Islam - the religion of peace

[martin48]

Good opinion piece


http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-d...ocial_facebook

[irvin66]

As we all know, Islam is a peaceful religion that we see examples of every day....

[Stavros]

One thing I will point out is that there is an important distinction between mocking someone's ethnic traits and satirizing a belief system, even if that doctrine is religious. Ridiculing ideas (such as the hypocrisy of threatening people for insinuating you aren't peaceful) should be fair game entirely.

But even if the cartoons are racist, that can never justify a violent response. If there are hate crime laws (personally I'm against their enactment), the authors can be taken to court. Someone can make their own cartoon. They can write an editorial stating how the cartoons go beyond some preconceived norm of decency. But people rightfully see the violence against cartoonists, even professional provocateurs, as actually threatening to one of the foundations of our civilization; the right to express oneself free of physical threat.

The point of re-printing the cartoons is not to say you would have printed them yourself had there been no threat, but that you stand in solidarity against any such threats once made.

It is curious that I posted two cartoons, one of which has since been deleted, or shall we way, censored?

The point I was making was that the drawings themselves perpetuate stereotypes of Jews and Arabs and that not only do I find that offensive, I also find it offensive that the implication in the cartoons -as Irvin's dirty cartoons also show- is that there is no difference between Muhammad as the founder of Islam, and the violent extremists who slaughter in his name, which puts Charlie Hebdo in the same camp as the neo-fascist movement in Britain, France and Germany which refuses to make any distinction between Islam as a theology and the perverse politics that is being used as a justification for any number of crimes.

That said, I do not recommend banning such cartoons, just as I am as appalled as everyone else at the destructive response the cartoons elicited, but I do believe that the Danish cartoons and the French ones are too close to the offensive to be 'merely satirical' and to think otherwise is naive. I wonder why it is that so many cartoons of Jesus do not present him as a Jew with thick lips, a big nose and cunning eyes, but as a European?

The Nazi cartoon with its resemblance to the Hebdo cartoon has been deleted, the cartoon of Muhammad remains -and has been added to by Irvin- and remains to foster precisely the hatred and ridicule that people want to express against Muslims, much as the Nazi's did against the Jews in the 1930s. Because a broader understanding of what Islam is, and might be, compared to what the violent extremists want is not for discussion. Is it any wonder that people with intelligence abandon HungAngels when it is so shamefully biased?

[Ben in LA]

From Tumblr: Charlie Hebdo: This Attack Was Nothing To Do With Free Speech - It Was About War

[trish]

From Martin’s link

“A religion is not just a set of texts but the living beliefs and practices of its adherents. Islam today includes a substantial minority of believers who countenance, if they don’t actually carry out, a degree of violence in the application of their convictions that is currently unique. Charlie Hebdo had been nondenominational in its satire, sticking its finger into the sensitivities of Jews and Christians, too—but only Muslims responded with threats and acts of terrorism. For some believers, the violence serves a will to absolute power in the name of God, which is a form of totalitarianism called Islamism—politics as religion, religion as politics. “Allahu Akbar!” the killers shouted in the street outside Charlie Hebdo. They, at any rate, know what they’re about.”––George Packer The Blame for the Charlie Hebdo Murders in http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-d...ocial_facebook .

It is often implied that Christians (for example) do not murder in the name of religion. However, they do. Just not as much as they use to and not with as little provocation as was once sufficient. In the U.S. the murder rate of obstetricians has reduced the number of family planning clinics that perform abortions to nearly zero in some States. But at least we’re not burning witches anymore, nor torturing heretics on the rack and mercifully murdering them when they say, “Uncle!” The atrocities and enhanced interrogations we now commit are in the name of politics and profit.

I do think the Packer’s article has this much right, “A religion is ... the living beliefs and practices of its adherents.” It is accordingly impossible to set aside Islam as a causative factor in the violence in Paris two days ago, or the ongoing violence in Syria, Iraq etc. But Islam does not sit within a vacuum, and that violence is a reaction not only to the satirical jabs of a few cartoonists but also the political upheaval wreaked upon the Islamic world by two centuries of exploitation by Western nations and their accompaniment of profiteers.

Did you know the war in Afghanistan ended yesterday? We still have missiles, jets and boots on the ground there. But we did lower and retire the Green NATO flag the flew above NATO headquarters there, and raised a different green NATO flag symbolizing our new “resolute support” for Afghanistan.

Those who travel in the MiddleEast and Northern Africa (I’ve only been to Morocco) note that the representation of people and animal forms in ancient religious art is infrequent. Depictions of Allah or the Prophet are rare. One might suspect this is because the Quran proscribes against idolatry––but such proscriptions in the Old Testament have not significantly discouraged Christians from making figurative representations of God, Jesus and the Virgin Mary. One can certainly display artful figures that refer to the holy pantheon without falling into idolatrous worship.

(I might mention that no one knows what any member of this pantheon actually looked like, and so it’s impossible to create an actual image of God, or Jesus or the Virgin, or Allah or Mohammad for that matter. One can only scribble a few lines that REFER to God, Jesus, the Virgin etc. Pictorial references are not images. They can only do what “words” do; i.e. they can only refer. So if a pictorial reference to Mohammad is sacrilegious, than why aren’t all other scribbles that refer to Mohammad sacrilegious?)

In any case, the proscription against idolatry in the Quran doesn’t really explain the infrequency of representational forms in Islamic art. The prohibition against such forms is found in the Islamic Hadith. The reason for the proscription is rather cryptic, but it seems that artists should not endeavor to create living forms because such is the work of Allah, not man. On the day of reckoning the creators of such representational forms will be punished. They will be told, “Give life to what you have created.” Presumably they will forfeit their eternal life and bequeath it to the forms they have drawn, sculpted and carved. Their punishment already secure, I see no reason why Allah requires his fundamentalists to go about killing cartoonists.

But what about the blasphemy? According to Fareed Zakaria ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...3d5_story.html )there is no law in the Quran against blasphemy. The proscriptions against blasphemy are (according to Fareed) mostly to be found in the Old Testament. If that’s the case Christians and Jews should also be killing folk for blasphemous satire, not just Islamic fundamentalists.

Throughout the Middle Ages the Islamic world bloomed intellectually. It produced mathematicians, astronomers, philosophers and poets that rival the best the world has ever seen. Religious art was non-representational, but representational art thrived in non-religious contexts. While Christians were committing atrocities in the name of religion, Omar Khayyam was writing poetry, solving cubic equations, drinking wine and making love to beautiful women in the warm desert dunes of Persia.

A religion is the living beliefs and practices of it’s adherents. Those adherents change with time and place. What beliefs drop away, what practices grow in importance and which are lost only later to be revived depend on hard political circumstances. Religion is one of those things that can lie dormant and then rise up and bite you in the ass just when you thought things were going well––or not so well.

[irvin66]

but they do live in the Middle Ages, just look at the laws that they follow, flogging and stoning people who think differently than them....
is it civilized if I may ask...?

[trish]

Who lives in the Middle Ages? At least metaphorically, those that flog and stone do. Also those who capture and torture their captives with water boarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions and forced feeding.

Flogging and stoning are the punishments demanded by the Old Testament for offending God's Law. How does a believer decide which of God's laws to follow? How does one pick and choose?

It's not so much the ancient religious laws that matter, but which ones the adherents choose to practice or not to practice. These choices are as much conditioned by the political forces (big oil, dictators, foreign powers, western culture) exercised upon the community of believers as by the dispositions of the believers themselves.

I do think there is something about the interconnections between Islam as it is practiced today and the modern world at large that is unstable. Everyone needs to work at extricating ourselves from this delicate balance, not just Muslims. Assimilation worked in the U.S. when it was inundated by waves of Italians, Germans, Poles and Irishmen. But the U.S. population then was composed mostly of Christians of European ancestry. Assimilation of Muslim North Africans into France is much more difficult...perhaps unlikely. Learning to live multiculturally (as opposed to the strategy of assimilation) is harder to do. It's probably preferable to building a wall, though Texans don't think so.

[cameron47]

Islam is a cult

[broncofan]

The Nazi cartoon with its resemblance to the Hebdo cartoon has been deleted, the cartoon of Muhammad remains -and has been added to by Irvin- and remains to foster precisely the hatred and ridicule that people want to express against Muslims, much as the Nazi's did against the Jews in the 1930s. Because a broader understanding of what Islam is, and might be, compared to what the violent extremists want is not for discussion. Is it any wonder that people with intelligence abandon HungAngels when it is so shamefully biased?

This is not a contest, so one bad act does not offset another. But there are hateful cartoons of Jews made in the Middle East on a weekly basis. In Iraq, the Shiite regime made a cartoon of satan having sex with a Jewish woman to spawn ISIS that was disseminated in their mainstream media, perhaps to riotous laughter. I happen to see these every week. Iran had a Holocaust cartoon contest to test the west' free speech standards. No deaths. Articles written. But no deaths.

I tried to say in the other thread during the Gaza campaign that I was concerned that nine synagogues had been lit on fire by molotov cocktails presumably by disgruntled Muslim youths. The cartoon murderer here ended up killing three or four hostages at the end of his reign of terror at a Kosher market (probably just because he wanted to kill people near salted meats). On the list of grievances, I think people being raped and murdered and houses of worship being firebombed merits more concern than mean-spirited cartoons. And such cartoons don't merit concern only in proportion to how many people get killed in response to them. Yes, I don't like cartoons of people with large noses. A letter to the editor would have been a very nice gesture by the murderers.

[broncofan]

If there are hate crime laws (personally I'm against their enactment), the authors can be taken to court.

I doubt anyone cares too much about my personal positions. But I am against the enactment of hate speech laws, not hate crime laws. I do believe in enhanced punishments for assaults based on race, sexual orientation, and religion. I just think punishing hateful speech is a bad idea....since it can be effectively countered through more speech.