2
Shout, Shout, Let It All Out
Above right: Hanson fans
Victor Urban Dance Squad Hanson, per usual, is yelling at and about Muslims:
The time is over both for coffee-table talk in the West about a pie-in-the-sky “reformation” needed in Islam, and the endless habit in the Middle East of blaming others for self-inflicted miseries.
Ah-ha, but the good doctor doesn’t just diagnose the problem in clenched-teeth, stock-villain prose — he also prescribes a solution:
[R]ight now we should hold the Muslim world to the same standards of tolerance that we demand of ourselves — no more apologies for things like our insensitive cartoons or excuses for their insane anger against novelists. In turn, the Middle East must grow up and accept, like the rest of the world, that there are social and cultural costs and consequences for any who wish to embrace the benefits of modernism.
The legitimacy of his gripes notwithstanding, this bargain sounds like a win-win-win for Hanson. Under his proposal, Muslims have to shut the hell up or else American liberals will start yelling at them, too — and if they don’t, Hanson will yell even louder and with much greater frequency.
This is like that Adam Dunn for Brett Tomko and Mark Hendrickson swap I saw a Dodgers fan suggest once at mlbtraderumors.com, but proposed by Chris Berman broadcasting from inside a noisy sports bar.
Ripley said,
August 2, 2007 at 22:21
I think he may have missed the memo on Saudi/US relations. But, oddly, no mention of Ted Haggard, David Vitter, Mark Foley, Bill O’Reilly, et al when it comes to Family Values, Culture Wars and hypocrisy.
Also - if someone’s paying him to write this plonk, they should stop. Immediately…
dave said,
August 2, 2007 at 22:23
But his yells go to eleven! It’s one louder, isn’t it?
Joe Morgan said,
August 2, 2007 at 22:24
“This is like that Adam Dunn for Brett Tomko and Mark Hendrickson swap I saw a Dodgers fan suggest once at mlbtraderumors.com, but proposed by Chris Berman broadcasting from inside a noisy sports bar.”
Chris Berman knows nothing about baseball.
cellulose said,
August 2, 2007 at 22:27
LOLz at the mlbtraderumors reference.
Some Guy said,
August 2, 2007 at 22:34
http://static.grupthink.com/answer/3/3c728fce8f5d24259b34754c797c303a
?
Righteous Bubba said,
August 2, 2007 at 22:37
Maybe we could persuade VD to head to Iraq to enforce these demands.
Galactic Dustbin said,
August 2, 2007 at 22:39
Chris Berman knows nothing about baseball.
or football… or basketball… hockey… NASCAR… soccer… arena football… hydroplane racing… cricket… Thai kickboxing… rugby… hotdog eating…
bl0ndej0n said,
August 2, 2007 at 22:43
Yes, because in America we have a special place for people who are childish/ primitive/ sissy enough to complain about an insulting cartoon:
http://michellemalkin.com/2007/07/14/ted-rall-is-at-it-again/
DAS said,
August 2, 2007 at 22:55
there are social and cultural costs and consequences for any who wish to embrace the benefits of modernism.
Indeed there are. In fact, I seem to remember some feller named Thorstein Veblen pointing out that when Germany modernized without paying these cultural costs, it caused problems for everyone. Alas, VDH is no Thorstein Veblen, otherwise he’d realize (as Michael Lind did), that the situation of our “Red States” mirrors fin de siecle Germany as much or more so than does the situation in the Middle East.
mikey said,
August 2, 2007 at 23:19
That’s it. I’ve had it with these damn muslims too. If they don’t straighten up their act right NOW we’re gonna stop invading their countries, destroying their shit and killing them. Hah! What’ll they do then, huh?
mikey
Jay B. said,
August 2, 2007 at 23:27
there are social and cultural costs and consequences for any who wish to embrace the benefits of modernism.
And yet you never hear Republicans shut the fuck up about it. Christ, they think global warming is a ploy developed in the smoke-filled rooms where “Old Money Socialists” and “academics” seduce the AP into promoting their anti-American agenda.
That, of course, is dumber than alchemy.
legion said,
August 2, 2007 at 23:30
or football… or basketball… hockey… NASCAR… soccer… arena football… hydroplane racing… cricket… Thai kickboxing… rugby… hotdog eating…
Oh, I dunno… I bet Berman knows a _lot_ about hotdog eating…
S.T.D. Hanson said,
August 2, 2007 at 23:34
“the endless habit in the Middle East of blaming others for self-inflicted miseries”
vs.
“Indeed, even after the five-year withdrawal from Vietnam, the American military took twenty years to regain its own confidence. If we blame a Jimmy Carter for the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, [not relevant here, but also:] the unchecked Cambodian genocide during 1977-79, or the communist infiltration of Central America”
And we (the Hansons) do blame Jimmy Carter.
Self-inflicted, except when Jimmy Carter did it.
Alec said,
August 2, 2007 at 23:35
While we’re at it, let’s make sure that neither rich nor poor are allowed to sleep under bridges or steal bread, that neither whites nor blacks are allowed to drag an indictee from jail with the implicit approval of local law enforcement and string them up from a tree, and that Anglo-Americans(TM) and Mexiswarthies are both forbidden from using any language except English.
For equality!
blowback said,
August 2, 2007 at 23:38
Since you want to let it all out, how about shouting about Atlas Shrugs’ latest travail.
Detectives are investigating possible links between the men accused of gunning down two Brooklyn cops and an alleged million-dollar scam at a Long Island auto dealership.
While probing the murder of car salesman Collin Thomas outside the showroom of Universal Auto World in Lawrence, L.I., in January, cops unraveled what they said was a massive scam at the dealership.
Employees at Universal allegedly stole and bought identities, then used the IDs to obtain at least $1.3 million in financing for fancy cars, court records show.
…..
As part of the homicide probe, Nassau County police raided the dealership, owned by auto czar Michael Oshry, and Oshry’s Hewlett Harbor home and seized business records.
Cops found banking records were sent to the house, though the state requires such files be kept at businesses, according to court papers filed in a civil forfeiture action by the Nassau district attorney.
“The dealership knew what was going on,” an investigator said.
Oshry’s lawyer, William Petrillo, said his client “has not engaged in any criminal activity.”
His ex-wife, Pamela Geller, former associate publisher of the New York Observer and a conservative blogger, burst into tears when told her ex is under criminal investigation.
Although listed in business records as a Universal co-owner, she denied it. “I have nothing to do with this,” Geller said.
Sometimes (not often) you have to love the New York Post.
roy edroso said,
August 2, 2007 at 23:41
Re “the legitimacy of his gripes”: yeah but. Everyone this side of lunacy thinks Muslims should stop persecuting infidels. It’s as obvious as saying “People should stop doing bad things.”
The purpose of these mantras are not argumentative, however, but incantatory. They are meant to make Hanson feel better. With each iteration Hanson feels his Moral Stature growing. This of course means that all the people who are not yelling at Muslims are much smaller than he, morally speaking, which heightens the intensity of both his ecstasy and his need to increase it.
We might call him a whirling dervish of denial. At this point all I can see is a blur.
Xel said,
August 2, 2007 at 23:50
Can’t we just say that it takes a lot of booklearning regarding History, Social Studies, Islamologi, Religious Studies, Philosophy and more before you can say what we can blame regarding the state of nations? The assholishness of some western countries or intriniscal flaws in Islam? Only objectivists ignore the fact that people react like humans, not ideals, to the environment. Too many on the left and right do not, yet apply it selectively.
How much damage has America done to nations that happen to be muslim and in different states of unpleasantness and general lethargy today? Had the “muslim world” been christian yet been forced to endure the same treatment throughout history - had it been a better place? Questions worthy of discussion!
Someone should tell Victor David Hanson and the sitzkriegers that just because talk is cheap, there is no reason to inflate the value further…
Alec said,
August 2, 2007 at 23:54
I also like how Hanson trots out that whimpering, oh-god-the-wogs-are-gonna-kill-me simp Rushdie.
Wingnuts of a feather fly into inchoate babbling rages at the mud people together.
Two of his translators were attacked - the Japanese killed, the Italian wounded - in order to bring a so-so magical realist immigrant novel into their native tongues. Rushdie, on the other hand, evolved into the blitcons’ pet wog, blathering on about how filthy Muslims are and how they’re going to kill and outbreed us and Islamophobia is too kind to them. I wish it had been him instead of the Japanese translator, because he’d have gone out trying to be Gabriel Garcia Marquez instead of that Steyn asshole.
Rufus said,
August 2, 2007 at 23:54
I started reading the first sentence quoted, but even before I got to the end I was distracted by thoughts of coffee and pie. I still don’t know what he said, nor do I care.
I am reminded, though, that both Bush and Cheney are very confident that when the history is written about their Administration, it will depict the two of them as heroic, far-seeing do-gooders. To which I respond, in my thoughts, “Yeah, if Victor Davis Hansen writes that history.”
Ripley said,
August 2, 2007 at 23:58
Actually, if you substitute ‘women’ for ‘Muslims’, he sounds an awful lot like ol’ Bob Carey. Salty and feisty and ready to shake his fist at some people doing some thing somewhere that doesn’t affect him personally.
Golden Boy said,
August 2, 2007 at 23:59
Now here’s a controversial idea: Muslims should act like civilized human beings. It would be interesting; I wonder when the Enlightenment will occur to them?
Alec said,
August 2, 2007 at 23:59
Finally, it is awesome how he declares reformation of Muslim society impossible, then demand that the Muslims reform or we’ll have to Get Tough(TM).
Not the most charitable when he comes to ultimatums, is he? I think VDH just wants so hard to be some kind of decadent Roman politician, with the power to command legions to commit massacres without an enlightened press to look over his shoulder. He forgets, I suppose, that in this more enlightened age no one is going to decide the war he helped start was a mistake and come to him with a sword and make diving motions.
PS: The most important thing for Muslim society to do is clearly not to reexamine their attitudes toward women or establish a political dyadism beyond Baathist-versus-Islamist; it is to greet us as liberators when we roll into town screaming about Mahomet being a child-molesting demon.
Ave Nero!
Alec said,
August 3, 2007 at 0:04
re. GB: The thing is really that the Enlightenment has to be internal. I’m rooting for it in the Muslim world myself; within our lifetimes, although probably later on in them, we will face a Muslim world with two billion people with a newfound eagerness for the cleansing light of science and reason.
Every time we go into a Muslim country and bomb the shit out of them, convincing a million widowers, widows, and orphans that the one with the right answer is the Koran-beating fanatic up the street, we set the process of an Islamic enlightenment back by anywhere between years and decades.
If we wanted to help the Muslim world, the best thing to do would be to tolerate their growing pains - we don’t send teenagers to prison for five years for getting into a fight - and offer financial and material support to the forces of enlightenment in the Muslim world.
Right now, the people we’re offering f&m support to are, surprise surprise, oil magnates and ‘Westernizers’ (read: agreeable kleptocrats), and we make matters even worse by pouring orders of magnitude more support into efforts to blow the shit out of major Muslim countries.
We couldn’t be fighting harder against the Enlightenment in the Muslim world if we tried, and VDH is demanding that we fight it harder - after all, it’d be unfair to let the wogs modernize. They’re so backwards!
mikey said,
August 3, 2007 at 0:05
There are ultimately two kinds of hate. If someone does something sufficiently foul to you or your loved ones, say burns down your house and mails you your dog’s head, you hate them. You didn’t hate them before they did this thing, you hate them now, and the reason you hate them is clear to all involved.
The other kind of hate has no reason. You hate them because they are different from you, because you are scared of them, because they are a different color, eat different foods, speak a different language and observe different cultural norms of behavior.
In modern times, we recognize that hate without reason is bigotry, and it is frowned upon. So now, we see people like Hanson, who hate for all the old tribal reasons, trying to provide a window-treatment of justifications for their hatred. They try to show us the REASONS for their hatred. They are betrayed by the indiscriminately broad targeting of their hatred.
9/11 made people fearful and suspicious of muslims, but truly was not enough to make people hate every muslim in the world. That was a pre-existing condition. But that would not prevent them from exploiting the attack as a way to more effectively demonize muslims. And we are seeing it more and more. Loathsome…
mikey
ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said,
August 3, 2007 at 0:08
If we blame a Jimmy Carter for the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan…
Whoa, Nelly! If we are going to blame Jimmy Carter for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, then we are going to have to credit Jimmy Carter with the fall of the Soviet Union.
Sorry, Ronnie Raygun!
P.S. I’m still going to keep calling it National Airport.
AJB said,
August 3, 2007 at 0:16
I wonder if he views the CIA-orchestrated coup against democratically elected Iranian leader Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 as a “self-inflicted miser[y]“?
Golden Boy said,
August 3, 2007 at 0:22
Alec,
I completely agree with you that our government is mishandling the problem of Islam. This includes 1) starting an illegal and pernicious war with Iraq and 2) providing financial and material support to some of the worst people in the world, especially in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. I further agree with you that the appeal of the core of Islam, which is to struggle with the outside world until it is brought into Islamic submission, is strengthened by things like the war in Iraq.
Where we part ways is in our patience in waiting for an Enlightenment to happen. Islam as an ideology simply cannot co-exist peacefully with civilized peoples. Rather than give you examples of this, which are legion, a better exercise would be to try and find a counter-example of a large Muslim population living peacefully and justly with non-Muslims. I don’t mean where the Muslims are a minority, like in the States, I mean where they are in significant numbers.
You pose an analogy of teenagers getting into fights, and say that we don’t hand out five year prison sentences for such a thing. (Nevermind for now the irony of this statement next to the recent news story of a young man facing four years in prison - right here in the States - for the “crime” of desecrating a Koran. I’ll get back to that.) I propose that a truer analogy is that of a sociopathic forty year old with an AK-47. We have to take away the weapon before we can talk about reform.
After all, Muslims have had the example of civilized people for centuries, It’s like saying, “Those folks really need to learn to invent fire” when in fact fire has already been invented. Their societies have been tremendously retarded by their Islamic ideology and there is no excuse for them.
Meanwhile, how many people - from the Phillipines to Nigeria, from the UK to Thailand - have to die while Muslims try to figure a philosophy that happened hundreds of years ago?
Alec said,
August 3, 2007 at 0:24
AJB: Misery? Why, the Shah was beloved by all. Democracy is a sham!
agum said,
August 3, 2007 at 0:35
Golden Boy: “try and find a counter-example of a large Muslim population living peacefully and justly with non-Muslims.”
Lebanon, when free from Israeli and Syrian meddling.
And how about most of these?
http://www.usip.org/pubs/specialreports/sr140.html
Sub-Saharan African countries have problems, but they don’t result from Muslim-Christian violence. (Except Sudan, but even there it’s secondary to nomads vs. agriculturalists.)
Herr Doktor Bimler said,
August 3, 2007 at 0:37
coffee-table… pie-in-the-sky…
These are the hallmarks of a column written shortly before lunchtime, when the noble intellect of VDH was half-devoted to other concerns. By way of contrast, in columns written after lunchtime, he uses more imagery about ’scotching threats’ and ‘ginning up opposition’.
Golden Boy said,
August 3, 2007 at 0:38
Agum,
Very interesting - I’ll read that. Thanks.
Alec said,
August 3, 2007 at 0:40
re. gb:
Where we part ways is in our patience in waiting for an Enlightenment to happen. Islam as an ideology simply cannot co-exist peacefully with civilized peoples. Rather than give you examples of this, which are legion, a better exercise would be to try and find a counter-example of a large Muslim population living peacefully and justly with non-Muslims. I don’t mean where the Muslims are a minority, like in the States, I mean where they are in significant numbers.
That’s pretty narrow, innit? I mean, Muslims are a minority in a great deal of the world.
Indonesia does OK, for the most part, and so does Turkey (their biggest problems, esp. with the entire honor-killing business, are, in fact, with backwaterish Islamists, largely Kurds). Most European countries have less problems with Muslims than their conservatives let on - they’re largely as quiet and hard-working on the average as our Mexicans. There’s a disproportionate amont of crime and violence, but that’s because they’re literally in society’s sewer. Any group in the same position would be the same way.
India prides itself on a well-integrated Muslim group which isn’t a subpolity or anything, although with the rise in BJP (Hindutva, or ‘Hinduness’, as a national ideology) that’s been strained of late. In fact, the typical standard-bearer for the Muslim community in India tends to be fairly secular, even compared to the ‘mainstream’ one.
If you’re looking for first-world countries with a Muslim majority where religious minorities are doing OK, find me a first-world country with a Buddhist majority where the religious minorities are doing OK and we’ll talk.
The situation is just as shitty in places like the Congo, where the only religion of any note is Christianity. It’s an economic problem, not a religious one, and in countries where the economic pressures are less severe so are the social problems. Turkey, for instance, is no better or worse on the grand scale of things than an Eastern European country in a similar economic situation.
You pose an analogy of teenagers getting into fights, and say that we don’t hand out five year prison sentences for such a thing. (Nevermind for now the irony of this statement next to the recent news story of a young man facing four years in prison - right here in the States - for the “crime” of desecrating a Koran. I’ll get back to that.)
The way I was raised, trying to terrorize someone who never did a damn thing to you with their own property makes you scum. I dunno about you. But I’ll get back to that, too.
I propose that a truer analogy is that of a sociopathic forty year old with an AK-47. We have to take away the weapon before we can talk about reform.
Thing is, the Islamists don’t represent a social group in full control of their faculties, as it were. Examine Islamist or at least Shariist groups in Muslim countries - where the ‘Infidel! *blam*’ problem isn’t as pronounced - and you will unanimously find them in the ‘worst’ part of the country. Aceh (in Indonesia) has been in dire economic straits for a long time, for instance. The strongholds of Islamism in even a uniformly poor country like Iraq are typically the equivalent of the South - just like, surprise surprise, the stronghold of Christian dominionism in America is largely the poorest part of the country.
After all, Muslims have had the example of civilized people for centuries,
Whoa-whoa-whoa, hold it, sailor. First and foremost, ‘civilized people’ is pretty nasty. After all, Muslims in the first world are pretty civilized, all things concerned. (Before you go off on a tangent, have you actually met any? The most savage inclination my Pakistani friends typically had was towards cricket.) You say ‘civilized’, I say ‘Napoleon, the Confederacy, Hitler, Stalin…’
We’re a pretty shitty ‘example of civilized people’, on the balance.
It’s like saying, “Those folks really need to learn to invent fire” when in fact fire has already been invented. Their societies have been tremendously retarded by their Islamic ideology and there is no excuse for them.
You’re confusing Islamism for something endemic to the religion. It’d be like treating the Christian-dominionist problem in the South as an inherent flaw of Christianity. It’s not fair, and it’s going to piss Christians on the fence off. Similarly, treating ‘Muslims’ as a problem is going to do a lot to damage the reputation of ‘civilization’ in the eyes of those who need it most.
Meanwhile, how many people - from the Phillipines to Nigeria, from the UK to Thailand - have to die while Muslims try to figure a philosophy that happened hundreds of years ago?
Tell that to the survivors of the OKC bombing?
It’s an economic problem, not one with ‘the Muslims’. That’s a really important hurdle to jump, sir, and until we do we’re going to have a condescending, counterproductive attitude towards the development of a positive social place for Islam.
Any religion is basically OK if it’s allayed by a sturdy belief in the necessity of secularization. Turkish women, the imbroglio from the Islamist loons aside, enjoy more freedom than their neighbors - either in Iraq or in Bulgaria.
There’s nasty stuff in the Koran, but there’s nasty stuff in the Bible and the Dao de Jing, too. ‘Enlightenment’ is largely picking and choosing in such a way as to cancel the nasty stuff out.
And if we’re going to be worrying about disarming sociopaths, we should probably be more worried about the religious nutjobs who currently have their hands on The Goddamn Button. Compared to that, anything A-Q or any other Islamist group has is like firecrackers.
Golden Boy said,
August 3, 2007 at 0:56
Alec,
I’m not sure that you can make the argument that Muslim violence stems out of poverty. It is well known that the al Qaeda terrorists were middle class (in fact terrorism as a whole, across the globe, seems to be a middle class phenomenon.) Several polls have revealed that it is the Muslims who are more educated and prosperous who are more likely to support terrorism.
However, my argument is more about the systemic illiberalism inherent in Islam. On a different thread I listed the discriminatory laws that Muslims have put in place over non-Muslims, in every country in which they gain ascendance. This illiberalism is backed up by violence, intimidation, and coercion.
India is a great example. 100 million Muslims live in India, and they are the source of all kinds of sectarian strife that you don’t see with other groups. I’m actually a little bit surprised that you picked India as an example; I think it illustrates precisely how violent and unstable large Muslim minorities are.
You ask if I’ve met any Muslims. Alec, I used to think like most of you do, that Muslims were misunderstood and that it was unfair to blame Islam for the excesses of a few fanatics. Then, later in my professional life, I became acquainted with several well-educated, prosperous Muslims, and once they began to open up to me, I was shocked, jaw-droppingly, mind-bendingly shocked by their true feelings about Islam and the West. It’s a long story but that was the genesis of my research into the reality of Islam.
Now I will whole-heartedly agree with you that in order to co-exist with civilized peoples, Islam will need to have the nastier parts plucked out of it. We can agree to call that the Islamic Enlightenment. In the case of Islam, the nasty bits are very close to the core, but that’s the only way forward.
mikey said,
August 3, 2007 at 0:58
Golden boy. Come out and say it. What is your prescription for ending the vile muslim menace. Come on, big guy. Have you got the stones to say out loud, clearly without weasel words, what you propose to do about the impending global dominations of islamic culture and shari’a law?
You’ve shown up here railing against a population of your fellow human beings a billion strong. You’ve blamed them, demonized them and predicted their victory over the “civilized” world. Do you have the sand to say the words?
mikey
J— said,
August 3, 2007 at 0:58
Victor Urban Dance Squad Hanson
As in “Deeper Shade of Soul” or “Demagogue”?
Golden Boy said,
August 3, 2007 at 1:12
Mikey,
It’s a pleasure to hear from someone so well known in neo-atheist and secular progressive community. I have very clearly stated - in the other thread in which we chatted - what I’d like to see happen. Feel free to take a gander.
Alec said,
August 3, 2007 at 1:17
The core of Christianity once consisted of the stuff that lead to the Holocaust, GB.
While UBL and his immediate associates are the products of wealth, so are the headmen of the Dominionists here - your Bushes, your Reagans, your megachurch-runners. On the other hand, the foot-soldiers, the ones who tend to be the one to carry bombs - they’re pretty disproportionately poor.
When you have nothing to live for, you have a lot less to lose.
As for Muslims being a source of sectarian strife in India - horseshit. Most of the Muslim ’strife’ in India is largely reactive, and it’s kind of unfair to talk about angry Muslims in India without mentioning what made them so inexplicably angry. It’d be like talking about all the trouble-making the civil rights movement engineered in the 50s and 60s. They sure as hell made a LOT of trouble, but the problem is that they were spurred on by someone bigger and meaner than they could have ever been.
I’m really not pleased by the ‘co-exist with civilized peoples’ schtick you have going on here. Who exactly are these ‘civilized peoples’? I’m of the opinion that civilization is an ongoing process and a term like ‘civilized peoples’ is a ridiculous oxymoron - you can’t actually have ‘a people’ that is uniformly ‘civilized’.
It’s OK not to like certain things done by people besides you. I don’t like female circumcision or honor-killings any more than you do. But ‘civilized peoples’ versus ‘uncivilized peoples’ is an antiquated way of dealing with the world, and it’s a kind of antiquated that has taken millions of lives.
Your middle-class Muslim acquaintances, to wit, are a part of the same ‘people’ as you. Lumping them into the same ‘people’ as a group who received no education past middle-school (and probably received that much in a madrassa), who had to contend with cholera and scurvy and polio and other diseases Western science had destroyed, and who would consider a yearly income of $1000 prosperity is insane. The only common factor is their religion, and the practice is in all likelihood fundamentally different.
It’s the sort of attitude that mumbled quietly whether or not we could trust Kennedy not to take orders from the Pope - after all, he is a Catholic, and you know how horribly they got along with civilized peoples in the Inquisition.
I think one major thing we can probably agree on, and which would hopefully separate out any out-and-out bigots, is the necessity of developing the standard of living in the Muslim world. Eliminating the specter of hunger, disease, and misery is about basic human decency, not geopolitics - although I’d contend it’d help geopolitics a lot, too.
In the 10th century, when the tables were turned - when Europe was a backwater whose savage inhabitants could not be relied upon not to burn epilepics at the stake and when the Muslim world was the last basion of classical learning and science - the same dynamic played out on a much larger scale. The post-Visigothic nobility made a land grab against the fairly liberal and enlightened Iberian emirates an issue of holy war (and then proceeded to expel the unrepentant Jews and slaughter the converted). The Europeans even went and friggin’ invaded the ‘holy land’, sacking village after village and town after town, slaying Muslims by the thousands for no better evident reason than religious fervor. (The influx of wealth and technology after the Crusades - surely a coincidence.)
In the long run, Napoleon, Hitler, et al aside, the perpetrators of the Crusades, the Reconquista, and sundry other atrocities against what was pretty much Civilization at the time got their shit together - surprisingly, without the benevolent but forceful hand of Islam to guide them - and now we have penicillin and lethal injections.
And by the way, the places where Islam remained present - there was even talk in the Ottoman empire along the ‘civilizing’ dynamic, with people willing to obey the Empire as necessary and perhaps even convert taking high positions in the Imperial court - turned into shit-holes like the Balkans (no offense, but seriously - you find a better word to describe how shitty they’ve been since). Indonesia and the like will probably be the leadership of the Muslim enlightenment, precisely because we’re not trying to bomb them to smithereens in the name of ‘civilization’. Meanwhile, places where we are Very Concerned about bringing Enlightenment to the uncivilized peoples - Iraq, say - will devolve into Balkan-style shitholes, violently racist and reactionary.
mikey said,
August 3, 2007 at 1:20
Still won’t come out and propose your “final solution”, eh? Y’know, your cowardice is matched only by your ignorant fears…
mikey
Golden Boy said,
August 3, 2007 at 1:27
Alec,
I’m not here to defend Christianity, for one very good reason - I’m not Christian. I’d make a pretty poor advocate, and that goes for any other religion too.
I agree with you that raising the standard of living in Muslim countries will go a long way towards reducing the level of violence there. After I wrote my response to you, I started thinking that my response was inadequate in that it doesn’t address the mass movements in places like Nigeria and Indonesia. You addressed this and you are quite right - the foot soldiers probably are motivated from a sense of nothing to lose.
However, your history lesson aside, the question arises of what we do while we wait for the Islamic world to reform itself and remove the most objectionable of its doctrines. Even here in the States we have absurd supremacist claims by Muslims being worked through our legal system. I am very pleased to see, though, that you aren’t trying to pretend that there is not a problem - it is a start.
Oh, and Mikey, can you be quiet for a little while? The grownups are talking. Thanks.
Simba B. said,
August 3, 2007 at 1:38
Oh, and Mikey, can you be quiet for a little while? The grownups are talking. Thanks.
Clearly you’ve not followed this site and mikey’s contributions here. Mikey is more of a grownup than you’ll ever be, you miserable bed-wetting fuckwit.
Simba B. said,
August 3, 2007 at 1:44
Hmph, I see <q> is yet another Preview Pretender.
Alec said,
August 3, 2007 at 1:44
We do have the occasional Muslim in America who tries to pretend his or her religion is above the law.
On the other hand, in many states a majority of the electorate wants to put the Ten Commandments - their version of them, mind you, not the heathen Papist or Jew version - in the courts.
I think the problem with focusing on Islamic theocracy as Westerners is exactly that. I was raised Catholic, bummed around the rest of Christianity as a youth, and am an atheist (and a fairly evangelical one) now. But throughout my entire time with Christian congregations, I’ve seen ideas we regard as intolerable impositions coming from Muslims being treated as mainstream theology in Christianity.
It’s nice to worry about the theocrats in Iraq, but we’ve got theocrats living next door, and they’re heavily armed and extremely well-organized. I think the latter of those is a pressing enough problem we should probably leave the other theocrats be. After all, it’s going to be pretty nasty if we manage to miraculously bring the Muslim world into a secular golden age — and our domestic Christianist phalange takes over and fulfills its lovely promises regarding the Hedjaz and radioactive glass.
To rely on scripture - one that is, nonetheless, impressed heavily into the consciousness of English literature - you are demanding we fish after the mote in the Muslim world’s eye with a scalpel even though the beam in our own is digging into our brain. (Literally - there’s a reason the biggest strides in stem-cell research of late have been made in places like South Korea.)
If we’ve eliminated the Dominionist threat, made poverty a thing of the past, and ensured that people have a more or less equal shot at things - if we have, in fact, achieved ‘civilization’ ourselves - and then the Muslims are still violent and uncivilized to the point that they have no hope of modernizing without outside intervention - then yes, we can talk about getting that mote out. In the meanwhile, though, we have MUCH more pressing concerns, and making Islamists #1 looks more than a little mean-spirited and dishonest in light of that.
It’s like, and I’m really hoping you’re as disgusted by this as I am (because if not, I don’t know how much hope there is for us having a civilized conversation) - that entire Shirley Q. Liquor controversy.
One-paragraph summary: Some fairly mainstream (among Libbies, anyway) Libertarian does this blackface mammy drag act mostly in the South, attracting large, almost exclusively white audiences to watch him pick on their social and economic inferiors’ superstition and bad habits. When he tried to break out of the South, the parts of the gay community that aren’t horrible assholes (there’s a a pretty unfortunately big section of it who are) got infuriated and tried to keep him out at all costs, because he’s an awful, awful bigot.
His excuse, and the excuse of those apologizing for him, is that he wants black people to come to terms with the problems in their ‘culture’. Which would be nice and all - if he were black. But he’s not.
And you aren’t, unless I’m horribly mistaken, a Muslim. There’s a lot that is very difficult to say without being an insider - otherwise, it’s instinctively taken as an insult, a threat, or whatever. Criticizing female circumcision, when it’s not obviously a wedge, is about as far as you can get as a Westerner in the parts of Africa it’s practiced. Flying in and demanding that they change major parts of their religious practice is going to piss them off, and we all know that.
They’ll want to change those parts on their own - nobody wants to be a bunch of superstitious, violent assholes (witness the Enlightenment here, where the Christian world gradually abandoned the parts of Scripture taken to justify monarchy, slavery, and later misogyny and anti-Semitism). But make the right side look like a bunch of preachy, condescending outsiders, and you’re doing harm, not good.
I mean, look at Poland. Among the Polish far right, the failed experiment of the Soviet Union includes not only communism, but the trappings of democracy and liberalism. (A conservative faction of the Sejm has been trying to elect Jesus King of Poland.) There were those in the Soviet sphere who meant well - who wanted to spread progress (and believe me, the Soviets had a boner for ‘progress’ like you would not believe - Marxists are nothing if not fervently driven by a belief in a forwards-moving history), but ultimately they fucked the pooch. Let’s not repeat that, please.
Gaffer said,
August 3, 2007 at 1:49
Urban Dance Squad? Jesus, that takes me back …
Smiling Mortician said,
August 3, 2007 at 1:51
history lesson aside
Well now, there’s a big part of your problem, Goldener Knabe: you seem more than content to wax analytical in the absence of valid historical context. Other portions of your problem have been articulated well here by others.
Your notion of yourself and others like you (one shudders) as “civilized,” as compared to everyone who adheres to, or was born into, or otherwise is identified as belonging to Islam as somehow less than civilized, is not only illogical, not only nauseating, but is sheer madness.
Oh — and didn’t your parents ever teach you not to show up to someone’s home uninvited and ineffectually insult the hosts? It’s really quite uncivilized.
mikey said,
August 3, 2007 at 2:14
Geez, Golden Bigot, you send your tinfoil hat out to the cleaners?
If I believed what you claim to believe, I’d feel like I’d have to DO something, y’know? I mean, you clearly feel that muslims are your enemy, that they are a threat to your way of life, and you clearly want to help other people to feel that way. I cannot believe you think we should sit back and do nothing. You have to have some idea of how to deal with this “crisis”, don’t you? I mean, it wouldn’t make sense, given your level of frantic hysteria about the horrors of “islam”, to just allow them to take over everything, right?
So what is it? Put them in camps? Gas them? Just detain them forever, maybe use them for slave labor?
Seems to me you’re fear of saying what you’d do about it is maybe related to the reaction to people who spout eliminationist rhetoric you’ve noticed before?
OK, lemme toss you a softball then, since you lack the courage of your own convictions. Give us 150 words on how you’re different from the grand wizard of the ku klux klan - other that the obvious, you hate a different group…
mikey
Alec said,
August 3, 2007 at 2:20
mikey:
Sounds like you’re taking the same attitude with him you suspect him of taking with the Muslims. :-p
(I’m normally a far, far bigger shithead, but I felt like being polite so as to make a point; I think GB is a well-meaning person in error owing to an honest mistake, as many people I have met are.)
I understand kicking people around a bit if they have an unquenchable, uncorrectable hatred for all that is good, but people can change. This is pretty much what the fundamental belief of progressivism represents.
Although it is fun to call people Nazis. :P
Kathleen said,
August 3, 2007 at 2:21
no more apologies for things like our insensitive cartoons or excuses for their insane anger against novelists.
yeah if there is one thing the Right is known for, it’s tolerating cartoon and books they don’t like.
mikey said,
August 3, 2007 at 2:26
Sorry Alec. Nope. Not buying it. I’ve seen enough hatred in my life. I’ve also seen the results of hatred of one group by another. If you’re uncertain, that result is typically torn bodies of innocent women and children, refugees, disease and a generational hardening of attitude that lends the additional horror of permanence to the hatred. I’m not going to tolerate it. I won’t listen to it in the world, and I won’t let it stand here. You might think the fucker’s hatred is grounded in an “honest mistake” or something, but hatred is not to be tolerated, ever.
Nope.
mikey
Golden Boy said,
August 3, 2007 at 2:31
Alec,
No, I never heard of Shirley Q Liquor. What you describe sounds absolutely grotesque. I’ll have to look this up.
Here’s a question though (I realize I could look this up at the same time): is anyone placing Shirley Q Liquor under arrest for insulting black people? The answer is no, but it is exactly that kind of exceptionalism that Muslims here and everywhere are seeking, and that I strongly object to.
Golden Boy said,
August 3, 2007 at 2:33
Mikey,
It seems like you are the one advocating violence. I’m actually asking for tolerance and free speech, the very things that Muslims attack the moment they have any influence. What I hate is the illiberalism, the intolerance, and the fascism inherent in Islam. You are deliberately ignoring this, and directing all the bile in the world at me won’t change that one bit.
mikey said,
August 3, 2007 at 2:36
Umm, ok, sure. You say they have a vile ideology, and you are encouraging them to spread that ideology around, and you are absolutely tolerant of their wish to do so? Wow. I really didn’t get that from your posts…
mikey
Oh, and violence seems to have been part of my life for nearly forty years. I don’t necessarily advocate it in every case, but I find it has proved useful on occasion…
Golden Boy said,
August 3, 2007 at 2:43
Mikey,
Yes, I think that Muslims should be able to practice their religion in this country. I find Islam to be vile, despicable, and illiberal, but hey - Scientologists are just as litigious, Mormons have a back story just as ridiculous, neoNazis are just as violent, etc. My tolerance stems from my support of our Constitution and my desire to see our American values upheld.
However, I will not tolerate any claims of supremacy from these groups. If you dumped a swatzika into a toilet, would the NYPD arrest you for felony hate crime? No, and yet Muslims have established enough of a climate of intimidation and exceptionalism that this is now true here in the States.
Mikey, violence has not been any significant part of my life. If you want to intimidate me, you probably can. Congratulations.
Snowwy said,
August 3, 2007 at 2:57
Siding with Mikey on this one. I haven’t seen any other interactions with Golden Boy, and I think I’m glad. I’d not be able to keep my food down if he was worse than this.
GB , look, people have practically trolled this past you without naming it, and you have failed to take the lesson. So let me give it to you simple like. Can you think of any other group over the last two hundred years that was subjected to the same kind of rhetoric as you’re putting out? Dangerous. Supremacist. A source of great strife. Cast in contrast with “civilized peoples”. Criminal. Keepers of “objectionable” practices. Too great a threat to let be, too useful to destroy outright. C’mon, you’re likely an American. Surely you can come up with ONE cogent, powerful example for comparison.
Y’know, I’m not confident you’ll comprehend me, so let me just give it to you. You might just see how ugly your ideas about Islam is if you just substitute the word “Black” or “Negro” or some similar flavor (go for the spice!) for Muslim in your comments above.
Now I suspect you’ll reject that out of hand (probably for some form of “but ethnic minorities can’t stop being ethnic”). If you do, fine. I’ll have done my part to point out your path to you as you stumble around in the dark. It’s your choice whether to proceed down that road of good intentions. Just remember people tried to tell you where it led.
Alec said,
August 3, 2007 at 3:04
The answer is no, but it is exactly that kind of exceptionalism that Muslims here and everywhere are seeking, and that I strongly object to.
Well, if he were taking it into the streets, knocking large black women down and shouting ethnic slurs at them, that might be a horse of a different color - specifically, a horse of that lovliest of colors, red-hate-crime-orange.
The difference between something like the Skeptic’s Annotated Koran (which see) and what transpired with the college student is around the same. The young man saw fit to steal and vandalize someone’s property. It’s not just a matter of speech; the person whose Koran got flushed can no longer, if they ever could, take security in the safety of their belongings and that they hold dear.
See, that’s where the line goes between iffy stuff and Hate Crimes - hate crimes are actively intimidatory, stuff like spraypainting swastikas on synagogues/mosques/etc. and stealing and vandalizing people’s holy books. The Koran-flushing was an effort to intimidate someone as a Muslim and Muslims in general by explicitly thumbing his nose not just at Islam, but at something beyond that: people practicing it.
The intent isn’t to denigrate Islam or the conventional view of Islam, because that can be and is done without deliberately terrorizing and antagonizing other people. The intent is to make sure the Muslims know they are not safe - it could as easily happen to them. Doing nothing to the man who did this is like saying they have it coming for being a member of some kind of minority. A fundamental part of democracy is protecting minority groups; tyranny of the majority is as bad as any other kind.
I wouldn’t, and I don’t think most of the Muslims you treat as a unified group would, want the kid persecuted if it were a matter of him buying a Koran and desecrating it. It would be his and he would be free to do with it as he wished. Doing it in public would be iffy, because then you could make a case that it’s meant to implicitly threaten Muslims. (This is what your religion means - you’re not welcome here; we shit on you.) But he stole someone’s holy book and desecrated it. It is not free speech but vandalism we’re dealing with here; the Koran is in the freaking public domain. If he really wanted to do what everyone’s claiming he was doing he could have printed out a few goddamn Suras for $.10 at a public library and pissed on them.
I’d have the same reaction if he stole someone else’s Bible or anything similar. I don’t hold the Koran in any reverence whatsoever, but the person he stole from did and he knew that, which strongly suggests it was the person - and the people who they represented - he wanted to get at, not the religion itself. What kind of shithead does something like that? Is it really a productive use of your reputation to support that kind of asshole behavior?
Alec said,
August 3, 2007 at 3:10
Also, I’m insulted as a man of letters by the comparison to Mormonism. They have a Skeptic’s Annotated Book of Mormon too, and it is nothing so much as really, really awful Bible fan fiction. Say whatever you will about Mohammed, and I’m certain you do, but he was a much better writer and scholar than that greasy asshole Smith. :P
Simba B. said,
August 3, 2007 at 3:12
Book of Mormon, Bible fanfic == full of win.
Golden Boy said,
August 3, 2007 at 3:13
Alec,
I agree that the young man’s action was juvenile; I wouldn’t do something like that myself. The initial charge against him was a misdemeanor property crime. It was only after CAIR agitated for harsher penalties that he was charged with felony hate crimes. It is clear that CAIR believes they have won a victory here by criminalizing insults to Islam.
I am worried that you think that desecrating a Koran in public is “iffy.” Do you think the KKK should be allowed to parade down Main Street? If so, why is insulting Islam in public iffy? This is a very slippery slope you are on, and I’m interested as to why.
Snowwy, your analogy is ridiculous. There are some things that Alec has brought up that concern me a bit, but equating ethnic discrimination with *criticizing* religious supremicists is ludicrous.
mikey said,
August 3, 2007 at 3:32
Awww, fer the love of….
At least Adam Yoshida was honest.
This idiot is the worst of both worlds. A cowardly, ineffectual, eliminationist troll.
Shit….
mikey
Alec said,
August 3, 2007 at 3:33
simba: It’s true, though. The way Smith wrote the BoM is the way American evangelicals believed and believe to this day that the Bible reads. :P
GB: I’m arguing that what he did isn’t juvenile but a damn hate crime specifically because it was an effort to target his quarry specifically as a Muslim and implicitly threaten Muslims as a group. They are a minority, they routinely deal with discrimination like any other minority (more so in areas where the belief persists that they’re all violent terrorists), and when you attempt to terrorize a minority with an act of violence against person or property you are commiting a hate crime. That is, like, the textbook definition there, and unless you’re denying that hate crimes are at all valid or that they don’t apply to Muslims for some reason, what he did was one and would have been one even if CAIR hadn’t stepped in. As a matter of fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say that him getting off with a misdemeanor property crime for a hate crime would have been a miscarriage of justice, like a lyncher being charged for manslaughter.
The reason I say it’s ‘iffy’ is because of the status of the Koran as an increasingly ethnic signifier. If it were to happen in Europe, where ‘Muslim’ is almost entirely racialized, it would unquestionably be a hate crime.
The Koran isn’t a purely religious instrument. In this context, its religious context was secondary to its social context, which is as an identifier for a group the perpetrator did not like.
I don’t like religion, I don’t like any religion, and as long as an attack on a religion is just on a religion I’m OK with that. But it’s almost impossible to physically degrade the Koran and separate that from a specific symbolic ethnic degradation.
‘Insulting Islam’ in public isn’t iffy, and I didn’t say it was. What is iffy is taking something that serves as a symbolic representative of a human group - a group that but for the lottery of birth you could as well have belonged to - and physically assaulting it. It’d be like if the Klan, while marching down Main Street, burned the hated Jew and Negro in effigy. It’d not only be as repugnant as attacking an ethnic group always is, but it’d also be specifically threatening and then it’d cross into the domain of hate speech.
Hate speech law might seem like a serious imposition on the first amendment, but it’s actually a lot clearer-cut than people like to make out distinguishing between actual exercise of free speech and chest-beating bigotry. This is an instance of someone symbolically attacking another person and the minority group he represented in order to cow them into terror and silence.
The CAIR doesn’t believe that they have won a victory by criminalizing insults to Islam. What they want is for Muslims to be treated as the minority group they are, and I think that’s reasonable. If you don’t…
Alec said,
August 3, 2007 at 3:35
mikey: Even if he is, I think I owe it to whoever might be watching and think he has a point (him, Christopher Hitchens, any other member of that genre) to deflate it.
I do have better things to do, though, so I won’t be at it all day.
Smiling Mortician said,
August 3, 2007 at 3:39
GB, your comparisons are off. Of course the KKK can parade down main street — just as you and your friends can get a permit and hold a parade against the supremacy of Islam. But when someone from the KKK (or wherever) steals someone’s private, sacred property and destroys it in a specifically disrespectful and public way in order to intimidate and frighten the owner of the property . . . then yeah. That’s a crime. You really can’t see that? The stupid Koran-flusher was not, as you insist, persecuted for voicing his opinions. He was arrested for stealing and destroying someone else’s property — and yes, the stakes are higher because he did it with the intent to intimidate someone based on his religion.
Djur said,
August 3, 2007 at 3:40
How dare an act of vandalism be blown up into some sort of “hate crime.”
Golden Boy said,
August 3, 2007 at 3:45
Alec,
I find it disturbing that you are willing to cede special privileges to Muslims in America. Somehow you are conflating tossing a Koran in the toilet with actual, violent acts. Frankly I am surprised that you believe this.
A hate crime is necessarily a crime of intent, which essentially makes it a thought crime. Who gets to interpret the intention of the thought criminal? Why, the purported offended party of course! This is a lever by which Muslims intend to intimidate Americans and anyone else who believes in free speech.
Alec, you’ve essentially set up a scenario whereby anyone who insults Islam in public would be committing a hate crime. There is no protection from this; enough Muslims could be found to say that they were offended by any such display to qualify for the criteria that you laid down. It is sad that you are happy to see the sacrifice of a young man who pulled a juvenile stunt in order to satiate the hunger for Muslims to prove their supremacy. I’m not sure what to say in the face of such an illiberal opinion.
Kevin Bacon Holding Playdoh said,
August 3, 2007 at 3:46
“the very things that Muslims attack the moment they have any influence. What I hate is the illiberalism, the intolerance, and the fascism inherent in Islam.”
By the blessed Dawkins that’s an ignorant and bigotted generalisation; As an atheist myself, I don’t think any Faith is rational, but you must be living in your own arrogant and narcissitic bubble to have not noticed that there are millions of people who have Faith but NOT a doctrinaire approach to life. And that includes millions of Muslims…. quite a few of whom own the late night shops that sell you the things supposedly proscribed by the Quran. Yet you walk around, with blind eyes completely unable to see the reality of the very streets you walk, and tell yourself that because you’ve a head stuffed full of fancy words, your shamefully simplistic and media driven understanding of the world should be worthy of respect. After all, don’t you try and express it eloquently? And maybe you do, but it’s still trying to make a silk purse out of a pigs ear.
ALL Islam is inherantly Fascist? Really? Comparing racial and genetically based, State controlled Corporatism with spiritually justified Globalism and anti-materialist purism? Just because both have a violent extreme? You honestly believe that passes as insightful comment? Then you’ll never get respect here, because that kind of thinking is completely unworthy of it.
No, if you want to actually prove you are worthy of debating, start using some genuine logic, and start doing some genuine research; Alec has just linked you to the Skeptics Annotated Bible. Go there, and click any particular category you feel like; Let’s say… Intolerance. Now go and do the same for the Skeptics Annotated Bible. Compare Apples to Apples, and not Oranges. And you’ll find that the original Doctrine for BOTH Faiths are incoherant, violent, intolerant, pretty much anything you care to mention. Both Old Testament and New. The “Fascism” you decry is “Inherant” in Christianity too. And yet you specifically claim it’s a problem unique to Islam. Would you care to try again?
mikey said,
August 3, 2007 at 3:48
May you never have to police up the pieces, Alec. Because when you do, it has a powerful effect on your level of tolerance for bullies and haters. A ten year old kid hit with thirty rounds of 7.62 from a minigun is a pathetic, horrendous sight. And when you consider how unnecessary it is, and the voices of demonization that led to that tragic crime, well, you tend to get a little twitchy about the talkers, y’know?
I’m an atheist, sure, but even if I’m wrong about that, I’m all done. I’ve broken all ten commandments, thoroughly, completely and repeatedly. This gives me a certain, well, freedom of action that allows me to take an umcompromising position about thugs like the Boy here.
See, the criminals are not the trigger-pullers on the front line. Eleven Bulletstops get used for the greater goals. The criminals are the voices of hate and immoderation that cry for the demonization of people that results in killing, rape, ethnic and sectarian cleansing and all the horrors that go with it, in vietnam, in sudan, in iraq, everywhere. People need to stop the hatred. And I’ll take my oar and pull. Hard. You’re gonna have to live with folks like me, golden egg, and we’re not going to let you demonize muslims, because we know where that path leads. You’ve already got blood on your hands. Trust me youngster. You don’t want more…
mikey
Kevin Bacon Holding Playdoh said,
August 3, 2007 at 3:52
Ooops, Annotated Quran first, then Bible natch…. not two rounds with just one of incoherant, violent books. Damnable typos.
Alec said,
August 3, 2007 at 4:05
Alec,
I find it disturbing that you are willing to cede special privileges to Muslims in America. Somehow you are conflating tossing a Koran in the toilet with actual, violent acts. Frankly I am surprised that you believe this.
Only as much as I cede special privileges to any minority group. And yes, I think that throwing a Koran in a toilet is a lesser crime than, say, physical assault, but it’s a difference of degree, not of kind - they both involve a conscious decision to demonize and terrorize.
A hate crime is necessarily a crime of intent, which essentially makes it a thought crime. Who gets to interpret the intention of the thought criminal? Why, the purported offended party of course!
This is actually why hate crime laws exist, actually. If it weren’t for those laws, taking justice for hate crimes would be the responsibility of the offended party rather than the state. As it stands, the state - a neutral adjudicator - is the one who interprets the intention of the ‘thought criminal’. What you are challenging is not the ability of the offended party to interpret the intention behind the hate crime but the ability of the offended party to even take a case for a hate crime to court. That’s absurd; they at least deserve a day in court for a judicator of the facts (whether the judge or the jury) to determine whether or not the crime was motivated by hate and intended to terrorize.
This is a lever by which Muslims intend to intimidate Americans and anyone else who believes in free speech.
It’s a lever by which the state intends to intimidate those who would abuse free speech. That is why hate crime laws have to be very careful, otherwise they impinge upon free speech. But as I said, CAIR is not trying the damned case here; you implying that they are is fundamentally dishonest if you’ve so much as seen a freaking episode of Law and Order. (BUH BUH)
Alec, you’ve essentially set up a scenario whereby anyone who insults Islam in public would be committing a hate crime. There is no protection from this; enough Muslims could be found to say that they were offended by any such display to qualify for the criteria that you laid down.
That’s for the courts to decide, isn’t it? We live in a nation of laws, and if the laws produce miscarriages of justice they will be amended. You’re treating this as summary vigilante justice; unlike the jackass with the toilet fetish, the government is obligated to carefully consider the facts before jumping to action.
It is sad that you are happy to see the sacrifice of a young man who pulled a juvenile stunt
If the ‘juvenile stunt’ had been the burning of a cross, would your opinion remain as generous?
in order to satiate the hunger for Muslims to prove their supremacy.
I think this speaks for itself. You honestly seem to believe that a group comprising less than a percent of the population somehow exercises supreme power over the courts and the laws and are not only adequately served justice in which shit like this routinely happens but who are actually flaunting it.
I am very sorry you feel that way. It must be difficult, thinking you are being persecuted by people you will never meet.
I’m not sure what to say in the face of such an illiberal opinion.
I’m not sure which of us is suggesting that belonging to one particular minority deprives one of the protections from abuse usually associated with minority status, or which one of us is cheering on a racist bully.
Once I figure that one out, I’m sure I can tell you all about ‘illiberal’, you pompous bigot.
Golden Boy said,
August 3, 2007 at 4:29
Kevin,
Yes, those skeptic’s annotated holy books look very interesting. I will take a look when I get a chance. Thanks to Alec for pointing them out to me.
The differences between Judeo-Christianity and Islam are not wholly contained within their scriptures, as you rightly point out. In fact, the Koran heavily plagiarizes the Bible; it would surprising if there were *not* a large number of similiarities.
The departures are in both the theory and practice of the religions. Christianity teaches love and forgiveness; when Christians don’t practice this, they are consciously going against the teaching of their religion. Islam is a violent, supremacist creed; bin Laden is following directly in the footsteps of Mohammed.
Of course, the other major difference is that Christianity has gone through an Enlightenment, and the Muslim world is stuck in seventh century barbarism.
Alec, I’m glad you have such faith in our courts. I prefer not to see people hauled in front of a judge for such charges as insulting religion, but then again you think I’m a bigot for expressing such views (I’ll cheerfully accept the “pompous” tag.) I’ll ignore your insults as I ignore those of the increasingly bizarre Mikey, and ask you this question: Would you support felony hate crime charges against someone who stole a Bible and threw it in the toilet?
Alec said,
August 3, 2007 at 4:33
See, if I hadn’t been polite with him until he started openly excoriating the hated wog, I wouldn’t have coaxed the modernization cover-talk out of him and I could well have abused a poor undeserving soul with a few misconceptions by accident.
That’s what you Web 2.0 wankers need to learn: patience. You don’t start baiting them for being Nazis until you can get them to salute the Fuhrer first. It’s not as if it’s usually too hard.
I hope this has been instructive.
Alec said,
August 3, 2007 at 4:40
As for being hauled in front of the courts, that’s how common law justice works: you get indicted for an offense on the force of evidence and the court decides whether you’re guilty or not on the basis of the weight of fact. It’s a pretty sturdy justice system, which is why we use it. And either you know that or you are a fool; either way, this is officially beneath me and I bother with it only because it amuses me.
Again with the ‘insulting religion’ thing. This is not what it is about. It is about attacking an ethnic or ethnicized group. You could at least get your cover story right before you start playing the bleeding heart.
The Bible is not an ethnic signifier for a minority group. Were it a piece of scripture specific and emotionally charged to any largely socially unintegrated group - say, Catholics in Utah or the Deep South - sure. Same goes for the Torah. And the same would be the case for a country where the Bible is representative of a minority group - Japan (Koreans, largely), Turkey (Greeks), etc. This is because terrorizing a minority group is wrong and the state has an interest in punishing people who do, whether or not you happen to like that minority group. Then again, I’m not in the business of making exceptions; that you are, and so casually and aggressively, speaks to the fundamental bankruptcy of your knee-jerk Islamophobia.
Golden Boy said,
August 3, 2007 at 4:47
Yes, these Muslims look pretty terrorized: http://catholiclondoner.blogspot.com/2006/09/very-rushed-post.html.
Well, Alec, I doubt we are going to reach a consensus here. I have presented a pretty compelling argument that Muslims are beginning to find a way to criminalize insulting Islam in the States, and you’ve presented… well, besides the insults to me, your belief that Muslims deserve special protection and consideration. So I guess we do agree that that is the fundamental issue. I simply don’t think we should surrender to their absurd claims for exceptionalism, and you apparently do.
Throw a Bible in the toilet and that’s fine; throw a Koran in there and you are a felon. Is this really where you are?
Alec said,
August 3, 2007 at 4:48
Christianity teaches love and forgiveness; when Christians don’t practice this, they are consciously going against the teaching of their religion.
10:34 Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.
10:35 For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.
10:36 And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.
10:37 He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
10:14 And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet.
10:15 Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city.
Of course, that’s only the New Testament. The truly heinous stuff - you know, God punishing Israel brutally for incomplete genocide - is largely in the Old Testament. On the other hand:
5:17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.
5:18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
But I guess that doesn’t count when the people who claim to believe in it aren’t brown, right? It can still be a religion of peace as long as its practicioners aren’t mud people.
Alec said,
August 3, 2007 at 4:54
Throw a Bible in the toilet and that’s fine; throw a Koran in there and you are a felon. Is this really where you are?
I directly stated the opposite of this. Play affronted liberal all you like, GB, but you’re the one who wants special treatment for Muslims. In this case, you want the world to assume by default they’re acting in bad faith and they’re evil and conspiring against you and your precious kultur.
You’re so damn obvious, that’s the sad thing. You’ve clearly been to college for this shit, because it’s the kind of dumb-ass bushleague bullshit that would have been beaten out of you anywhere else, but you still try and frame the entire discussion about ‘insulting Islam’ when everyone else to say a word on the topic - even me, when I was being charitable and taking you at your word instead of openly reviling you as the hypocrite you are - has acknowledged that insulting Islam is not what is at issue here and that if it were they’d agree with you. Hell, you didn’t even try to prove that it was about insulting Islam instead of demonizing Muslims; the closest you even came was casually writing the whole thing off as a ‘juvenile prank’. You couldn’t be doing this awful, awful shit more ineptly if you tried; there are so many levels on which you ought to be ashamed of yourself, and someday, with any hope, you’ll at least get in touch with one of them - as the saying goes, insh’Allah.
Alec said,
August 3, 2007 at 5:01
Interesting fact: the Koran is actually more liberal on homosexuality than the Bible. Every claim it makes about gay sex being immoral is on the basis of it being ‘unnatural’; while at the time it was believed that it was, evidence has come to light that animals bugger each other all the time. Once more liberal clerics have the breathing room to come forward, that’ll be one thing they have the ‘civilized’ West beat on.
Another interesting fact: transsexuals in big, bad, evil Iran enjoy better legal protections than their brothers/sisters in most of Europe - and they enjoy them because of a specific theological decision by the Ayatollah Khomeini.
The Ayatollahs represent a jurisprudent tradition similar to that of the Catholic Church. While each has produced abominations and will produce more, and while each argue from defective, superstitious grounds, they are reasonable, intelligent people and the errors in their ways can be rectified - and will, in time.
It’s an interesting thought, especially when one thinks about how hard we have tried to ignore anything but buck-toothed savagery from the Middle East. There is the occasional glimmer of hope for a better future even from the darkest of places - but only if you aren’t wearing blinders when dealing with them.
Snowwy said,
August 3, 2007 at 5:10
Golden Boy-
Thanks for being so very predictable. You couldn’t even take the time to think about it- as I anticipated. When you conflate ALL OF ISLAM (except, of course, when they are properly under our oh-so-benevolent heel) with religious supremacism, I can come to only one conclusion.
You, sir, are a rank and vile bigot, and worthy of nothing but scorn and abuse until you mend your ways.
Herr Doktor Bimler said,
August 3, 2007 at 5:17
I’m sure that it is possible to argue honestly and in good faith that hate-crime laws are a Bad Thing (whatever good intentions the legislators may have had). Such arguments are none of my business, and I have enough residual sense to keep my mouth shut, though after a few beers I would no doubt have an opinion on the topic.
In contrast, Golden Boy seems to be arguing that when hate-crime laws are a Bad Thing specifically when they are applied on behalf of Muslims; indeed, such legislation is suddenly the thin end of the slippery slope down to Sharia Law.
OK, that’s more or less what Alec said back at 23:35.
Golden Boy said,
August 3, 2007 at 5:22
Herr Doktor Bimler,
No, I actually think all hate crime legislation is pernicious, because it is predicated on the intent of the perpetrator and is in essence a thought crime. Hate crime legislation is being misused in this particular instance to criminalize insulting Islam, but I am uneasy with it in all of its forms.
mikey said,
August 3, 2007 at 5:40
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that “golden boy” has never been tied up and dragged behind a pickup truck. Probably can’t even tell you three epithets that were hurled at him in his younger days.
What a surprise…
mikey
Alec said,
August 3, 2007 at 5:59
Mikey: Me neither. Am suburban white boy; closest to ethnic slurs I ever had to be was bigot grandfather.
I know I’ve got race problems, and I know the dumb animal part of my brain freaks out just a little when I see someone too different from me. The important thing isn’t not having that reaction, of course - it’s knowing the reaction is there and beating the living shit out of it.
I’d also like to make sure that my grandchildren, as much as is possible, live in a world where that dumb animal instinct has nowhere to take them. People need to just be people to one another; it’s a pretty simple goal, but society and its idiot defenders make it so difficult.
As GB demonstrates, ‘thought crime’ is only Orwellian if you use it as such. It is possible to have thoughts which, if translated into action, become criminal.
Hate crimes have nothing to do with ‘thought crimes’, it’s just the hamhanded effort to shut the entire genre of laws down that makes them so. Hate crimes exist to protect minority groups from abuse, because abuse is really, really easy.
You know what, I have criminal thoughts. I’m not immediately comfortable with a lot of people; my old roommate made me uneasy because he was a huge black guy with a fairly thick accent. For Garcon d’Or, it’d be the fact he was a Muslim that freaked him out. But between Nyali and GB, I know who I’d prefer to be stuck in a train cab with, no matter how lily-white the latter’s ass might be. Because once I’ve kicked my subconscious’s ass - which isn’t hard to do, if you’re actually interested in being part of civilization - we’d have a lot more to talk about, the big black architecture student and I, than I would with the courageous young islamophobe behind Door Two.
Golden Boy said,
August 3, 2007 at 6:26
Alec,
“I have criminal thoughts.”??!! My goodness, I don’t know what happened to you, but please accept my congratulations on your willingness to engage in a Maoist self-accusatory session.
In the meantime, I suppose we’ll both be watching the struggle between those who wish to impose a special superiority in law for Islam and those who fall afoul of their supremacy.
Snowwy said,
August 3, 2007 at 7:02
Goldielocks, having drunk too deeply of the product of his sacred cow (hey! Kool-Aid!), refuses to acknowledge that there’s no there there. There’s just no way the self-interest of a majority Christian American nation is going to allow the institution of an Islamic theocracy upon itself.
But he’s gotta beat that drum, boy. Too many people are too unafraid of teh Sceeery Moosleems.
Snowwy said,
August 3, 2007 at 7:07
Oh, and about that “intent of the perpetrator” meme? I wonder how our legal system ever tells the difference between justifiable homicide, manslaughter, and murder. They must just throw 20-sided dice or something. For death penalty cases- rochambeau!
owlbear1 said,
August 3, 2007 at 7:31
Huh, I had thought we had been witnessing that ’struggle’ since the day Dubya was “Appointed by God’.
kingubu said,
August 3, 2007 at 8:13
No, I actually think all hate crime legislation is pernicious, because it is predicated on the intent of the perpetrator and is in essence a thought crime.
Evidently, the Golden Fleeced has never pondered the distinction between, say, manslaughter and murder. That’s right, its intent. You know, mens rea (”guilty mind”), the ancient Western legal tradition that takes into account what someone intended– what they were thinking, what their motivation was– when deciding both offense and punishment.
kingubu said,
August 3, 2007 at 8:15
Heh, Snowwy beat me to it.
Qetesh the Abyssinian said,
August 3, 2007 at 10:07
The departures are in both the theory and practice of the religions. Christianity teaches love and forgiveness; when Christians don’t practice this, they are consciously going against the teaching of their religion.
Look at nearly all vocal religious figures in the US: how many of them are preaching love and forgiveness? And how many are inveighing against Those Eeevullll Muslims and how we should bomb the bejeezus out of them?
Islam is a violent, supremacist creed; bin Laden is following directly in the footsteps of Mohammed.
Pig’s. Fat. Arse. Islam is no better or worse than Christianity or Judaism. Neither in theory or practice.
Of course, the other major difference is that Christianity has gone through an Enlightenment, and the Muslim world is stuck in seventh century barbarism.
This might surprise you a little, but much of that Enlightenment actually came from the Islamic world in the first place. The Islamic world was into science, medicine, poetry, etc, while Christendom was still pissing in their own trousers (quite literally).
And, of course, there’s the vast difference between the behaviours of the Islamic and Christian conquerers: in Spain, the Muslim overlords allowed Jews to live unmolested as valued members of society, while the Christians immediately drove them out and/or started killing them. During the time of the Crusades, Christian armies would slaughter anyone they came across (many Armenian Christians, for example), and reneged on a promise to spare cities that surrendered (putting them all to the sword). The Muslim armies kept their word once given, refrained from wholesale pillage and slaughter, and allowed citizens of conquered cities to become part of the empire.
Then we come to the 20th century. You constantly complain that the Middle East is backward: do you have any idea of what the West has been doing to it in the last century? It’s bloody surprising there’s anyone left there, in some cases. And both Iran and Iraq were quite modern, at least until they drew the attention of the US.
Lebanon was once a beautiful country, And Beirut was once the Paris of the region: beautiful, cosmopolitan, and extremely modern. Alas, it was not allowed to remain so. Greece, although not Muslim, also attracted the attention of the US shortly after the Second World War, much to its detriment.
I could go on at length, but I won’t. Suffice it to say that (a) Islam is not the “vile ideology” you claim it is, and (b) many of the problems in the Middle East are directly attributable to actions of the US, Britain, France, and Russia.
Question: If someone bombed your house, and you had nowhere to go, so were forced to shelter in the ruins, would you take it kindly when I called you “squalid, filthy, brutal, and uncivilised”?
Think about that.
Kevin Bacon Holding Playdoh said,
August 3, 2007 at 12:42
Just a FYI, “Golden Boy” was the name one of our charming obsessive-compulsive trolls used a year or two ago, either at Eschaton or Kos as I recall. You’ll notice he’s just distorting people’s arguments here, refusing to address any point that doesn’t allow him to slander Islam (spot how he skips the fact that the original Quran was stolen so by default any Bible in exactly the same situation would also result in a crime; notice too he claims that he’s not yet read the annotated notes on either holy book, but instantly goes on to shift his claim to state that it’s irrelevant any because Christianity, which he claims he doesn’t follow, teaches love and blah blah blah…). And in particular, pay close attention to the fact that he keeps trying to claim that “Liberalism” is whatever he thinks, rather than what endless actual liberals keep pointing out to him… Concern Troll? I’d say the odds are pretty high that this is all he is, wouldn’t you?
Incidentally, this post is coming to you from the United Kingdom. Where every day I mix with as many Muslims as Christians. Anyone who claims Islam is a monotheistically violent religion is simply ignoring many of the actual Muslims who exist; after all, it doesn’t matter which Muslim organisation or how vehemently they disown violence, people like “Golden Boy” never, ever believe them, and still insist they are violent at some deterministic level. Just like the deterministic Fascists in fact.
blowback said,
August 3, 2007 at 12:48
Golden Boy - the link you used earlier doesn’t work but this does. As Joee Blogs says “These were 100 Muslims out of the 2 million (ish?) living in Britain. Thus this is hardly representative of all muslims“. It is hardly representative of any muslims!
Guess where Joee Blogs sources some of his pictures - where else than from a recently tearful ex-Mrs Oshry (aka Atlas Shrugs, aka Pamela Geller).
The bloke with the “Behead those who insult Islam” sign is now in a British prison doing six years along with three of his co-protestors. While British prisons may not be as violent as American prisons, they are certainly not fine examples of inclusiveness.
Islam is being used by many of the West’s lackeys in the Middle East and Asia as an “the opiate of the masses”. If I was living there, I would be protesting about the lack of democracy, the inequality of wealth and the corruption rather than a handful of very unfunny cartoons published by a newspaper that once supported the Nazis in a country well known for its racism.
bjacques said,
August 3, 2007 at 14:14
The Muslim/Ottoman Empire wasn’t a paradise for Jews, but overall they fared better there than in Christendom.
A pretty good antidote to DV8 Hanson is probably the War Nerd (aka “Gary Brecher” not his real name, apparenly) columns in exile.ru, an English-language online magazine about Russia. If you can get past the gleeful Russian triumphalism, which is actually pretty entertaining and sobering at the same time, exile.ru is worth a read. And Brecher enjoys puncturing Hanson not least because Hanson apparently thinks Brecher set fire to Hanson’s grapevines (!). Anyway, Brecher points out that the British Empire in its heyday puts the neocons in the shade, and we’re basically living with the result.
India, by the way, is a pretty good example of where Muslim grievances come from. Like the US and the UK, India’s stuck pretty much with two major parties, Congress Party, essentially a Gandhi family operation, and the Bharatya Janata Party (BJP). With the Congress Party, you get old-fashioned corruption, though they seem to be wising up a little. With the BJP you get the latter overlaid with Hindu fascism. Vajpayee, the last BJP Prime Minister until the Congress Party stomped them in the last elections, was a full-bore Hindu fascist. He and his party encouraged bulldozing of mosques to wind up the Muslims to justify sending in the army or just letting Hindu rent-a-mobs conduct pogroms.
blowback said,
August 3, 2007 at 14:47
BTW, going back to the VDH shit, how the mighty have fallen. William Ffing Buckley plugging plonk in a particularly mawkish way (pdf!). Soon he will be doing adverts for Thunderbird.
Golden Boy said,
August 3, 2007 at 15:32
Snowwy and Kingbu bring up the valid point that determining the intent of a criminal act is already a well-established part of our legal process. That’s undeniable, but the difference here is that in the case of hate crimes, it is the victim’s perception of the act that becomes the key factor. The manslaughter / murder distinction is found within the act itself, but the status of hate crime is determined post facto. In the case of the young man who tossed a Koran in the toilet, he was arrested and charged with misdemeanor property charges, and only later did a Muslim pressure group determine that his intent was such that a felony charge was appropriate.
Qetesh, I’m afraid that seeking to draw an equivalence between the actions of medieval Crusaders and modern jihadists doesn’t bolster the case for Islam. And I condemned and continue to condemn the invasion of Iraq, and I would be totally against any war with Iran. I take your point about Western interference in the Middle East, but why is it that Saudi Arabia is using its immense wealth to spread Salafism around the globe? Why is it that in Thailand, the Phillipines, Nigeria, etc Muslims are targeting Christian and Buddhist populations? I don’t think the issue of Islamic aggression can be boiled down to one of a reaction against the West (gee and you think that *I* am the one who is simplistic.)
Kevin, I never posted at Eschaton or Kos. I have run into the comments of a different “Golden Boy” who is vociferously in favor of the war in Iraq. The only other place I post on a regular basis (and am registered so my moniker cannot be reused) is at Salon. Now your claim that I skip over the fact that the Koran was stolen is totally false. I’ve said many times that the initial action resulted in misdemeanor property charges, and that a Muslim pressure group funded by the Saudis forced those charges to be changed to felony hate crimes. And of course, my point about the Islamic ideology is not that it is universally and excusively violent, but then again you were happy to distort my earlier statements. Get your Muslim friends to open up about Islam; you may be surprised.
Dan Someone said,
August 3, 2007 at 17:13
That’s undeniable, but the difference here is that in the case of hate crimes, it is the victim’s perception of the act that becomes the key factor. The manslaughter / murder distinction is found within the act itself, but the status of hate crime is determined post facto.
This is purely fiction. The distinction between manslaughter and murder is in the intent of the perpetrator. The distinction between random vandalism and “hate crime” vandalism is… wait for it… in the intent of the perpetrator.
Which of these is a hate crime? (1) Young idiot steals a Koran and flushes it down the toilet. (2) Young idiot steals a Bible and flushes it down the toilet. (3) Young idiot steals a Torah and flushes it down the toilet.
Which of these is murder? (1) Young idiot stabs a guy in a bar. (2) Young idiot shoots a guy in an alley. (3) Young idiot runs over a guy in a parking lot.
Hmm… We don’t know. We have to determine the answer based on the intent of the young idiot in each case. And when do we make that determination? To use your own words: post facto. But when did the young idiot form his intention? Why, before committing the crime, of course.
And how do we determine intent? Well, we can ask the young idiot, and he might tell us. We can look at all the other circumstances — was the young idiot shouting anti-Muslim/anti-Christian/antisemitic comments as he flushed the toilet? Was he shouting “I’ve been planning this for months, you asshole!” as he stabbed/shot/drove? We can ask witnesses to describe what they saw and, to some extent, what they thought was going on. And yes, in the flushing incidents, we can ask the owners of the flushed books whether they felt intimidated on the basis of their religion. And that may or may not influence the determination. (Of course, it’s not possible, but if we could ask the homicide victim if he thought the perpetrator intended to kill him, we would have the same situation.)
So frankly, I’m not sure I see that big a difference between hate crimes and other intent-specific crimes.
Golden Boy said,
August 3, 2007 at 18:52
Dan,
You don’t see the difference between hate crimes and other intent-specific crimes? OK, I’ll give it a try.
How does one avoid falling afoul of the murder / manslaughter distinction? Don’t kill anyone.
How does one avoid falling afoul of the Muslim hate crime distinction? Don’t insult Islam, the Koran, or their despicable prophet.
Please tell me you cannot see the difference.
Simba B. said,
August 3, 2007 at 18:58
Golden Boy, that makes absoultely no sense. The guy committed a crime, and based on intent it’s a hate crime. Your point falls apart, but it’s supposed to be:
How to avoid the hate crime distinction when stealing someone else’s property and vandalizing it? Don’t be a miserable xenophobe like Golden Boy.
Golden Boy said,
August 3, 2007 at 19:06
Hi SimbaB,
Let’s say that the Koran hadn’t been stolen. Let’s say that instead, a Koran that one owns is burned / shot / dumped in a toilet, in public (that’s key.)
Is this a thought / hate crime? Let’s assume that it is reasonable to believe that the person doing the burning / shooting / dumping dislikes Islam.
This is not an unsubtle point. Alec indicated upthread that he thought such an action would be “iffy”. Teasing that out of him showed me that the fact that the Koran was stolen in the actual case is irrelevant; what is relevant is how sensitive we will be to the Muslim demand that we revere their holy books and symbols.
Can you answer that, SimbaB? Or at least try?
Robert Green said,
August 3, 2007 at