Saturday, December 01, 2007
The teddy bear jihad
Michelle Malkin rounds up the "teddy bear jihad," in which Sudanese Islamists in dire need of a doseage adjustment have demanded that an English school teacher be executed for naming a teddy bear "Mohammed."
As I've written before, I've grown quite tired of "Muslim rage." Piling into the street in anger over something like this is purely and simply barbaric, and Westerners who treat it as anything other than that do not appreciate the importance of reason to their own spiritual, cultural, intellectual, and economic heritage. We should either mix some Prozac into the relief agency rice or get out of that part of the world as quickly as possible.
14 Comments:
By 
, at
Sat Dec 01, 12:11:00 PM:
At last! Someone else has finally resurrected the old, out of style, yet extremely appropriate label:
"simply barbaric"
Barbarians is right. Honest to goodness historical barbarians like Celts, Goths, and Franks showed higher levels of civilization.
One incident, with which I am more familiar than I want to be, demonstrates this fact. It took me most of an hour to find reference to it on the Internet. It seems that no one wants to remember a mob of Palestinian civilians mutilating and dismembering a couple of lost Jews *with their bare hands.*
http://www.masada2000.org/ramallah.html
The PA police tried to protect the Israelis for a while. Then they were ordered to 'just take the cameras.' They didn't want people to be able to see what was going to happen. But they didn't try to stop it.
By 
Purple Avenger, at
Sat Dec 01, 01:39:00 PM:
Those streets where the mobs are demonstrating are only a short Tomahawk flight from somewhere in the Red Sea. I'm just saying...
By Gary Rosen, at
Sat Dec 01, 02:05:00 PM:
The only thing left to debate is whether they are barbaric savages, or savage barbarians.
By Escort81, at
Sat Dec 01, 02:47:00 PM:
You know you've done something pretty bad when even the BBC America newscasts open with the story in disbelieving tones.
I wonder, though, how much of the mob demonstrations reflect tribalism, and how much are true expressions of Islamic theology. I am not a student of the Koran -- where would a plain text reading of a specific passage in the Koran lead to a desire to behead this poor teacher or even jail her for a few weeks?
I suspect there is some section of the Koran a sharia devotee could gin up to rationalize any act. There are chapters of the Old Testament (see Leviticus) that address how we are supposed to deal with lepers, and sections that say we are supposed to stone adulterers. There are even some scary sections in the New Testament, if read literally and not metaphorically (see Matthew 18:9, regarding eye plucking). The point here is that Christians and Jews overwhelmingly moved past enforcing such literalism in determining punishment, because there is an underlying belief in secular authority.
But Islam is 600+ years younger than Christianity. Where was Christendom 600 years ago? Not as enlightened as today -- since the Enlightenment had yet to take place! So I will pick a nit with DF82 and say that the Goths (who go back more than 600 years, not counting the teenage fashion movement of the 1990s) could certainly compete with Islamist demonstrators in The Sudan in the Barbarian Bowl. I'll lay the points and take the Visigoths. The fundamental difference, though, is that Islamists are barbaric in reaction to modernity, while the Goths didn't know any better (because of the obvious differences in mass communication technology).
We need Islam to go through a crash course of Renaissance & Reformation, and do it fast.
The only upside to this incident is that virtually all Islamic organizations in the west have condemned the sentence and the mobs. It would really be worrisome if that wasn't the case.
By , at
Sat Dec 01, 03:39:00 PM:
I have serious doubts that Western Islamic organizations repudiated these actions because they genuinely object to them. All of them want to see Sharia law installed in the West, and this kind of exaggerated reaction to the tiniest of perceived slights is typical of Islamic states.
By Escort81, at
Sat Dec 01, 06:32:00 PM:
I have no way of gauging the sincerity of Western Islamic organizations in their condemnation of the sentence and the mob conduct, so I'll take it at face value for now.
Some of these organizations may indeed want Sharia law in the West, but that it not a realistic goal. There is a big difference between the most progressive multi-culti wanting to be accommodating to Muslim practices in the West for the Muslim community, and actually consenting to being ruled by such practices, such that all Westerners are subject to a theocracy.
I know that there are lots of examples of, er, the camel's nose under the tent, but, really, does anyone see that as even a remote possibility in the next century?
By , at
Sun Dec 02, 12:18:00 AM:
Sharia law already exists in Canada and in the UK (defacto polygamy is allowed) and also the US (same).
Not all of it but parts of it. Under the rubric of PC and Multiculturalism.
I expect more expressions of this (ala Islamic Rage Boy) angry over cartoons, teddy bears or Piglet. And most Westerners will draw the appropriate conclusion:
This is what Muslims are really like. And we'd really like them to be deported far away. To their miserable failure homelands.
By , at
Sun Dec 02, 03:44:00 AM:
We need Islam to go through a crash course of Renaissance & Reformation, and do it fast.
Research how medieval Islam treated the philosopher Averroes and compare to the medieval Christian treatment of Aquinas, and then speculate on Renaissance and Reformation. Pope Benedict’s discourse last year, for which he got much grief, illuminates some of the differences between Islam and Christianity that were apparent even 600 years ago.
Also note the difference between “Render Unto Caesar” and the combining of church and state from in Islam from the beginning.
Much of the progress of the Renaissance came from intellectual curiosity: learning ancient Greek and Roman texts. One measure of the intellectual curiosity of the Arab world is the number of books translated into Arabic every year. Among the 325 million people of the Arab world, about 330 books are translated into Arabic each year. Greece, with a population of about 11 million, less than five percent of the population of the Arab world, translates five times as many books per year into Greek.
I too would like to have Renaissance & Reformation in Islam. Given evidence of in the face of such lack of intellectual curiosity on the part of the Arab world, and other factors cited above, I fear that a Renaissance & Reformation with regard to Islam is wishful thinking.
By Purple Avenger, at
Sun Dec 02, 08:10:00 AM:
Anyone who questions a single word of the Koran is kinda by definition apostate...since (unlike the Bible or Torah) its billed as the literal word of Allah.
The penalty for apostasy of course is death. Not going to have too many takers to be leading the charge for reform given the tautological nature of the beast.
By , at
Sun Dec 02, 10:46:00 AM:
PA is correct. Reform and reformation are, literally, heretical *unless* it's backward Reformation. That is, purifying practices to their earliest forms rather than innovating or altering them in new ways. That is called "bida'" [ بداء ]. (innovation)
ReE81: The European barbarians purposefully emulated the Romans in their dress, practices, and politics. (The feudal system of the Dark and Middle Ages grew from this synthesis, uniting an evolved version of barbarian tribalism in the form of a hierarchy of personal oaths of loyalty with Roman titles and ideas of governance and ties to land.) They *wanted* to be civilized. They knew that they were comparatively backward and *wanted* progress.
'Modern' Muslims like those in Sudan actually want to go backwards, because stoning adulteresses and executing people who insult the prophet are purer and more Islamic than twisted, infidel, zionist ideas of tolerance and secularism. Because that's how it starts, you know. You let the infidels come in and say things like that, and pretty soon they're 'enlightening' and 'educating' your youth, and your daughters wear jeans and sons stop 'disciplinging' their wives, and stop praying 5 times a day, and eventually some of them will convert to another religion and then you have to go and execute them.
And historical records and sociological mores and practices aside, the barbarians were at least kind enough to invent trial by jury and allow trial by combat, and if they were going to spontaneously lynch foreigners to use f'ing weapons and end it quickly.
IMO, a certain minimum of behavior exists to qualify oneself as part of civilization, and tearing out eyes, entrails, ripping off limbs, and parading them around as trophies (all by hand!) is FAR below that minimum.
Also, the very fact that we're comparing these assholes to barbarian hordes from 1500 years ago says a lot in and of itself, doesn't it?
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Sun Dec 02, 01:54:00 PM:
This comment has been removed by the author.
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Sun Dec 02, 02:01:00 PM:
TH: "...or get out of that part of the world as quickly as possible."
Good idea. It allows middlemen like me to take a piece of more cross-border business deals.
By , at
Sun Dec 02, 02:15:00 PM:
Islam is the anti-Christ, that is all one needs to understand.
In the meanwhile, do you support saving Congo? Does he live near you?
By JPMcT, at
Sun Dec 02, 05:10:00 PM:
I always find it amusing that our leftist anointed ones disparage military action in this theater of the world as "War For Oil". Their own draconian, poorly conceived environmental policies have made it impossible to seek realistic alternative or domestic fuel sources, so oil, like it or not, is the lifeblood of our economy...and WELL WORTH fighting about. On the other hand, these same illuminati are silent when these monkeys-in-people-suits bellow, howl and threaten armageddon over a political cartoon, a novel....or a Teddy Bear. We all find it amusing...but imagine them with a nuclear weapon.
