I’m not anti-Islam, I’m anti-Islamist and there’s a huge distinction. I don’t care whether my neighbour claimed there were thirty gods or no God, as long as the neighbour neither picked my pocket nor broke my arm.
Radical Islam, though, picks pockets and breaks arms and that’s why we must find a way to stop it.
The underlying problem with radical Islam is that it is both political and religious. It teaches that the two cannot be separated. The Islamists believe that man-made laws are inferior and must be replaced with “God-given” Islamic or sharia law and that all governments worldwide should be Islamic.
Coupled with the mandate that violence be wreaked upon all unbelievers until they capitulate to Islam’s yoke, radical Islam is anathema to individual liberty everywhere.
There is no doubt that there is an active campaign by Muslim radicals to destroy Western civilization from within – quietly, peacefully, even legally. They are working to destabilise Australia and ultimately replace the Australian Constitution with Islam sharia law. And this should bother every Australian.
And it’s already happening. They have brought about women-only classes and swimming times at public pools. Some public schools have been pulling pork from their menus. Women have been beaten, strangled, and killed by their husbands, brothers, or fathers for “dishonouring” their families.
It’s death by a thousand cuts, or sharia inch-by-inch as some refer to it, and most Australians have no idea this battle is being waged every day across Australia.
By not fighting back, by allowing certain radical Muslims to obfuscate what is really happening, and not insisting that the Islamist adapt to our culture, Australia is cutting its own throat with a politically correct knife and helping to further the Islamists’ agenda.
You see, the Islamists aren’t stupid. They are slowly creating a specialised victim status for themselves whereby any discussions of Islam, as well as their motives for Islamic supremacism, were quickly becoming no-go topics.
The Islamists have realised that they could further their radical agenda by playing upon Australia’s natural distaste for racism. They did it by creating a label that smacked of bigotry and which could be applied to anyone who called into question their true loyalties, motivations, religious texts, or ultimate end game – Islamophobia - and if you dare criticise Islam, you are immediately labelled as an Islamophobe.
Australia is doing nothing but ceding ground to the Islamists. It would rather be politically correct than victorious, and as long as it refuses to engage its enemy on every single front, Australia will never win.
For the majority of its adherents, Islam is a gentle religion. Moderate Muslims not only don’t want to commit acts of violence, they don’t want anyone else to either, especially not in the name of their religion. If it were up to the moderates, I’m sure they would gladly see the violent passages the radicals use to justify their actions torn-out from the Koran.
The majority of Muslims in Australia and around the world are moderate and peaceful. Islam brings comfort and provides a path for over a billion people on this planet. It is the source of goodness. Moderate Muslims want to live in harmony with their neighbours, regardless of what their beliefs are.
Non-Muslims want the moderate Muslims to reform Islam, but no one does anything to help them. Some of us (politicians) don’t seem to understand that the moderates who are brave enough to stand up are constantly drowned out by the Islamists who are more media savvy, better organised, and considerably better funded.
Most Muslims have a private spiritual life and are quite happy to live in a country where they can practice their faith freely and openly. But Islamists don’t want a ‘private spiritual life’ – they want a political system that makes faith a very public, state oriented system (Saudi Arabia/Iran). At first I didn’t get it but now I do. It’s all about politics, not religion. In the world of Islamic extremism there is no separation of mosque and state because their church is their state. Their religious leaders are their political leaders and those leaders are happy to give you a simple choice: Live under Islamic sharia rule or die.
I’ll end this post with the best interpretation I have read of what an Islamophobe really is and should anyone ever call you one, my advice is wear it as a badge of honour.
Now an “Islamophobe” is a non-Muslim who knows way more than they are supposed to know about Islam.
Islamophobia is a fear of losing life or liberty to Islamic rule merely because the laws, sacred texts, and traditional practices of Islam demand the submission of culture, politics, religion and all social expression. It tends to afflict those most familiar with the religion while sparing the more gullible.
Unlike Infidelophobia (Quranically-inspired hatred for non-Muslims), Islamophobia doesn't involve dead bodies, but rather bruised Muslim feelings, which - according to the teachings of the faith - are far more important than the lives of infidels.
In Muhammad's day, Islamophobia was treated with a practice known as beheading. Since this is now impractical outside of the Muslim world, the condition is best addressed by means of prevention. Such preventive measures include willful ignorance (best assisted with a strong dose of taqiyya).
The fact is that when Islam checks in, a lot of folks wind up checking out... permanently. Therefore Islamophobes are a pretty broad group.
Islamophobes include:
- Hindus, Christians, and Jews who don’t want to be forced into a political system that treats them as third-class citizens. (Islamic teaching)
- Atheists who want the freedom to live openly and challenge religious orthodoxy in the public spherre. (Islamic teaching)
- Women who don’t want to be draped in black bags. (Islamic teaching)
- Heterosexual males who prefer not to see women draped in black bags. (Islamic teaching)
- Drinkers (this one's important). (Islamic teaching)
- Artists (not quite as important). (Islamic teaching)
- Historians who don’t want to see priceless manuscripts and books burned just because they disagree with the Quran.
- Homosexuals who don’t want to be beaten to death. (Islamic teaching)
- Anyone else who believes that consenting adults should not be killed or tortured over sexual practices. (Islamic teaching)
- Dog lovers. (Islamic teaching).
- Animal Rights activists and anyone else who is opposed to the cruel and unethical treatment of animals. (Islamic teaching)
- Mothers who don’t want their daughters killed over a man’s “honor.” (Islamic teaching)
- Females who want to keep their clitoris. (Islamic teaching)
- Intellectuals who value freedom of conscience and public dissent. (Islamic teaching)
- Anyone believing that the value of a person's life is not determined by their religious beliefs. (Islamic teaching)
- Feminists who believe that women should not be made subordinate to men by a religion which openly insists that females are the intellectual and legal inferior of males. (Islamic teaching)
- Anyone else who objects to a religion in which a woman’s identity is defined by her relationship to a man. (Islamic teaching)
- The left-handed (Islamic teaching).
- Progressives who don’t believe that culture and moral values should be established by a state-sponsored religion. (Get past The Religion Barrier)
- Conservatives who believe in preserving the Western heritage responsible for the civil freedom, political liberty and economic success which has attracted the flood of immigrants from Muslim nations, where such values are conspicuously lacking. (Islamic teaching)
- Muslims who would like the freedom to leave Islam. (Islamic teaching)
And many more...
Andy is on holidays in a country that will probably never ever introduce a Carbon Dioxide Tax. He returns in early October 2012.
@FoxNews @SkyNewsAust #auspol #teaparty
I fall into a slightly different class classification with regard Islam than you, Dear Ranter, in that, having made several hundred journeys into, around and, thank God, out of every corner of the Muslims' world, learnt to communicate in several of its languages, including Arabic -- in which I have read and re-read and studied its Mein Kampf -- and Bahasa Indonesia/Malaysia. I've spent an aggregate more than fifteen years living and working among Muslims and number many individual adherents of that ideology -- and it is not by any intelligent measure a "religion" -- among my friends. And reserve but the utmost contempt loathing and abhorrence for the enslaving, raping, sexually-mutilating, mass-murdering, murderously-destructive psychosis. For the totalitarian ideology. For Islam.
Rather than my rabbit on about any of that however, there are a few whose acquaintance I've been privileged to make who've way better than I managed to describe the underlying pathological envy self-loathing hatred and rage that drives the Islamic Psychosis.
For example, from September 14 of 2001, three days after those of that month's Islamic atrocities, that will for ever live in islamanazi infamy.
This, from the inimitable John Derbyshire:
QUOTE:
Hesperophobia
Back in 1982 there were some horrible massacres at two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Christian Lebanese Arabs actually did the killing; but the Israeli army was in the neighborhood and was responsible, at some theoretical level, for keeping the peace in the zone that included the camps. Because of this, the Israelis took much of the brunt of the world's outrage at the killings. Commenting on these events, the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, remarked in disgust: "Goyim kill goyim and they blame the Jews!"
I've been getting the same feeling from some of my email. The fundamental reason America is under attack by Arab terrorists, several dozen people want me to know, is that the U.S. supports Israel. And the only reason we do that, several of them have said, or hinted, is because of the political power of the Jewish lobby here in America. A few of my correspondents have expressed themselves more … bluntly than that. Put it this way: while I have not yet encountered the word "bloodsuckers" (perhaps my readership isn't "diverse" enough), some of this stuff comes pretty close — though I should say in fairness, most is argued on cold national-interest grounds. At any rate, a lot of people feel that the mass killing of Americans by Arab terrorists is all the fault of Israel and those American politicians who, for low and disreputable motives, or from sheer blindness to America's true ideals and interests, support her. Goyim kill goyim -- and they blame the Jews.
Setting aside the statistical certainty that some of the dead Americans are Jewish (as, in high statistical probability, some were of Arab origins)and at the risk of yet more ill-tempered or abusive emails, I am going to declare that I don't think these recent outrages can be blamed on the Jews, nor even on pro-Israel American politicians. The root phenomenon is not American involvement in Middle Eastern affairs: the root phenomenon is hesperophobia.
This word was coined by the political scientist Robert Conquest. Its roots are the Greek words έσπερος (hesperos), which means "the west" and φόβος (phobos), which means "fear," but which when used as an English suffix can also carry the meaning "hate." Hesperophobia is fear or hatred of the West. [While I'm in the classical stuff, by the way, I committed a breach of good manners in my last posting by inserting a Latin tag without translation. I am sorry. Oderint dum metuant means "Let them hate us, so long as they fear us." Seneca rebuked Cicero for saying it, though it seems to have been current among educated late-republican Romans.]
Here is the news: a lot of people out there hate us. The name "Durban" mean anything? In China, in India, in Pakistan, in Indonesia and Malaysia, in Africa and in the Arab countries, European civilization — the West — is widely hated. Matter of fact, quite a lot of Europeans and Americans hate it, too, as you will know if you spend much time on college campuses.
I can't see any strong reason for believing that if the Nation of Israel were to disappear from the face of the Earth tomorrow, hesperophobia would disappear with it. Not even just Arab hesperophobia would decline. A common word for Europeans in the Arabic language is feringji, from "Frank," i.e. crusader. Arabs don't hate us because we support Israel. They hate us because we humiliated them, showed up the gross inferiority of their culture. To them and similarly humiliated peoples, we are the other, detested and feared in a way we can barely understand. Things got really bad in the 19th century. When European society achieved industrial lift-off, Europeans were suddenly buzzing all over the world like a swarm of bees. They encountered these other cultures, that had been vegetating in a quiet conviction of their own superiority for centuries (or in the case of the Chinese, millennia). When these encounters occurred, the encountered culture collapsed in a cloud of dust. Some of them, like the Turks, managed to reconstitute themselves as more or less modern nations; others, like the Arabs and the Chinese, are still struggling with the trauma of that encounter. Neither the Arabs nor the Chinese, for example, have yet been able to attain rational, constitutional government. For a devastating look at the paleolithic condition of politics and society in the Arab world, I strongly recommend my colleague David Pryce-Jones's book, The Closed Circle.
The 1991 Gulf War showed how little has changed since those first encounters. Here were the armies of the West: swift, deadly, efficient, equipped and organized, under the command of elected civilians at the head of a robust and elaborate constitutional structure. And here were the Arabs: a shambling, ill-nourished, shoeless rabble, led by a mad gangster-despot. (That was their Arabs. There were also, of course, our Arabs — the Kuwaitis and Saudis, cowering in their plush-lined air-conditioned bunkers being waited on by their Filipino servants while we did their fighting for them.) Final body counts: the West, 134 dead, the Arabs, 20,000 or more. The superiority of one culture over another has not been so starkly demonstrated since a handful of British wooden ships, at the end of ten-thousand-mile lines of communications, brought the Celestial Empire to its knees a hundred and fifty years earlier. The Chinese are still enraged about that: they are still making angry, bitter movies about the Opium Wars. A hundred fifty years from now, the Arabs will not have forgotten the Gulf War.
If you haven't spent some time in its company, the depth and bitterness of hesperophobia in these cultures is hard to imagine. As Thomas Friedman points out in today's New York Times, Palestinian suicide bombers do not target yeshivas, synagogues or religious settlements. They go for shopping malls or Sbarro's outlets. Sure, they hate the Jews, but they hate the West as much, or more.
Israel is not a cause of any of this, except to the degree that Israeli culture is essentially Western. If the present state of Israel were inhabited by Christian Lithuanians or Frenchmen, the hatred would be nearly as intense. Nearly, not completely: hatred of the Jews has been built into Arab-Moslem culture since the time of Mohammed. There is a tale you will hear from Arab apologists that the Jews were contented and well-treated in the old Arab-Moslem empires. This is nonsense: more often than not, they were treated like swine. For a true account, read Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial, or Gil Carl Alroy Behind the Middle East Crisis. From the Arab point of view, Israel, or any Western state on "Arab land," is an outrage, an illegitimate creation, a crusader state. The fact that the Jews had a wealthy and powerful nation on that land three thousand years ago counts for nothing. Israel is, from the point of view of most Arabs, an alien graft that must not be allowed to "take." It is a reminder of what can barely be thought of without acute psychic pain: the squalid, hopeless, irredeemable inferiority of one's own culture by comparison with another.
So, so, so, is this any of America's business? What are we doing, meddling in the Middle East? Where is our interest? Well, U.S. politicians must speak for themselves, but if I had any position of authority in any Western nation, I would be urging full support for Israeland I am not Jewish. (Following my Passover column, in fact, a lot of NRO readers, along with at least one ex-editor of The New Republic, believe I am an antisemite.) It's a matter of cultural solidarity. We of the West must hang together, or else we shall hang separately. American isolationists simply do not understand how much we are hated in other places.
What, after all, does the Buchananite program offer us, if carried through? We have no troops in Israel to be withdrawn. If we withdraw our aid, the Israelis will be less able to defend themselves against the Arabs. Should we just let the free market take over, U.S. arms manufacturers selling weapons to them cash on the nail? Apparently not: several of my correspondents have explained to me that what so enrages the Arabs is the sight of their people being killed "by American weapons." Oh. No weapons, then (and presumably we should try to repatriate the ones they already have — lots of luck with that, guys). But if we don't arm the Israelis, who will? While other hesperophobic countries — China, for example — are gleefully arming the Arabs and other Israel-haters like Iranand pocketing the profits?
And the end of it all will be … what? Inevitably, without our support, it will be the destruction of Israel. They are so few and the Arabs so many. The Arabs will overwhelm that tiny stateand there will be such an orgy of massacre as has not been seen since the Rape of Nanking. And we shall be doing … what? Watching it on our TVs, with a six-pack and a bucket of Nacho chips to hand? That's the Buchananite vision? If so, it is a vision of cowards and foolsand I want no part of it.
Israel's culture is ours. She is part of the West. If she goes down, we have suffered a defeatand the howling, jeering forces of barbarism have won a victory. You don't have to be Zionist, nor even Jewish, to support Israel. You don't have to be in the pocket of the Israeli congressional lobbies, or a suck-up to "powerful pro-Zionist interests." You don't have to pretend not to notice the occasional follies and cruelties of Israeli policy. You don't have to forget about the U.S.S. Liberty or Jonathan Pollard. You just have to think straight. You just have to understand that the war between Human Civilization and barbarism is being fought today just as it was fought at Chalons and Tours, at the gates of Kiev and Vienna, by the hoplites at Marathon and the legions on the Rhine. It is, as you have heard a thousand times, this past few days, a war; and the thing about war is, you have to take sidesand close your eyes to your allies' imperfections for the duration. There isn't any choice. What happened this week was not, or not only, an act of anti-Americanism, anti-Israelism or anti-Semitism.
It was in part all those things.
But more than anything else, it was an act of hesperophobia.
END QUOTE.
Original at: http://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/Britain/hesperophobia.html
Food for thought, eh?
Best regards.
Sincerely - Brian
Brian Richard Allen
Lost Angels
Califobamacated 90028
And the Very Far Abroad
Posted by: Brian_R_Allen | 18 September 2012 at 05:45 PM