The Archangel would flee the sight of her exposed face, the deceiver wouldn’t.
Of course, there was a time, in our tradition, when the angels didn’t flee human female beauty, . And it’s still so tempting to them, especially our hair, that St Paul, exhorts us to cover our heads.
That is a nice version. As Ms. Hazleton tells the tale, it instead relates to Muhammed’s youngest wife who accidentally got left behind in the desert when the caravan moved on. As a teenage woman, she did not try to catch up, assuming that they would turn the caravan around to rescue her. In the event nobody noticed her absence.
Then a young handsome strappingly-fit warrior happened to pass by. He put Muhammed’s wife on his camel, and walked her into town. The sight of the teenage wife arriving much later with the handsome warrior started tongues wagging. To prevent any further bother, Mohammed ruled that all his wives had to wear a veil so that they could not be recognized by the hoi polloi. From there, the rule eventually extended to all females over the age of puberty.
The Israelites were directed to kill every last man, woman, child and domesticated animal of a small number of specific tribes. Not any other tribes. This was a very limited command, issued for a specific war in a specific time and place. The war lasted less than a decade. Joshua 3:10 repeats the list of tribes: “the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Hivites, the Perizzites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, and the Jebusites.”
All other wars were to be conducted according to rules set forth in Deuteronomy chapter 20. That is where cities are to be offered peace terms before an attack. Women and children are to be taken as slaves. There are limits on the conduct of war. The order for extermination is strictly applied only to the listed tribes, with the reason given in verse 18: “… that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices that they have done for their gods, and so you sin against the Lord your God.”
This is very different from the Koranic injunction to “slay the infidels wherever you find them.”
I think MJB has the better argument. My inner lawyer agrees the commands are clearly distinguishable, unless one substitutes the ‘refined’ judgment of today. It is a rare disagreement between us.