9/11 Koran-burning: armed congregation vow ceremony will go ahead

[Jericho]

Stop the childish sneering and then we can talk.

Ha, how ironic!

[morim]

Same books should be destroyed...

[Stavros]

Burning books says something about the arsonist rather than the books being burned, and doesn't say much.

Just last weekend Neo-Nazis opposed to the 'Jewification of the UK' planned a demonstration in a part of North London inhabited by a large number of Haredi in which they planned to burn the Torah, deciding later to do this 'in private' but to film it and then put it online. Burning the Torah is supposed to achieve something, what I do not know. Burning a Quran, a Bible, a flag, an effigy of Guy Fawkes on November 5th -gesture politics of the lowest order, pathetic, useless; but a means whereby people advertise their stupidity.

Joshua Bonehill-Paine, one of the organisers is on Wikipedia here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Bonehill-Paine

A report on the rally which was moved by police to Westminster shows 20 neo-Nazis turned up, overwhelmed by anti-Fascist counter-demonstrators.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...ounter-protest

[sukumvit boy]

Yeah me too , but what the fuck ,let's burn some Koreans too. ! And God Bless America LOL.

[trish]

Yeah me too , but what the fuck ,let's burn some Koreans too. ! And God Bless America LOL.

Oh say can you see,
All the hyp-ocra-cy?
Oh so proudly we bragged,
When we lock up our fags...

[martin48]

Let's have a little bit of history - if you visit Beelplatz in Berlin, you will see a simple glass covered vault in the square - with empty bookshelves
These subterranean bookshelves could accommodate about 20,000 books - and remind at the approximately 20,000 books, which the Nazis burnt on May 10th, 1933 on this place: works by journalists, writers, scientists and philosophers, seen as a threat to the Nazi ideology - in former terminology such as "literature, which undermines the moral and religious foundations of our nation" or "writings who glorify the Weimar Republic." Even works by communist thinkers should be wiped out in this "action against the un-German spirit". Among the most maligned authors were e. g. Erich Kaestner, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Heinrich and Klaus Mann, Rosa Luxemburg, August Bebel, Bertha von Suttner and Stefan Zweig.
The philosopher, John Milton, whose books were publicly burned in England and France, gives the best explanation of why authorities down the centuries have seen danger in certain books. "Books are not absolutely dead things," he wrote in his celebrated attack on censorship, Areopagitica, in 1644, "but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are." Anyone who kills a man, Milton said, kills "a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself".

[yodajazz]

If people claim authority by a book such as the Koran, it's better to understand what's really in it. For example, there is a verse, which states something like; "There should be no compulsion in religion". It forbids the killing of non-combatants. The concept of Allah as merciful was important to the Prophet. He stared out every chapter in the Koran but two, with the concept of a merciful God (Allah), along with a few other qualities. So this shows that IS is missing lots of things in the book. And the fact that they are warring with other Muslims, kind of underscores this. And they don't want you to understand the Koran. They want you to persecute people who do, in order to drive them to their side for protection. So burning the Koran helps them in their cause. And the same thing goes as making to cartoons about the Prophet. He expressly forbid images of himself, mostly because he did not want people to worship him, but Allah only. This appears to be what happened in the case of Jesus. I should say however, that the Koran is a high context book. That is, ones very often needs historical or other data, to find the context of many, many things in the book. Often times the interpretations to English might be somewhat inaccurate, because some Arabic words have multiple English meanings, and vice versa. If anyone wants to discuss other aspects of Islam, I would be happy to do so. There are lots of thing that are misunderstood by many people. I took a college course on the history of Islam. This was before the 'radical Islam' movement existed. This 'new' radical movement will not survive. One day it will be just another chapter in the history books. And believe me, it won't be the last chapter, either.

[Stavros]

Thank you for that contribution, Yodajazz. I think we are living through another age in which the contemporary (re-)interpretation of ancient religious texts continues to result in an equal measure of inspiration, misery and confusion. The attempt by radicals to return to the origin of their faith is doomed if they think that replicating exactly what is said in the Bible or Quran is the fulfillment of God's will. There is not only the question -how can anyone know God's will? - but the surely devastating question for Christian killers such as George W Bush and Tony Blair: What does 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' mean? It is not as if there is any doubt, it doesn't even relate to 'Saint' Augustine's confession: Lord, make me chaste...but not yet to produce Thou Shalt Not Kill, unless

We know that both Bush and Blair could use the Just War argument in the context of Christianity, but just as Islam did not emerge as a single system even within Muhammad's lifetime, so the development of Christianity as a 'single system' never really happened, and the dominance in Europe of the Catholic Church was only sustained through the mass extermination of so-called 'heretics' such as the Anomoeans and notably the Cathars, who were pacifists. Indeed, one wonders if Christianity was stripped of its pacifist tendencies precisely to enable the Holy Roman Empire to fulfill its political destiny, noting that it would not have believed there could be any separation between religion and politics. Just as one notes the determination of later generations to break this connection, even among the devout Christians of the American Revolution.

How much any of this is derived from a reading of the Bible depends on whether the Bible is to be taken as a whole, or just in its parts, with the inevitable reality that people will cherry pick those bits which suit them and ignore the rest. Thus the same Christians who cite the Old Testament for their beliefs and actions, ignore the denunciations of masturbation and homosexuality, and have no intention of stoning adulterers to death, as if these instructions did not apply to them. The same people who believe God created the world in 7 days, who believe in Adam and Eve and original sin, choose the Genesis version of the creation because it suits them; that there are seven accounts of creation, one such being in Job is blithely ignored, perhaps because it doesn't feature the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, original sin and seven days. Or it could just be that most people don't read Job so as Yodajazz puts it, they don't really know what is in their own book?

The Quran was unfinished, because Muhammad did not live to complete his work, which was to create a community of the faithful who would live at peace with each other instead of constantly bickering and fighting and wasting their resources. Muhammad had the nous to present his revelations in Arabic, when the competing monotheist ideas of Judaism and Christianity came in other tongues. Islam was a religion that came from the Arabs that was for the Arabs. To understand the Quran thus means to understand the context in which Muhammad lived, to weave one's way through the challenges of the powerful pagan tribes into which he was born, the existence of the Roman and Sassanid empires to the north which Muhammad may have encountered if indeed he travelled that far north, but also to ask why monotheism became such a dominant concept in religion, to which there have rarely been any satisfactory answers, other than that is easier and more convenient to believe in one almighty power rather than a tree god, a river god, a sand god, a love god and so on -and that is before you even start on the goddesses. Christopher Hitchens has pointed out how much of Islam is pinched from other religions, how the Hajj was a ritual that existed before Islam; some may not know that before Muhammad's flight from Mecca, Muslims turned toward Jerusalem to pray, and only turned to Mecca once they reached Medina.

What we end up with is the bizarre situation in which the large number of 'Islamic scholars' who emerged after 9/11 have been determined to prove that Islam is little more than a violent death cult that justifies the execution of infidels and the sexual slavery of women, but cherry pick the same passages from the Quran that are cited by those Muslims -often converts from Christianity- who justify the murder of infidels and the sexual enslavement of women. This is not possible because that is what the Quran actually says, it is only possible through a wilfull re-interpretation of the text to justify anything, including the acts of violence that have so rightly caused outrage and horror among decent people, many of them Muslims.

The status of women illustrates this confusion well. The radical Egyptian, Sayed Qutb, whose writings are required reading among the Islamic revolutionaries, once wrote that capitalism is a 'Jewish plot' to destroy the family. In his writings on women 'Women are Working' he condemned the idea that a woman should leave the home and work when her real work is at home raising a family. The example of Muhammad himself is clearly irrelevant here, as his first wife Khadija was not only older than him but was a merchant who ran her own trading house, in which Muhammad was employed and on whose caravans north to the markets of Damascus it is assumed Muhammad went. She was also the first person to convert to Islam, and in the Quran it is clear that when Muhammad called for women to dress with modesty, it was because most at that time were barely dressed at all. If one can conjure up an image of what the Arabs looked like at that time, think of the way we see the tribes of the Amazon basin. Another point illustrates how contemporary Muslims re-interpret the Quran, for it nowhere suggests women should hide their faces. I have even read somewhere where this obsession with covering the face is called the Saudi Veil, in recognition of the damage that has been done to modern Islam by the strictures of Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahab who married into the Saudi tribe and through this alliance established a link between politics and religion that has brought ruin across the Middle East and Asia, and whose well-paid evangelists have become a driving force in Islamic education in the United Kingdom and other countries.

Fundamental to all this is what Irving Finkel has argued is the emergence of a moral cosmology after the flood at a time when Middle Eastern religions were being written down. In the millenia before science as we know it emerged to offer practical explanations of the world we live in, it appears human societies -and it is as true of the Middle East and Africa as it is of the Americas- developed concepts of punishment and reward that were designed to give order to social relations, and whose moral content was related to a cosmology which saw no separation between past, present and future, nor any separation between the earth and the heavens. Give it some thought. If people believe in an all-powerful god, and a man or a group of men tell them that if they do not behave in such a way god will punish them, the believers will be genuinely keen to behave. But it has been possible for people who ridicule religious peolple for believing in sky fairies and miracles, to detach the moral agenda from religion and re-cast punishment and reward as law, to replace priests and imams with judges and politicians, to replace religious texts with constitutions

And you need only consider the endless and often bitter debates that rage over the 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution to understand how easy it is to not understand what the Constitution says, and what it means. Because as people use texts from the past to justify the present, so they are also attempting to shape the future, but without the doubts that occupied Ophelia, doomed as she was to fall in love with Hamlet:

Lord, we know what we are, but not what we might be.

[yodajazz]

Many people try to critique Islam and other ancient religions in light of today's society. But if you simply put things in perspective of what was happening at the time, things are a lot easier to understand. Take the veil for example. In the time of Muhammed and before, soldiers often got to keep whatever they could pick up, and also take women for their own sexual pleasure (rape). Muhammed had to consider how to control his own soldiers. So when they conquered a town, having the women cover up was a way to keep his own men from running wild. So at that time it really was for their own protection, I believe. When Nasser, the President of Egypt died in 1970 there were videos taken of crowds crying women. Not, one could be observed to be wearing their heads covered. I believe that of ot the radical Islamists practices are more about power and control, rather than religious purity. For example the Taliban's attack on women's education. Muhammad's first wife, ( and Islam's first convert) was a wealthy business woman, who was older than him.

I am one who believes, the life lessons in ancient wisdom are still valid and important. I see them not as keys to an afterlife, but for prescriptions for peace in happiness in our current lives. And for me, it's not so much about belief in an actually God, (by what ever name he/it is called), but understanding that our actions have consequences beyond what is immediately seen.

[Stavros]

Many people try to critique Islam and other ancient religions in light of today's society. But if you simply put things in perspective of what was happening at the time, things are a lot easier to understand. Take the veil for example. In the time of Muhammed and before, soldiers often got to keep whatever they could pick up, and also take women for their own sexual pleasure (rape). Muhammed had to consider how to control his own soldiers. So when they conquered a town, having the women cover up was a way to keep his own men from running wild. So at that time it really was for their own protection, I believe. When Nasser, the President of Egypt died in 1970 there were videos taken of crowds crying women. Not, one could be observed to be wearing their heads covered. I believe that of ot the radical Islamists practices are more about power and control, rather than religious purity. For example the Taliban's attack on women's education. Muhammad's first wife, ( and Islam's first convert) was a wealthy business woman, who was older than him.

I am one who believes, the life lessons in ancient wisdom are still valid and important. I see them not as keys to an afterlife, but for prescriptions for peace in happiness in our current lives. And for me, it's not so much about belief in an actually God, (by what ever name he/it is called), but understanding that our actions have consequences beyond what is immediately seen.

I don't agree that the veil was one way of protecting women from predatory men. As I suggested in my earlier post, and as is implied in the Quran itself, people did not wear many clothes at that time, and there is nothing to suggest that Hijab means covering the face, though it almost certainly does mean covering up the breasts and genital areas. From this perspective, it has been argued that Islam offered women more respect than they had before, although another perspective sees the emergence in Islam of a more patriarchal social structure, with a shift from polyandry to polygamy although the context of the latter is often ignored in contemporary society.

Hijab is little different from women covering their heads when they enter a place of religious worship; you can see members of the Plymouth Brethren in the UK whose clothing bears a reasonable similarity with what Muslim and some Orthodox Jewish women wear in their daily lives, it has been manipulated for political purposes by both the so-called Radicals and their critics in the West.

Your comment on Egypt is a good one, as my own experiences in the Middle East over many years suggests that more and more women have adopted 'modest' attire, when in years gone by it was not considered necessary or even desirable. At one time the veil was actually more a facet of class in the sense that the women who wore it were for the most part wives or daughters from wealthy and politically influential families. The poor could not afford to dress properly; indeed, even today many young women who go to colleges on scholarships from Islamic societies receive a clothing grant which inevitably means they conform to the 'standards' imposed by that society. For what it's worth, I recall a talk on a 16th or 17th century Tsar who would not allow a physician to treat his wife because it meant he might see her face. The Tsar's women, until when I do not know, never emerged from their apartments without a full-face veil, something unheard of in most of the Middle East at that time.

It is all driven by politics.