I like Zionism the way I like cherry pie, which should be served every year on Washington's birthday, and only philistines would add ice cream.
We know that human beings are often bigots, and right now an unfortunate percentage of the human beings who embrace Islam also appear to be bigotted against Jews. This is not to say that Islam itself expresses bigotry against Jews. Believing that adherants of a particular idea or ideas are incorrect is not bigotry. It is to say that many adherents of Islam are bigotted against Jews.
Okay, the commenters seem to be busy, silent or least not tappy toeing with the issue at hand.
But fearless Mck will trip, clunk wade into the moshpit in dispute of said excellent post by the gentleman from Mt. Horeb.
1. A letter didn't recently surface. It actually was send to a group of scholars concerned with pastoral, academic and philosophical understandings regard B16 when he spoke at Regensburg to der german guys in der catholische seminary/university/philosophische department.
The argument flollowing seemed to center around whether B16 did or did not say:
in erstaunlich schroffer, uns uberraschend schroffer Form ganz einfach. (something to do with brusqueness)
And of course did B16 use Ibn Hazm's name instead of al Ghazzali ?
As it turned out, B16 did say that but of course that was mis-unterstooden and so a bunch of people blew stuff up and al jeezera recorded the protests.
2. Then 38 guys wrote a letter to papa ratzi, a year ago. And now in anniversary of one year, another 138 scholars respectfully sent a lot of christian respectables another letter.
3. This is getting too long. So before I go on, I have to ask question for the gentleman from Mt. Horeb:
Arnold, It seems you could have written your post independent of ever having read the 138 Letter, since you seem to be covering purely political territory. Does that seem correct ?
Not to seem biased, another question:
What in sam hill, does it matter what Muhammed letters were sent 800 years ago ?
Well, McK, here's what the prophet Mohammed's letter, sent out to a byzantine emperor, a persian king, and a chinese emperor 1375 years ago, has to do with a letter sent out by a committee of moslem clerics to their christian counterparts in 2007.
If you read Ms Schesler's comments, which I passed on to everybody here, she clearly pointed out the parallels in the language used in the letters in 632 and the letter composed in 2007. She clearly shows the threat to the "people of the Book" spelled out concisely in the Qur'an. And she therefore points out that this letter to the West and to the leaders of its religions is a threat warning of intended conquests to come.
Religion isn't significant to me, McK. You certainly know that by now. But here in the christian West there is freedom for people like me to live in more or less complete political harmony with everyone, because nobody really gives a damn what I believe or do not believe.
I think you will understand why I have to say that is a result of the protestant reformation of Luther, Zwingli, Knox and a host of other dissenting religious leaders; and certainly not because of anything your church did for human freedom over the centuries.
But if our civilization had been led -- or even strongly influenced -- by Moslems, and not by Roman Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Mormons, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and whatever, we here would be living at the same level of pious ignorance, hatred, intercommunal viciousness and all else that characterizes the totalitariansm of the world of Islam that I have been reading about in the news media of the entire none-islamic world for most of my life. Not to mention the human degradation that would have been forced upon the lives of my wife and daughter from the time of their childhood.
So the question of confronting his alien civilization that so strongly clashes with ours, is not just a question of religion, and is not just a question of politics.
It is, in my judgement, a question of the growing need for free men and women everywhere to realize the threat posed to the freedoms that are at the very core of western civilization.
That threat may or may not be posed by Islam as a religion. But what some people term a religion, I can all too frequently as an army in training to destroy us. The suicide bombers that seem so pervasive in their culture are merely a harbinger of that threat. But I treat all this as a warning to the West that ought to be confronted and not ignored.
Anyway, that is what Ms Phyllis Schesler, a Jewish religious scholar who has travelled and studied the islamic world, and now can no longer do, thinks. I would heed her warning.
Wince, I don't think those letters of warning from the islamic clerics are targeted at Jews in particular. I think they are letters of intent sent to western civilization as a whole.
This is now a West that is growing mushy, weak and tolerant of people who intend us terminal harm. That is why Europe is threatened with the
emergence of Eurabia in its heartland.
These are among the reasons I am happy with the rise of China as a superpower, the re-emergence of Russia as a superpower, and the re-emergence of India as a great power after a sleep of many centuries.
These societies, along with Japan, Taiwan, the two Koreas and the buddhist societies of southeast Asia will one day be the front line of defense against Islam for the rest of the world; reprising exactly the same role that the Soviet Union played against the wartime threat of armed Nazism. They shall never allow democracy to give Islam a wedge with which to decay their strength and resolve.
I'm surprised that my condemantion of cherry pie a la mode is so uncontroversial.
Arnold,
Since Hindus, Buddists, Taoists, Shintoists and atheists are not the somewhat protected Peoples of the Book, they have even less motivation to give Islamo-fascists any breathing room.
I'm looking for some synogogues in Mecca. They were there before Mohammed. They should be there now, and the people who worship at them should be first class citizens.
Arnold, I think you are confused about the finer points of classical (i.e. pre-modern) Islamic law. The invitation to Islam (dawa), or at least to Islamic sovereignty, had to be given in clear language, and before the beginning of any hostilities. If the invitation was fully understood and rationally accepted, then there would be no need for hostility. Taqiyya, on the otherhand, is dissimulation allowed in the midst of hostilities to mislead the enemy -- like US efforts at counter-intelligence.
So, not only did you miss the fact that the authors of these letters (e.g. Ali Gomaa) were followers of modernist interpretations of Islamic law that call for coexistence with non-Islamic nations, but you completely mixed-up the concepts of dawa and taqiyya, which are fundamentally different.
"From my readings of the history of the conquests of the Arab nation"
Did you read how, following Muslim conquest, Muslim Arabs invited Jews back to Jerusalem after both Byzantines and Persians (the latter under Byzantine pressure) had banned them from their holy city?
they who are true to their bond with God and never break their covenant; and who keep together what God has bidden to be joined, and stand in awe of their Sustainer and fear the most evil reckoning [which awaits such as do not respond to Him]; and who are patient in adversity out of a longing for their Sustainer's countenance, and are constant in prayer, and spend on others, secretly and openly, out of what We provide for them as sustenance, and [who] repel evil with good.* It is these that shall find their fulfilment in the hereafter. (Qur'an: 20-22, trans. M. Asad)
*Asad explains in a note that meaning of this phrase, according to "the great majority of the classical commentators"
is "they repay evil with good"; thus Al-Hasan al-Basra (as quoted by Baghawi, Zamakhshari and Razi): "When they are deprived [of anything], they give; and when they are wronged, they forgive." Tabari's explanation is very similar: "They repel the evil done to them by doing good to those who did it"; and "they do not repay evil with evil, but repel it by [doing] good".
I posted for review comments made in print by the Ms Schesler, a religious Jew who has spent a fair amount of her life studying islamic relegion and the islamic cultures.
Obviously I agreed with much of what she wrote, or I wouldn't have posted her commentary.
My own experiences with Moslems -- aside from the Bosnians to whom my wife was distantly related through a marriage of one of her aunts after she came here from Croatia -- were Arabs we both encountered during our studies in Israel in 1973-1974. Unlike the Israelis, who frequently were unpleasant but straight, the Arabs tended to be charming liars.
So I think Phyllis Schesler's studies and experiences in dealing with them reflect reality.
Your experience with Arabs and Muslims does not in the slightest match my own.
But that is neither here nor there when it comes to the fact that you (and the cited author with whom you've expressed broad agreement) have made logically contradictory conclusions in your exegesis of the recent open letter to Christian leaders.
I assume you posted the religious Jewish lady's exegesis of the Muslim scholars' letter for some reason. Given that you claimed to agree with her conclusions, I thought it would be useful for you (and anyone else still reading) to learn about the errors in her analysis.
My understanding of Arnold Harris is that he chooses to have absolutely nothing, zilch, nada whatsoever to do with religion except when he so chooses to have something to do with religion.
And his conclusion that the 138 letter can be intractably referenced as directly connected to Muhammed letters some 1375 years ago because a jewish lady said so in print on the internet recently confirms the total veracity of his, ermmh, tenuous conclusions.
I don't think Phyllis Schesler made any mistakes in her analysis of the threat of Islam to the non-islamic world. Her descriptions of islamic societies both in Mohammed's time and today equally describe adacious would-be conquerors who threaten the religious rights and independent cultures of all non-islamic societies.
Where in the entire Islamic world are Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and those of other non-islamic creeds allowed to freely congregate, worship, seek converts, and enjoy the political freedoms that all of them have as a birthright in the advanced societies of the West?
The only exceptions in the Middle East are in Lebanon, in which the local Christians have their own armed militias with which they enforce their rights, and in the State of Israel, in which the local Jews have not only a country of their own, but some 200 nuclear and thermonuclear weapons with which to defend themselves, if the Jew-hating ideas of Jimmy Carter were ever to be locked in as the foreign policy of the United States.
I would never trust my freedoms as an American or non-believer to any collection of moslem clerics or to any of the peoples they have under their sway.
Because I am convinced that the world order they are attempting to create is one in which all freedoms, all human liberties, all that spells out the human dignities of the various independent civilizations, would be erased forever, to be supplanted by a blind, unthinking and permanent submission to the force they consider to be their deity. And more likely, to whatever gang takes over their societies and tyrannizes the populations in the name of that deity.
And this also is why I am opposed to allowing Moslems to set up large-scale permanent residency in this country. There will be nothing but endless trouble with them as their numbers accumulate here.
IMO, B16 accomplished a similar feat during his speech in Regensburg when he addressed an academic audience and a few islamic scholars. After, all, the comfort zone is sometimes the only place where change has the potential to occur.
While B16 probably may not have the pastoral skills or diplomatic language of his predecessor, the global reaction in some quarters indicate, B16 did strike an appropriate nerve. The reaction was something different among the global loonies
Unfortunately, the internet doesn't seem a friendly-user place where valid discussion is genuinely permeable without others screaming victimhood, islamaphobe, racist, the usual suspects, new terms for jihad-asses, money-mongering at the expense of authentic relig-jun, or downright idiocy:
I vision a serious global threat which will not be ameliorated or dissolved by defensive linguistic or convoluted exegeses by scholars publishing open letters to ecclesiastical potentates as though they are in fact in charge of anything. The scholarly approach is quite good as long as one knows there aren't going to be any bombs coming through the window.
While I'm at it, the biggest bombast of all, the only thing I got out of the 138 letter is that Islam shares equally in the first and second commandments---love God and be nice to your neighbors. Like welcome to second grade catholic religion class.
So after 1300 years, there finally comes a meeting ground for pax vobiscum.
In the mean time, the saudi government and others are the source of major funding of islamic centers throughout north America and who knows what the thugocrats in Iran are doing.
I better quit, as I don't wish to burn out the brain power of the commenters here.
As I wrote above, it is logically contradictory to claim that an instance of communication such as the recent letter is both dawa and taqiyya (as defined in classical Islamic law) -- and you still have not to this point. The fact that the author does exactly this (and by extension you through your unqualified praise) shows that she is either confused about fundamental terminology or is engaged in a deceitful smear of Muslims and of Islam.
We know that human beings are often bigots, and right now an unfortunate percentage of the human beings who embrace Islam also appear to be bigotted against Jews. This is not to say that Islam itself expresses bigotry against Jews. Believing that adherants of a particular idea or ideas are incorrect is not bigotry. It is to say that many adherents of Islam are bigotted against Jews.
Yours,
Wince
But fearless Mck will
trip, clunkwade into the moshpit in dispute of said excellent post by the gentleman from Mt. Horeb.1. A letter didn't recently surface. It actually was send to a group of scholars concerned with pastoral, academic and philosophical understandings regard B16 when he spoke at Regensburg to der german guys in der catholische seminary/university/philosophische department.
The argument flollowing seemed to center around whether B16 did or did not say:
in erstaunlich schroffer, uns uberraschend schroffer Form ganz einfach. (something to do with brusqueness)
And of course did B16 use Ibn Hazm's name instead of al Ghazzali ?
As it turned out, B16 did say that but of course that was mis-unterstooden and so a bunch of people blew stuff up and al jeezera recorded the protests.
2. Then 38 guys wrote a letter to papa ratzi, a year ago. And now in anniversary of one year, another 138 scholars respectfully sent a lot of christian respectables another letter.
3. This is getting too long. So before I go on, I have to ask question for the gentleman from Mt. Horeb:
Arnold, It seems you could have written your post independent of ever having read the 138 Letter, since you seem to be covering purely political territory. Does that seem correct ?
Not to seem biased, another question:
What in sam hill, does it matter what Muhammed letters were sent 800 years ago ?
If you read Ms Schesler's comments, which I passed on to everybody here, she clearly pointed out the parallels in the language used in the letters in 632 and the letter composed in 2007. She clearly shows the threat to the "people of the Book" spelled out concisely in the Qur'an. And she therefore points out that this letter to the West and to the leaders of its religions is a threat warning of intended conquests to come.
Religion isn't significant to me, McK. You certainly know that by now. But here in the christian West there is freedom for people like me to live in more or less complete political harmony with everyone, because nobody really gives a damn what I believe or do not believe.
I think you will understand why I have to say that is a result of the protestant reformation of Luther, Zwingli, Knox and a host of other dissenting religious leaders; and certainly not because of anything your church did for human freedom over the centuries.
But if our civilization had been led -- or even strongly influenced -- by Moslems, and not by Roman Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Mormons, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and whatever, we here would be living at the same level of pious ignorance, hatred, intercommunal viciousness and all else that characterizes the totalitariansm of the world of Islam that I have been reading about in the news media of the entire none-islamic world for most of my life. Not to mention the human degradation that would have been forced upon the lives of my wife and daughter from the time of their childhood.
So the question of confronting his alien civilization that so strongly clashes with ours, is not just a question of religion, and is not just a question of politics.
It is, in my judgement, a question of the growing need for free men and women everywhere to realize the threat posed to the freedoms that are at the very core of western civilization.
That threat may or may not be posed by Islam as a religion. But what some people term a religion, I can all too frequently as an army in training to destroy us. The suicide bombers that seem so pervasive in their culture are merely a harbinger of that threat. But I treat all this as a warning to the West that ought to be confronted and not ignored.
Anyway, that is what Ms Phyllis Schesler, a Jewish religious scholar who has travelled and studied the islamic world, and now can no longer do, thinks. I would heed her warning.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
This is now a West that is growing mushy, weak and tolerant of people who intend us terminal harm. That is why Europe is threatened with the
emergence of Eurabia in its heartland.
These are among the reasons I am happy with the rise of China as a superpower, the re-emergence of Russia as a superpower, and the re-emergence of India as a great power after a sleep of many centuries.
These societies, along with Japan, Taiwan, the two Koreas and the buddhist societies of southeast Asia will one day be the front line of defense against Islam for the rest of the world; reprising exactly the same role that the Soviet Union played against the wartime threat of armed Nazism. They shall never allow democracy to give Islam a wedge with which to decay their strength and resolve.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
...walk into a bar. And the Byzantine Emperor says to the bartender, "Three Zombies." And the bartender says, "I'm hip. But what do you wanna drink?"
bada-bing!
Good one.
I'm surprised that my condemantion of cherry pie a la mode is so uncontroversial.
Arnold,
Since Hindus, Buddists, Taoists, Shintoists and atheists are not the somewhat protected Peoples of the Book, they have even less motivation to give Islamo-fascists any breathing room.
I'm looking for some synogogues in Mecca. They were there before Mohammed. They should be there now, and the people who worship at them should be first class citizens.
Yours,
Wince
Thanks. It's an homage to an old gag by the Ritz Brothers.
So, not only did you miss the fact that the authors of these letters (e.g. Ali Gomaa) were followers of modernist interpretations of Islamic law that call for coexistence with non-Islamic nations, but you completely mixed-up the concepts of dawa and taqiyya, which are fundamentally different.
Did you read how, following Muslim conquest, Muslim Arabs invited Jews back to Jerusalem after both Byzantines and Persians (the latter under Byzantine pressure) had banned them from their holy city?
*Asad explains in a note that meaning of this phrase, according to "the great majority of the classical commentators"
I posted for review comments made in print by the Ms Schesler, a religious Jew who has spent a fair amount of her life studying islamic relegion and the islamic cultures.
Obviously I agreed with much of what she wrote, or I wouldn't have posted her commentary.
My own experiences with Moslems -- aside from the Bosnians to whom my wife was distantly related through a marriage of one of her aunts after she came here from Croatia -- were Arabs we both encountered during our studies in Israel in 1973-1974. Unlike the Israelis, who frequently were unpleasant but straight, the Arabs tended to be charming liars.
So I think Phyllis Schesler's studies and experiences in dealing with them reflect reality.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
But that is neither here nor there when it comes to the fact that you (and the cited author with whom you've expressed broad agreement) have made logically contradictory conclusions in your exegesis of the recent open letter to Christian leaders.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
And his conclusion that the 138 letter can be intractably referenced as directly connected to Muhammed letters some 1375 years ago because a jewish lady said so in print on the internet recently confirms the total veracity of his, ermmh, tenuous conclusions.
That I believe is fair and balanced.
You decide.
I don't think Phyllis Schesler made any mistakes in her analysis of the threat of Islam to the non-islamic world. Her descriptions of islamic societies both in Mohammed's time and today equally describe adacious would-be conquerors who threaten the religious rights and independent cultures of all non-islamic societies.
Where in the entire Islamic world are Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and those of other non-islamic creeds allowed to freely congregate, worship, seek converts, and enjoy the political freedoms that all of them have as a birthright in the advanced societies of the West?
The only exceptions in the Middle East are in Lebanon, in which the local Christians have their own armed militias with which they enforce their rights, and in the State of Israel, in which the local Jews have not only a country of their own, but some 200 nuclear and thermonuclear weapons with which to defend themselves, if the Jew-hating ideas of Jimmy Carter were ever to be locked in as the foreign policy of the United States.
I would never trust my freedoms as an American or non-believer to any collection of moslem clerics or to any of the peoples they have under their sway.
Because I am convinced that the world order they are attempting to create is one in which all freedoms, all human liberties, all that spells out the human dignities of the various independent civilizations, would be erased forever, to be supplanted by a blind, unthinking and permanent submission to the force they consider to be their deity. And more likely, to whatever gang takes over their societies and tyrannizes the populations in the name of that deity.
And this also is why I am opposed to allowing Moslems to set up large-scale permanent residency in this country. There will be nothing but endless trouble with them as their numbers accumulate here.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
IMO, B16 accomplished a similar feat during his speech in Regensburg when he addressed an academic audience and a few islamic scholars. After, all, the comfort zone is sometimes the only place where change has the potential to occur.
While B16 probably may not have the pastoral skills or diplomatic language of his predecessor, the global reaction in some quarters indicate, B16 did strike an appropriate nerve. The reaction was something different among the global loonies
Unfortunately, the internet doesn't seem a friendly-user place where valid discussion is genuinely permeable without others screaming victimhood, islamaphobe, racist, the usual suspects, new terms for jihad-asses, money-mongering at the expense of authentic relig-jun, or downright idiocy:
All religions are memetic fitness enhancers.... Sorry, that that link is emphasized.
I vision a serious global threat which will not be ameliorated or dissolved by defensive linguistic or convoluted exegeses by scholars publishing open letters to ecclesiastical potentates as though they are in fact in charge of anything. The scholarly approach is quite good as long as one knows there aren't going to be any bombs coming through the window.
While I'm at it, the biggest bombast of all, the only thing I got out of the 138 letter is that Islam shares equally in the first and second commandments---love God and be nice to your neighbors. Like welcome to second grade catholic religion class.
So after 1300 years, there finally comes a meeting ground for pax vobiscum.
In the mean time, the saudi government and others are the source of major funding of islamic centers throughout north America and who knows what the thugocrats in Iran are doing.
I better quit, as I don't wish to burn out the brain power of the commenters here.
Peace,
McK
As I wrote above, it is logically contradictory to claim that an instance of communication such as the recent letter is both dawa and taqiyya (as defined in classical Islamic law) -- and you still have not to this point. The fact that the author does exactly this (and by extension you through your unqualified praise) shows that she is either confused about fundamental terminology or is engaged in a deceitful smear of Muslims and of Islam.
Life is just full of logical contradictions. Few of which you can escape from except in your last ride in a box.
McK,
You got me serious thinking about religions as memetic fitness enhancers. We shall talk more of that at length one day.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI