Miscellanea Agnostica

With the fighting going in in the Gaza strip between Israel and Hamas, it’s time I reviewed the best object-lesson in the dangers of religion that the world has ever seen. The conflict between Israel and Palestinian Arabs is a morass of hyperreligiosity, not only on the parts of Muslims and Jews, but Christians have been meddling in it as well — mostly to no good effect. It’s a problem that can theoretically be solved, but only once the religiosity and the raging sanctimony on all sides, have been extracted from the scenario.

Yeah, I know, good luck getting that to happen!

A lot has been said about this conflict — much of it wrong, or misrepresented. Because the matter is quite involved, I created a special extra page on my blog about it. I have linked it heavily to other reference material — mostly using the reference site Answers.Com — so that anyone who’s interested, can more easily delve into the many things and events I mention.

Of course, these reference pages I link to are, by nature, dynamic, and I have no control over their contents. They could be different tomorrow, or the next day, or the next year, depending on what is compiled within them by the reference service. They should, however, be more than sufficient to begin your own learning process. Do yourself the favor of reading the whole article, and exploring the reference links.

If you don’t like what I have to say on the matter — I know it’s controversial so I’m sure to have offended someone — at least do yourself the favor of looking at the reference material and find out why I said what I said. You don’t have to agree with my conclusions, but don’t accuse me of bias, because on this matter I am not: I clearly stated in my page — and will repeat here for clarity — that no party to the Arab-Israeli conflict has “clean hands.” No one.

Everybody and his brother and sister seems to have ideas about how the economic crisis should be solved. Would you believe, religion has been proposed as the solution? We have this from one of the world’s foremost religious authorities:

Al-Qaida’s No. 2 leader appeared in a new video posted Friday calling on Americans to embrace Islam to overcome the financial meltdown, which he said was a consequence of the Sept. 11 attacks and militant strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ayman al-Zawahri, whose 80-minute recording touched on a number of subjects, also lashed out at Afghanistan’s government and said any U.S. gains in Iraq will be temporary. …

Appearing in a white turban and robe, Zawahri discussed the roots of the U.S. economic crisis. He said it was a repercussion of the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, and that the crisis would continue “as long as the foolish American policy of wading in Muslim blood continues.” …

“The modern economy has been destroyed by the strikes of the mujahedeen (in Iraq and Afghanistan) and usury,” he said, using the Arabic term for holy warriors.

Under Islamic Sharia law, usury, like drinking alcohol, is among the grand sins.

Zawahri then called on the American people to “embrace Islam to live a life free of greed, exploitation and forbidden wealth.”

Funny how al-Qaeda’s number 2 is condemning wealth, his boss, Osama bin-Laden, is the son of a Saudi billionaire and a member of one of the wealthiest families in the world.

Then again, religious folk love hypocrisy (even though they condemn it, and are sometimes enjoined never to engage in it), so this ought not be a big surprise.

About the only response I can think of to al-Zawahri’s drivel is, “Bite me, Ayman.”

Ah, the “religion of peace” has struck again. The Indian city of Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay) is under attack by militants who are part of a group called the Deccan Mujahideen. CNN has a bit to say about them:

The Indian Mujahideen is a Muslim militant group which emerged about a year ago but has the organizational capability to carry out attacks such as those in Mumbai, said Paul Cruickshank, a fellow at the Center on Law and Security at New York University’s School of Law.

The group has declared “open war” against India in retaliation for what it said were 60 years of Muslim persecution and the country’s support of U.S. policies.

This is not the Deccan Mujahideen’s first attack on India:

In September, the group said it was behind a series of explosions which ripped through busy marketplaces in New Delhi, killing 24 people and wounding about 100.

The group also claimed responsibility in May for near-simultaneous bomb attacks that killed 63 people in the northwest city of Jaipur.

Also, the Deccan Mujahideen is not the only Islamist terror group now operating in India:

Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (Army of the Pure) is an Islamic extremist group that has claimed responsibility for several attacks on Indian troops and civilians in recent years. They are suspected of being behind the string of bombs that ripped through packed Mumbai commuter trains and platforms during rush hour in July 2006. More than 200 people were killed in that attack.

It’s interesting that so many groups are engaged in terror and/or violence as an expression of their faith in Islam, a religion which bills itself as the “religion of peace,” a point famously reiterated by President George W. Bush shortly after the al-Qaeda terror attacks in September of 2001:

The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.

When we think of Islam we think of a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world.

I keep thinking about the open warfare now being waged in the hotels of Mumbai — and the many other similar actions of the Deccan Mujahideen and other Islamist groups — but somehow I can’t see how they can be said to represent, or be acting in the name of, a “religion of peace.” Killing people and taking over hotels is not typically what one thinks of as an expression of “peace.” I wonder if, perhaps, I missed something … ? After all, how can this vile godless infidel be expected to understand the wishes of almighty al-Lah?

By now we’re all used to the raging immature intolerance of the Islamic world when it comes to their own religion. They will not permit any “insult to Islam,” whether perceived or real — and are more than willing to resort to violence over it. They issued fatwas and death sentences against Salman Rushdie in the late 1980s over his novel The Satanic Verses. They rioted and destroyed property over the Mohammed cartoons in 2005. A year later Pope Benedict XVI dared quote the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus, inciting more riots, death threats, and the usual vitriol.

But the latest example of this irrationality and immaturity took place in Morocco recently — and for no apparent reason:

The Moroccan government has banned the most recent issue of the French magazine L’Express International for insulting Islam.

Information Minister Khalid Naciri said Sunday that he had no choice but to ban the issue because of the offensive nature of the articles it contained. The minister said that Article 29 of the kingdom’s press code allows the government to shut down or ban any publication deemed to offend Islam or the king.

Note that the Moroccan government took this action without even bothering to explain the exact nature of the “offense” — making this particular example of Islamic intolerance even more incomprehensible than the usual example of furious intolerance (in which a reason for the outrage is cited, even though it usually makes no sense).

About the only good thing about this episode is that L’Express International hasn’t been firebombed or threatened (but it’s a little too soon yet to rule out that possibility). Someday the Islamic world is going to grow up and get over itself … but probably not in my lifetime, and not even in the next few centuries.

That Saudi Arabia is stuck in the Middle Ages is not news. What is news is that a prominent Saudi cleric is taking on what has become a major cultural trend in the Arab world, as reported by Reuters:

A senior Saudi cleric has said purveyors of horoscopes on Arab television should face the death penalty, a paper said on Sunday, days after another cleric argued death for TV owners.

“Sorcerers who appear on satellite channels who are proven to be sorcerers have committed a great crime … and the Muslim consensus is that the apostate’s punishment is death by the sword,” Sheikh Saleh al-Fozan told al-Madina daily. …

Many of the hundreds of Arab satellite channels have sprung up in recent years specialise in horoscopes and other advice to callers on solving problems that is seen as “sorcery.”

In their capacity as judges, clerics of Saudi Arabia’s austere form of Islam often sentence “sorcerers” to death.

Fozan, a member of the Higher Council of Clerics, was responding to a controversy ignited by a Council colleague, Sheikh Saleh al-Lohaidan, who said last week that owners of Arab TV shows should be tried and face death over some shows. …

Lohaidan, who is the head of Saudi Arabia’s Islamic sharia courts, told Saudi radio: “I want to advise the owners of these channels that broadcast programmes with indecency and vulgarity and warn them of the consequences … They can be put to death through the judicial process.”

He was referring to comedy shows and soap operas airing in Ramadan, a month of fasting when Muslims are supposed to focus on God. Critics say Ramadan has become an orgy of food and television consumption once the fast ends at sunset. …

The Reuters article concludes by explaining the tension between state and religion in Saudi Arabia that drove these clerics to lash out:

The owners of Arab entertainment channels, including MBC, ART, Orbit, Rotana and LBC, are mostly Saudi royals and businessmen closely allied to them.

Concerned about the country’s international image, some key members of the Saudi royal family have promoted liberal reforms. The clerics fear plans to limit their extensive influence in what is the world’s largest oil exporter.

Like little children, when faced with opposition, the Saudi clerics react in typical immature fashion — by stamping and fuming and making threats. Nice, huh?

These days, in the US and the rest of the occidental world, it’s not uncommon to think of religion as promoting peace. The Quakers, for example, were pacifists; many Abolitionists were strongly religious; and more recently the most prominent leader of the civil-rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr, was a pastor who promoted non-violent resistance to racism. A column in today’s USA Today follows this reasoning, and claims that religion can stop wars:

Faith is sometimes the fuel that feeds conflict and spreads strife. History is a witness to this. But lest we forget, believers also can be the salve to bring people and religions back together. …

Religion — a solution to the problem of religiously motivated conflict and violence? Yes, actually. Because in their best traditions, the world’s two dominant faiths do promote peace, both through their central teachings and the lessons-by-example taught every day by innumerable Muslims and Christians who take their scriptures seriously.

The author cites examples of this phenomenon in, for example, some recent defections from al-Qaeda, and the request for “understanding” by Christians, offered by some 138 Muslim scholars, a little over a year and a half ago.

I hate to say it but these are fairly meager examples, given the much-larger scale of religiously-fueled violence that has taken place — and which is currently taking place (as in the Palestinian conflict, among others).

And to be honest, many of the positive religiously-inspired movements I mentioned already (e.g. abolition, and civil rights) had strong secular components that went along for the ride; among abolitionists were many northern capitalists who hoped to gain from the decline of the southern economy if slavery ended, and the civil rights movement of the 60s was not made up solely of religious people, but was aided by secular organizations as well, such as the ACLU. While both of these had strong religious components, they were not solely religious movements.

Articles like this one tend to gloss over the damage that religion has done, and amount to an attempt to whitewash the harm that centuries of religious-inspired violence has done to humanity. It serves no one to minimize the horrors of religion, precisely because, without keeping this in mind, it’s far too easy for it to happen again. It likewise does little good to cite a couple weak examples of religion fostering peace, and assume that religion automatically will do so again. It won’t — and in fact, it can’t, unless people make it happen.

Another way of putting it is: Religion cannot and will not save humanity; only humanity can save itself. We will either choose to live with one another, or we won’t. Religion will not make that happen, all by itself. It will take societal maturity, willpower, patience, determination, and tolerance. None of these can be forced on people from pulpits or by reading sacred texts.

Britain’s highest jurist believes Islamic law, known as Shari’a, should be allowed in the UK:

The most senior judge in England tonight gave his blessing to the use of sharia law to resolve disputes among Muslims.

Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips said that Islamic legal principles could be employed to deal with family and marital arguments and to regulate finance.

He declared: ‘It is possible in this country for those who are entering into a contractual agreement to agree that the agreement shall be governed by a law other than English law.’

This is truly a bizarre pronouncement, on many levels. First, the idea that people can enter into a contract which operates according to some other law than the prevailing law of the land, is freakish and nonsensical … this means that, basically, any two people can enter into any kind of agreement they want, based on anything they want to base it on; they could even agree to violate the prevailing law of the land, but so long as it’s acceptable in terms of their own personal law (whatever that might be), it’s enforeable!

Second, under shari’a women have virtually no rights; they cannot initiate a divorce, for example, even if they are being abused, and they count as only one-half of a person as eyewitnesses in shari’a courts — which means essentially that a crime against a lone woman cannot ever be prosecuted under shari’a (since there has to be at least one whole person as a witness to the crime).

Third, if one can pick and choose from law codes under which to conduct one’s affairs, how will anyone ever be held accountable for anything? If I enter into a contract with a British Muslim and we have a dispute over it, would he be able to force me into a shari’a court rather than a civil British court? Who would have that power, and under whose law would the question be resolved?

That a judge who came from the noble tradition of British law — the ancestor of the law of the United States, Canada and every other Commonwealth nation — could possibly come out with something like this, is truly horrifying. Lord Phillips’s pronouncement betrays the rule of law which has served much of the western world so well for the last several centuries. It’s unfathomable!

Two recent stories in Time show how far the Islamic world has to go before it grows up and accepts that time marches on, with it or without it:

Alleged 9/11 Plotter Holds Court

Confessed terrorist mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told U.S. military judge Ralph Kohlman on Thursday that he would represent himself at his tribunal, and that he welcomed the death penalty that would make him a “martyr.”

Bomb at Pakistan’s Danish Embassy

An apparent car bomb exploded outside the Danish embassy in Pakistan’s capital on Monday, killing at least five people and wounding dozens more, officials and witnesses said.

Yes folks, we have a guy who claims to want to be a martyr, even though he sent others to their deaths rather than himself and tried to evade US forces before finally being caught. We also have suicide-bombers who are still bellyaching over the Jyllands-Posten cartoons published over 2 years ago.

Unfortunately, Islam still has not come to grips with the furious sanctimony and ferocious immaturity that still rage within it. Someday it will; I hope we all live long enough to see it happen. But I’m not hopeful.

By now most everyone has heard about the short film, Fitna (“strife” in Arabic) by Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders. No doubt you have also heard that it was first available on the Internet video repository site, LiveLeak, then yanked … because of death threats against LiveLeak staff. LiveLeak restored it after taking security precautions; view it here.

I find it an interesting film, although most of the content it conveys, i.e. the calls to violence in the name of al-Lah and Islam found in the Qur’an, is actually old news. The film dramatically overlays these Qur’an quotations — as well as calls for violence in Islam’s name by Islamist-extremist terrorists — with footage of real terrorist acts perpetrated by real Muslims who really believe in these extreme interpretations of Islam and the Qur’an.

Of course, this film has aroused the ire of Muslims around the world, as happened previously with the Mohammed cartoons published by Wilders’ countrymen a couple years ago.

This current reaction to Fitna, now, has exactly the same impetus as the cartoon-controversy in 2006: Muslim immaturity and unwillingness to accept that anyone might criticize their religion.

Yes, I said immaturity. And I meant it. No other word describes it. To be incensed — to the point of violence — that someone does not believe what one believes, can only be called “immaturity.”

A global society such as the one we live in, cannot afford this kind of immaturity. Muslims are simply going to have to accept that there are other people in the world who do not like their religion. No religion — in fact, no ideology or package of beliefs of any sort — is entitled never to be analyzed or critiqued. To expect never to be criticized is irrational and juvenile. Period.

Anyone care to hazard a guess when Islam will collectively grow up and accept that there are people like Wilders who refuse to “surrender” (that is, after all, what islam means in Arabic) to their god al-Lah?