What to do about Terrorism? Should news media publish Charlie Hebdo cartoons?

Terrorism is defined in the Terrorism Act 2000. (1)

Jonathan Powell was on Andrew Neils' Daily Politics on 8/1/15 with Maajid Nawaz of Quilliam foundation and Douglas Murray - the day after Charlie Hebdo Paris shootings. Nawaz said that the Charlie killers and others seek to create civil war between Muslims and non-muslims throughout Europe. Muslim liberals need to speak up to reform Islamic Blasphemy laws. Murray said the Hebdo killers were seeking to enforce Islamic blasphemy laws on the free west. For a decade, the UK media has been cowed by the threat of Islamist violence into not publishing cartoons of Mohammed. Murray says . Terrorism works. UK media should publish Mohammed cartoons on front pages (Powell agreed) en masse at a particular hour - to 'share the risk'. But before doing so, UK Government should protect UK media from attack by Islamists. When gunmen shout 'Allah Akbah' - it is everything to do with Islam, said Murray. (2,3)

In other news, concerning the Charlie Hebdo attack: the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten will not print Prophet Mohammad cartoons. They say "We have lived with the fear of a terrorist attack for nine years, and yes, that is the explanation why we do not reprint the cartoons, whether it be our own or Charlie Hebdo's," Jyllands-Posten said. "We are also aware that we therefore bow to violence and intimidation." "Denmark's other major newspapers have all republished cartoons from the French satirical weekly as part of the coverage of the attack which killed 12 people in Paris on Wednesday 7/1/15." (4)

Buzzfeed summarises other news organisations views about publishing  / not publishing the M cartoons. (5)

Change.org have a petition calling on UK and USA news organisations worldwide to publish the Charlie cartoons. (6)

Stephen Fry calls on news organisations to publish. (7)

sources:
(1) https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/380939/ProscribedOrganisations.pdf
(2) http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04xtkdx/daily-politics-08012015
(3) http://www.meetup.com/Cafe-Philo-Bournemouth/events/219170608/#
(4) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11334891/Charlie-Hebdo-attack-Jyllands-Posten-will-not-print-Prophet-Mohammad-cartoons.html
(5) http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/some-outlets-are-censoring-charlie-hebdos-satirical-cartoons#.ajZlVvK10
(6) https://www.change.org/p/editors-and-journalists-around-the-world-publish-charlie-hebdo-s-mohammed-cartoons-in-solidarity-with-the-victims-of-censorship-and-violence
(7) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/stephen-fry-calls-on-the-worlds-media-to-publish-charlie-hebdo-cartoons-9965449.html

Defend the Individual and So the West

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Thanks to ItAintNecessarilySo for the link.

http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.28415/pub_detail.asp

Defend the Individual and So the West

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

ARTICLES
Sydney Morning Herald
Publication Date: August 4, 2008

Thinkers of the Enlightenment, a set of new intellectual attitudes that remade Western culture in the 17th and 18th centuries, set out to understand the world and themselves through reason rather than religion. Their ideas led to massive advances in science, economics and commerce, the arts and human liberty, which underpin our present prosperity and social freedoms.

Since the September 11, 2001, attacks, Islam has often been seen as the chief threat to the Enlightenment's legacy. But is there also something internal to Western intellectual history that leaves us vulnerable to the enemies of reason?

The West has cultivated an ethos of individualism, reason and tolerance, and an elaborate system in which every actor, from the individual to the nation-state, seeks to resolve conflict through words.

The entire system is built on the idea of self-interest. This ethos rejects fanaticism. The alpha male, in our societies, is pacified and groomed to study hard, find a good job, and plan prudently for retirement. "While we in America are drugging our alpha boys with Ritalin," writes Lee Harris, author of The Suicide Of Reason, "the Muslims are doing everything in their power to encourage their alpha boys to be tough, aggressive and ruthless."

By dulling its people's instincts to stand up in defence of their own society and its values, the West is committing itself to slow suicide.

Sometimes the response to attacks on Western societies is one of rapprochement, of softening our insistence on respect for the individual and the primacy of reason in public life. At others it is the reverse--a suspension of the civil liberties and normal legal processes that exemplify Western cultural achievements.

But the way to rescue Western civilisation from its present path of what looks like decline can never be to challenge its tradition of reason and individualism.

I was not born in the West. I was raised with the code of Islam, and from birth I was indoctrinated into a tribal mind-set. Yet I have changed: I have adopted the values of the Enlightenment, and as a result I have to live with the rejection of my native clan as well as the Islamic tribe.

Why have I done so? Because in a tribal society, life is cruel and terrible. And I am not alone. Muslims have been migrating to the West in droves for decades now. They are in search of a better life. Yet their tribal and cultural constraints have travelled with them. The multiculturalism and moral relativism that reign in the West have accommodated this.

Many Western leaders are terribly confused about the Islamic world. They are woefully uninformed and often unwilling to confront the tribal nature of Islam. The problem, however, is not too much reason, but too little. The enemies of reason within the West are religion and the Romantic movement. Both the Romantic movement and organised religion have contributed a great deal to the arts and to the spirituality of the Western mind, but they share a hostility to modernity.

It is not reason that accommodates and encourages the persistent segregation and tribalism of immigrant Muslim populations in the West. It is Romanticism and its descendants. Multiculturalism and moral relativism promote an idealisation of tribal life, and have shown themselves to be impervious to empirical criticism. I see today's Western leaders squandering a great and vital opportunity to compete with the agents of radical Islam for the minds of Muslims, especially those within their borders. But to do so, they must allow reason to prevail over sentiment.

To argue that children born and bred in superstitious cultures that value fanaticism are doomed to be governed by the law of the jungle is to ignore the lessons of the West's own past. There have been periods when the West was less than noble, when it engaged in crusades, inquisitions, witch-burnings, and genocides. Many of those now-Westerners who were born abroad into the law of the jungle, with its alpha males and submissive females, have since become acquainted with the culture of reason and have adopted it. They are even willing to die for it, perhaps with the same fanaticism as the jihadists willing to die for their tribe. While this conflict between Islam and the West is undeniably a deadly struggle between cultures, it is individuals who will determine the outcome.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a resident fellow at AEI. She is the author of Infidel.

Nigerian advises against 86 wives

source: New Humanist.

While an ordinary man with 10 wives “would collapse and die”, Mohammed Bello Abubakar, an 84-year-old from Nigeria, now has 86 wives and has so far survived thanks to his power “given by Allah”. Due to this, he advises other men, that is, those out of direct communication with God, against having 86 wives and an estimated 170 children.

Mohammed Abubakar has wives a quarter of his age, one of whom says that he claimed the marriage was “directly an order from God”. As for the others, they all came with illnesses to find Mohammed (who also happens to have healing powers), all of whom he cured. If you have an illness, all you have to do is sit in front of him, and he can see it and “just remove it”.

Despite the large family, neither Mohammed nor his wives have any work, and to the casual observer it may seem a mystery how he makes the money to pay for food and clothes. No need to worry though, as Mohammed easily answers the question – he gets it from God.

Posted by Ramon Gonsalves at Monday, August 11, 2008

By Andrew Walker full story: BBC News, Bida, Nigeria

Mr Bello Abubakar says he does not go and find women, they come to him

Nigerian Mohammed Bello Abubakar, 84, has advised other men not to follow his example and marry 86 women.

The former teacher and Muslim preacher, who lives in Niger State with his wives and at least 170 children, says he is able to cope only with the help of God.

"A man with 10 wives would collapse and die, but my own power is given by Allah. That is why I have been able to control 86 of them," he told the BBC.

He says his wives have sought him out because of his reputation as a healer.

"I don't go looking for them, they come to me. I will consider the fact that God has asked me to do it and I will just marry them."

But such claims have alienated the Islamic authorities in Nigeria, who have branded his family a cult.

When you marry a man with 86 wives you know he knows how to look after them Wife Ganiat Bello Abubakar

Most Muslim scholars agree that a man is allowed to have four wives, as long as he can treat them equally.

But Mr Bello Abubakar says there is no punishment stated in the Koran for having more than four wives.

"To my understanding the Koran does not place a limit and it is up to what your own power, your own endowment and ability allows," he says.

"God did not say what the punishment should be for a man who has more than four wives, but he was specific about the punishment for fornication and adultery."

'Order from God'

As Mr Bello Abubakar emerged from his compound to speak to the BBC, his wives and children broke out into a praise song.

Some of Mr Bello Abubakar's wives are younger than some of his children

Most of his wives are less than a quarter of his age - and many are younger than some of his own children.

The wives the BBC spoke to say they met Mr Bello Abubakar when they went to him to seek help for various illnesses, which they say he cured.

"As soon as I met him the headache was gone," says Sharifat Bello Abubakar, who was 25 at the time and Mr Bello Abubakar 74.

"God told me it was time to be his wife. Praise be to God I am his wife now."

Ganiat Mohammed Bello has been married to the man everyone calls "Baba" for 20 years.

When she was in secondary school her mother took her for a consultation with Mr Bello Abubakar and he proposed afterwards.

"I said I couldn't marry an older man, but he said it was directly an order from God," she says.

She married another man but they divorced and she returned to Mr Bello Abubakar.

"I am now the happiest woman on earth. When you marry a man with 86 wives you know he knows how to look after them," she said.

No work

Mr Bello Abubakar and his wives do not work and he has no visible means of supporting such a large family.

Many of the wives live three to a room, some have seven children

He refuses to say how he makes enough money to pay for the huge cost of feeding and clothing so many people.

Every mealtime they cook three 12kg bags of rice which all adds up to $915 (£457) every day.

"It's all from God," he says.

Other residents of Bida, the village where he lives in the northern Nigerian state, say they do not know how he supports the family.

According to one of his wives, Mr Bello Abubakar sometimes asks his children to go and beg for 200 naira ($1.69, £0.87), which if they all did so would bring in about $290 (£149).

Most of his wives live in a squalid, unfinished house in Bida; others live in his house in Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital.

He refuses to allow any of his family or other devotees to take medicine and says he does not believe that malaria exists.

They were sick and we told God and God said their time has come Wife Hafsat Bello Abubakar

"As you sit here if you have any illness I can see it and just remove it," he says.

But not everyone can be cured and one of his wives, Hafsat Bello Mohammed, says two of her children have died.

"They were sick and we told God and God said their time has come."

She says that most of the wives see Mr Bello Abubakar as next in line from the Prophet Muhammad.

Indeed, he claims the Prophet Muhammad speaks to him personally and gives detailed descriptions of his experiences.

It is a serious claim for a Muslim to make.

"This is heresy, he is a heretic," says Ustaz Abubakar Siddique, an imam of Abuja's Central Mosque.

Saudi pets banned to stop men on the pull

As part of Saudi Arabia's never-ending mission to clamp down on immoral behaviour, religious police in the capital Riyadh have banned the sale of cats and dogs, and prohibited men from walking dogs in public.

While taking your pet for a stroll may not seem like the most immoral of acts, the Saudi Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice are acting on the basis of a time-honoured stereotype – the ladies just love cuddly animals, and are guaranteed to fall for any man displaying similar affections.

Speaking to state newspaper Al-Hayat, the commission's general manager Othman al-Othman explained that the ban is designed to put a stop to "the rising of phenomenon of men using cats and dogs to make passes at women and pester families" as well as "violating proper behaviour in public squares and malls."

However, it remains to be seen if moral standards in Riyadh will soar as a result of the ban. Pet ownership is fairly rare in Saudi Arabia and similar bans in Mecca and Jiddah have failed to have the desired effect.

Reporting on the ban,

Associated Press offer another possible reason – the ruling conservative Saudis view pets as a Western trend, popular among fashionable youngsters, just like pop music, fast food and jeans.

A third of Muslim students back killings

by Times Online

Reposted from:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4407115.ece

Radicalism and support for sharia is strong in British universities

ALMOST a third of British Muslim students believe killing in the name of Islam can be justified, according to a poll.

The study also found that two in five Muslims at university support the incorporation of Islamic sharia codes into British law.

The YouGov poll for the Centre for Social Cohesion (CSC) will raise concerns about the extent of campus radicalism. "Significant numbers appear to hold beliefs which contravene democratic values," said Han-nah Stuart, one of the report's authors. "These results are deeply embarrassing for those who have said there is no extremism in British universities."

The report was criticised by the country's largest Muslim student body, Fosis, but Anthony Glees, professor of security and intelligence studies at Buckingham University, said: "The finding that a large number of students think it is okay to kill in the name of religion is alarming.

"There is a wide cultural divide between Muslim and nonMuslim students. The solution is to stop talking about celebrating diversity and focus on integration and assimilation."

The researchers found that 55% of nonMuslim students thought Islam was incompatible with democracy. Nearly one in 10 had "little respect" for Muslims.

In addition to its poll of 1,400 Muslim and nonMuslim students, the centre visited more than 20 universities to interview students and listen to guest speakers. It found that

extremist preachers regularly gave speeches that were inflammatory, homophobic or bordering on antisemitic.

The researchers highlighted Queen Mary college, part of London University, as a campus where radical views were widely held. Last December, a speaker named Abu Mujahid encouraged Muslim students to condemn gays because "Allah hates" homosexuality. In November, Azzam Tamimi, a British-based supporter of Hamas, described Israel as the most "inhumane project in the modern history of humanity".

James Brandon, deputy director at CSC , said: "Our researchers found a ghettoised mentality among Muslim students at Queen Mary. Also, we found the segregation between Muslim men and women at events more visible at Queen Mary."

A spokesman for Queen Mary said the university was aware the preachers had visited but did not know the contents of their speeches. "Clearly, we in no way associate ourselves with these views. However, also integral to the spirit of university life is free speech and debate and on occasion speakers will make statements that are deemed offensive."

In the report, 40% of Muslim students said it was unacceptable for Muslim men and women to associate freely. Homophobia was rife, with 25% saying they had little or no respect for gays. The figure was higher (32%) for male Muslim students. Among nonMuslims, the figure was only 4%.

The research found that a third of Muslim students supported the creation of a world-wide caliphate or Islamic state.

A number of terrorists have been radicalised at British universities. Kafeel Ahmed, who drove a flaming jeep into a building at Glasgow airport last year and died of his burns, is believed to have been radicalised while studying at Anglia Ruskin university, Cambridge.

Wes Streeting, president of the National Union of Students, condemned the study. "This disgusting report is a reflection of the biases and prejudices of a right-wing think tank – not the views of Muslim students across Britain," he said. "Only 632 Muslim students were asked vague and misleading questions, and their answers were wilfully misinterpreted."

Some of the findings amplify previous research.

A report by Policy Exchange last year found that 37% of all Muslims aged 16-24 would prefer to live under a sharia system.

Baroness Warwick, chief executive of Universities UK, said: "Violence, or the incitement to violence, has no place on a university campus."

ALSO SEE:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/27/islam.highereducation

Escape or betrayal.

by Guardian

Thanks to Linda Ward Selbie for the link.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/24/religion.middleeast

Escape – or betrayal?

Why Muslim women who are oppressed by their families are often reluctant to break free

Whenever another honour killing hits the headlines or another Muslim female is vaporised into a forced marriage, the question I get asked more than any other is: "Why don't these women just leave?"

Even though the sense of intimidation and menace these women are subject to may be palpable, the answer to this question is not a simple one. There are many reasons why women who live in non-Muslim societies in the west and have the ability to leave their families in search of a better life do not do so. First and foremost however, what needs to be identified is that most Muslim societies exist in cultures where the authority of the family is overarching.

When a woman flees a forced marriage, a threatening brother or even the risk of death, as far as she is concerned she also leaves behind not only that but sisters, aunts, cousins, an entire culture, a belief system and closely interwoven units.

The burden of honour, the shared ownership of the ramifications of her choices, stretches out across the lattice of her family and renders every move she makes magnitudinous, sending waves rippling and tainting hapless family members on the fringes of the epicentre.

The thought of escape conjures up images of innocent younger sisters shamed and abandoned, growing up in the shadow of her dishonour, and mothers who did their best to provide more freedom than her father would have allowed, crushed – their faith and trust in her flung back in their faces. To that she will add the vision of countless family members and friends who invested in her, gave her succour with a kind word or a gesture of understanding.

Emotionally blackmailed, it is difficult for her to view an escape as a heroic brave leap; the huge number of those she hurts and the dearth of those she benefits make it seem a selfish, cowardly endeavour. Surely, she thinks, it is more commendable to sacrifice oneself on the altar and at least elicit some satisfaction from one's martyrdom, than it is to bolt?

Besides, what is on the other side? The liberal ideals of a western culture do not a family make. She might have her freedom but who to share it with? She may fall in love, but who to rejoice with? From within the cultural outlook of a traditional family, it is difficult to envision the friends, colleagues and significant others who would potentially, eventually, come to be a comforting network. She thinks about the fact that by leaving behind her family, she truncates their existence in her life, freezing them out and precluding her children from the pleasure of maternal grandparents, aunts and uncles.

But it does not occur to her that their presence in her life may guarantee her daughters the same fate and that raising children within the same value system would predestine them to the very same dynamic she strove to escape. Bereft of all links to her prior life, she alone must impart her own genesis to her offspring, a heavy burden under which to traipse into womanhood.

The prospect of succumbing gradually thus becomes less daunting and is not necessarily an either/or. Muslim women more often than not are allowed, indeed encouraged, to get an education, a decent job as long as it is within the confines of the respectable parameters prescribed by family and milieu – not always a fate dire enough to warrant or justify a wholesale uprooting

.

A cousin of mine once rejected a suitor to whom she had already been promised by her family. As her mother wept in anticipation of the perceived disgrace, an aunt gently whispered to her that she should "marry him, become a doctor, have children and buy some pretty curtains". And so she did. Was she forced? No. Not in a classic honour-based, violent way. But little enforcement comes in the way of physical violence; most is psychological and hence more insidious.

This dictatorship of the family is a result of a complex interplay between social pressures, cultural heritage and religious observance and is not a Muslim issue as much as it is a cultural one. The elders of a family are victim to these structures almost as much as their daughters, forced to choose between powerful parental instincts and their perception of themselves and their offspring as part of a tightly woven fabric, the rupture of which assails their very identity and self-perception.

In contrast to societies where individual opportunity and achievement are championed, Arab culture in particular subscribes to a more sober view of individualism, even more so in women, and is suspicious of all endeavours that do not run in tandem with the values of the group. This contributes to a way of life where the suppression of individual desire is likely and one's personal feelings, preferences or fears shrink in comparison to the grandeur of powerful existing structures, where these values have been so internalised that the injured party may even have sympathy for his/her oppressors, cognisant of their helplessness against their indoctrination, seriously believing no one person is evil or fully culpable. This ring fence applies to men as well as women, granted with a larger circumference for male members of the clan.

Of course, it is not just a religious issue; the pull of the eternal deep-rooted institution is omnipresent – be it religion, nationality, race or class. Only a few decades ago, inter-racial marriage came with the threat of familial excommunication, and if none had raised their heads above the parapet it would have stayed that way.

This conflict between the temporal and the ostensibly eternal is what is important. Whether it is campaigns to combat forced marriage in Muslim and non-Muslim Asian communities or honour killings in Arab regions like Jordan and Iraq,

efforts need to be made to not only identify girls and women at risk but to provide mentors, sponsors and look to create alternative networks to make a break less daunting.

Evidently, not all Muslim women are oppressed but many are, and the high-profile stories in the media are only the most extreme manifestations, the tip of an iceberg of a silent mass of women living lives of quiet desperation.

A secular world is a sane world

Are the media on a daily mission to equate Islam with fascism?

Not all news is bad news

Soumaya Ghannoushi insists the media are on a daily mission to equate Islam with fascism. This is patently not the case

All comments (75)

• 
• • Martin Bright
  • guardian.co.uk,
  • Tuesday July 15, 2008
  • Article history

The obvious response to Soumaya Ghannoushi's piece, Saying 'Islamic threat' over and over doesn't make it real is: "No Soumaya,

what makes it real is the thousands of people who lie dead and mutilated as the result of militants acting in the name of Allah."

The Islamic threat was clearly very real for them and their grieving relatives. As such, the article hardly merits a response.

But there is much in the piece that I agree with. It is absurdly hyperbolic to say that "the much hyped Islamic threat is one of the greatest lies of our time".

But as a military threat, or a threat to the existence of western civilisation it has been vastly overstated. The Arab hordes are not about to sweep through Europe.

Ghannoushi is right to be

concerned that perceptions of the threat of terrorism from a tiny minority of British Muslims risks stigmatising a whole community.

I was due to appear on a platform with Soumaya Ghannoushi at an event organised by the leftwing thinktank Demos at IslamExpo this weekend. The title was The Islamist Threat: Myth or Reality? As is so often the case in such debates, the answer is both. But the real question being posed here is whether there was something more sinister at work behind the ideological construction of an Islamic threat. Again, I agree that this may be the case – historically, the threat of terrorism has often provided useful cover for repressive legislation. This applies equally to authoritarian governments intent on cracking down on internal subversion and to colonial powers fighting resistance movements. Neither applies in this case.

Ghannoushi agrees about the psychotic nature of al-Qaida inspired terrorism. She would also agree that it is at one and the same time very real and something which has taken in the status of a modern myth.

The difficulty for her argument lies in her insistence that newspapers, radio and television are on a daily mission to equate Islam with fascism.

This is patently not the case, She herself uses the example of Peter Oborne's programme for Channel 4's Dispatches on Islamophobia. Yesterday, Channel 4 began its Islam season with a programme about the Qur'an. This will be followed by programmes on the "wonders of the Islamic world" and a new series of Sharia TV. There are countless other examples of British journalists making genuine attempts to educate people about Islam in all its extraordinary diversity. Some have been authored by me.

I say that I was due to speak at IslamExpo because I withdrew last week after I discovered that the organisers were suing the Harry's Place blog for identifying their alleged links to Hamas, the Palestinian extremist organisation.

Douglas Murray of the Centre for Social Cohesion made a similar decision.

I had been aware of these links before I agreed to speak (there is no point in inviting further legal action by going into detail). But I was not prepared to appear knowing that those who were promoting IslamExpo as a genuine forum for dialogue were closing down the very debate they claimed to be fostering. I was later pleased to discover that government ministers Stephen Timms and Shahid Malik also made the decision not appear on a Hamas platform.

It is true that not all Islamists are violent. Nor should al-Qaida be put in the same category as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian parent organisation of Hamas. There are important distinctions to be made here. But the Islamist ideology promoted by the British manifestations of the Brotherhood, such as the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, the British Muslim Initiative, the Muslim Association of Britain and IslamExpo itself brings its own dangers. These do not threaten British democracy but they do have a pernicious effect, especially on young Muslims in this country who fall under their influence. This is where the danger lies and the threat is very real.

'I despise Islamism': Ian McEwan faces backlash over press interview

by Independent

Thanks to Michael Murray for the link.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/i-despise-islamism-ian-mcewan-faces-backlash-over-press-interview-852030.html

'I despise Islamism': Ian McEwan faces backlash over press interview

He defends fellow writer Martin Amis against racist charge and condemns religious hardliners

By Peter Popham in Rome and Thais Portilho-Shrimpton

The novelist Ian McEwan has launched an astonishingly strong attack on Islamism, saying that he "despises" it and accusing it of "wanting to create a society that I detest". His words, in an interview with an Italian newspaper, could, in today's febrile legalistic climate, lay him open to being investigated for a "hate crime".

In an interview with Guido Santevecchi, a London correspondent for Corriere della Sera, the Booker-winning novelist said he rarely grants interviews on controversial issues "because I have to be careful to protect my privacy". But he said that

he was glad to leap to the defence of his old friend Martin Amis when the latter's attacks on Muslims brought down charges of racism on his head.

He made an exception of the Islamic issue out of friendship to Amis, and because he shares the latter's strong opinions.

"A dear friend had been called a racist," he said.

"As soon as a writer expresses an opinion against Islamism, immediately someone on the left leaps to his feet and claims that because the majority of Muslims are dark-skinned, he who criticises it is racist.

"This is logically absurd and morally unacceptable. Martin is not a racist. And

I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on – we know it well."

McEwan – author of On Chesil Beach and the acclaimed Atonement and Enduring Love – has spoken on the issue of Islamism before, telling The New York Times last December: "All religions make very big claims about the world, and it should be possible in an open society to dispute them. It should be possible to say, 'I find some ideas in Islam questionable' without being called a racist."

But his words in the Corriere interview are far stronger, although they do fall short of the invective deployed by Martin Amis. He has said "the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order", and told The Independent's columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a Muslim, in an open letter:

"Islamism, in most of its manifestations, not only wants to kill me – it wants to kill you."

McEwan's interviewer pointed out that there exist equally hard-line schools of thought within Christianity, for example in the United States.

"I find them equally absurd," McEwan replied. "I don't like these medieval visions of the world according to which God is coming to save the faithful and to damn the others. But those American Christians don't want to kill anyone in my city, that's the difference."

But McEwan's specific irritation is reserved for those who find ideological grounds to condemn his and Amis's views. "When you ask a novelist or a poet about his vision regarding an aspect of the world, you don't get the response of a politician or a sociologist, but even if you don't like what he says you have to accept it, you can't react with defamation. Martin is not a racist, and neither am I."

Elsewhere in the interview McEwan serenely predicted the Balkanisation of the United Kingdom. "Great Britain is an artificial construction of three or four nations. I'm waiting for the Northern Irish to unite with the Irish Republic sooner or later, and also Scotland could go its own way and become independent."

Does the prospect disturb him? "No," he replied, "I think that at this point we should start to reflect on Englishness: this is the country of Shakespeare, of Milton, Newton, Darwin..."

To have your say on this or any other issue visit www.independent.co.uk/IoSblogs

On 2007 National Secular Society’s Secularist of the Year Award Winner Mina Ahadi

reposted from: http://maryamnamazie.blogspot.com/2007/10/on-2007-national-secular-societys.html
Chris Street comments are in bright green; highlights in blockquotes (yellow).

Congratulations to the brilliant Mina Ahadi who won the 2007 Secularist of the Year award this Saturday October 20!

Here is what Richard Dawkins said:

I have long felt that the key to solving the worldwide menace of Islamic terrorism and oppression would eventually be the awakening of women, and Mina Ahadi is a charismatic leader working to that end.

The brutal suppression of the rights of women in many countries throughout the Islamic world is an obvious outrage

. Slightly less obvious, but just as outrageous, is the supine willingness of western liberals to go along with it. It is worse than supine, it is patronising and condescending: "Wife-beating is part of 'their' culture. Who are we to condemn their traditions?"

A religion so insecure as to mandate the death penalty for apostasy is not to be trifled with, and ex-Muslims who stand up and fight deserve our huge admiration and gratitude for their courage.

Right out in front of this honourable band is Mina Ahadi. I salute her and congratulate her on this well-deserved award as Secularist of the Year.

Here is introduction Keith Porteus Wood, the Executive Director of the National Secular Society's gave on the day:

What can the National Secular Society say about the winner of this year’s Secularist of the Year award – other than to affirm our deepest admiration for Mina Ahadi’s courage and commitment?

Mina Ahadi started her serious political activities when she was 16 and living in Iran. She was at university in 1979 in Tabriz at the time of the Iranian revolution and she began immediately to organise demonstrations and meetings to oppose the compulsory veiling of women. This courageous dissent got her noticed by the Islamic regime’s authorities and soon she had to go underground to avoid retribution.

The end of 1980 her house was raided by the police and her husband and 4 of their comrades arrested. Mina escaped only because she wasn’t at home at the time.

Her husband and the 4 arrested were all executed by firing squad soon after. She lived underground for some time and then fled to Iranian Kurdistan in 1981, where she continued to struggle against the Islamic regime for the next ten years. In 1990 she went to Vienna. She moved to Germany in 1996 and has lived in Europe since then.

In all that time, Mina Ahadi has struggled mightily for the rights of women. She founded the International Committee against Stoning – which now has over 200 branches throughout the world. She also heads the International Committee against Executions and is the spokesperson for the newly formed women’s rights organisation, Equal Rights.

She formed the Central Council of ex-Muslims in Germany early this year to help people renounce Islam and religion should they so wish.

This brilliant idea has now been replicated in several other European countries, including in Britain by our own Maryam Namazie.

Undeterred by the inevitable death threats, Mina has pressed on, determined as ever to protect women from the ravages of Islam.

Apostasy, of course, is forbidden in Islam and in some Islamist states it carries the death penalty – including in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan and Mauritania.

She calls such states “Islam-stricken” and her own experience of living and suffering under such regimes has made her ever more determined to rescue others from their clutches.

I cannot tell you how proud the National Secular Society is to honour this wonderful, compassionate, kindly but strong-as-steel woman. Ladies and gentlemen, Mina Ahadi.

Whose sacrifice? When religious observance affects others, the connection with political gain is all too apparent.

reposted from: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/david_green/2007/10/whose_sacrifice.html
Chris Street comments are in bright green; highlights in blockquotes (yellow).

Whose sacrifice?

When religious observance affects others, the connection with political gain is all too apparent.

David Green

October 12, 2007 11:00 AM |

Which is the odd one out? The supermarket checkout worker who will not serve customers buying alcohol; doctors who will not treat patients with conditions related to alcohol or sexual activity; a dentist who insists that his female patients cover their hair; the pharmacist who refuses to dispense the contraceptive pill; or a medical student who failed his finals because he refused to examine a female patient?

The student sacrificed his chosen career to fulfil an assumed religious obligation. All religions demand sacrifice from their followers and whether the medical student was misguided or not, the cost of his actions was borne by him alone. After years of study, he cannot call himself a doctor. The other four examples are political demands hiding behind religion.

They involve no self-sacrifice. On the contrary everyone else is expected to adjust to the demands of the religious adherent. Demands that others must tiptoe around religious sensibilities may even be inspired by entirely selfish motives, particularly the desire to secure personal salvation or to get to paradise.

As a guiding principle, if a religion demands self-sacrifice by its followers and seeks reconciliation it can be accepted as valid. If it makes demands that other people change and, into the bargain, puts the promotion of grievances above forgiveness, it is more a political movement than a religion.

Moreover, these political demands are made for a reason. We know from the work of Ed Husain (the former Hizb ut-Tahrir activist who revealed the ways of the jihadists in his book, The Islamist) that innocent-looking demands are made as part of a wider strategy. At Tower Hamlets College, for example, Husain describes how demands for a bigger Muslim prayer room were used to encourage recruitment. The activists were exultant when the college authorities gave in after initial resistance. The demand for a prayer room was an entirely political technique. If the college had refused, then the activists had a grievance on which to base recruitment. If the college agreed, then it proved that militancy was successful and encouraged new recruits, permitting yet more demands to be made. And sure enough before very long all the women students came under pressure to wear the headscarf, the primary symbol of female subordination in Islam. If aggression pays you will get more of it.

Isn't this a conspiracy theory? Yes, but it's a conspiracy theory admitted by former conspirators like Ed Husain. Moreover, the decision by Sainsbury's to allow some Muslim checkout staff to refuse to process alcohol sales was discussed on Radio 4 at the weekend and Asghar Bukhari of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK gave the game away when he claimed that protests against the decision were an example of the victimisation of Muslims. It has only become a big deal, he said, "because it doesn't matter what the Muslims do someone is always ready to bash them and make a hoo-ha out of it". According to Mr Bukhari, Muslims should fight back: "Let them come, let's defend our rights and stop running away from them."

This is not religion, it's politics and it's precisely why, since the 17th century, liberal democracies have tried to separate the two.

Western democracies should look upon these campaigns for concessions as probing attacks on our defences, and learn to say "no". Religion is entitled to respect when it demands much of its followers. It deserves none when it wants everyone else to make the sacrifices.

Muzzling in the Name of Islam

reposted from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/28/AR2007092801358.html
via NSS Newsline 5th October

My highlights of this article.

in September when a U.N. report said that Articles 18, 19 and 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights should be reinterpreted by "adopting complementary standards on the interrelations between freedom of expression, freedom of religion and non-discrimination."

Islamists and authoritarian governments now routinely use accusations of blasphemy to repress writers, journalists, political dissidents and, perhaps politically most important, religious reformers.

Egypt has been unusually active of late in imprisoning its critics in the name of Islam. On Aug. 8, it arrested Adel Fawzy Faltas and Peter Ezzat, who work for the Canada-based Middle East Christian Association, on the grounds that, in seeking to defend human rights, they had "insulted Islam."

Repressive laws, supplemented and reinforced by terrorists, vigilantes and mob violence, are a fundamental barrier to open discussion and dissent, and so to democracy and free societies, within the Muslim world. When politics and religion are intertwined, there can be no political freedom without religious freedom, including the right to criticize religious ideas. Hence, removing legal bans on blasphemy and 'insulting Islam' is vital to protecting an open debate that could lead to other reforms.

If, in the name of false toleration and religious sensitivity, free nations do not firmly condemn and resist these totalitarian strictures, we will abet the isolation of reformist Muslims, and condemn them to silence behind what Sen. Joseph Lieberman has aptly termed a "theological iron curtain."

Paul Marshall, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom, is writing a book on blasphemy.

Swedish cartoon drawer in hiding

reposted from:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6999652.stm

Swedish cartoon drawer in hiding

Lars Vilks (L) spoke to journalists the day before being whisked away

The Swedish cartoonist at the centre of a row over drawings of the Prophet Muhammad says police have taken him to a secret location for his own safety.

Lars Vilks said he was only able to pick up a few things when he returned from Germany at the weekend before police escorted him from his home.

The purported head of al-Qaeda in Iraq has offered $100,000 (£49,310) to anyone killing Mr Vilks.

Muslims regard visual representation of the Prophet as blasphemous.

Several Muslim countries have protested against the cartoon.

Mr Vilks said the Swedish secret services considered the threat against him as "very serious".

"The police guard was non-existent before this. It's 100% now," Mr Vilks said in a telephone interview with Associated Press agency.

"I can't live in my home, I've only been allowed to pick up some things."

Local laws

A man said to be the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, offered a reward for the murder of Mr Vilks in an audio message aired on the internet.

Nerikes Allehanda newspaper defended publishing the cartoon

The $100,000 (£49,310) reward would be raised by 50% if Mr Vilks was "slaughtered like a lamb", he said.

The cartoon showed the Prophet Muhammad's head on a dog's body and was published by Nerikes Allehanda newspaper on 18 August.

Many Muslims regard the dog as an impure animal.

But Ibrahim el-Zayat, of the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe, told the BBC that Muslims in the West had to live with the local laws on freedom of expression.

He said there were much more important issues to worry about, and praised the Swedish government for trying to defuse tensions.

This month, Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt met ambassadors from 22 Muslim countries over the issue.

Last year there were riots over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, first published in September 2005 by the newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

Pakistani women beheaded by religious zealots

reposted from:http://bligbi.com

The headless bodies of two women were found outside the city of Bannu. A note was pinned to one of the women and stated “We have started doing this to end obscenity in the area.” The “we” is Islamic religious zealots. The obscenity is prostitution.

Perhaps it’s just the godlessness in me, but for some reason I have the firm conviction that cutting a woman’s head off because she doesn’t follow obey your religion is multitudes worse than any “obscenity” she may have committed.

reposted from:richarddawkins

Young Muslims begin dangerous fight for the right to abandon faith

by Times Online, David Charter

Reposted from:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2426314.ece

A group of young Muslim apostates launches a campaign today, the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on America, to make it easier to renounce Islam.

The provocative move reflects a growing rift between traditionalists and a younger generation raised on a diet of Dutch tolerance.

The Committee for Ex-Muslims promises to campaign for freedom of religion but has already upset the Islamic and political Establishments for stirring tensions among the million-strong Muslim community in the Netherlands.

Ehsan Jami, the committee's founder, who rejected Islam after the attack on the twin towers in 2001, has become the most talked-about public figure in the Netherlands. He has been forced into hiding after a series of death threats and a recent attack.

The threats are taken seriously after the murder in 2002 of Pim Fortuyn, an antiimmigration politician, and in 2004 of Theo Van Gogh, an antiIslam film-maker.

Speaking to The Times at a secret location before the committee's launch today, the Labour Party councillor said that

the movement would declare war on radical Islam. Similar organisations campaigning for reform of the religion have sprung up across Europe and representatives from Britain and Germany will join the launch in The Hague today.

"Sharia schools say that they will kill the ones who leave Islam. In the West people get threatened, thrown out of their family, beaten up,"

Mr Jami said.

"In Islam you are born Muslim. You do not even choose to be Muslim. We want that to change, so that people are free to choose who they want to be and what they want to believe in."

Mr Jami, 22, who has abandoned his studies as his political career has taken off, denied that the choice of September 11 was deliberately provocative towards the Islamic Establishment. "We chose the date because we want to make a clear statement that we no longer tolerate the intolerence of Islam, the terrorist attacks," he said.

"In 1965 the Church in Holland made a declaration that freedom of conscience is above hanging on to religion, so you can choose whether you are going to be a Christian or not. What we are seeking is the same thing for Islam."

Mr Jami, who has compared the rise of radical Islam to the threat from Nazism in the 1930s,

is receiving only lukewarm support from his party which traditionally relies upon Muslim votes. His outspoken attack on radical Islam has led to a prelaunch walk-out from fellow committee founder Loubna Berrada, who herself rejected Islam.

She said: "I don't wish to confront Islam itself. I only want to spread the message that Muslims should be allowed to leave Islam behind without being threatened."

There have been suggestions that Mr Jami might defect to the right-wing Freedom Party, led by

Geert Wilders, the most outspoken politician in the Netherlands, who has called for the Koran to be banned. But Mr Jami said: "I have respect for Wilders but we do not have the same ideology. I am for the freedom of religion.

"Banning something is not going to help. I am the opposite – everyone should read the Koran." Mr Jami is being compared to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali refugee who became a prominent Dutch politician campaigning for the reform of Islam but who left eventually for an academic career in the United States.

Jannie Groen, a writer for De Volksrant newspaper, said: "[Among Muslims] he is getting the same reaction as Ayaan Hirsi Ali that he is too confrontational but you are seeing other former Muslims now coming forward. So he has been able to put this issue of apostasy on the agenda, even though they do not want to be in the same room as him and he has had to pay a price."

By the Book

— 14 passages in the Koran refer to apostasy

— According to Baidhawi's commentary, Sura 4: 88-89 reads:

"Whosoever turns back from his belief, openly or secretly, take him and kill him wheresoever ye find him, like any other infidel.

Separate yourself from him altogether. Do not accept intercession in his regard."

— The hadith, tradition and legend about Muhammad and his followers used as a basis of Sharia, tells of some atheists who were brought to "'Ali and he burnt them. The news of this reached Ibn Abbas who said: 'If I had been in his place, I would not have burnt them, as Allah's Apostate forbade it . . . I would have killed them according to the statement of Allah's Apostate, 'Whoever changed his [Islamic] religion, then kill him'."

— According to hadith, a special reward in Paradise is reserved for the killer of apostates

Source: Times archives; Barnabas Fund

reposted from: http://www.daneandrade.com/2007/09/11/the-epistemology-of-an-atheist/

The Epistemology of an Atheist

September 11th, 2007 by Dane Andrade

Despair, like the smoky avoirdupois of this turbid grey and dismal morning, hangs apposite to the integrity of this specific day. This day, as if the news would let us forget, is the six year anniversary of religion announcing her flagrant and holy right to destroy life. It is also the six year anniversary of the moment faith was unmasked for me. To explain to someone what it was like for me, staring dolorously at the large screen TV in the tenebrous confines of the Notre Dame student center, would be doing the ineffable experience an injustice. The potency of the event would come to fruition later, but as the world seemed on fire, the sudden realization that the thousands of people who die annually in equal brutal fashion around the globe were no different then my own countrymen, thousands having died that day. I was 20 years old, and I was introduced to the world. Everything was simultaneously closer and farther away. My brain, ripe with its’ developmental apex, seemed unable to filter the abattoir of thoughts and feelings.

I was there, standing, among my peers, yet I was alone. I watched the President’s devotional prayer, to the supposed creator of all life, me a skeptic, agnostic, only recently liberated slowly and painfully from indoctrination, watching the prayers of my school and the leaders of the country. It was then, at some moment between invocation and realization, that I vomited. On my knees in a men’s bathroom in a school dedicated the Our Lady, mother of the personal god of the Christians, I lost god completely.

Watching them, these people, praying to the same bloody creator who was invoked in the very destruction of life… the word irony was insufficient. My humility was gone, and my correspondence to my weakness was gone. I was no longer a skeptic. There was hard proof, and real life experiences that pointed to the most obvious fact in all of human existence: There is no personal god; there is no watcher, safe keeper, protector, or creator.

Years later and the facts would conclude this without a doubt. None of the manifestations of the personal deities of cultures made any sense… none of the ancient arguments held any modern philosophical weight, nothing was left of this god except the faith of the majority. The same faith across the globe, in its’ diverse representations. It was after this that I started reading the philosophies. In Alvin Plantinga’s class, I was introduced to what would later become the strongest argument for the existence of god to apologists, and needless to say, I left the class armed with certainty of the failure of the god hypothesis. I started reading different literature, from C.S. Lewis and then to Russell, and in 2004, picked up End of Faith, by Sam Harris, which led to pre-ordering of his second work, Letter to a Christian Nation, and Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion.

This is the modern epistemology of an atheist. It started many, many years ago, with my Catholic family background, my first encounter with evangelicalism, southern Baptism, going to school in the deep south, becoming “born-again”, and finally being brought by a close friend to a Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames production during the revival of the world’s worst youth movement. I was forged in the most religious parts of this once secular country, and I was introduced to what my life would be, what I would become, six years ago today.

Is Islamist extremism infiltrating our universties and public libraries?

reposted from New Humanist

Yesterday's Newsnight picked up on a new report by the right-leaning Centre for Social Cohesion which suggests that public libraries in areas of London with dense Muslim populations have been inundated with copies of Islamist texts.

Books by the key Islamist thinkers Sayed Qutb and Sayed Abdullah Maydudi, and the more recent terrorist sympathisers Abu Hamza (picture) and Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal were found in libraries in the Tower Hamlets borough.

The author of the report, Douglas Murray (picture), said that the collections on Islam in these libraries were "warped towards one particular extreme interpretation of Islam", while the former Islamist Ed Husian expressed concerns that readers could be inspired by these teachings: "The worry is how many of those people - it might be a small number, but small enough to cause carnage - who are then prepared to literally act upon those teachings."

This story follows on from concerns over the influence of Islamism on university campuses, and raises similar questions over civil liberties. Should people be free to read about and even espouse these ideas, or are they so dangerous that they should be banned from public life? Our cover story for the new September/October issue takes a look at the question of Islamic extremism on university campuses. We speak to students and leading academics, and ask how universities should be dealing with the problem.

Christopher Hitchen's 'Bible belter' by Richard Dawkins

Christopher Hitchens
GOD IS NOT GREAT
The case against religion
307pp. Atlantic. £17.99.
978 1 84354 586 6
US: New York: Twelve. $24.99.
978 0 446 57980 3

reposted from Times online

There is much fluttering in the dovecots of the deluded, and Christopher Hitchens is one of those responsible. Another is the philosopher A. C. Grayling. I recently shared a platform with both. We were to debate against a trio of, as it turned out, rather half-hearted religious apologists (“Of course I don’t believe in a God with a long white beard, but . . .”). I hadn’t met Hitchens before, but I got an idea of what to expect when Grayling emailed me to discuss tactics. After proposing a couple of lines for himself and me, he concluded, “. . . and Hitch will spray AK47 ammo at the enemy in characteristic style”.

Grayling’s engaging caricature misses Hitchens’s ability to temper his pugnacity with old-fashioned courtesy. And “spray” suggests a scattershot fusillade, which underestimates the deadly accuracy of his marksmanship. If you are a religious apologist invited to debate with Christopher Hitchens, decline. His witty repartee, his ready-access store of historical quotations, his bookish eloquence, his effortless flow of well-formed words, beautifully spoken in that formidable Richard Burton voice (the whole performance not dulled by other equally formidable Richard Burton habits), would threaten your arguments even if you had good ones to deploy. A string of reverends and “theologians” ruefully discovered this during Hitchens’s barnstorming book tour around the United States.

With characteristic effrontery, he took his tour through the Bible Belt states – the reptilian brain of southern and middle America, rather than the easier pickings of the country’s cerebral cortex to the north and down the coasts. The plaudits he received were all the more gratifying. Something is stirring in that great country. America is far from the know-nothing theocracy that two terms of Bush, and various misleading polls, had led us to fear. Does the buckle of the Bible Belt conceal some real guts? Are the ranks of the thoughtful coming out of the closet and standing up to be counted? Yes, and Hitchens’s atheist colleagues on the American bestseller list have equally encouraging tales to tell.

God Is Not Great is a coolly angry book, but there are good laughs too; for example, Hitchens’s hilarious account of how Malcolm Muggeridge launched “the ‘Mother Teresa’ brand upon the world” with his story that, while the BBC struggled to film her under low-light conditions, she spontaneously glowed. The cameraman later told Hitchens the true explanation of the “miracle” – the ultra-sensitivity of a new type of film from Kodak – but Muggeridge fatuously wrote: “I myself am absolutely convinced that the technically unaccountable light is, in fact, the Kindly Light that Cardinal Newman refers to in his well-known exquisite hymn”.

Hitchens also offers an extremely funny brief history of Mormonism: how it was invented from scratch by Joseph Smith, a nineteenth-century charlatan who wrote his book in sixteenth-century English, claiming to have translated the text from plates of gold – which conveniently ascended into heaven before anyone else could see them. Even the amanuenses to whom the illiterate Smith dictated had to sit behind a curtain lest they should catch a glimpse and be struck dead. Do you know anyone so gullible? Yet today, Mormonism is powerful enough to field a presidential candidate, its clean-cut young missionaries patrol the world in pairs, and the Book of Mormon nestles in every Marriott hotel room.

Hitchens’s title alludes, of course, to those famous last words “Allahu Akhbar”. The subtitle has suffered from its Atlantic crossing. The American original, “How religion poisons everything”, is an excellent slogan, which recurs through the book and defines its central theme. The British edition substitutes the bland and pedestrian subtitle “The case against religion”.

I referred earlier to Hitchens’s old-fashioned courtesy, and that was not (entirely) a joke. You can hear it in recordings of his lectures and debates, and you can see it in the first chapter of this book, “Putting It Mildly”.

I leave it to the faithful to burn each other’s churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can always be relied upon to do. When I go to the mosque, I take off my shoes. When I go to the synagogue, I cover my head.

The next chapter, “Religion Kills”, benefits from Hitchens’s experience as a war correspondent. (Others have likened him to Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene, but my own comparison is with Waugh’s intrepid rogue Basil Seal, who couldn’t keep out of trouble or away from the world’s trouble spots.) Publicly challenged by an American preacher to admit that, if approached by a gang of men in a dark alley, he would be reassured to learn that they had emerged from a prayer meeting, Hitchens’s return volley was unplayable:

Just to stay within the letter “B”, I have actually had that experience in Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem and Baghdad. In each case I can say absolutely, and can give my reasons, why I would feel immediately threatened if I thought that the group of men approaching me in the dusk were coming from a religious observance.

He does give his reasons too, and in no case are they vulnerable to the objection “But the dispute in B— is tribal / political / economic, not religious”. It is doubtless true that the people of B— are killing each other over something more than a mere liturgical disagreement. They are pursuing hereditary vendettas, paying back economic injustices. It’s all “them and us” stuff, yes, but how do they know who is them and who is us? Through religion, religious education, sectarian apartheid; through decades of faith-based separation, starting in kindergarten, working up through faith school and on to later life and the inculcated horror of “marrying out”; then, most importantly, the dutifully segregated indoctrination of the next generation.

I once had a televised encounter with a leading “moderate” Muslim, of the kind who gets a knighthood or a peerage for not being an “extremist”.

I publicly challenged this “moderate” to deny that the Muslim penalty for apostasy was death. Unable to do so (the Koran is word-for-word inerrant), he wriggled and twisted, and finally claimed that it was an “unimportant detail”, because never enforced. Tell that to Salman Rushdie, of whom the knighted “moderate” had earlier said, “Death is perhaps too easy for him”

. . . . the literal mind does not understand the ironic mind, and sees it always as a source of danger. Moreover, Rushdie had been brought up as a Muslim and had an understanding of the Koran, which meant in effect that he was an apostate. And “apostasy”, according to the Koran, is punishable by death. There is no right to change
religion . . . .

Thus Christopher Hitchens on his friend Salman Rushdie, whom he welcomed into his Washington home and was subsequently warned by the State Department

. . . to change my address and my telephone number, which seemed an unlikely way of avoiding reprisal. However, it did put me on notice of what I already knew. It is not possible for me to say, Well, you pursue your Shiite dream of a hidden imam and I pursue my study of Thomas Paine and George Orwell, and the world is big enough for both of us. The true believer cannot rest until the whole world bows the knee. Is it not obvious to all, say the pious, that religious authority is paramount, and that those who decline to recognize it have forfeited their right to exist.

Hitchens invokes the Danish cartoons to discuss complicity and cowardice in the West:

Islamic mobs were violating diplomatic immunity and issuing death threats against civilians, yet the response from His Holiness the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury was to condemn – the cartoons! In my own profession, there was a rush to see who could capitulate the fastest, by reporting on the disputed images without actually showing them. And this at a time when the mass media has become almost exclusively picture-driven. Euphemistic noises were made about the need to show “respect’” but I know quite a number of the editors concerned and can say for a certainty that the chief motive for “restraint” was simple fear. In other words, a handful of religious bullies and bigmouths could, so to speak, outvote the tradition of free expression in its Western heartland.

While I admire Hitchens’s courage, I could not condemn those editors. There are times when “cowardice” amounts to no more than sensible prudence. But Hitchens is surely right to despise leaders of other religions who, while under no threat, go out of their way to volunteer a gratuitous “respect” and “sympathy” for those who incite murder in the name of God.
To return to Hitchens on Rushdie and the fatwa:

One might have thought that such arrogant state-sponsored homicide . . . would have called forth a general condemnation. But such was not the case. In considered statements, the Vatican, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the chief sephardic rabbi of Israel all took a stand in sympathy with – the ayatollah. So did the cardinal archbishop of New York and other lesser religious figures. While they usually managed a few words in which to deplore the resort to violence, all these men stated that the main problem raised by the publication of The Satanic Verses was not murder by mercenaries but blasphemy.

Moving to today’s Iran (and this may go some way towards explaining his otherwise mysterious flirtation with the neocon blackguards of Washington) Hitchens notes, “as I write, a version of the Inquisition is about to lay its hands on a nuclear weapon”. This is an unexpected threat. Theocracy doesn’t obviously nurture the sort of cultural and educational advancement that goes with modern scientific inventiveness. Hitchens develops his point with respect to September 11, 2001, when

from Afghanistan the holy order was given to annex two famous achievements of modernism – the high-rise building and the jet aircraft – and use them for immolation and human sacrifice. The succeeding stage, very plainly announced in hysterical sermons, was to be the moment when apocalyptic nihilists coincided with Armageddon weaponry. Faith-based fanatics could not design anything as useful or beautiful as a skyscraper or a passenger aircraft. But, continuing their long history of plagiarism, they could borrow and steal these things and use them as a negation.

While my own primary concern as a scientist has been with religion’s claims about the cosmos and the sources of life, Hitchens restricts such matters to two short chapters. Where he really comes into his own is with the evils that are done in the name of religion: “religion poisons everything”. His list is pretty comprehensive. There is a good chapter on religion as child abuse; another on religion as a health hazard, which doesn’t fail to mention those Roman Catholic priests, including at least two cardinals and an archbishop, who solemnly told their flocks, in African countries ravaged by AIDS, that condoms transmit the virus.

Reviewers have variously described Hitchens as an equal opportunity atheist, an equal opportunity embarrasser (of all religions), an equal opportunity ranter, and an equal opportunity bigot. He is certainly not a bigot, nor does he rant (any critic of religion, no matter how mild, is automatically assumed to “rant”). But it is true, as another reviewer of God Is Not Great has put it, that it is “ecumenical in its contempt for religion”. Even Buddhism, which is often praised as a cut above the rest, gets both barrels.

It is no surprise that Hitchens’s chapter “The Nightmare of the Old Testament” effortlessly lives up to its name. The next one, despite its promising title (“The New Testament Exceeds the Evil of the Old”) is more about the unreliability of the texts than about any evil to match the admittedly high standards of the Pentateuch. Many Gospel stories were invented to fulfil Old Testament prophecies, and the shameless candour with which their authors admit it is almost endearing: “All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet . . .”. The real evil of the New Testament gets a chapter to itself: that is, the divine-scapegoat theory of Jesus’s crucifixion, as vicarious atonement for “original sin” (the past sin of Adam who had never existed, and the future sins of people like us who didn’t yet exist but were presumed to have every intention of sinning when our time came).

Hitchens is quick to note the similarity of Christianity to extinct cults. Jesus slots right into a cosmopolitan catalogue of virgin births along with Horus, Mercury, Krishna, Attis, Perseus, Romulus and, incongruously, Genghis Khan. Is it Jungian atavism, shrewd PR, or sheer accident that leads the inventors of cults, and the religions into which they mature, to conjure their gods out of virgin wombs, like so many rabbits out of hats? Jesus’s case was abetted by a simple mistranslation from the Hebrew for “young woman” into the Greek for “virgin”.

One of Hitchens’s central themes is that gods are made by man, rather than the other way around. A related theme is plagiarism: “monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay, of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents”. A pair of chapters explores “The Tawdriness of the Miraculous” and the widespread fallacy that we derive our morals from religious rules such as the Ten Commandments. As Hitchens witheringly puts it, does anybody seriously think that, before Moses delivered the tablet inscription “Thou shalt not kill”, his people had thought it a good idea to do so?

I said that Hitchens comes into his own on the evils that are done in the name of religion: “in the name of” is important. You can’t just point to evil – or indeed good – individuals who happen to be religious. The case to be made is that people do evil (or good) – because they are religious. Crusaders and jihadis are – by their own lights – good. They do evil things (by our lights) because their faith drives them to it. The nineteen murderers of September 11 scrupulously washed, perfumed and shaved their whole bodies in preparation for the martyrs’ paradise, as they set off on what they sincerely, truly, prayerfully believed was a supremely righteous mission.

If ever a man embodied evil it was Adolf Hitler. He never renounced his Roman Catholicism, and affirmed his Christianity throughout his life, but unlike, say, Torquemada or a typical crusader or conquistador, he did not do his horrible deeds in the name of Christianity. Another deeply evil man, Joseph Stalin, was probably an atheist but, again, he didn’t do evil because he was an atheist, any more than he, or Hitler, or Saddam Hussein, did evil because they had moustaches. Hitchens is especially good on the idiotic challenge “Stalin and Hitler were atheists, what d’you say to that?” – doubtless after plenty of practice. Stalin, Hitler and the others may not have been religious themselves, but they understood the ingrained religiosity of their subjects, and exploited it gratefully. Hitchens makes the point only briefly in the book, but he has enlarged upon it in later speeches and interviews:

For hundreds of years, millions of Russians had been told the head of state should be a man close to God, the Czar, who was head of the Russian Orthodox Church as well as absolute despot. If you’re Stalin, you shouldn’t be in the dictatorship business if you can’t exploit the pool of servility and docility that’s ready-made for you. The task of atheists is to raise people above that level of servility and credulity.

The point applies again to Kim Jong Il (the Dear Leader) and to his late father, Kim Il Sung (the Great Leader), who is still the Eternal President of North Korea, despite having died in 1994. Hitchens has personal experience of North Korea, and his observations on its modern cult of ancestor worship are the sort of thing he does best.

Having failed myself to find anything to complain about, I thought it my duty to examine other reviews in the hope of uncovering something negative to say. Most of them have been favourable, but Matt Buchanan, in the course of an otherwise rave review in the Sydney Morning Herald, hit home with this:

He is also occasionally guilty of crassness. For example: “In the very recent past we have seen the Church of Rome befouled by its complicity in the unpardonable sin of child rape, or as it might be phrased in Latin form, no child's behind left.” Hitchens squanders a lot of trust with that vulgar lapse: readers suddenly catch sight of him chortling at his desk and it’s not pretty, or funny, and it impugns his seriousness elsewhere.

An undeniable lapse but not a characteristic one. The slightly odd habit of downsizing self-important leaders by calling them “mammals” is a lesser error of tone that might be corrected in a future edition.

Peter Hitchens begins his negative review in the Daily Mail quite well (“Am I my brother’s reviewer?”), but the substance of his complaint seems to be that Christopher is as confident in his disbelief as any fundamentalist is confident in his belief. The answer to the familiar accusation of atheist fundamentalism is plain enough. The onus is not on the atheist to demonstrate the non-existence of the invisible unicorn in the room, and we cannot be accused of undue confidence in our disbelief. The devout churchgoer recites the Nicene Creed weekly, enumerating a detailed and precise list of things he positively believes, with no more evidence than supports the unicorn. Now that’s overconfidence. By contrast, the atheist says the humble thing: of all the millions of possible entities that one might imagine, I believe only in those for which there is evidence – trombones, pelicans and electrons, say, but not unicorns or leprechauns, not Thor with his hammer, not Ganesh the elephant god, not the Holy Ghost.

The second commonest complaint from reviewers is that Christopher Hitchens attacks bad religion. Real religion (the religion the reviewer subscribes to) is immune to such criticism. Here is the theologian Stephen Prothero in the Washington Post:

To read this oddly innocent book as gospel is to believe that ordinary Catholics are proud of the Inquisition . . . and that ordinary Jews cheer when a renegade Orthodox rebbe sucks the blood off a freshly circumcised penis.

This complaint, too, is familiar, and the answer (even when the point is not exaggerated, as it is by Prothero) is obvious. If only all religions were as humane and as nuanced as yours, gentle theologian, all would be well, and Hitchens would not have needed to write this book. But come down to earth in the real world: in Islamabad, say, in Jerusalem, or in Hitchens’s home town, Washington DC, where the President of the most powerful nation on earth takes his marching orders directly from God. Channel-hop your television in any American hotel room, look aghast at the huge sums of money subscribed to build megachurches, at museums depicting dinosaurs walking with men, and see what I mean.

Finally, there are those critics who can’t resist the ad hominem blow: “Don’t you know Christopher Hitchens supported the invasion of Iraq?” But so what? I’m not reviewing his politics, I’m reviewing his book. And what a splendid, boisterously virile broadside of a book it is.

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Richard Dawkins FRS is Oxford's Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. His latest book, The God Delusion, has sold more than a million copies in its first year, and is being translated into more than 30 languages.

How British libraries encourage Islamic extremism

reposted from Centre for Social Cohesion

A number of Councils have responded to the Centre for Social Cohesion’s report Hate on the State - How British libraries encourage Islamic extremism

Birmingham Council has denied that its library holdings are problematic. They claim in the Birmingham Mail that: ‘Many of the writings highlighted are historic and scholarly works.’ Indeed. But why the need for 60 different works by Maududi? Evidently Birmingham Council is pleased to continue so disproportionately providing the works of the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami in its Islamic sections.

Tower Hamlets meanwhile are standing firm in their desire to keep ‘Women who deserve to go to hell’ and the works of Abu Hamza available free of charge to their residents.

Among the reaction to the Centre’s work in the press are major pieces in the Telegraph, Sun and a lively column in the Daily Mail. In the blogosphere the report has been picked up by numerous sites including Little Green Footballs and Jihad Watch.

Why Sharia Law must be Opposed

reposted from NTPI = No To Political Islam

Why Sharia Law must be Opposed

Sharia law is the instrument by which Political Islam seeks to control the Muslim world. Whilst the Sharia may have been inspired by the Holy Quran,

it has developed and evolved through time and through the efforts of men. The Sharia should be open to analysis, research and criticism like any other system of law, practice and belief. Its divine inspiration should no more shield it from criticism than Christianity should have been spared criticism for burning heretics or massacring unbelievers. The more pernicious interpretations of the Sharia today fall far short of the minimum standards of justice widely demanded by the international community and by Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

The Sharia should be opposed for its imposition of theocracy over democracy, its abuse of human rights, its institutionalized discrimination, its denial of human dignity and individual autonomy, its punishment of alternative lifestyle choices, and for the severity of its punishments.

In the west, in countries that have a sizable Muslim population, there have been calls for the Sharia to be adopted for the Muslim community.

These calls should be vigorously opposed; the Sharia conflicts with many basic human values, such as equality before the law, that punishments should be commensurate with the crime, and that the law must be based on the will of the people.

The Sharia as it developed in the first few centuries of Islam incorporated many pre-Islamic Middle-Eastern misogynist and tribal customs and traditions. The Sharia was developed not only from the Holy Quran but incorporates legal principles from other sects.

We may ask how a law whose elements were first laid down over 1,000 years ago can possibly be relevant in the 21st century.

The Sharia reflects the social and economic conditions at the time of the Abbasids and has become further and further out of touch with later social, economic, technological, cultural and moral developments.

The principles of the Sharia are inimical to moral progress, humanity and civilized values.

The problem for all of us is how to oppose the violations of human rights inherent in the Sharia without being accused of blasphemy or apostasy. We would suggest that the answer lies in a return to the Five Pillars of Islam.

For non-Muslims who want to help, the problem is how to avoid charges of cultural imperialism, neocolonialism and racism, or of failing to respect “the other”. But cultural relativism is not the answer. In India, each religion has its own social laws. Muslim women do not enjoy the same rights as Hindu women. Why not? Justice cries out for secularism. One law for all – equality before the law – for Muslims and non-Muslims, for men and women alike, must be the answer.

Many of the arguments for permitting each religion or culture to determine its own laws are based on a misunderstanding of the nature of human rights. Human rights as defined in the UDHR are vested in the individual, not the group. As soon as rights are accorded to a group rather than to individuals, conflict becomes possible not only between one group and another, but between the group and its own members. Any group that denies the right of its members to leave is in contravention of one of the most fundamental principles of human rights. Yet clearly, one of the reasons for the growth of Islam over the past century has been that becoming a Muslim is a one-way street. Whether by birth or conversion (historically likely to have been a forced conversion) once you are a Muslim the only way out, under the Sharia, is death.

When Political Islam really does advocate jihad to achieve world domination, then anyone deeply concerned with humanity and human rights will be critical.

Of all the existing ideologies, Political Islam remains the greatest danger to humanity. Political Islam has been neither tamed nor moderated by progressive forces. It has the power to inspire the terrorist mind, and, through its ties to oil-rich states, the funds to pursue its plans.

Islamic apologists often claim that many so-called violations of human rights are based on a misreading of the Holy Quran and will quote this or that sura in its defense. But the arguments against Political Islam are not against the holy texts but against the Sharia as it is practiced today in Islamic states.

We are told that Islam is a religion of peace and that the struggle, jihad, to impose Islam by conquest is not to be taken literally. But for Political Islam it is. Ask the suicide bombers.

The only possible response to the charge of misunderstanding or misreading Islam is to look at the reality of what is happening in those countries such as Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and northern Nigeria where the Sharia now holds sway.

The world is a battleground of social movements and ideas. It took people in the west over 400 years of often-bloody struggle to gain the right to criticize Christianity. Even now, that right is still not fully recognized. In Britain, for example, there is still a law against blasphemy, and many Islamic clerics have argued that it should be extended to cover Islam as well. It should be scrapped. Once we are prevented from expressing our point of view in the market place of ideas we will be heading back to the Dark Ages.

We must recognize that we now live in a global community. Society is far larger, more diverse and far more complex than the primitive tribal society of 7th century Arabia that gave birth to Islam. It is time to renounce the idea that anyone should be ruled exclusively by the Sharia.

More than ever before, people need a secular state that respects freedom of religion, and freedom from religion for those that have none, and human rights founded on the principle that power belongs to the people. This means that we must reject the claims of the Islamists that sovereignty belongs exclusively to Allah – by which they mean His representatives, that is, themselves. Indeed it demands that the very concept of an Islamic state be challenged. The imposition of Sharia law for political ends must be opposed.

What is needed is nothing less than the secularization of Islamic society, and the establishment of the idea that individual conscience must be our guide and the judge of personal, private conduct.

But secularization cannot be imposed from outside by force. Attempts by America and its allies to impose democracy and human rights on the Islamic world will rightly be resisted as neocolonialism and will simply drive more and more Muslims into the arms of the extremists. The onus is on us to promote the ideals of personal freedom, progress and change from within Muslim society, with help from those in the rest of the world who share our ideals and hopes for the future.

We call on all Muslims and all who value freedom, democracy and human rights to support our campaign: NO to Political Islam, YES to Human Rights.