http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/the_crusades_reconsidered.html

August 11, 2013
The Crusades Reconsidered
By Mike Konrad


One of the idiocies passed off for decades among Western historians is bemoaning the Crusades as evil. The Islamic world -- the Ummah -- has disseminated this imaginary charge against the West, and like fools, we have absorbed Arab lies and taken the blame to heart. But the most superficial reading of Western history should put that canard to rest.
Shortly before he died in June 632 AD, Mohammed ordered Muslims to prepare to wage war against the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire.
Upon his death, Mohammed's successor, Abu Bakr, planned to fulfill those instructions. Plans were also made to conquer Zoroastrian Sassanid Persia.
This vainglorious troop of bandits should have been easily dispatched,
However. Persia and Byzantine Rome had just come out of a savagely vicious war which ended in 628 AD. Emperor Heraclius had finally imposed the total defeat over Persia that had eluded the earlier Roman Republic and the Caesars -- but Byzantine Rome, though victorious, was severely mauled. Persia was reduced to a state of anarchy; and forced to pay indemnities to Constantinople.
The Persian and Eastern Roman empires were attacked almost simultaneously around 633 AD, while both were still licking their wounds. So frightening were the Islamic advances that these former blood enemies made a sadly futile alliance. By 644, Persia fell anyway.
By 634 AD, Byzantine Palestine and Syria were being attacked. The Battle of Yarmouk in August 636 AD would see Eastern Roman forces beaten. Emperor Heraclius, the victorious warrior, a mere 8 years earlier, would have to sneak out back to Constantinople in a boat.
Farewell, a long farewell to Syria, my fair province. Thou art an infidel's (enemy's) now. Peace be with you, O' Syria -- what a beautiful land you will be for the enemy hands -- Emperor Heraclius, after the defeat at Yarmouk.
Roman-held Jerusalem was besieged in November 636 AD, and surrendered by the following April.
By 674 AD, the Muslims had taken Egypt and much of Anatolian Turkey, and were besieging Constantinople. The Byzantine Romans, unlike the Persians, still had some fight left and managed to lift the siege using Greek fire, a fearsome weapon similar to a flamethrower.
By 709 AD, all of Christian North Africa had fallen to Islam. Though it took the Muslims centuries, eventually all of Christianity was eliminated in the Maghreb.
In 711 AD, the Muslims invaded Spain, again taking advantage of weakness caused by internecine wars. It would be 781 years before Spain would be free. Among Islamic Andalusia's contributions to civilization were the demanded tribute of 100 white virgins every year to staff their harems. Every other contribution was plagiarized from other civilizations the Muslims had plundered.
By 732, the Muslims had advanced to central France, where they were finally repelled by Franks at the battle of Tours. Western Europe had been temporarily spared.
Sicily fell under Islamic rule for almost two centuries, until finally liberated by Norman Franks around 1091 AD.
According to tradition, Malta fell to Islam in 870 AD. Islam's contribution's to local culture was piracy. Malta became a staging point for predatory raids on Southern Europe.
After two centuries, Malta was finally retaken in 1091 AD.
Later on, historians would blame the Dark Ages on the Germanic Tribes, but the Goths and Vikings readily Christianized and embraced the higher civilization of the lands they conquered. The reality is that Islamic raiding is what produced the Dark Ages. Trade and the economy collapsed under the Muslim threat, plunging Europe into stagnation.
In 1095, after centuries of Muslim aggression, Pope Urban II finally had enough, and called Christians to war. He did so after the Byzantine Empire, now broken away from Roman Catholicism, appealed for fraternal help from the Western Christians to save them from Islam. After over 4 centuries of war with Islam, the Byzantines were on the verge of collapse. Most of Spain was still under Islamic tyranny. Malta and Sicily had only been recently freed.

One may condemn the atrocities of the Crusaders, but what infuriates the objective student of history is that the far greater crimes of Islam are ignored.
The Crusades was Christendom finally fighting back, not always honorably, but against a foe which had plunged Europe into darkness for centuries.
Instead we allowed our students to be brainwashed, and force fed an Islamic line that we have to feel guilty. The Muslims invaded Southern Europe, yet somehow we Westerners are labeled the imperialists.
Islamic aggression did not end with the Crusades.
The reason Columbus headed West was because the Muslims had blocked all trade routes to the East. Yet, we are never told this.
Up until the 16th century, Italy was regularly invaded by Islam. Otranto was taken by the Turks in 1480, and held for only 10 months. Yet, it was time enough to behead over 800 Christians who refused to convert.
Piracy and kidnapping was so common that Catholic Churches in Southern Europe had donation boxes where the faithful could contribute to ransom hostages.
One could go on and on. The Islamic subjugation of Greece and the Balkans. The kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of Christian boys, over the centuries, to be forcibly converted to Islam, and compelled to serve in the Ottoman Army as Janissaries.
The Islamic attempt to take Vienna. Twice! In 1529 and 1683.
A half million or more slaves from the British Isles were kidnapped on the high seas by the religion of peace.
It was not until the U.S. Marines took on the Barbary Pirates and the French razed Algeria that Islamic predation finally stopped in the 19th century; but all of this is forgotten. Somehow, white Christians are the only villains now.
We hear the Muslims bewail about British imperialism; but the British do not want to go back to Egypt. The Muslim do want Andulasia back. We hear about French crimes in Algeria -- which were real -- but do we remember that Islamic predation that was the real agent which caused the Dark Ages. Europeans were in North Africa for only a century, but Islam pounded Europe for 1200 years. Yet, it is the Arabs who claim victim status.
But what do our politicians do, but apologize for the Crusades. Why?! Have the Muslims apologized for 1400 years of their crimes?!
Part of this idiocy stems from a hyper-liberal view of history which views European Christianity as inherently evil. It permeates the culture of academia; and refuses to see the real evil of Islam.
Sadly, a second cause is an ancillary residue of historiography which has a tradition of exaggerating the real crimes of Catholicism out of all proportion. The Spanish call this exaggeration the Black Legend of the Inquisition; and it results in a pseudo-acquittal of Islam, by blaming the Crusades on Catholicism.
Let us not forget that it was Catholic Europe which insulated Northwest European Protestants from Islam's full fury. It was Catholic Spain which eventually broke the Turkish fleet at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. It was Catholic Poland's Jan Sobieski who saved Northwest Europe at Vienna in 1683 AD. It was the Catholic French who tamed Algeria in 1830.
Let us not forget either that it was Catholic France which saved the Christians of Lebanon in 1860 while the Protestant British were arming the Druze.
The time for apologizing to Islam must end.
Mike Konrad is the pen name of an American who is neither Jewish, Latin, nor Arab. He runs a website, http://latinarabia.com/, where he discusses the subculture of Arabs in Latin America. He wishes his Spanish were better.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/ee2a2b36-9de5-11e2-9ccc-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2ZkhAGm90

http://video.ft.com/v/2508275314001



Islamic finance sits awkwardly in a modern business school
By William Barnes

©Sara D.Davis
Timur Kuran: Islamic finance sits awkwardly in a modern business school
UK business schools and universities lead the non-Muslim world in the teaching of Islamic finance, with at least nine institutions teaching an MBA or similar which refer to Koranic principles. These include Durham, Aston, Bangor, Salford and Cass Business School. Only business schools in the Gulf, Malaysia, Pakistan and Indonesia rival the UK in offering pedagogy based on a seventh-century religious code.
Yet Timur Kuran, professor of economics and political science at Duke University and a leading authority on Islamic economics, argues that Islamic finance is a faith-based fabrication that sits awkwardly in a modern business school.

What is Islamic or sharia finance?
Islamic economics requires financial transactions to be free of interest. The replacement of interest with “profit and loss sharing”, say its proponents, serves to direct capital to its most productive users, as opposed to individuals with the best connections, collateral, or social status.
Why do you consider it bogus?
Islamic banking, in its current form, will go down in history as a mighty deceit based on an operational principle that is simply unfeasible. Islamic banks give and take interest as a matter of course, though under the guise of commissions, fees, penalties or profit shares. The holder of a “halal” credit card pays a penalty on unpaid balances; this penalty is proportionate to the size of the balance, which makes it equivalent to interest.
The sharia code was suited to the Middle Ages, when it assumed its classical form. At least on matters of economics and finance, it has not advanced measurably since then. To regain economic usefulness, it would have to be modified so extensively as to make it unrecognisable.
Can supposedly objective centres of learning such as international business schools teach economics constructed around rules derived from a holy book?
We need to distinguish between studying a doctrine or phenomenon and training practitioners. Within academia the proper place for training practitioners of Islamic finance is divinity schools, where beliefs may be treated as sacred and left unquestioned. It is not the place of an economics, business or law programme to teach future bankers the tricks of disguising interest. As a global phenomenon involving hundreds of billions of dollars, Islamic finance may be studied and should be studied, dispassionately within multiple core disciplines and professional schools.


But global sharia assets could reach $1.8tn this year. Can business schools ignore this large sector?
It should not be ignored. Business schools should use the tools of the social sciences to understand the social, political, economic and of course religious forces that account for its growth.
Presumably Islamic finance and economics dominate the curriculums of business schools across the Muslim world?
Not at all. The overwhelming majority of the Muslim world’s business schools teach the economics taught at the world’s leading business schools. A few require a sprinkling of Islamic courses. It is generally understood that these courses have little practical value.
What development in the teaching of Islamic economics can you foresee?
Funding for Islamic economics programmes is tied to oil wealth. If oil prices stay high, legitimacy-seeking Arab oil producers will continue to finance such programmes. The role that fundraising now plays in academia practically guarantees the promoters of Islamic economics will find university administrators willing to accommodate their requests.

It's an article from the huffington post from 2005.

The "end time" as you think it is is not near. In fact, it doesn't exist. Africans/Nigerians need to WAKE UP! Get a proper understanding of how the world works and stop believing in Middle Eastern bronze age fairytales. Get your mind right people!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9X2yXXCR6o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zxuMKP_kqg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkgAQcSpypo

We live in a twisted world, where right is wrong and wrong reigns supreme. It is a chilling fact that most of the world's leaders believe in nonsensical fairytales about the nature of reality. They believe in Gods that do not exist, and religions that could not possibly be true. We are driven to war after war, violence on top of violence to appease madmen who believe in gory mythologies. These men are called Christians, Muslims and Jews.

Osama bin Laden is insane. He believes God whispered in the ear of Mohammed 1,400 years ago about how he should conquer Arabia. Mohammed was a pure charlatan -- and a good one at that. He makes present religious frauds like Pat Robertson look like amateurs.

He said God told him to have sex with as many of the women he met as possible. I'm sorry, I meant to say "take them as wives." God told him to kill all other tribes that stood in his way or that would not placate him with assurances of loyalty or bribes. God told him, conveniently, that everyone should follow him and never question a word he said.

He sold this bag of goods to the blithering idiots who lived in the Arabian Peninsula at the time. If that weren't shockingly stupid enough, over a billion people continue to believe the convenient lies that Mohammed told all that time ago -- to this very day.

We live in a world full of insane people. Sanity is an island battered in an ocean of frothing delusion. The people who believe in science are the minority. The people who believe in bloody fairytales are the overwhelming majority.

George W. Bush is the most powerful man alive. He is a class A slowpoke. He is far less intelligent than the average Christian. But like most of the others, he believes Jesus died for his sins. That idea is so perverse and devoid of logic it should shock the conscience. Instead, it gets him elected, and earns him the reverence of a great percentage of America. America! The most advanced country in the world -- run by a bunch of villagers who still believe Santa Claus is going to save them.

There is no damn Easter Bunny. There is no Jesus waiting to return. Moses never even existed. These were all convenient lies from the men of those times to gain power. Their actions were rational -- they wanted to deceive their brethren so that they could amass power. I get their motivations. But I cannot, for the life of me, understand our motivations, thousands of years later, still following the conmen of yesteryear into our gory, bloody, violent end.

Jesus is said to have said on the cross, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" Because Jesus was insane and the God he thought would rescue him did not exist. And he died on that cross like a fool. He fancied himself the son of God and he could barely convince twelve men to follow him at a time when the world was full of superstition.

Excellent marketing by some of his followers would later rescue his botched effort. How many people saw his miracles? One? Twelve? Eighty? Why didn't he show the whole world? Not because this is some giant pop quiz by God to test us -- but because he did not perform any miracles!

Even his apostles can't agree on what miracles he supposedly carried out or when he carried them out. Or whether he returned after death or he didn't. Whether they saw him in person or just as a vision. Rational human beings shouldn't believe this kind of nonsense. Yet most of the world does.

If a man today killed his only son to show how much he loved other people, he would be considered a madman, locked in jail and earn society's contempt. Yet we think this is some sort of noble act by our Father in Heaven.

In Heaven? What, with the harps and the winged angels and the 72 virgins? My God, how stupid do you have to be to believe that?

I know most of you don't actually read your religious texts, and when you do, you assiduously try to avoid the parts that make no sense whatsoever or hide underneath the comforting grasp of your religious leaders who have concocted a bunch of circular logic (a crime to even use that word in regards to Christianity, Islam or Judaism) to shield you from the obvious folly of the written text.

So, I'm not calling you stupid if you haven't really read the material. And I know how powerful brainwashing is. We all received it when we were young and it is exceedingly difficult to break its grasp. But people dance around the issue out of politeness because they don't want to call you what you are -- ignorant.

There are a lot of people I love dearly and respect wholeheartedly who believe in religion. I hate to do this to them. But we have killed far too many people, wasted far too much time on this nonsense for us to keep going in this direction for fear of offense.

Jesus was a lunatic. God is not coming to your rescue. He hasn't come to anyone's rescue in thousands of years, including Jesus. Mohammed was a power hungry, scam artist and ruthless conqueror. Moses and Abraham were figments of the imagination of some long dead rabbi. He would probably laugh his ass off at all of you who still believe the fairytales he made up thousands of years ago. He probably wouldn't even believe it if you told him.

Did I mention Judaism? The chosen people? Come on, get off it. People walk around in clothes from 18th century Russia, thinking they have been chosen by God when they look like a bunch of jackasses. I'm tired of all the deaths because we did not want to give offense. Orthodox Jews are wrong and ridiculous.

As are the orthodox and fundamentalists of all of the religions. It says in the Bible that it is an abomination to wear clothes made of two different cloths or to eat shellfish. If you think God will hate you because you mixed wool and linen or because you ate some shrimp, you are insane.

How long are we going to dance around the 800-pound gorilla in the room? The world is run by madmen. It's not just Bush and bin Laden. It is the leader of all of the countries in the Middle East, almost all of the Americas and most of the rest of the world.

Have I offended you? That's too bad. Stop killing each other in the name of false and ridiculous Gods and I will stop ridiculing you. Trust me, your offense is much worse than mine.

Right now as you read this, there are ignorant, hateful Muslims teaching other ignorant Muslims how to put on a suicide belt. There are orthodox Jews telling other Jews how they must never leave their "holy land" no matter what the consequences are to other human beings. They assure their followers -- remember, they are not the chosen ones, we are. If we crush and oppress them, don't worry, God will excuse it, and even desires it, because He is on our side.

There are maniacal Christians who are praying for the end of time. Who are hoping that most of the world's population is wiped off the face of the Earth by their vengeful and murderous God. Whom they believe is, ironically, a loving God. Unless, of course, you make the fatal mistake of not kissing his ass and appeasing him, in which case he will slaughter you and condemn you to eternal torture. What kind of sick people believe this?

The kind who live next to you. The kind who voted for George Bush. The kind who send their religious leaders to the White House to argue against even-handedness in the Middle East because it would prevent their sick prophecy. The kind who have undue influence over how we use the greatest and most lethal army ever built by man.

If you don't want to be called ignorant or misinformed, then get informed. Learn the real nature of our universe and put aside old wives tales about resurrected Gods, omniscient prophets and a guy who could split the Red Sea but couldn't find where he's going in the desert for forty years.

It's the year 2005. Let's start acting like it.



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/if-youre-a-christian-musl_b_9349.html

Nice Read....

http://saharareporters.com/article/religion-bane-afica%E2%80%99s-development-ijabla-raymond

Let’s keep this really simple – our continent has adopted 2 foreign religions, which are diametrically opposed to each other. Their gods are mutually exclusive and hating of each other, the inevitable consequence being that we are engaged in perpetual ethno-religious conflicts in the name of these gods. An African muslim will sooner identify with say, an Arab or Afghan muslim than with a fellow non-muslim African.

The fatalism inherent in these religions has also led to the EVOLUTION of a CULTURE characterised by the tendency to blame third parties (usually the devil and his agents) for actions (or inactions) that we should accept responsibility for and reliance on god and prayers for solutions to problems we have created. I think it is quite plausible that fatalism is also the reason why we seem incapable of thinking beyond today, content with the assurance of a blissful future in some utopian heaven and not bothered about our current ephemeral constituency. There is also this pervasive attitude of ostentatiousness (the "I have arrived" or "Big man's" syndrome), which drives corruption. We seem driven by the desire to show others that we too have ‘arrived’. This causes us to make poor choices and provides the fuel that corruption requires to burn ceaselessly. Thus, we have a reputation for immediate self-gratification e.g. marrying many wives, throwing senselessly lavish parties, shopping abroad for the most mundane personal or household items, the ridiculous situation where an individual could own up to 20 luxury cars at a time and so on. The prosperity gospel preachers love that we can donate huge tithes and offerings and therefore use the bible, even if unwittingly, to defend and promote these attitudes by capitalizing on our greed and ignorance. A vicious cycle forms birthing a new culture.

The West tried religion and abandoned it after centuries of religious conflicts, diseases and stagnation. It embraced science and has since landed man on the moon. By its nature, religion is reliant on superstitions and does not encourage critical thinking. Thanks to science, Man is now exploring other planets for signs of life. We Africans love these foreign religions and are not about to let go anytime soon. Heck, we even nearly produced the pope. We have a global reputation for religious zealousness and now proudly export religion to the rest of the world; never mind science, technology, philosophy, innovations or any of the ideals of progressive societies. Some of us vehemently oppose the separation of state and religion and will die to defend theocracy (e.g. Sharia). Some have gone farther and have imposed this expansionist system of government on secular states without a referendum. We know very well that the modus operandi of expansionism is ‘give us an inch and we’ll demand a mile’. Needless to say, any form of resistance to this expansionist ideology leads inexorably to conflicts.

The black race is like the biblical ‘house divided against itself’, which cannot stand. This is why development has eluded us and the mention of ‘Africa’ conjures up images of darkness, wars, hunger and diseases. Using Nigeria as an example, the First Republic fell because of ethno-religious bigotry, which subsequently led to a bloody civil war. The bigotry has worsened to the point where most people no longer believe in the Nigerian project. Yet, ethno-religious bigotry and parochial regional interests are the very reasons we cannot convene a needful Sovereign National Conference to define the terms of our continued existence or separation into devolved governments or smaller national entities. We continue to plod along, praying and fasting to god for a miraculous solution.

I can see the appeal of religion; it gives people hope, which in itself is not a bad thing especially when one considers the hopelessness of leadership on our continent. But religion is not innocuous. It engenders mental laziness and divisions and, is a potent tool for mental enslavement. How can our society thrive when our universities have seemingly become places where our bright future leaders graduate as religious zealots? How will we advance if the bond of religious fraternity supersedes natural kinship? In what way does it advance us when we kill our own brothers in the name of religion?

To conclude, I believe that religion is a besetting problem for Africans (Nigerians) and that it’s negative influences are not fully appreciated or grasped. Africa will remain the Dark Continent until its people can unite, rise above all forms of self-inflicted bigotry and learn to put the interest of the community over and beyond those of the individual. Until then, it seems to me that the debate on why Africa is backward will go on for a long time and not many will disagree with former South African President, P.W Botha or the statements credited to him to the effect that Africans cannot rule themselves.

''By now every one of us has seen it practically that the Blacks cannot rule themselves. Give them guns and they will kill each other. They are good in nothing else but making noise, dancing, marrying many wives and indulging in sex. Let us all accept that the Black man is the symbol of poverty, mental inferiority, laziness and emotional incompetence. Isn't it plausible, therefore that the White man is created to rule the Black man? Come to think of what would happen one day if you woke up and on the throne sat a Kaff*ir! Can you imagine what would happen to our women? Does anyone of you believe that the Blacks can rule this country?'' PW Botha. August 1985.


PS:
This article is not an endorsement of our indigenous African religions; I believe they are no different.



Ijabla Raymond
Medical doctor of Nigerian heritage writes from the UK
Email: ijabla.raymond@facebook.com

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/ben/blasphemy-laws_b_3560615.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003

As a Christian, there is one thing I dislike even more than blasphemy, and that is legislation that prohibits it. Such laws invariably contribute to increasing intolerance, violence and injustice, and are widely open to misuse. And the key point is, if your God needs man-made laws to protect him from insult, he must be a pretty small and weak deity.

Yet laws criminalising blasphemy, defamation of religion or insulting religious belief are included in the criminal code of several countries, with Russia becoming the latest. On 26 June, Russia's State Duma passed a bill on "causing offence to the sentiments of religious believers", with punishment of up to three years in prison. Countries such as Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, Turkey and Indonesia have had such laws for many years and in some cases it carries the death penalty. The UK repealed its blasphemy law in 2008

In Pakistan, for example, at least 79 people have been arrested for blasphemy. Some have been jailed for life, or sentenced to death, and while to date no one has actually been executed for blasphemy by the State in Pakistan, even if acquitted or released from prison eventually, a person accused of blasphemy is in danger of being murdered by extremists. Two prominent Pakistani politicians, the Governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, and Shahbaz Bhatti, Federal Minister for Minorities Affairs and someone I was privileged to call a friend, were assassinated because they called for reform of the law.

In Indonesia, three people are currently in jail for blasphemy: two are Shia, and one is a Christian. In May, I visited one of them, a Shia cleric called Tajul Muluk. I also returned to see Alexander Aan, an atheist charged under both the blasphemy law and the Electronic Information and Transactions Law because he declared himself an atheist on Facebook. He was eventually sentenced to two years under the Electronic Information and Transactions Law.

There are several problems with blasphemy laws. In most cases the 'crime' is very poorly defined. Often there is a very low requirement for evidence - sometimes, as in Pakistan, a reliance simply on the accusation of one person. As a result, many blasphemy charges turn out to be completely false. The law is used to settle personal or commercial scores that have nothing to do with religion. The accused never even said or did anything offensive - the blasphemy law is simply used as a convenient tool for a vindictive adversary.

There is typically no proof of intent. In Pakistan, people have been charged and jailed for inadvertently throwing into the rubbish a newspaper containing a verse from the Qur'an. In many cases false accusations of blasphemy have led to mass violence.

The concept of 'defamation of religion' is particularly problematic. People can be defamed, religions and ideas cannot. Similarly, people can be insulted, while religions or ideas cannot. And while defamation already exists as a legal term, there is no law against insult. If there was, few people would do or say anything at all. There are laws to prevent hate speech, and incitement to violence, and rightly so, but that is different.

A fundamental human right is the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief. Another is freedom of expression. Without either of these, what other freedom matters? Yet so-called blasphemy laws are complete violations of these two rights, established respectively in Articles 18 and 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

If we do not have the freedom to think, to choose what to believe, to change our beliefs, to question the beliefs of others, to share our beliefs with others without coercion, or to decide not to believe, we have no freedom. In the course of thinking, questioning, exploring, it is legitimate - indeed essential - to ask probing questions of religions and beliefs, our own and others. Sometimes those questions may be awkward, uncomfortable, challenging. That is the nature of freedom of thought. Legitimate inquiry and debate, and disagreement, cannot be held ransom by prohibitions on insult.

Deliberate, gratuitous offence is unnecessary and unpleasant. Where it crosses the line into incitement to violence, it should not be permitted, and there are rightly laws to prohibit such incitement. But in countries with blasphemy laws, those laws themselves are a de facto - indeed de jure - incitement to violence. And unless offensive words actually spill over into incitement to hatred and violence, we should all be big enough to ignore them and walk away. If someone will engage with me in a serious discussion about beliefs, in an atmosphere of mutual respect, I'll gladly engage with them. If someone is unnecessarily and gratuitously offensive, I have the option of disengaging. In neither case would I want to legislate to stop them.

Furthermore, it is not the role of government to play God. John Locke, the 17th century philosopher and author of A Letter Concerning Toleration, argues that we must "distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion." It cannot be the business of government to determine blasphemy and heresy, let alone to legislate against them. Religious teachers can teach and preach about them, but politicians should not outlaw them.

An open society consists of open minds and, whether we like it or not, open mouths too. Even when we come across views that inherently offend, or are expressed in an unnecessarily offensive way, we should accept the freedom to think and express such views, just as we wish to have the freedom or express ours. We accept this principle in the political realm; we should apply it to the world of religion and belief too. We should also recognise that we can sometimes find we have common cause with our intellectual or ideological opponents, or at the very least develop a healthy respect. Two of my favourite contemporary thinkers and writers are the late Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen. Both are lefties and atheists, and I am a Conservative and a Christian. But Cohen's 'What's Left?' and 'You Can't Read This Book', and Hitchens' memoirs 'Hitch 22' and some of his other work, are riveting.

Furthermore, not only do I admire Hitchens' and Cohen's intellect, and enjoy their literary style, but I passionately agree with their defence of freedom. I would like to see a society in which I defend their freedom to think and say what they believe, and they defend mine.

In our politically correct era, religion and race are often and too easily conflated. There is no excuse whatsoever for criticising or insulting or questioning someone on account of their race, because race is not an idea, it is a fact, and not one that the holder can answer for or change. Religion, on the other hand, is a set of beliefs and ideas which, no matter how divine they may be, should be open to scrutiny, debate, discussion and questioning, even at the risk of offence.

The God I worship is encountered through a journey of soul-searching and intellectual inquiry which must inherently involve at least the possibility of questioning, and disagreeing with, another person's God. If God is God, he is surely big enough to take some blasphemous insults without needing us to protect him. And if he isn't, he wouldn't be a God I'd want to believe in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDknjLYaguQ

Interesting perspective from an Egyptian Author


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XuPWvsbxfI


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHaFbHOBbo0

The ambassador answered us that [their right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.
The above passage is not a reference to a declaration by al Qaeda or some Iranian fatwa. They are the words of Thomas Jefferson, then the U.S. ambassador to France, reporting to Secretary of State John Jay a conversation he'd had with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, Tripoli's envoy to London, in 1786 -- more than two and a quarter centuries ago.

That is before al Qaeda and the Taliban, before the creation of Israel or the Arab-Israeli conflict, before Khomeini, before Saudi Arabia, before drones, before most Americans even knew what jihad or Islam was, and, most importantly, well before the United States had engaged in a single military incursion overseas or even had an established foreign policy.

At the time, thousands of American and European trade ships entering the Mediterranean had been targeted by pirates from the Muslim Barbary states (modern-day North Africa). More than a million Westerners had been kidnapped, imprisoned and enslaved. Tripoli was the nexus for these operations. Jefferson's attempts to negotiate resulted in deadlock, and he was told simply that the kidnapping and enslavement of the infidels would continue, tersely articulated by Adja in the exchange paraphrased above.

Adja's position wasn't a random one-off. This conflict continued for years, seminally resulting in the Treaty of Tripoli, signed into law by President John Adams in 1797. Article 11 of the document, a direct product of the United States' first-ever overseas conflict, contained these famous words, cementing America's fundamental commitment to secularism:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext, arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
Yes, the establishment of secularism in America back in the 18th century was largely related to a conflict with Islamist jihadism.

So where did Abdul Rahman Adja's bin Laden-esque words come from?

They couldn't have been a response to American imperialism (the start of the conflict precedes the presidency of George Washington), U.S. foreign policy, globalization, AIPAC or Islamophobia. Yet his words are virtually identical to those spouted ad nauseum by jihadists today who justify their bellicosity as a reaction to these U.S.-centric factors, which were nonexistent in Adja's time.

How do we make sense of this? Well, the common denominator here just happens to be the elephant in the room.

In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings and the foiled al Qaeda-backed plot in Toronto, the "anything but jihad" brigade is out in full force again. If the perpetrators of such attacks say they were influenced by politics, nationalism, money, video games or hip-hop, we take their answers at face value. But when they repeatedly and consistently cite their religious beliefs as their central motivation, we back off, stroke our chins and suspect that there has to be something deeper at play, a "root cause."

The taboo against criticizing religion is still so astonishingly pervasive that centuries of hard lessons haven't yet opened our eyes to what has been apparent all along: It is often religion itself, not the "distortion," "hijacking," "misrepresentation" or "politicization" of religion, that is the root cause.

The recent attack on "new atheists" like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens by Nathan Lean and Murtaza Hussain have been endorsed by renowned liberal writers like Glenn Greenwald, who has also recently joined a chorus of denialists convinced that jihad and religious fervor had nothing to do with the Tsarnaev brothers' motive, despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary. (HuffPost Live recently had a great segment holding Murtaza Hussain accountable for his claims.)

In a way, these attacks on Dawkins et al. are a good thing. Typically, resorting to ad hominem attacks and/or labeling the opposing side "bigoted" is a last resort, when the opponent is unable to generate a substantive counterargument.

This phenomenon can be wholly represented by loaded terms like "Islamophobia." As an atheist Muslim (I'm not a believer, but I love Eid, the feasts of Ramadan and my Muslim family and friends), I could be jailed or executed in my country of birth, the country I grew up in and a host of other Muslim countries around the world for writing this very piece. Obviously, this is an unsettling, scary feeling for me. You may describe that fear as a very literal form of "Islamophobia." But is that the same thing as anti-Muslim bigotry? No.

Semantics matter here. As much as I have differences with the contents of Islam's canonical texts, I know that most Muslims are good, peaceful people who have barely read the Quran and seldom follow it except for the occasional cherry-picking and hearsay, much like the adherents of any other religion. Most of the 1 billion Muslims in the world (with the largest populations in Indonesia, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) don't even understand Arabic.

I also understand that extremism in any ideology isn't a distortion of that ideology. It is an informed, steadfast adherence to its fundamentals, hence the term "fundamentalism." When you think of a left-wing extremist, do you think of a greedy capitalist? Would you imagine a right-wing extremist to be dedicated to government-funded social welfare programs? The "extremists" and strict followers of the Jain faith, which values the life of every being, including insects, don't kill more than their average co-religionists. Instead, they avoid eating foods stored overnight so as not to kill even the microorganisms that may have collected in the meantime. In a true religion of peace, the "extremists" would be nonviolent pacifists to an extreme (and perhaps annoying) degree, not the opposite.

Too often in the aftermath of these tragedies, whether they occur in Boston or Karachi, I notice people rushing to defend the faith from judgment instead of acknowledging the victims. If a link is considered or even discovered, everyone from the Western media to Hollywood deems that person "Islamophobic" for linking Islam to terrorism.

But the number-one reason that terrorism is linked with Islam is not the media or "Islamophobes." It is that jihadi terrorists link themselves with Islam. Timothy McVeigh (also a terrorist by any definition of the word) didn't yell "Jesus is great!" before carrying out the Oklahoma City bombing. His brand of terrorism wasn't linked to Christianity, because it wasn't carried out in the name of it. (In contrast, the bombing of abortion clinics is terrorism universally acknowledged as being linked with Christian religious extremism.)

This is not to say that anti-Muslim bigotry doesn't exist. As a Pakistani-born man raised in Libya and Saudi Arabia, I'll be the first to acknowledge that it does. Yes, racists and bigots do pop up, not just attacking peaceful Muslims but pushing Hindus into subways or murdering Sikhs because they wear turbans or have beards like some Muslims. Ignorance can have immensely tragic consequences.

However, denialism does not adequately counter it. As Asra Nomani has bravely and effectively argued in her article praising the attitude of the Tsarnaevs' uncle, the onus is on the Muslim community, not just here but the world over, to start dealing honestly with the parts of their religion that undeniably promote armed jihad.

This does not lose an individual any Muslim cred. Jews frequently profess their faith without justifying or defending passages in the Old Testament calling for the stoning to death of homosexuals, non-virginal brides or blasphemers. In fact, most of them condemn these ideas. Religious Catholics still identify with their faith in large numbers without agreeing with the pope on birth control, abortion or premarital sex. Like them, almost all Muslims cherry-pick the contents of their faith as well. Why not be honest about the parts you don't like? If you're being discriminated against, why not protect your people first instead of jumping to protect your beliefs, books or religion every time someone driven by them commits mass murder?

This is a key difference for "new atheists." To us, the fight against religious ideology isn't a struggle against human rights but a struggle for them. Human beings have rights and are entitled to respect. Books and beliefs don't and aren't.

Instead of judging these religions by the actions of a few, we judge them more objectively: by the contents of their sacred texts (revered by fundamentalists and moderates alike). To us, a simple reading of the Abrahamic holy books reveals endorsements of virtually all the oppressive and discriminatory systems that civil and human rights movements have tried to dismantle over time: patriarchy, misogyny, slavery, tribalism, xenophobia, totalitarianism and homophobia, all rolled into one.

Our critical words aren't an attack on people. They are a challenge to what we consider bad ideas that drive bad behavior. Saying "smoking is bad" does not translate to "all smokers are bad people."

It is also important to understand why criticism, satire or mockery of any ideology isn't bigoted or racist. Criticizing capitalism does not make you an anti-capitalist "bigot." Criticizing religious ideology is no different. No one is born pre-circumcised or pre-baptized with a hijab or a yarmulke sewn to their heads. It is clear now, as it always has been, that ethnicity, gender, age, nationality, educational status, financial status, citizenship status, marital status and family background have little to do with Islamist terrorism. Before the Russian Tsarnaevs from North Caucasus, we've had Richard Reid, the Hispanic Jose Padilla, the Nigerian underwear bomber, California's Adam Gadahn and others. The only common denominator among them is Islamic belief and religious fervor, which is not a race or ethnicity.

For the longest time, Arabs and Muslims have rightly complained that labeling them anti-Semitic for legitimate criticism of Israeli policy was the Israeli government's ploy to shield itself from accountability. Today, Muslims (along with liberal apologist allies like Greenwald) are doing the same thing with their generously broad use of the "Islamophobia" label against the likes of Dawkins and Harris, both of whom have spoken against all religions equally, even if they contend (rightly so) that Islam poses a unique threat at this time because of its greatly increased influence on (and integration into) world politics, as Christianity had for centuries in Europe.

The most revolutionary human rights struggles in history have faced violent opposition, ostracization, alienation, insult and often injury and death for those engaged. The fight for women's rights took much more courage for women in the 1800s than for those born in the 21st century. Civil rights activists who spoke out at a time when lynchings were accepted and commonplace took on a much more dangerous task than those born in the America of Barack Obama. Countless LGBT activists have faced discrimination and cruelty throughout history (and continue to today) for openly advocating what 70 percent of America's youth now believe to be the right thing, no matter what it says in Leviticus 20:13.

Overall, "new atheists" think of religion the same way. It is considered sacred and untouchable now like white supremacy and patriarchy were less than a century ago. The consequences for speaking out against it are often as dire as they were for those who spoke out against white or male authority back then. But the secularist struggle is bearing fruit, here and elsewhere, particularly among America's youth.

To us, the "root causes" of jihadist terrorism are the same today as they were when Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja said those historic words to Thomas Jefferson. We want to be honest about it so that we can actually do something about it.

For the fast-growing secularist/humanist movement, criticism of religion isn't a demonstration of bigotry but a struggle against it. To us, bigotry against bigotry isn't bigotry, and intolerance of intolerance isn't intolerance.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ali-a-rizvi/an-atheist-muslims-perspective-on-the-root-causes-of-islamist-jihadism-and-the-politics-of-islamophobia_b_3159286.html



The ambassador answered us that [their right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.
The above passage is not a reference to a declaration by al Qaeda or some Iranian fatwa. They are the words of Thomas Jefferson, then the U.S. ambassador to France, reporting to Secretary of State John Jay a conversation he'd had with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, Tripoli's envoy to London, in 1786 -- more than two and a quarter centuries ago.

That is before al Qaeda and the Taliban, before the creation of Israel or the Arab-Israeli conflict, before Khomeini, before Saudi Arabia, before drones, before most Americans even knew what jihad or Islam was, and, most importantly, well before the United States had engaged in a single military incursion overseas or even had an established foreign policy.

At the time, thousands of American and European trade ships entering the Mediterranean had been targeted by pirates from the Muslim Barbary states (modern-day North Africa). More than a million Westerners had been kidnapped, imprisoned and enslaved. Tripoli was the nexus for these operations. Jefferson's attempts to negotiate resulted in deadlock, and he was told simply that the kidnapping and enslavement of the infidels would continue, tersely articulated by Adja in the exchange paraphrased above.

Adja's position wasn't a random one-off. This conflict continued for years, seminally resulting in the Treaty of Tripoli, signed into law by President John Adams in 1797. Article 11 of the document, a direct product of the United States' first-ever overseas conflict, contained these famous words, cementing America's fundamental commitment to secularism:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext, arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
Yes, the establishment of secularism in America back in the 18th century was largely related to a conflict with Islamist jihadism.

So where did Abdul Rahman Adja's bin Laden-esque words come from?

They couldn't have been a response to American imperialism (the start of the conflict precedes the presidency of George Washington), U.S. foreign policy, globalization, AIPAC or Islamophobia. Yet his words are virtually identical to those spouted ad nauseum by jihadists today who justify their bellicosity as a reaction to these U.S.-centric factors, which were nonexistent in Adja's time.

How do we make sense of this? Well, the common denominator here just happens to be the elephant in the room.

In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings and the foiled al Qaeda-backed plot in Toronto, the "anything but jihad" brigade is out in full force again. If the perpetrators of such attacks say they were influenced by politics, nationalism, money, video games or hip-hop, we take their answers at face value. But when they repeatedly and consistently cite their religious beliefs as their central motivation, we back off, stroke our chins and suspect that there has to be something deeper at play, a "root cause."

The taboo against criticizing religion is still so astonishingly pervasive that centuries of hard lessons haven't yet opened our eyes to what has been apparent all along: It is often religion itself, not the "distortion," "hijacking," "misrepresentation" or "politicization" of religion, that is the root cause.

The recent attack on "new atheists" like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens by Nathan Lean and Murtaza Hussain have been endorsed by renowned liberal writers like Glenn Greenwald, who has also recently joined a chorus of denialists convinced that jihad and religious fervor had nothing to do with the Tsarnaev brothers' motive, despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary. (HuffPost Live recently had a great segment holding Murtaza Hussain accountable for his claims.)

In a way, these attacks on Dawkins et al. are a good thing. Typically, resorting to ad hominem attacks and/or labeling the opposing side "bigoted" is a last resort, when the opponent is unable to generate a substantive counterargument.

This phenomenon can be wholly represented by loaded terms like "Islamophobia." As an atheist Muslim (I'm not a believer, but I love Eid, the feasts of Ramadan and my Muslim family and friends), I could be jailed or executed in my country of birth, the country I grew up in and a host of other Muslim countries around the world for writing this very piece. Obviously, this is an unsettling, scary feeling for me. You may describe that fear as a very literal form of "Islamophobia." But is that the same thing as anti-Muslim bigotry? No.

Semantics matter here. As much as I have differences with the contents of Islam's canonical texts, I know that most Muslims are good, peaceful people who have barely read the Quran and seldom follow it except for the occasional cherry-picking and hearsay, much like the adherents of any other religion. Most of the 1 billion Muslims in the world (with the largest populations in Indonesia, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) don't even understand Arabic.

I also understand that extremism in any ideology isn't a distortion of that ideology. It is an informed, steadfast adherence to its fundamentals, hence the term "fundamentalism." When you think of a left-wing extremist, do you think of a greedy capitalist? Would you imagine a right-wing extremist to be dedicated to government-funded social welfare programs? The "extremists" and strict followers of the Jain faith, which values the life of every being, including insects, don't kill more than their average co-religionists. Instead, they avoid eating foods stored overnight so as not to kill even the microorganisms that may have collected in the meantime. In a true religion of peace, the "extremists" would be nonviolent pacifists to an extreme (and perhaps annoying) degree, not the opposite.

Too often in the aftermath of these tragedies, whether they occur in Boston or Karachi, I notice people rushing to defend the faith from judgment instead of acknowledging the victims. If a link is considered or even discovered, everyone from the Western media to Hollywood deems that person "Islamophobic" for linking Islam to terrorism.

[b]But the number-one reason that terrorism is linked with Islam is not the media or "Islamophobes." It is that jihadi terrorists link themselves with Islam. Timothy McVeigh (also a terrorist by any definition of the word) didn't yell "Jesus is great!" before carrying out the Oklahoma City bombing. His brand of terrorism wasn't linked to Christianity, because it wasn't carried o[/b]ut in the name of it. (In contrast, the bombing of abortion clinics is terrorism universally acknowledged as being linked with Christian religious extremism.)

This is not to say that anti-Muslim bigotry doesn't exist. As a Pakistani-born man raised in Libya and Saudi Arabia, I'll be the first to acknowledge that it does. Yes, racists and bigots do pop up, not just attacking peaceful Muslims but pushing Hindus into subways or murdering Sikhs because they wear turbans or have beards like some Muslims. Ignorance can have immensely tragic consequences.

However, denialism does not adequately counter it. As Asra Nomani has bravely and effectively argued in her article praising the attitude of the Tsarnaevs' uncle, the onus is on the Muslim community, not just here but the world over, to start dealing honestly with the parts of their religion that undeniably promote armed jihad.

This does not lose an individual any Muslim cred. Jews frequently profess their faith without justifying or defending passages in the Old Testament calling for the stoning to death of homosexuals, non-virginal brides or blasphemers. In fact, most of them condemn these ideas. Religious Catholics still identify with their faith in large numbers without agreeing with the pope on birth control, abortion or premarital sex. Like them, almost all Muslims cherry-pick the contents of their faith as well. Why not be honest about the parts you don't like? If you're being discriminated against, why not protect your people first instead of jumping to protect your beliefs, books or religion every time someone driven by them commits mass murder?

This is a key difference for "new atheists." To us, the fight against religious ideology isn't a struggle against human rights but a struggle for them. Human beings have rights and are entitled to respect. Books and beliefs don't and aren't.

Instead of judging these religions by the actions of a few, we judge them more objectively: by the contents of their sacred texts (revered by fundamentalists and moderates alike). To us, a simple reading of the Abrahamic holy books reveals endorsements of virtually all the oppressive and discriminatory systems that civil and human rights movements have tried to dismantle over time: patriarchy, misogyny, slavery, tribalism, xenophobia, totalitarianism and homophobia, all rolled into one.
[font=Lucida Sans Unicode][/font]
Our critical words aren't an attack on people. They are a challenge to what we consider bad ideas that drive bad behavior. Saying "smoking is bad" does not translate to "all smokers are bad people."

It is also important to understand why criticism, satire or mockery of any ideology isn't bigoted or racist. Criticizing capitalism does not make you an anti-capitalist "bigot." Criticizing religious ideology is no different. No one is born pre-circumcised or pre-baptized with a hijab or a yarmulke sewn to their heads. It is clear now, as it always has been, that ethnicity, gender, age, nationality, educational status, financial status, citizenship status, marital status and family background have little to do with Islamist terrorism. Before the Russian Tsarnaevs from North Caucasus, we've had Richard Reid, the Hispanic Jose Padilla, the Nigerian underwear bomber, California's Adam Gadahn and others. The only common denominator among them is Islamic belief and religious fervor, which is not a race or ethnicity.

For the longest time, Arabs and Muslims have rightly complained that labeling them anti-Semitic for legitimate criticism of Israeli policy was the Israeli government's ploy to shield itself from accountability. Today, Muslims (along with liberal apologist allies like Greenwald) are doing the same thing with their generously broad use of the "Islamophobia" label against the likes of Dawkins and Harris, both of whom have spoken against all religions equally, even if they contend (rightly so) that Islam poses a unique threat at this time because of its greatly increased influence on (and integration into) world politics, as Christianity had for centuries in Europe.

The most revolutionary human rights struggles in history have faced violent opposition, ostracization, alienation, insult and often injury and death for those engaged. The fight for women's rights took much more courage for women in the 1800s than for those born in the 21st century. Civil rights activists who spoke out at a time when lynchings were accepted and commonplace took on a much more dangerous task than those born in the America of Barack Obama. Countless LGBT activists have faced discrimination and cruelty throughout history (and continue to today) for openly advocating what 70 percent of America's youth now believe to be the right thing, no matter what it says in Leviticus 20:13.

Overall, "new atheists" think of religion the same way. It is considered sacred and untouchable now like white supremacy and patriarchy were less than a century ago. The consequences for speaking out against it are often as dire as they were for those who spoke out against white or male authority back then. But the secularist struggle is bearing fruit, here and elsewhere, particularly among America's youth.

To us, the "root causes" of jihadist terrorism are the same today as they were when Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja said those historic words to Thomas Jefferson. We want to be honest about it so that we can actually do something about it.

For the fast-growing secularist/humanist movement, criticism of religion isn't a demonstration of bigotry but a struggle against it. To us, bigotry against bigotry isn't bigotry, and intolerance of intolerance isn't intolerance.

All I could say was wow!!!
This article is also relevant to the differences between Nigerians/Africans and westerners not just Muslims.

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2012/04/robert-spencer-interviews-nicolai-sennels-muslims-are-taught-to-be-aggressive-insecure-irresponsible.html

Jihad Watch
Robert Spencer interviews Nicolai Sennels: "Muslims are taught to be aggressive, insecure, irresponsible and intolerant"

Nicolai Sennels regularly contributes to Jihad Watch, with articles on psychology and translations of Scandinavian and German news. To help you get to know Sennels better, we decided to do an interview.

Nicolai Sennels (born 1976) is a Danish psychologist. His first appearances in the Danish media concerned his unorthodox therapy methods that he developed as the only psychologist at Sønderbro, the youth prison (see here, here, here, here and here). He taught the young prisoners about mindfulness meditation and developed a special program on anger management. Sennels also developed a psychotherapeutic method that focused on teaching criminals with a low understanding of emotions and empathy how to take responsibility for their own behavior. In 2008, the prisoners of Sønderbro voted the facility as the best prison in Denmark. The leader of Social Services in the Copenhagen municipality concluded that this was due to the work of Nicolai Sennels (Amagerbladet, November 3, 2008).

At a conference on immigrant crime in 2008, arranged by the Copenhagen municipality, Sennels said that one should not use the term “criminal immigrants,” but “criminal Muslims,” since the majority of criminal immigrants have Muslim backgrounds. Seven out of ten inmates in the Danish youth prisons have immigrant backgrounds, and almost all of them are Muslims. Sennels was threatened that if he were to discuss his experiences, he would risk losing his job. This story developed into a national debate on the freedom of speech and became a widely discussed topic in the Danish media (please see here and here), and the Minister of Integration joined the discussion.

Sennels decided to publish a book on his experiences, Among Criminal Muslims. A Psychologist's Experiences from the Copenhagen Municipality, which was well received in both the official Psychologists Union's magazine and the newspapers. He found himself a new appointment at the Danish Ministry of Defense, and now once again he works as a psychologist for children and teenagers.

Sennels consulted on the case against Omar Khadr, a convicted terrorist serving in Guantanamo. He also contributed a chapter to the Dutch book Islam: Critical Essays on a Political Religion, along with Raymond Ibrahim, Hans Jansen, Michael Mannheimer, Ibn Warraq, Bat Ye’or and other renowned critics of Islam and Muslim immigration.

Spencer: Nicolai, people know you mainly for your articles on the psychological differences between Muslims and Westerners (please see here and here). You have also contributed your professional insights in the case against the Guantanamo prisoner Omar Khadr. You wrote several articles, as well as a book on your conclusions. Could you give us a brief account of your findings?

Sennels: There are many differences between people brought up as Muslims and those who are brought up as Westerners. I identified four main differences that are important in order to understand the behavior of Muslims. They concern anger, self-confidence, the so-called "locus of control" and identity.

Westerners are brought up to think of anger as a sign of weakness, powerlessness and lack of self-control. "Big dogs don't have to bark," as we say in Denmark. In Muslim culture, anger is seen as a sign of strength. To Muslims, being aggressive is in itself an argument and a way of gaining respect. But we should not be impressed when we see pictures of bearded men hopping up and down, shouting like animals and shooting in the air. We should take it for what it is: the local madhouse passing by.

In Western culture, self-confidence is connected with the ability to meet criticism calmly and to respond rationally. We are raised to see people who easily get angry when criticized, as insecure and immature. In Muslim culture it is the opposite; it is honorable to respond aggressively and to engage in a physical fight in order to scare or force critics to withdraw, even if this results in a prison sentence or even death. They see non-aggressive responses to such threats and violence as a sign of a vulnerability that is to be exploited. They do not interpret a peaceful response as an invitation to enter into a dialogue, diplomacy, intellectual debate, compromise or peaceful coexistence.

[b]"Locus of control" is a term used in psychology, and relates to the way in which people feel that their lives are controlled. In Western culture, we are brought up to have an "inner locus of control," meaning that we see our own inner emotions, reactions, decisions and views as the main deciding factor in our lives. There may be outer circumstances that influence our situation, but in the end, it is our own perception of a situation and the way we handle it that decides our future and our state of mind. The "inner locus of control" leads to increased self-responsibility and motivates people to become able to solve their own problems. Muslims are brought up to have an "outer locus of control." Their constant use of the term inshallah ("Allah willing" when talking about the future, as well as the fact that most aspects of their lives are decided by outer traditions and authorities, leaves very little space for individual freedom. Independent initiatives are often severely punished. This shapes their way of thinking, and means that when things go wrong, it is always the fault of others or the situation. Unfortunately, many Westerners go overboard with their self-responsibility and start to take responsibility for others' behavior as well. The mix of many Westerners being overly forgiving, their flexible attitude, and Muslim self-pity and blame is the psychological crowbar that has opened the West to Islamization. Our overly protective welfare system shields immigrants from noticing the consequences of their own misbehavior and thereby learning from their mistakes and motivating them to improve.[/b]

Finally, identity plays a big role when it comes to psychological differences between Muslims and Westerners. Westerners are taught to be open and tolerant toward other cultures, races, religions, etc. This makes us less critical, impairs our ability to discriminate, and makes our societies open to the influence of other cultural trends and values that may not always be constructive. Muslims, on the other hand, are taught again and again that they are superior, and that all others are so bad that Allah will throw them in hell when they die. While most Westerners find national and cultural pride embarrassing, Muslim culture's self-glorification, massive use of inbreeding, the rule that only Muslims can marry Muslims and their all-pervading social control function as self-protecting mechanisms on the levels of culture and identity.

In general, Westerners are taught to be kind, self-assured, self-responsible and tolerant, while Muslims are taught to be aggressive, insecure, irresponsible and intolerant.

Spencer: That reminds me of my interactions with the likes of Reza Aslan, Salam al-Marayati, Moustafa Zayed, Ahmed Rehab, Mohamed Elibiary, Ahmed Afzaal, Omid Safi, Ibrahim Hooper, Caner K. Dagli, Haroon S. Moghul, Nadir Ahmed, and so many others. Can you give a psychological explanation as to why so few Muslims integrate into our societies?

Sennels: Integration is dependent on motivation, freedom and intelligence. In other words, immigrants have to want to integrate, be allowed to by their family and friends, and mentally have to be able to do this.

People coming from cultures that are aimed mainly at physical survival, and in which religious practice and adherence to cultural traditions give more social status than having a good education and being self-supporting, usually are not very productive if they can live on the state. If on top of that, they can live in closed communities among others with the same culture and language, there is very little reason for them to get involved in our society. The only solution is to make the lack of integration so unpractical and economically non-beneficial that the only attractive choice is to receive our offer of state-sponsored repatriation.

As history and Muslim societies have show us time and time again, there is no need for more bloody examples before the majority does as expected. Muslim societies only have to kill, rape, incarcerate, kidnap and beat a few, before the rest "voluntarily" prefer Sharia to integration.

Thirdly, handling intellectually demanding jobs in our high-tech societies, is not easy for people brought up to believe that the Qur'an and Hadith, not school and science, has the answers. Being brought up in a Muslim family also makes it difficult to adapt to Western social conduct at workplaces, including contact between the sexes and emotional control. T[b]he fact that almost half of all Muslims are inbred, often many generations in a row, also does not increase cognitive abilities. In most cases, our workplaces demand that the employees are able to take initiative and be creative and self-responsible, which are all human qualities that are not welcomed among people who are first of all expected to blindly submit and who live in surroundings that punish independent thinking and behavior, sometimes even with death.
[/b]
Spencer: As a psychologist, what is your explanation as to why Muslims oppress women?

Sennels: I see two psychological explanations for the oppression of women in Islam.

[b]John Adams, the USA's 2nd president, said that he studied warfare so that his children could study agriculture and their children could study art. Abraham Maslow formulated a similar idea, the "hierarchy of needs," which shows how we aim toward a state of full development, possessing complete inner and outer freedoms, spontaneous playful creativity and love for all.

While Adams's and Maslow's views describe the goals and aims of our Western society beautifully as the full development of an individual’s potential, they do not apply to Islam or Muslim tradition. The aim of Islam and Muslims is dominance, not self-realization. Islam and Muslim culture is an aggressive movement, and giving space to female qualities such as sensitivity and empathy would be a hindrance, since it would allow for less aggressive human tendencies to emerge. Diplomacy, compromise, tolerance, democracy, compassion, sensitivity and empathy have to be locked away both on an internal and external level. On the outside, the oppression of women limits their influence, and their aversion against femininity in the outer world helps Muslims to also repress it inside themselves on the psychological level. Oppression of women is thus a psychological method of hardening a culture on the outside and people on the inside.[/b]

The other reason why Muslims oppress women and female sexuality, is the fact that women are simply stronger when it comes to sex. And it does not work for omnipotent, jealous and insecure Muslim macho-men that they in the most naked and vulnerable situation of all are the weaker party. Muslim men compensate this by oppressing their women and locking them up in apartments and ugly clumsy garments. The more embarrassing it is for the man that the woman is stronger in this essential aspect of life, the more he must dominate her in daily life. I had contact with two prostitutes who both said that Arab men did not last very long in bed. In many Muslim societies, a women's ability to enjoy sex is simply destroyed by a knife or a piece of glass. The jealous fantasy of the man not being able to satisfy his lustful wife, who therefore looks down on him and may even go to other men to gain satisfaction, is an ongoing source of torment for the wanna-be almighty Muslim man.

True love can only exist on the basis of respect and equality. Muslim societies are therefore full of men and women who never experienced true, satisfying and giving love. The emotional and sexual frustration that results from the inequality of the sexes and being forced to marry a partner that one does not love surely contribute to the aggression and emotional immaturity that Muslims display whenever they are numerous enough to feel that such behavior is acceptable. As one said, "forced marriage is the earthquake and what follows is a tsunami of domestic abuse, sexual abuse, child protection issues, suicide and murder."

Spencer: Why do you think that Muslims living in the West are statistically more criminal and violent than others?

Sennels: Well, there are several reasons. Firstly, the Islamic scriptures teach them that attacking and robbing non-Muslims is completely okay. Muslim culture's degrading view of non-Muslims functions in the same way as war propaganda. By hearing again and again how evil, disgusting and unworthy the enemy is, empathy is removed, aggression is strengthened, and the step towards harming the perceived enemy becomes smaller. The Qur'an and the Hadith are criminal books that allow and even force people to undertake criminal acts.

[b]The psychological differences that I mentioned before also play a role when it comes to the high crime rate among Muslims. Our diplomatic and tolerant attitude is simply perceived as weakness and exploitable vulnerability. We may not like it, but we Westerners must abandon our peaceful, dialogue seeking and politically correct ways if we hope to communicate with Muslim society. Otherwise, they will think we are too scared to risk a conflict. They simply do not respect to or understand our preferred ways of communicating.

Finally, most Muslims are unable to earn real respect from us. Their immature behavior, their lack of contribution to the community and their lack of success makes them look like real losers in the eyes of civilized modern people. And it is not easy to belong to Allah's chosen people, who are supposedly better than the rest of the lot, when in fact they come in last every time. So, because of the lack of well-earned respect, and because of not being able to discriminate between the two, they try to be feared instead. It is Muslims, not Westerners, who invented the word Islamophobia. They want us to be afraid. But we are not. We feel sick of all their parasitism, violent behavior and mistreatment of their women. We have Islamonausea.
[/b]
Spencer: Is there a psychological explanation as to why political correctness is still so widespread, in spite of the obvious evidence that Islam is an aggressive ideology and Muslim immigration is eroding our societies and destroying our economy?

Sennels: Yes, there is. As I already mentioned, we Westerners are brought up to think that tolerance and openness are positive human qualities. For a long time, we did not have to be aware that such qualities are only a strength as long as nobody wants to harm us. In our meeting with Islam and Muslim immigration, our biggest strength -- our willingness to be open towards the new, that made us so curious and inventive and therefore knowledgeable and rich -- has become our worst enemy.

In my article "Psychological explanations of Political Correctness," I go through the most important social psychological explanations on irrational herd behavior. The most important are the bystander effect and pluralistic ignorance.

The bystander effect is when a person uses another reaction to assess a situation. If others do not react, it is interpreted as a sign that the situation is not serious and that there is no need to act. That is why we need more people to act, and in good style.

Pluralistic ignorance appears when people know that there is a problembut feel that it would be embarrassing to point it out. Leftists screaming "racist," the general view that it is impolite to point out obvious weaknesses in others and our culture's definition of good people as being open and tolerant, makes many people keep their mouths shut and even doubt their own sense and senses. When a majority of people, as a result of insecurity and wanting to be a "good person," do not speak their mind, the result is pluralistic ignorance. The famous Danish fairytale about the Emperor's New Clothes is an excellent example.

In the end, it comes down to cowardliness and wanting to be a good person in the eyes of others. Compassion for 700 million women who cannot chose their own sexual partners, clothing or lifestyle, as well as an openly declared war on our values and countries, the quick decay of our big cities into Sharia colonies, and the destruction of our economy as a result of Muslim immigration apparently do not count.

Spencer: Besides writing about psychology, you also write and translate articles on Muslim criminals, politics etc. Are you just a critic of Islam who happens to be a psychologist?

Sennels: No, I am a psychologist who through his work with Muslims became aware of how big a mistake it is to allow Muslim immigration and the spread of Islam in our societies. Together with overpopulation, which should be taken care of by using the enormous amounts of foreign aid to pay people who have less money, this problem is the most dangerous threat to world peace today. It has now been several decades since we passed the stage at which the problem could be solved without blood, sweat and tears.

I have dedicated my life to making people aware of the danger that is already gnawing off big chunks of our cities, economy and freedom.

The most embarrassing thing I can imagine is that the only place in this universe with intelligent life will end as a planet-sized khalifat floating around in space. Just like the bad guys in The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and other archetypal stories of good and evil, Islam does not strive for freedom, happiness and love. Islam strives for the submission of Muslims to Allah and of non-Muslims to Muslims -- a dark, cold and humorless world where men are forced to mistreat their women and everybody is a slave to a god whose only wish is the enforcement of Sharia down to the very last comma. They do what they can to reach their final solution, and we must do what we can to prevent it from happening.

Spencer: You have several years of experience in writing and debating on Islam. You have participated in intellectual debates on Danish national TV and national radio about Islam and Muslim immigration. Many people are critical of Sharia and immigration, but do know dare to speak out -- or they are not sure how to express their views. Do you have any advice to people who feel like that?

Sennels: If we have compassion, people will feel it. Criticizing Islam is like shooting fish in a barrel, but we are not intellectual sadists. We are worried about the freedom of our women and the future of our children, and about our constitutions. And we know that the first and in many cases also the biggest victims of Islam are Muslims. We do not even have to use words like Islam or Muslims. We can just say that religions that oppress women and start holy wars make us sick. If you know that you are right, you do not have to be nervous or ashamed of yourself. Know that our politicians and media aim for the soft middle in society in order to be reelected and to sell newspapers and ads, and it is therefore up to ordinary people to protect our values, society and constitution.

Inform yourself and spread what you find out via email, social media, blogs and letters to the editor and to our politicians and journalists. When among others, the most important thing is that you do not force your view upon them and are happy and relaxed when you express your opinions. Only share your knowledge and your feelings when it feels natural -- wait until others mention the topic and use only a few words unless people really ask you several times what you think. If you are good, you can even use humor.

And do not fear to lose a few politically correct friends on the way. They will thank you in the end.
Posted by Robert on April 2, 2012 8:22 AM | 61 Comments
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It is more bs from the arabian fairy tale religion. As long as you state you position with the chic and fam you will be alright. At least you live in the west were the cant do you nothing. These ppl sometimes have the dumbest rules and regulations.

www.huffingtonpost.com/victor-stenger/the-god-hypothesis_b_1355321.html


The following article appeared in the March 17, 2012 "God issue" of New Scientist.



The party line among scientists -- believers and nonbelievers alike -- is that science and religion are what Stephen Jay Gould called "non-overlapping magisteria." In 1998 the US National Academy of Sciences issued a statement asserting "Science can say nothing about the supernatural. Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral."

Yet according to a survey the same year, 93 percent of the members of the academy do not believe in a personal god.

Since about the same percentage of all US citizens say they do believe in a personal god, it makes one wonder what, if not their science, leads the elite of US scientists to differ so dramatically from the general population.

A majority of scientists at all levels do not believe in any god. Yet most are unwilling to challenge the religious beliefs of others. I am a physicist who, along with others dubbed the New Atheists, is willing to challenge religious belief. The gods worshipped by billions either exist or they do not. And those gods, if they exist, must have observable consequences. Thus, the question of their existence is a legitimate scientific issue that has profound import to humanity.

We can consider the existence of god to be a scientific hypothesis and look for the empirical evidence that would follow. Many of the attributes associated with the Judaic-Christian-Islamic God have specific consequences that can be tested empirically. Such a God is supposed to play a central role in the operation of the universe and the lives of humans. As a result, evidence for him should be readily detectable by scientific means.

If a properly controlled experiment were to come up with an observation that cannot be explained by natural means, then science would have to take seriously the possibility of a world beyond matter.

In fact scientists have empirically tested the efficacy of intercessory prayer -- prayers said on behalf of others. These studies, in principle, could have shown scientifically that some god exists. Had they found conclusively, in a double-blind placebo-controlled trial, that intercessory prayers heal the sick, it would have been difficult to find a natural explanation. They did not.

Similar tests have been done on near-death experiences (NDEs). Some people having an NDE during surgery have reported floating above the operating table and watching everything going on below. Whether this is a real experience or a hallucination can be tested easily by placing a secret message on a high shelf out of sight of the patient and the hospital staff. This has been tried, and no one reporting an NDE has yet to read the message.

Just as science can design experiments to test the existence of God, it can also seek evidence against a god's existence in the world around us. Here we must be clear that we are not talking about evidence against any and all conceivable gods. For example, a deist god that creates the universe and then just leaves it alone would be very hard to falsify. But no one worships a god who does nothing.

If God is the intelligent designer of life on Earth, then we should find evidence for intelligence in observations of the structure of life. We do not. The Intelligent Design movement failed in its effort to prove that the complexity found in some biological systems is irreducible and cannot be explained within Darwinian evolution. Life on Earth looks just as it should look if it arose by natural selection.

Most religions claim that humans possess immaterial souls that control much of our mental processing. If that were true, we should be able to observe mentally induced phenomena that are independent of brain chemistry. We do not.

If God is the source of morality, then we should find evidence for a supernatural origin in human behavior. We do not. People of faith behave on average no better, and in some cases behave worse, than people of no faith. History shows that the moral and ethical guides that most of us live by did not originate with the monotheistic religions, as proponents of those religions would have us believe. Instead, moral behavior appears to have evolved socially.

Again, if God answers prayers, we should see miraculous effects of prayer. With millions of prayers having been said every day for thousands of years, we would expect some to have been answered by now in a verifiable way. They have not.

If God has revealed truths to humanity, then these truths should be testable. Over the millennia many people have reported religious or mystical experiences in which they have communicated with one god or another. By now, we should have seen some confirming evidence for this, such as a verifiable fact that could not have been in the person's head unless it was revealed to them. We have not.

If God is the creator of the universe, then we should find evidence for that in astronomy and physics. We do not. The origin of our universe required no miracles. Furthermore, modern cosmology suggests an eternal "multiverse" in which many other universes come and go.

If humans are a special creation of God, then the universe should be congenial to human life. It is not. Theists claim that the parameters of the universe are fine-tuned for human life. They are not. The universe is not fine-tuned for us. We are fine-tuned to the universe.

After evaluating all the evidence, we can conclude that the universe and life look exactly as they would be expected to look if there were no God.

Finally, I would like to comment on the folly of faith. When faith rules over facts, magical thinking becomes deeply ingrained and warps all areas of life. It produces a frame of mind in which concepts are formulated with deep passion but without the slightest attention paid to the evidence. Nowhere is this more evident than in the US today, where Christians who seek to convert the nation into a theocracy dominate the Republican party. Blind faith is no way to run a world.

[url]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victor-stenger/the-god-hypothesis_b_1355321.html


The following article appeared in the March 17, 2012 "God issue" of New Scientist.



The party line among scientists -- believers and nonbelievers alike -- is that science and religion are what Stephen Jay Gould called "non-overlapping magisteria." In 1998 the US National Academy of Sciences issued a statement asserting "Science can say nothing about the supernatural. Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral."

Yet according to a survey the same year, 93 percent of the members of the academy do not believe in a personal god.

Since about the same percentage of all US citizens say they do believe in a personal god, it makes one wonder what, if not their science, leads the elite of US scientists to differ so dramatically from the general population.

A majority of scientists at all levels do not believe in any god. Yet most are unwilling to challenge the religious beliefs of others. I am a physicist who, along with others dubbed the New Atheists, is willing to challenge religious belief. The gods worshipped by billions either exist or they do not. And those gods, if they exist, must have observable consequences. Thus, the question of their existence is a legitimate scientific issue that has profound import to humanity.

We can consider the existence of god to be a scientific hypothesis and look for the empirical evidence that would follow. Many of the attributes associated with the Judaic-Christian-Islamic God have specific consequences that can be tested empirically. Such a God is supposed to play a central role in the operation of the universe and the lives of humans. As a result, evidence for him should be readily detectable by scientific means.

If a properly controlled experiment were to come up with an observation that cannot be explained by natural means, then science would have to take seriously the possibility of a world beyond matter.

In fact scientists have empirically tested the efficacy of intercessory prayer -- prayers said on behalf of others. These studies, in principle, could have shown scientifically that some god exists. Had they found conclusively, in a double-blind placebo-controlled trial, that intercessory prayers heal the sick, it would have been difficult to find a natural explanation. They did not.

Similar tests have been done on near-death experiences (NDEs). Some people having an NDE during surgery have reported floating above the operating table and watching everything going on below. Whether this is a real experience or a hallucination can be tested easily by placing a secret message on a high shelf out of sight of the patient and the hospital staff. This has been tried, and no one reporting an NDE has yet to read the message.

Just as science can design experiments to test the existence of God, it can also seek evidence against a god's existence in the world around us. Here we must be clear that we are not talking about evidence against any and all conceivable gods. For example, a deist god that creates the universe and then just leaves it alone would be very hard to falsify. But no one worships a god who does nothing.

If God is the intelligent designer of life on Earth, then we should find evidence for intelligence in observations of the structure of life. We do not. The Intelligent Design movement failed in its effort to prove that the complexity found in some biological systems is irreducible and cannot be explained within Darwinian evolution. Life on Earth looks just as it should look if it arose by natural selection.

Most religions claim that humans possess immaterial souls that control much of our mental processing. If that were true, we should be able to observe mentally induced phenomena that are independent of brain chemistry. We do not.

If God is the source of morality, then we should find evidence for a supernatural origin in human behavior. We do not. People of faith behave on average no better, and in some cases behave worse, than people of no faith. History shows that the moral and ethical guides that most of us live by did not originate with the monotheistic religions, as proponents of those religions would have us believe. Instead, moral behavior appears to have evolved socially.

Again, if God answers prayers, we should see miraculous effects of prayer. With millions of prayers having been said every day for thousands of years, we would expect some to have been answered by now in a verifiable way. They have not.

If God has revealed truths to humanity, then these truths should be testable. Over the millennia many people have reported religious or mystical experiences in which they have communicated with one god or another. By now, we should have seen some confirming evidence for this, such as a verifiable fact that could not have been in the person's head unless it was revealed to them. We have not.

If God is the creator of the universe, then we should find evidence for that in astronomy and physics. We do not. The origin of our universe required no miracles. Furthermore, modern cosmology suggests an eternal "multiverse" in which many other universes come and go.

If humans are a special creation of God, then the universe should be congenial to human life. It is not. Theists claim that the parameters of the universe are fine-tuned for human life. They are not. The universe is not fine-tuned for us. We are fine-tuned to the universe.

After evaluating all the evidence, we can conclude that the universe and life look exactly as they would be expected to look if there were no God.

Finally, I would like to comment on the folly of faith. When faith rules over facts, magical thinking becomes deeply ingrained and warps all areas of life. It produces a frame of mind in which concepts are formulated with deep passion but without the slightest attention paid to the evidence. Nowhere is this more evident than in the US today, where Christians who seek to convert the nation into a theocracy dominate the Republican party. Blind faith is no way to run a world.

[/url]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victor-stenger/the-god-hypothesis_b_1355321.html


The following article appeared in the March 17, 2012 "God issue" of New Scientist.



The party line among scientists -- believers and nonbelievers alike -- is that science and religion are what Stephen Jay Gould called "non-overlapping magisteria." In 1998 the US National Academy of Sciences issued a statement asserting "Science can say nothing about the supernatural. Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral."

Yet according to a survey the same year, 93 percent of the members of the academy do not believe in a personal god.

Since about the same percentage of all US citizens say they do believe in a personal god, it makes one wonder what, if not their science, leads the elite of US scientists to differ so dramatically from the general population.

A majority of scientists at all levels do not believe in any god. Yet most are unwilling to challenge the religious beliefs of others. I am a physicist who, along with others dubbed the New Atheists, is willing to challenge religious belief. The gods worshipped by billions either exist or they do not. And those gods, if they exist, must have observable consequences. Thus, the question of their existence is a legitimate scientific issue that has profound import to humanity.

We can consider the existence of god to be a scientific hypothesis and look for the empirical evidence that would follow. Many of the attributes associated with the Judaic-Christian-Islamic God have specific consequences that can be tested empirically. Such a God is supposed to play a central role in the operation of the universe and the lives of humans. As a result, evidence for him should be readily detectable by scientific means.

If a properly controlled experiment were to come up with an observation that cannot be explained by natural means, then science would have to take seriously the possibility of a world beyond matter.

In fact scientists have empirically tested the efficacy of intercessory prayer -- prayers said on behalf of others. These studies, in principle, could have shown scientifically that some god exists. Had they found conclusively, in a double-blind placebo-controlled trial, that intercessory prayers heal the sick, it would have been difficult to find a natural explanation. They did not.

Similar tests have been done on near-death experiences (NDEs). Some people having an NDE during surgery have reported floating above the operating table and watching everything going on below. Whether this is a real experience or a hallucination can be tested easily by placing a secret message on a high shelf out of sight of the patient and the hospital staff. This has been tried, and no one reporting an NDE has yet to read the message.

Just as science can design experiments to test the existence of God, it can also seek evidence against a god's existence in the world around us. Here we must be clear that we are not talking about evidence against any and all conceivable gods. For example, a deist god that creates the universe and then just leaves it alone would be very hard to falsify. But no one worships a god who does nothing.

If God is the intelligent designer of life on Earth, then we should find evidence for intelligence in observations of the structure of life. We do not. The Intelligent Design movement failed in its effort to prove that the complexity found in some biological systems is irreducible and cannot be explained within Darwinian evolution. Life on Earth looks just as it should look if it arose by natural selection.

Most religions claim that humans possess immaterial souls that control much of our mental processing. If that were true, we should be able to observe mentally induced phenomena that are independent of brain chemistry. We do not.

If God is the source of morality, then we should find evidence for a supernatural origin in human behavior. We do not. People of faith behave on average no better, and in some cases behave worse, than people of no faith. History shows that the moral and ethical guides that most of us live by did not originate with the monotheistic religions, as proponents of those religions would have us believe. Instead, moral behavior appears to have evolved socially.

Again, if God answers prayers, we should see miraculous effects of prayer. With millions of prayers having been said every day for thousands of years, we would expect some to have been answered by now in a verifiable way. They have not.

If God has revealed truths to humanity, then these truths should be testable. Over the millennia many people have reported religious or mystical experiences in which they have communicated with one god or another. By now, we should have seen some confirming evidence for this, such as a verifiable fact that could not have been in the person's head unless it was revealed to them. We have not.

If God is the creator of the universe, then we should find evidence for that in astronomy and physics. We do not. The origin of our universe required no miracles. Furthermore, modern cosmology suggests an eternal "multiverse" in which many other universes come and go.

If humans are a special creation of God, then the universe should be congenial to human life. It is not. Theists claim that the parameters of the universe are fine-tuned for human life. They are not. The universe is not fine-tuned for us. We are fine-tuned to the universe.

After evaluating all the evidence, we can conclude that the universe and life look exactly as they would be expected to look if there were no God.

Finally, I would like to comment on the folly of faith. When faith rules over facts, magical thinking becomes deeply ingrained and warps all areas of life. It produces a frame of mind in which concepts are formulated with deep passion but without the slightest attention paid to the evidence. Nowhere is this more evident than in the US today, where Christians who seek to convert the nation into a theocracy dominate the Republican party. Blind faith is no way to run a world.

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/islam-and-the-future-of-liberalism


I recently had a very enjoyable three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan on his podcast, where the topics ranged from jihad to probability theory to psychedelics. But I subsequently received a fair amount of abuse online for a few things I said about Islam and our adventures in the war on terror. For instance, I appear to have left many viewers with the impression that I believe we invaded Afghanistan for the purpose of rescuing its women from the Taliban. However, the points I was actually making were rather different: I think that abandoning these women to the Taliban is one of the things that make our inevitable retreat from Afghanistan ethically problematic. I also believe that wherever we can feasibly stop the abuse of women and girls, we should. An ability to do this in places like Afghanistan, and throughout the world, would be one of the benefits of having a global civil society and a genuine regime of international law. Needless to say, this is not the world we are living in (yet).

The ferocious response to my discussion with Rogan about the war on terror has, once again, caused me to worry about the future of liberalism. It is one thing to think that the war in Afghanistan has been an excruciating failure (which I believe), but it is another to think that we had no moral right to attack al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the first place. A significant percentage of liberals seem to hold the latter view, and consider President Obama to be nothing more than a neocon stooge and Islam to be an unfairly maligned religion of peace. I regularly hear from such people, and their beliefs genuinely trouble me. It doesn’t take many emails containing sentences like “The United States and Israel are the greatest terrorist states on earth” to make me feel that liberalism is simply doomed.

My criticism of Islam, as of any other religion, is aimed at its doctrine and the resulting behavior of its adherents. I am not talking about races of people, or nationalities, or any other aspects of culture. And yes, there are more moderate strands of the faith: The Ahmadis, for instance, resemble what many liberal Westerners imagine the “true” face of Islam must be like. I still find their creed disconcerting: According to one of the websites affiliated with this movement, Ahmadis believe that the “Holy Qu’ran is the word of God which is to guide mankind forever, and the Holy Prophet Muhammad was the perfect model of Islamic teachings whose example shall forever be binding on every Muslim to follow.” To my ear, the words “forever” and “perfect” and “every” and “binding” convey the scent of despotism about as well as “a thousand-year Reich”—especially when one considers the actual contents of the Qur’an and the example set by Muhammad. However, the Ahmadis at least claim to believe that jihad “primarily signifies a spiritual, intellectual and moral struggle to reform oneself and others” and to condemn “all use of force except in unavoidable self-defense.” I’m not sure I would want to put these assertions to the test by venturing into an Ahmadi mosque with a fresh batch of cartoons of the Prophet, but the Ahmadis are at least disposed to make the sorts of conciliatory sounds that the religious must make in order to live peacefully in a pluralistic world where most people do not share their favorite superstitions.

But the Ahmadis are by no means the “true” face of Islam, and their mosques are regularly bombed in Pakistan. It is only decent to observe that these atrocities have nothing to do with Israel’s occupation of Palestine, or U.S. foreign policy, or any other terrestrial concern. Why do Ahmadis suffer and die in this way? The reason is as easily discerned as reasons generally are among religious lunatics: Sunni Muslims consider Ahmadis to be heretics—in fact, the government of Pakistan officially deems them so. Unwisely, one branch of this sect holds that its founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835–1908), was a true Prophet of Islam, akin to Muhammad. One thing is as certain in the year 2012 as it was in the year 1012: If you claim that your favorite mystic was Muhammad’s true successor, some young Muslims will be eager to lay down their lives for the pleasure of destroying yours.

As I tried to make clear on Rogan’s podcast, we know that intolerance within the Muslim world extends far beyond the membership of “extremist” groups. Recent events in Afghanistan demonstrate, yet again, that ordinary Afghans grow far more incensed when a copy of the Qur’an gets defaced than when their own children are accidentally killed by our bombs—or, indeed, than when they are intentionally murdered. I doubt there is a more ominous skewing of priorities to be found in this world.

Should people be free to draw cartoons of the Prophet? There must be at least 300 million Muslims spread over a hundred countries who think that a person should be put to death for doing so. (This is based on every poll assessing Muslim opinion I have seen over the past ten years.) Should Ayaan Hirsi Ali be killed for her apostasy? Millions of Muslim women would applaud her murder (to say nothing of Muslim men). These attitudes have to change. The moral high ground here is clear, and we are standing on it.

Of course, millions of Muslims are more secular and are eager to help create a global civil society. But they are virtually silent because they have nothing to say that makes any sense within the framework of their faith. (They are also afraid of getting killed.) That is the problem we must keep in view. And it represents an undeniable difference between Islam and Christianity at this point in history. There are also many nefarious people, in both Europe and the U.S., who are eager to keep well-intentioned liberals confused on this point, equating any criticism of Islam with racism or “Islamophobia.” The fact that many critics of Islam are also racists, Christian fascists, or both does not make these apologists any less cynical or sinister.

The only way to know which way is up, ethically speaking, is to honestly assess what people want and what they believe. We must confront the stubborn reality of differing intentions: In every case it is essential to ask, “What would these people do if they had the power to do anything they wanted?”

Consider the position of Israel, which is so regularly vilified by the Left. As a secularist and a nonbeliever—and as a Jew—I find the idea of a Jewish state obnoxious. But if ever a state organized around a religion was justified, it is the Jewish state of Israel, given the world’s propensity for genocidal anti-Semitism. And if ever criticism of a religious state was unjustified, it is the criticism of Israel that ceaselessly flows from every corner of the Muslim world, given the genocidal aspirations so many Muslims freely confess regarding the Jews. Those who see moral parity between the two sides of Israeli-Palestinian conflict are ignoring rather obvious differences in intent.

My fellow liberals generally refuse to concede that the religious beliefs of groups like Hamas merit any special concern. And yet the slogan of Hamas, as set forth in Article 8 of its charter, reads: “Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.” If this is insufficient to establish this group as a death cult of aspiring martyrs, consider the following excerpts from the charter:

[T]he Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Muslim).

…

There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with. As is said in the honourable Hadith:

“The people of Syria are Allah’s lash in His land. He wreaks His vengeance through them against whomsoever He wishes among His slaves. It is unthinkable that those who are double-faced among them should prosper over the faithful. They will certainly die out of grief and desperation.”

…

It is necessary to instill in the minds of the Muslim generations that the Palestinian problem is a religious problem, and should be dealt with on this basis. Palestine contains Islamic holy sites. In it there is al-Aqsa Mosque which is bound to the great Mosque in Mecca in an inseparable bond as long as heaven and earth speak of Isra` (Mohammed’s midnight journey to the seven heavens) and Mi’raj (Mohammed’s ascension to the seven heavens from Jerusalem).

“The bond of one day for the sake of Allah is better than the world and whatever there is on it. The place of one’s whip in Paradise is far better than the world and whatever there is on it. A worshipper’s going and coming in the service of Allah is better than the world and whatever there is on it.” (As related by al-Bukhari, Muslim, al-Tarmdhi and Ibn Maja).

“I swear by the holder of Mohammed’s soul that I would like to invade and be killed for the sake of Allah, then invade and be killed, and then invade again and be killed.” (As related by al-Bukhari and Muslim).

Whether or not every Palestinian believes these things is not the point. The point is that many do, and their democratically elected government claims to. It is only rational, therefore, for Israel to behave as though it is confronted by a cult of religious sociopaths. The fact that much of the world, and most Western liberals, cannot see the moral imbalance here only makes the position of Israel more precarious, leaving it increasingly vulnerable to overreacting to Palestinian provocations. If the rest of the world were united in condemnation of Hamas, and of Islamism generally, Israel could afford to be slower to reach for its guns.

As is so often the case on the subject of religion, those who should know better reliably do not. For instance, Nicholas Kristof has consistently championed the cause of women in the developing world, many of whom suffer under the strictures of Islam. But he has also been a tireless advocate of political correctness on the subject of religion. In his review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book, Nomad, these two commitments collide and, predictably, political correctness wins:

To those of us who have lived and traveled widely in Africa and Asia, descriptions of Islam often seem true but incomplete. The repression of women, the persecution complexes, the lack of democracy, the volatility, the anti-Semitism, the difficulties modernizing, the disproportionate role in terrorism — those are all real. But if those were the only faces of Islam, it wouldn’t be one of the fastest-growing religions in the world today. There is also the warm hospitality toward guests, including Christians and Jews; charity for the poor; the aesthetic beauty of Koranic Arabic; the sense of democratic unity as rich and poor pray shoulder to shoulder in the mosque. Glib summaries don’t work any better for Islam than they do for Christianity or Judaism… [I]n the West, we should try to have a conversation about Islam and its genuine problems — while speaking out against over-the-top exaggerations about the East. This memoir, while engaging and insightful in many places, exemplifies precisely the kind of rhetoric that is overheated and overstated.

There is sanctimony to spare here, of course, but that is not the worst of it. How could someone as smart and as obviously well-intentioned as Kristof be so off the mark when discussing the views and career of Ayaan Hirsi Ali? He, of all people, should understand how important Hirsi Ali’s contributions have been to our global conversation about the rights of women (and what an obstacle religion has been to the establishment of those rights).


Whenever I make observations of this kind, I am accused of misunderstanding the true causes of the conflict between Islam and the West. Almost invariably, I am urged to read the work of Robert A. Pape. Pape is the author of a very influential paper, “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism” (American Political Science Review 97, no. 3, 2003), and the book Dying to Win, in which he argues that suicide bombing is best understood as a strategic means to achieve certain well-defined nationalist goals and should not be considered a consequence of religious ideology. No one has done more to convince my fellow liberals that if we just behaved ourselves on the world stage, our problems with Islam would go away. I am happy to say that Pape has agreed to discuss these issues with me on this page in the coming weeks. Stay tuned…


[b]http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/islam-and-the-future-of-liberalism


I recently had a very enjoyable three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan on his podcast, where the topics ranged from jihad to probability theory to psychedelics. But I subsequently received a fair amount of abuse online for a few things I said about Islam and our adventures in the war on terror. For instance, I appear to have left many viewers with the impression that I believe we invaded Afghanistan for the purpose of rescuing its women from the Taliban. However, the points I was actually making were rather different: I think that abandoning these women to the Taliban is one of the things that make our inevitable retreat from Afghanistan ethically problematic. I also believe that wherever we can feasibly stop the abuse of women and girls, we should. An ability to do this in places like Afghanistan, and throughout the world, would be one of the benefits of having a global civil society and a genuine regime of international law. Needless to say, this is not the world we are living in (yet).

The ferocious response to my discussion with Rogan about the war on terror has, once again, caused me to worry about the future of liberalism. It is one thing to think that the war in Afghanistan has been an excruciating failure (which I believe), but it is another to think that we had no moral right to attack al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the first place. A significant percentage of liberals seem to hold the latter view, and consider President Obama to be nothing more than a neocon stooge and Islam to be an unfairly maligned religion of peace. I regularly hear from such people, and their beliefs genuinely trouble me. It doesn’t take many emails containing sentences like “The United States and Israel are the greatest terrorist states on earth” to make me feel that liberalism is simply doomed.

My criticism of Islam, as of any other religion, is aimed at its doctrine and the resulting behavior of its adherents. I am not talking about races of people, or nationalities, or any other aspects of culture. And yes, there are more moderate strands of the faith: The Ahmadis, for instance, resemble what many liberal Westerners imagine the “true” face of Islam must be like. I still find their creed disconcerting: According to one of the websites affiliated with this movement, Ahmadis believe that the “Holy Qu’ran is the word of God which is to guide mankind forever, and the Holy Prophet Muhammad was the perfect model of Islamic teachings whose example shall forever be binding on every Muslim to follow.” To my ear, the words “forever” and “perfect” and “every” and “binding” convey the scent of despotism about as well as “a thousand-year Reich”—especially when one considers the actual contents of the Qur’an and the example set by Muhammad. However, the Ahmadis at least claim to believe that jihad “primarily signifies a spiritual, intellectual and moral struggle to reform oneself and others” and to condemn “all use of force except in unavoidable self-defense.” I’m not sure I would want to put these assertions to the test by venturing into an Ahmadi mosque with a fresh batch of cartoons of the Prophet, but the Ahmadis are at least disposed to make the sorts of conciliatory sounds that the religious must make in order to live peacefully in a pluralistic world where most people do not share their favorite superstitions.

But the Ahmadis are by no means the “true” face of Islam, and their mosques are regularly bombed in Pakistan. It is only decent to observe that these atrocities have nothing to do with Israel’s occupation of Palestine, or U.S. foreign policy, or any other terrestrial concern. Why do Ahmadis suffer and die in this way? The reason is as easily discerned as reasons generally are among religious lunatics: Sunni Muslims consider Ahmadis to be heretics—in fact, the government of Pakistan officially deems them so. Unwisely, one branch of this sect holds that its founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835–1908), was a true Prophet of Islam, akin to Muhammad. One thing is as certain in the year 2012 as it was in the year 1012: If you claim that your favorite mystic was Muhammad’s true successor, some young Muslims will be eager to lay down their lives for the pleasure of destroying yours.

As I tried to make clear on Rogan’s podcast, we know that intolerance within the Muslim world extends far beyond the membership of “extremist” groups. Recent events in Afghanistan demonstrate, yet again, that ordinary Afghans grow far more incensed when a copy of the Qur’an gets defaced than when their own children are accidentally killed by our bombs—or, indeed, than when they are intentionally murdered. I doubt there is a more ominous skewing of priorities to be found in this world.

Should people be free to draw cartoons of the Prophet? There must be at least 300 million Muslims spread over a hundred countries who think that a person should be put to death for doing so. (This is based on every poll assessing Muslim opinion I have seen over the past ten years.) Should Ayaan Hirsi Ali be killed for her apostasy? Millions of Muslim women would applaud her murder (to say nothing of Muslim men). These attitudes have to change. The moral high ground here is clear, and we are standing on it.

Of course, millions of Muslims are more secular and are eager to help create a global civil society. But they are virtually silent because they have nothing to say that makes any sense within the framework of their faith. (They are also afraid of getting killed.) That is the problem we must keep in view. And it represents an undeniable difference between Islam and Christianity at this point in history. There are also many nefarious people, in both Europe and the U.S., who are eager to keep well-intentioned liberals confused on this point, equating any criticism of Islam with racism or “Islamophobia.” The fact that many critics of Islam are also racists, Christian fascists, or both does not make these apologists any less cynical or sinister.

The only way to know which way is up, ethically speaking, is to honestly assess what people want and what they believe. We must confront the stubborn reality of differing intentions: In every case it is essential to ask, “What would these people do if they had the power to do anything they wanted?”

Consider the position of Israel, which is so regularly vilified by the Left. As a secularist and a nonbeliever—and as a Jew—I find the idea of a Jewish state obnoxious. But if ever a state organized around a religion was justified, it is the Jewish state of Israel, given the world’s propensity for genocidal anti-Semitism. And if ever criticism of a religious state was unjustified, it is the criticism of Israel that ceaselessly flows from every corner of the Muslim world, given the genocidal aspirations so many Muslims freely confess regarding the Jews. Those who see moral parity between the two sides of Israeli-Palestinian conflict are ignoring rather obvious differences in intent.

My fellow liberals generally refuse to concede that the religious beliefs of groups like Hamas merit any special concern. And yet the slogan of Hamas, as set forth in Article 8 of its charter, reads: “Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.” If this is insufficient to establish this group as a death cult of aspiring martyrs, consider the following excerpts from the charter:

[T]he Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Muslim).

…

There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with. As is said in the honourable Hadith:

“The people of Syria are Allah’s lash in His land. He wreaks His vengeance through them against whomsoever He wishes among His slaves. It is unthinkable that those who are double-faced among them should prosper over the faithful. They will certainly die out of grief and desperation.”

…

It is necessary to instill in the minds of the Muslim generations that the Palestinian problem is a religious problem, and should be dealt with on this basis. Palestine contains Islamic holy sites. In it there is al-Aqsa Mosque which is bound to the great Mosque in Mecca in an inseparable bond as long as heaven and earth speak of Isra` (Mohammed’s midnight journey to the seven heavens) and Mi’raj (Mohammed’s ascension to the seven heavens from Jerusalem).

“The bond of one day for the sake of Allah is better than the world and whatever there is on it. The place of one’s whip in Paradise is far better than the world and whatever there is on it. A worshipper’s going and coming in the service of Allah is better than the world and whatever there is on it.” (As related by al-Bukhari, Muslim, al-Tarmdhi and Ibn Maja).

“I swear by the holder of Mohammed’s soul that I would like to invade and be killed for the sake of Allah, then invade and be killed, and then invade again and be killed.” (As related by al-Bukhari and Muslim).

Whether or not every Palestinian believes these things is not the point. The point is that many do, and their democratically elected government claims to. It is only rational, therefore, for Israel to behave as though it is confronted by a cult of religious sociopaths. The fact that much of the world, and most Western liberals, cannot see the moral imbalance here only makes the position of Israel more precarious, leaving it increasingly vulnerable to overreacting to Palestinian provocations. If the rest of the world were united in condemnation of Hamas, and of Islamism generally, Israel could afford to be slower to reach for its guns.

As is so often the case on the subject of religion, those who should know better reliably do not. For instance, Nicholas Kristof has consistently championed the cause of women in the developing world, many of whom suffer under the strictures of Islam. But he has also been a tireless advocate of political correctness on the subject of religion. In his review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book, Nomad, these two commitments collide and, predictably, political correctness wins:

To those of us who have lived and traveled widely in Africa and Asia, descriptions of Islam often seem true but incomplete. The repression of women, the persecution complexes, the lack of democracy, the volatility, the anti-Semitism, the difficulties modernizing, the disproportionate role in terrorism — those are all real. But if those were the only faces of Islam, it wouldn’t be one of the fastest-growing religions in the world today. There is also the warm hospitality toward guests, including Christians and Jews; charity for the poor; the aesthetic beauty of Koranic Arabic; the sense of democratic unity as rich and poor pray shoulder to shoulder in the mosque. Glib summaries don’t work any better for Islam than they do for Christianity or Judaism… [I]n the West, we should try to have a conversation about Islam and its genuine problems — while speaking out against over-the-top exaggerations about the East. This memoir, while engaging and insightful in many places, exemplifies precisely the kind of rhetoric that is overheated and overstated.

There is sanctimony to spare here, of course, but that is not the worst of it. How could someone as smart and as obviously well-intentioned as Kristof be so off the mark when discussing the views and career of Ayaan Hirsi Ali? He, of all people, should understand how important Hirsi Ali’s contributions have been to our global conversation about the rights of women (and what an obstacle religion has been to the establishment of those rights).


Whenever I make observations of this kind, I am accused of misunderstanding the true causes of the conflict between Islam and the West. Almost invariably, I am urged to read the work of Robert A. Pape. Pape is the author of a very influential paper, “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism” (American Political Science Review 97, no. 3, 2003), and the book Dying to Win, in which he argues that suicide bombing is best understood as a strategic means to achieve certain well-defined nationalist goals and should not be considered a consequence of religious ideology. No one has done more to convince my fellow liberals that if we just behaved ourselves on the world stage, our problems with Islam would go away. I am happy to say that Pape has agreed to discuss these issues with me on this page in the coming weeks. Stay tuned…


[/b]http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/islam-and-the-future-of-liberalism


I recently had a very enjoyable three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan on his podcast, where the topics ranged from jihad to probability theory to psychedelics. But I subsequently received a fair amount of abuse online for a few things I said about Islam and our adventures in the war on terror. For instance, I appear to have left many viewers with the impression that I believe we invaded Afghanistan for the purpose of rescuing its women from the Taliban. However, the points I was actually making were rather different: I think that abandoning these women to the Taliban is one of the things that make our inevitable retreat from Afghanistan ethically problematic. I also believe that wherever we can feasibly stop the abuse of women and girls, we should. An ability to do this in places like Afghanistan, and throughout the world, would be one of the benefits of having a global civil society and a genuine regime of international law. Needless to say, this is not the world we are living in (yet).

The ferocious response to my discussion with Rogan about the war on terror has, once again, caused me to worry about the future of liberalism. It is one thing to think that the war in Afghanistan has been an excruciating failure (which I believe), but it is another to think that we had no moral right to attack al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the first place. A significant percentage of liberals seem to hold the latter view, and consider President Obama to be nothing more than a neocon stooge and Islam to be an unfairly maligned religion of peace. I regularly hear from such people, and their beliefs genuinely trouble me. It doesn’t take many emails containing sentences like “The United States and Israel are the greatest terrorist states on earth” to make me feel that liberalism is simply doomed.

My criticism of Islam, as of any other religion, is aimed at its doctrine and the resulting behavior of its adherents. I am not talking about races of people, or nationalities, or any other aspects of culture. And yes, there are more moderate strands of the faith: The Ahmadis, for instance, resemble what many liberal Westerners imagine the “true” face of Islam must be like. I still find their creed disconcerting: According to one of the websites affiliated with this movement, Ahmadis believe that the “Holy Qu’ran is the word of God which is to guide mankind forever, and the Holy Prophet Muhammad was the perfect model of Islamic teachings whose example shall forever be binding on every Muslim to follow.” To my ear, the words “forever” and “perfect” and “every” and “binding” convey the scent of despotism about as well as “a thousand-year Reich”—especially when one considers the actual contents of the Qur’an and the example set by Muhammad. However, the Ahmadis at least claim to believe that jihad “primarily signifies a spiritual, intellectual and moral struggle to reform oneself and others” and to condemn “all use of force except in unavoidable self-defense.” I’m not sure I would want to put these assertions to the test by venturing into an Ahmadi mosque with a fresh batch of cartoons of the Prophet, but the Ahmadis are at least disposed to make the sorts of conciliatory sounds that the religious must make in order to live peacefully in a pluralistic world where most people do not share their favorite superstitions.

But the Ahmadis are by no means the “true” face of Islam, and their mosques are regularly bombed in Pakistan. It is only decent to observe that these atrocities have nothing to do with Israel’s occupation of Palestine, or U.S. foreign policy, or any other terrestrial concern. Why do Ahmadis suffer and die in this way? The reason is as easily discerned as reasons generally are among religious lunatics: Sunni Muslims consider Ahmadis to be heretics—in fact, the government of Pakistan officially deems them so. Unwisely, one branch of this sect holds that its founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835–1908), was a true Prophet of Islam, akin to Muhammad. One thing is as certain in the year 2012 as it was in the year 1012: If you claim that your favorite mystic was Muhammad’s true successor, some young Muslims will be eager to lay down their lives for the pleasure of destroying yours.

As I tried to make clear on Rogan’s podcast, we know that intolerance within the Muslim world extends far beyond the membership of “extremist” groups. Recent events in Afghanistan demonstrate, yet again, that ordinary Afghans grow far more incensed when a copy of the Qur’an gets defaced than when their own children are accidentally killed by our bombs—or, indeed, than when they are intentionally murdered. I doubt there is a more ominous skewing of priorities to be found in this world.

Should people be free to draw cartoons of the Prophet? There must be at least 300 million Muslims spread over a hundred countries who think that a person should be put to death for doing so. (This is based on every poll assessing Muslim opinion I have seen over the past ten years.) Should Ayaan Hirsi Ali be killed for her apostasy? Millions of Muslim women would applaud her murder (to say nothing of Muslim men). These attitudes have to change. The moral high ground here is clear, and we are standing on it.

Of course, millions of Muslims are more secular and are eager to help create a global civil society. But they are virtually silent because they have nothing to say that makes any sense within the framework of their faith. (They are also afraid of getting killed.) That is the problem we must keep in view. And it represents an undeniable difference between Islam and Christianity at this point in history. There are also many nefarious people, in both Europe and the U.S., who are eager to keep well-intentioned liberals confused on this point, equating any criticism of Islam with racism or “Islamophobia.” The fact that many critics of Islam are also racists, Christian fascists, or both does not make these apologists any less cynical or sinister.

The only way to know which way is up, ethically speaking, is to honestly assess what people want and what they believe. We must confront the stubborn reality of differing intentions: In every case it is essential to ask, “What would these people do if they had the power to do anything they wanted?”

Consider the position of Israel, which is so regularly vilified by the Left. As a secularist and a nonbeliever—and as a Jew—I find the idea of a Jewish state obnoxious. But if ever a state organized around a religion was justified, it is the Jewish state of Israel, given the world’s propensity for genocidal anti-Semitism. And if ever criticism of a religious state was unjustified, it is the criticism of Israel that ceaselessly flows from every corner of the Muslim world, given the genocidal aspirations so many Muslims freely confess regarding the Jews. Those who see moral parity between the two sides of Israeli-Palestinian conflict are ignoring rather obvious differences in intent.

My fellow liberals generally refuse to concede that the religious beliefs of groups like Hamas merit any special concern. And yet the slogan of Hamas, as set forth in Article 8 of its charter, reads: “Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.” If this is insufficient to establish this group as a death cult of aspiring martyrs, consider the following excerpts from the charter:

[T]he Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Muslim).

…

There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with. As is said in the honourable Hadith:

“The people of Syria are Allah’s lash in His land. He wreaks His vengeance through them against whomsoever He wishes among His slaves. It is unthinkable that those who are double-faced among them should prosper over the faithful. They will certainly die out of grief and desperation.”

…

It is necessary to instill in the minds of the Muslim generations that the Palestinian problem is a religious problem, and should be dealt with on this basis. Palestine contains Islamic holy sites. In it there is al-Aqsa Mosque which is bound to the great Mosque in Mecca in an inseparable bond as long as heaven and earth speak of Isra` (Mohammed’s midnight journey to the seven heavens) and Mi’raj (Mohammed’s ascension to the seven heavens from Jerusalem).

“The bond of one day for the sake of Allah is better than the world and whatever there is on it. The place of one’s whip in Paradise is far better than the world and whatever there is on it. A worshipper’s going and coming in the service of Allah is better than the world and whatever there is on it.” (As related by al-Bukhari, Muslim, al-Tarmdhi and Ibn Maja).

“I swear by the holder of Mohammed’s soul that I would like to invade and be killed for the sake of Allah, then invade and be killed, and then invade again and be killed.” (As related by al-Bukhari and Muslim).

Whether or not every Palestinian believes these things is not the point. The point is that many do, and their democratically elected government claims to. It is only rational, therefore, for Israel to behave as though it is confronted by a cult of religious sociopaths. The fact that much of the world, and most Western liberals, cannot see the moral imbalance here only makes the position of Israel more precarious, leaving it increasingly vulnerable to overreacting to Palestinian provocations. If the rest of the world were united in condemnation of Hamas, and of Islamism generally, Israel could afford to be slower to reach for its guns.

As is so often the case on the subject of religion, those who should know better reliably do not. For instance, Nicholas Kristof has consistently championed the cause of women in the developing world, many of whom suffer under the strictures of Islam. But he has also been a tireless advocate of political correctness on the subject of religion. In his review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book, Nomad, these two commitments collide and, predictably, political correctness wins:

To those of us who have lived and traveled widely in Africa and Asia, descriptions of Islam often seem true but incomplete. The repression of women, the persecution complexes, the lack of democracy, the volatility, the anti-Semitism, the difficulties modernizing, the disproportionate role in terrorism — those are all real. But if those were the only faces of Islam, it wouldn’t be one of the fastest-growing religions in the world today. There is also the warm hospitality toward guests, including Christians and Jews; charity for the poor; the aesthetic beauty of Koranic Arabic; the sense of democratic unity as rich and poor pray shoulder to shoulder in the mosque. Glib summaries don’t work any better for Islam than they do for Christianity or Judaism… [I]n the West, we should try to have a conversation about Islam and its genuine problems — while speaking out against over-the-top exaggerations about the East. This memoir, while engaging and insightful in many places, exemplifies precisely the kind of rhetoric that is overheated and overstated.

There is sanctimony to spare here, of course, but that is not the worst of it. How could someone as smart and as obviously well-intentioned as Kristof be so off the mark when discussing the views and career of Ayaan Hirsi Ali? He, of all people, should understand how important Hirsi Ali’s contributions have been to our global conversation about the rights of women (and what an obstacle religion has been to the establishment of those rights).


Whenever I make observations of this kind, I am accused of misunderstanding the true causes of the conflict between Islam and the West. Almost invariably, I am urged to read the work of Robert A. Pape. Pape is the author of a very influential paper, “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism” (American Political Science Review 97, no. 3, 2003), and the book Dying to Win, in which he argues that suicide bombing is best understood as a strategic means to achieve certain well-defined nationalist goals and should not be considered a consequence of religious ideology. No one has done more to convince my fellow liberals that if we just behaved ourselves on the world stage, our problems with Islam would go away. I am happy to say that Pape has agreed to discuss these issues with me on this page in the coming weeks. Stay tuned…

http://www.sunnewsonline.com/webpages/news/national/2012/mar/01/national-03-01-2012-000.html

BIZARRE!
Woman, 22, kills cousin’s 5-yr-old daughter, removes her tongue
, Holy Spirit instructed me to remove object from her mouth –Suspect
From NGOZI UWUJARE, Ibadan


This could pass for one of the wonders of the world. It is a strange but true life story of a 22-year lady, Chinyere Alegu, who dragged her cousin’s daughter, Chioma Edukwu, 5, to a nearby bush, inserted her fingers in her mouth and pulled out her tongue . The victim died as a result of the wicked act.

The incident took place at Ndi Duma Ekpaomaka village, in Ikwo Local Government Area of Ebonyi State.
According to a source, the suspect allegedly committed the crime under the influence of some unseen forces.

He narrated how the suspect behaved strangely, each time the spirit came upon her. But despite that, Chinyere was said to have taken her Christian life seriously and even became a ‘prayer warrior.’
Crimewatch was also told that the suspect, who was described by many as a very quiet person, usually saw vision and received revelations ‘anytime she was in spirit’.

One day, she told her relatives how she dreamt and the spirit directed her to pull out an object from an elderly woman’s mouth. However, when she woke up from sleep, she traveled to her cousin’s village, Ishiekke Igbubuikwo and told him she wanted to train his daughter, Chioma. Monday Edukwu was said to have granted her request and asked Chioma to go with her.
Chinyere was said to have taken the little girl to her elder sister’s house at Ekpaomaka where they slept in the same room.

At about 1.30a.m., Chinyere claimed she was directed to go and pray for an elderly woman and to pull out an object from her mouth but she decided to go along with the victim.
But instead of going to the woman’s house as she claimed, she dragged the little girl to a bush, which was a kilometre away from her sister’s house, allegedly pushed her to the ground and started praying for her.

As the prayer was going on, she allegedly inserted her fingers in the girl’s mouth and pulled out her tongue. And when the suspect came back to her senses, she realised that it was Chioma, and not the elderly woman from whose mout.hhe ‘removed the object’ .

Realising the implication of what she did, she raised the alarm and beckoned on a hunter, that was passing by for assistance. Crimewatch gathered that the girl died before help could come her way.
The news of the incident spread like wildfire and attracted the villagers to the scene. They reported the matter at Ikwo Police Station while policemen went to the bush where they arrested Chinyere and recovered a copy of Holy Bible.
The suspect, who spoke to Crimewatch, said: “ I am a hair dresser by profession. I love to evangelise and attend churches and where they hold rallies and preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I was sleeping when the Holy Spirit instructed me to go and pull out an object from an elderly woman’s mouth. I dreamt again before I took Chioma to the bush for prayer and while there, I used my hands to remove her tongue.
“Having realised what I did, I raised the alarm and appealed to people to come and help me revive her. I used my right hand to remove her tongue. Sometimes, Holy Spirit visit me. I can pray in the house for three to four hours. I don’t know what to say but to beg my cousin to forgive me,” she lamented.

The deceased’s father told the reporter that he was surprised that Chinyere killed his daughter. “She came to me to request that my daughter stayed with her. Two days later, information got to us that Chioma, my first daughter, was found dead in the bush. I saw my daughter’s tongue on the ground and was later told that Chinyere removed it. I want law to take its course, I want justice to be done. I don’t know what came over her. I know her to be a Christian, a prayer warrior,” the grieving father said.

The Ebonyi State Commissioner of Police, Mr. Adeola Adeniji, said the suspect had been arrested and would be tried for murder. He said: “We didn’t see any object on her apart from the Bible.”

[flash=200,200]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNuJ6A6iGP4&sns=fb[/flash]


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNuJ6A6iGP4&sns=fb

LOL!!! Too funny. ,

Not sure why my earlier post was removed. I just lifted the article from the economist, and the title was what it was not trying to offend anybody.

http://www.economist.com/node/21546002

A debate about homosexuality in Islam is beginning. But in Muslim lands persecution—and hypocrisy—are still rife


ONE leaflet showed a wooden doll hanging from a noose and suggested burning or stoning homosexuals. “God Abhors You” read another. A third warned gays: “Turn or Burn”. Three Muslim men who handed out the leaflets in the English city of Derby were convicted of hate crimes on January 20th. One of them, Kabir Ahmed, said his Muslim duty was “to give the message”.

That message—at least in the eyes of religious purists— is uncompromising condemnation. Of the seven countries that impose the death penalty for homosexuality, all are Muslim. Even when gays do not face execution, persecution is endemic. In 2010 a Saudi man was sentenced to 500 lashes and five years in jail for having sex with another man. In February last year, police in Bahrain arrested scores of men, mostly other Gulf nationals, at a “gay party”. Iranian gay men are typically tried on other trumped-up charges. But in September last year three were executed specifically for homosexuality. (Lesbians in Muslim countries tend to have an easier time: in Iran they are sentenced to death only on the fourth conviction.)

Gay life in the open in Muslim-majority countries is rare, but the closet is spacious. Countries with fierce laws, such as Saudi Arabia, also have flourishing gay scenes at all levels of society. Syria’s otherwise fearsome police rarely arrest gays. Sibkeh park in Damascus is a tree-filled children’s playground during the day. By night it is known for the young men who linger on its benches or walls. Wealthy Afghans buy bachabazi, (dancing boys) as catamites.

Where laws are gentler, authorities find other ways to crack down. In the Jordanian capital, Amman, several gay hangouts have been raided or closed on bogus charges, such as serving alcohol illegally. Even where homosexuality is legal (as in Turkey), official censure can be fierce. A former minister for women’s affairs, Aliye Kavaf, called it “a disease”; the interior minister, Idris Naim Sahin, cited it (along with Zoroastrianism and eating pork) as an example of “dishonour, immorality and inhuman situations”. A new film, “Zenne Dancer”, portrays a young man’s murder in 2008 as Turkey’s first gay “honour killing” (the suspect, the victim’s father, is on the run).

Charges of homosexuality can also be used in political repression. The Malaysian opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, was twice tried for sodomy; the attorney-general is appealing against the latest acquittal. Intolerance can unite otherwise warring factions. In Nigeria Muslims and conservative Christians alike back a proposed law banning gay marriage (and indirectly criminalising all same-sex unions).


Earlier Islamic societies were less hardline. An 11th-century Persian ruler advised his son to alternate his partners seasonally: young men in the summer and women in the winter. Many of the love poems of the eighth-century Abu Nuwas in Baghdad, and of other Persian and Urdu poets, were addressed to boys. In medieval mystic writings, particularly Sufi texts, it is unclear whether the beloved being addressed is a teenage boy or God, providing a quasi-religious sanction for relationships between men and boys. Austere European chroniclers fumed at the indulgent attitudes to gay sex in the Caliphs’ courts (now the censure is the other way).

Like liberal Jewish and Christian scholars in recent decades, some Muslim thinkers are now finding theological latitude. “The Koran does not condemn homosexuality,” says Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, an American Muslim convert who teaches Islamic studies at Emory University in Atlanta. The story of Lot, he argues, deals with male rape and violence, not homosexuality in general. Classical Islamic theologians and jurists were mostly concerned with stifling lustful immorality, he says. Koranic verses describe without condemnation men who have no sexual desire for women.

Arash Naraghi, an Iranian academic at Moravian College in Pennsylvania, suggests that the verses decrying homosexuality, like those referring to slavery and Ptolemaic cosmology, stem from common beliefs at the time of writing, and should be re-examined. Even Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, the late spiritual leader of Lebanon’s Hizbullah party-cum-militia, conceded that more research is needed in order to understand homosexuality.

Unsurprisingly, the debate, such as it is, is led by gay Muslims outside the Islamic world. Though their rights are better protected, they too can suffer from intolerance—as the trial in Derby last month highlighted. In European cities with lots of poor, pious Muslim immigrants, municipal politics brings some rum alliances. Ken Livingstone, a left-wing London politician with a strong record on gay rights, has in the past welcomed Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an America-bashing Muslim cleric from Egypt who supports the death penalty for homosexuality.

In Muslim countries activists have mostly shied away from the pitfalls of theological debate. Instead, groups such as Helem, a Lebanese NGO, use the secular language of human rights, citing United Nations declarations. Mr Alizadeh sees progress, though it is slow. Even some Muslim clerics, the group most resistant to reform, are shifting slightly. After attacks on gay men in Iraq in 2009, Muqtada al-Sadr, a fiery Shia cleric, condemned the killings. He said that the “depravity” of homosexuality should indeed be eradicated, but through “preaching and guidance” rather than violence. Optimists would see that as progress, of a sort.



The democratic upheavals of the Arab spring have brought little comfort. Hossein Alizadeh of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, a New York-based lobby group, says that religious awakening is strengthening hardline interpretations of Islam and a repressive backlash on all kinds of sex-related issues. But the laws left behind by the former regimes in countries such as Tunisia and Egypt seem draconian enough to satisfy the new governments.

An ominous counter-example is Iraq. The previous Iraqi regime was politically repressive but unbothered by sexual mores. Now men even suspected of being gay face kidnappings, rape, torture and extrajudicial killing. Ali Hili, head of a group called Iraqi LGBT, (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) says that since the 2003 invasion more than 700 people have been killed because of their sexuality. It is the most dangerous place in the world for sexual minorities, he says.

Theology or technology

One small source of hope is the internet: life online offers gays safety, secrecy and the chance to make their case. In a campaign called “We are everywhere” Iranian gays and lesbians are posting protest videos on Facebook. In one, entitled “Ali the Queer”, a man speaks of his longing for a world in which those who deviate from the heterosexual standard are no longer considered unnatural or abnormal. However, a video newly posted from the United Arab Emirates shows an effeminate gay man being “cured” by two straight men.

The internet also offers a chance to debate the fundamental issue: the Islamic prohibition of homosexuality. This is based on a tale (common to all three Abrahamic religions, though details differ) of a man called Lot and the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. These were engulfed in fire and brimstone as divine punishment for the local penchant for gay sex.

http://www.economist.com/node/21546002


Islam and homosexuality
Straight but narrow
A debate about homosexuality in Islam is beginning. But in Muslim lands persecution—and hypocrisy—are still rife



ONE leaflet showed a wooden doll hanging from a noose and suggested burning or stoning homosexuals. “God Abhors You” read another. A third warned gays: “Turn or Burn”. Three Muslim men who handed out the leaflets in the English city of Derby were convicted of hate crimes on January 20th. One of them, Kabir Ahmed, said his Muslim duty was “to give the message”.

That message—at least in the eyes of religious purists— is uncompromising condemnation. Of the seven countries that impose the death penalty for homosexuality, all are Muslim. Even when gays do not face execution, persecution is endemic. In 2010 a Saudi man was sentenced to 500 lashes and five years in jail for having sex with another man. In February last year, police in Bahrain arrested scores of men, mostly other Gulf nationals, at a “gay party”. Iranian gay men are typically tried on other trumped-up charges. But in September last year three were executed specifically for homosexuality. (Lesbians in Muslim countries tend to have an easier time: in Iran they are sentenced to death only on the fourth conviction.)

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Iraq
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Islam
Culture and lifestyle
Gay life in the open in Muslim-majority countries is rare, but the closet is spacious. Countries with fierce laws, such as Saudi Arabia, also have flourishing gay scenes at all levels of society. Syria’s otherwise fearsome police rarely arrest gays. Sibkeh park in Damascus is a tree-filled children’s playground during the day. By night it is known for the young men who linger on its benches or walls. Wealthy Afghans buy bachabazi, (dancing boys) as catamites.

Where laws are gentler, authorities find other ways to crack down. In the Jordanian capital, Amman, several gay hangouts have been raided or closed on bogus charges, such as serving alcohol illegally. Even where homosexuality is legal (as in Turkey), official censure can be fierce. A former minister for women’s affairs, Aliye Kavaf, called it “a disease”; the interior minister, Idris Naim Sahin, cited it (along with Zoroastrianism and eating pork) as an example of “dishonour, immorality and inhuman situations”. A new film, “Zenne Dancer”, portrays a young man’s murder in 2008 as Turkey’s first gay “honour killing” (the suspect, the victim’s father, is on the run).

Charges of homosexuality can also be used in political repression. The Malaysian opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, was twice tried for sodomy; the attorney-general is appealing against the latest acquittal. Intolerance can unite otherwise warring factions. In Nigeria Muslims and conservative Christians alike back a proposed law banning gay marriage (and indirectly criminalising all same-sex unions).

The democratic upheavals of the Arab spring have brought little comfort. Hossein Alizadeh of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, a New York-based lobby group, says that religious awakening is strengthening hardline interpretations of Islam and a repressive backlash on all kinds of sex-related issues. But the laws left behind by the former regimes in countries such as Tunisia and Egypt seem draconian enough to satisfy the new governments.

An ominous counter-example is Iraq. The previous Iraqi regime was politically repressive but unbothered by sexual mores. Now men even suspected of being gay face kidnappings, rape, torture and extrajudicial killing. Ali Hili, head of a group called Iraqi LGBT, (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) says that since the 2003 invasion more than 700 people have been killed because of their sexuality. It is the most dangerous place in the world for sexual minorities, he says.

Theology or technology

One small source of hope is the internet: life online offers gays safety, secrecy and the chance to make their case. In a campaign called “We are everywhere” Iranian gays and lesbians are posting protest videos on Facebook. In one, entitled “Ali the Queer”, a man speaks of his longing for a world in which those who deviate from the heterosexual standard are no longer considered unnatural or abnormal. However, a video newly posted from the United Arab Emirates shows an effeminate gay man being “cured” by two straight men.

The internet also offers a chance to debate the fundamental issue: the Islamic prohibition of homosexuality. This is based on a tale (common to all three Abrahamic religions, though details differ) of a man called Lot and the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. These were engulfed in fire and brimstone as divine punishment for the local penchant for gay sex.



Earlier Islamic societies were less hardline. An 11th-century Persian ruler advised his son to alternate his partners seasonally: young men in the summer and women in the winter. Many of the love poems of the eighth-century Abu Nuwas in Baghdad, and of other Persian and Urdu poets, were addressed to boys. In medieval mystic writings, particularly Sufi texts, it is unclear whether the beloved being addressed is a teenage boy or God, providing a quasi-religious sanction for relationships between men and boys. Austere European chroniclers fumed at the indulgent attitudes to gay sex in the Caliphs’ courts (now the censure is the other way).

Like liberal Jewish and Christian scholars in recent decades, some Muslim thinkers are now finding theological latitude. “The Koran does not condemn homosexuality,” says Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, an American Muslim convert who teaches Islamic studies at Emory University in Atlanta. The story of Lot, he argues, deals with male rape and violence, not homosexuality in general. Classical Islamic theologians and jurists were mostly concerned with stifling lustful immorality, he says. Koranic verses describe without condemnation men who have no sexual desire for women.

Arash Naraghi, an Iranian academic at Moravian College in Pennsylvania, suggests that the verses decrying homosexuality, like those referring to slavery and Ptolemaic cosmology, stem from common beliefs at the time of writing, and should be re-examined. Even Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, the late spiritual leader of Lebanon’s Hizbullah party-cum-militia, conceded that more research is needed in order to understand homosexuality.

Unsurprisingly, the debate, such as it is, is led by gay Muslims outside the Islamic world. Though their rights are better protected, they too can suffer from intolerance—as the trial in Derby last month highlighted. In European cities with lots of poor, pious Muslim immigrants, municipal politics brings some rum alliances. Ken Livingstone, a left-wing London politician with a strong record on gay rights, has in the past welcomed Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an America-bashing Muslim cleric from Egypt who supports the death penalty for homosexuality.

In Muslim countries activists have mostly shied away from the pitfalls of theological debate. Instead, groups such as Helem, a Lebanese NGO, use the secular language of human rights, citing United Nations declarations. Mr Alizadeh sees progress, though it is slow. Even some Muslim clerics, the group most resistant to reform, are shifting slightly. After attacks on gay men in Iraq in 2009, Muqtada al-Sadr, a fiery Shia cleric, condemned the killings. He said that the “depravity” of homosexuality should indeed be eradicated, but through “preaching and guidance” rather than violence. Optimists would see that as progress, of a sort.

http://saharareporters.com/interview/interview-wole-soyinka-next-phase-boko-haram-terrorism-thenews
http://thenewsafrica.com/2012/02/06/next-phase-of-boko-haram-terrorism/


To what will you attribute Boko Haram’s terrorism?-Let me begin by reminding everyone that Boko Haram has a very long history, whether you describe Boko Haram as an army of the discontent, or even as some people grotesquely try to suggest, “revolutionaries,” or you describe them as, legitimately, this time, as marginalised or feeling marginalised.

When I say that the phenomenon has a very long history, I am talking about a movement that relies on religion as a fuel for their operation, as a fuel for mobilisation, as the impetus, an augmentation of any other legitimate or illegitimate grievance that they might have against society. Because of that fuel, that irrational, very combustible fuel of religion of a particular strain, of a particular irredentist strain; because of the nature of that religious adherence, which involves the very lethal dimension of brain-washing from childhood, all a man needs to be told is that this is a religious cause. All they need to be told is that this is an enemy of religion and they are ready to kill. No matter the motivations, no mater the extra-motivations of those who send them out, they need only one motivation: that they are fighting the cause of that religion.

People wonder, sometimes, if they are fighting the cause of religion, why are they also killing fellow religionists? It is very important for us to understand that they have a very narrow view of even their faith. Anyone outside that narrow confine, narrow definition (in this case, we are talking about Islam), is already an infidel, an unbeliever, a hypocrite, an enemy of God (they use all these multifarious descriptions) and therefore is fit for elimination. If they believe that this environment contains any non-believer in their very narrow strain of Islam, that person or that very area is due for sanitation. And if there are those who also believe, who are confined within the very narrow limit of their arbitrary religion, any chance that there are such people, they consider them matyrs, who will be received in the bosom of Allah, with double credits as having been killed accidentally.

What I am saying is not any theorising; it is not any speculation. Examine this particular strain of Islam from Afghanistan, through Iran to Somalia to Mauritania. We are speaking in fact of a deviant arm of Islam, whose first line of enemies, in fact, are those who I call the orthodox Muslims with whom we move, interact, inter-marry, professional colleagues and so on. They don’t consider them true Muslims.

So the seeming paradox is explained in that. And this mind is bred right from infancy. We are talking about the madrasas, we are talking about the almajiris. They have only one line of command: their Mullah. If the Mullah says go, they go; come, they come; kill, they kill; beg, they beg. They don’t believe in leaving their narrow religion, which teaches them that they have to be catered for either by their immediate superior as an authority or by the community or sometimes an extension of that by the town. When they go out to beg, they believe that this mission of begging is divinely ordered and it is the responsibility of the person from whom they are begging to give them alms.

They sit before their Mullah or their Emir or their chief or whatever and memorise the Qu’ran. Their entire circumscription or mental formation is to be able to recite the Qu’ran from the beginning to the end. Outside of that, there is no educational horizon. So, I want us to distinguish very carefully. If you don’t distinguish, if you don’t narrow these things down to the specifics, we are likely to be misunderstood, as people like me have been misunderstood, because I have been against fundamentalism all my life, of any religion, whether it’s Christianity, Orisha worship, Buddhism, Hinduism or whatever. Any kind of extreme in faith that makes you feel that you are divinely authorised to be the executioner of your deity or that there is only one view of the world, or that only one view exists, for me, is pernicious and it is anti-human. That is why I am making this preliminary explanation.

The second elaboration I want to make is that I have never liked the expression, “the core North”. We are talking about North because the North is very much identified with Islam. And for one reason, there is no core South. I don’t know about the core East, I don’t know about the core West. So why that expression? For me it is too general, too loose and it confuses the dramatis personae of our political life.

I, however, identify hard-core northerners, as in hard core pornography. There exist hardcore northerners. They may be in the minority, but they believe that they are divinely endowed to run any society.

They are hardcore Northerners, whether you are talking about Sheikh Gumi and others. For a character like Sheikh Gumi, politics fuses with religion. A man who said Christianity is nothing, who said a Christian would rule this nation over his dead body. So, we have hardcore northerners, hardcore northern Islamists like the late Sheik Gumi. Among those that I describe as the hardcore northerners, (note I didn’t say Islamists), are people like Sani Ahmed Yerima, the former Zamfara State governor, who is now a legislator. There are hardcore northern Islamists. Why do I use Yerima? Because in him, you also encounter the fusion of a credo in Northernism and at the same time in Islamism. So you can see somebody like him as an opportunist. And I say this, you know, because he himself admitted to some of our people in NALICON during the immediate post-Abacha era, when he was asked why he decided to turn Zamfara into a theocratic state in a secular dispensation. He said, and I dare him to deny it, that it was the only weapon he had to snatch power. He said the PDP machinery was so strong that he needed something which would appeal to raw emotions, to mobilise and get the governorship.

If, periodically, I refer to this individual, it is because he represents to me, the opportunistic face of Islamism. And, of course, he had to deliver after he became governor. He is not the only one. I distinguish between him and Gumi because Gumi never sought political power. He was just a raw believer in raw Northernism and Islam. The two tributaries fuse in a personality like that.

In the case of Mr. Yerima and a number of others, Islam is just an instrument. I don’t consider them genuine Muslims. For them, however, they are willing to go the full length of Islam because it pays them politically. Having said that, I do not say for a moment that he is responsible for Boko Haram or that he has any hand in it. But I say that his school of thought and his school of opportunism is responsible for the birth of a movement like Boko Haram.

Now let’s get to the specifics. And I dare anybody to contradict what I am about to say. General Obasanjo came to power as a civilian ‘President’ on the platform of the Northern caucus. If you remember, there was a huge controversy: Did he sign? Didn’t he sign? Did that one sign, didn’t this sign?

Before the presidency was, shall we say ‘conceded’ to him, it’s quite true, and he’ll be the last to deny. In fact, he admitted that he was even brought a paper to sign but he refused.

The first signs that the sponsors of Obasanjo got that they made a mistake was when he dismissed military officers, who had held political offices. That was the first time those who sponsored Obasanjo, who were hardcore northerners, felt they had got themselves into trouble because as it happened, those who were most affected were northerners. That was the first sign of trouble.

And they just didn’t take it and say ‘oh let it pass’ until later. They then opened a war office at that time. I’m talking of a physical office in which every single thing he said, every clipping, was stored. Ask Olusegun Obasanjo. I personally told him this. I said: ‘By the way, I hope you realise that the people who sponsored you have declared war on you; that they have opened an office on you, specifically an Obasanjo office!’ How do I know about this? If anybody denies this, I will come back to you and I will tell you how I knew about it. I am not ready to divulge. So, that is the first. The second phase was when Obasanjo proceeded and began privately to plan his re-election (that is the second term in office). At that time, what I called the hardcore northerners began to mobilise at what level yet, I cannot categorically say.

I don’t have the slightest interest in whether Obasanjo was right to seek a second term or not. I am not going to discuss whether it is right or wrong for anybody to try to impose a limitation, which is not backed by the constitution, on any individual candidate. I’m just telling this nation certain facts which no one can deny.

Obasanjo decided to have a second term, that is a southerner, not just an ex-military man, but a southerner. The language at the time was very overt. It was ‘we are just lending you the presidency, we will take it back at the end of your term.’ It was a feeling, a belief, which percolated through the various levels, various ranks of politicians and across all ages.

I remember one incident. I was invited by Fani-Kayode (Femi) and Akin Osuntokun to a meeting of a group they had. There was a very young man, very intelligent, at the meeting. A lot of young northerners gravitated towards me, by the way, and I interact with them. Even back in the Abacha days, some of them used to come and see me in Harvard University, where I relocated and taught. And each time I meet a generation that does not belong to the hardcore northerners, I am always delighted to exchange ideas with them till tomorrow. And this young man, I remember I met him. And I wanted him to join us. I sent his name to Fani-Kayode and I said this is the kind of man you people should interact with. These are very progressive people. It almost ended in a disaster because that young fellow, whom I discussed with, made a mistake by saying: ‘After all, I don’t know what you people are complaining about. We did concede after Abiola. We did concede the thing to you.’ Fani-Kayode wanted to take that man’s head off. He blew up, it was difficult for me to separate them. I say these things only to explain that, even among some of the young generation that one thought could be weaned away from such ideas, such notions exist. A lot of people there that day can check on the incident. And it’s only one of such incidents.

So, the next sense of betrayal was when Obasanjo got a second term. Some of them even said openly that they had been misled that the man they thought was going to hold the forte for them turned out to have an agenda of his own. So far, so bad. The next phase that can determine at which time, I won’t tell you, the hardcore northerners began to activate what I called secret army, when they began to send their people to training. They felt they had to fight to take back what they felt belonged to the North.

So I suspect that the breaking point was when Yar’Adua took ill and the question of succession began. ‘If Yar’Adua dies, you mean another southerner is going to get into that position?’ This now became a real nightmare. For this, hardcore northerners (it’s too long, let’s just use the word cabal, even though that word is misused, to narrow it down to make sure we are talking about individuals, not about a region).

They decided that something drastic had to be done. Around this time, they had begun to activate, they intensified the training, this set of foot soldiers, they began to make intensified contacts, alliances with international religion-based insurgents like al-Qaeda. And their soldiers began to go to Mauritania, Sudan and Somalia, particularly those who were categorically confirmed by the security services. They began to send them seriously for training. That is not the problem, al-Qaeda has always been interested in Nigeria, as in Kenya and Mauritania. Osama bin Laden listed, if you remember, it’s published, Nigeria among the nations to be Islamised.

And so, these people went for training, they came back lying low, waiting to be activated. Remember all these didn’t begin with the period I’m talking about. They have a long history of extremists. People tend to forget about Maitatsine; that was a different calibre altogether. So there is nothing new about what we are seeing. It is the intensification and the murderous dimension that this narrow Islamism is taking.

I am talking of accumulation of grievances of this narrow group. And this is why even some of their own fellow northerners were targets because these were considered malodorous among them and in any struggle of this kind historically, you find that the first stage is to clean out your rearguard, those whom you consider might stab you in the back–the rearguard traitors. You wipe them out first. And that is why we are seeing the intensification of the antagonism towards certain progressive liberal northerners.

Matters became worse, of course, when Jonathan decided that in his own right, he was going to contest elections. That is when the last restraint vanished from the hardcore northerners. That is when they activated the extreme, murderous strain of religion. That is why they began to identify political enemies as religious enemies. What we are reaping today is largely a political problem. It’s true that in my article, precisely the last one, used in Newsweek, I emphasised the religious strain because it is true. I did not want to make statement of a political nature; I did not want to elaborate, but I said enough in that article where I used the expression: ‘those who lost out in the political stakes are the ones who are now intensifying, who are now mobilising, activating the religious fanatics in our midst.’ I just hinted as much. But now, we are reaching a place where we are talking in terms of fatalities, we are counting now in four figures. By the time you add together all the fatalities that have occurred in the last year and half, we are talking in terms of thousands now since the real militancy began.

But I think at that point, even before now, we should never even have gotten to this point. But now, we have reached the stage where there is going to be some frank talking among ourselves.

If you read the ‘manifesto’ of the Boko Haram, you will find that there is nothing you can actually hold on to unlike, say, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, MEND, which is categorical on the polluted environment. The oil companies have polluted the environment, all the wealth coming from there goes to develop the rest of the country, you killed our leaders, we turned them into martyrs, land is polluted, air is polluted. There are pulmonary and skin diseases as a result of oil spillage and flaring of gases. Fish ponds have been degraded. You can see what you can hold on to. You can agree or disagree with their methodologies, we are not talking about that now. The important thing is that when you read their table of content, of complaints, at least, it is not on an eerie level.

In this particular case, you can go to Youtube and all what Shekau says is that ‘democracy is haram’. We are going to Islamise’ and so on. What is he going to Islamise? You are talking nonsense because you are saying you were going to Islamise dead bodies. Let’s say there are non-Muslims in this country, a modest estimate, let’s say two million. I say very modest estimate, you know you cannot kill two million. So, what you do to Islamise is you do that over dead bodies and you can’t do that, not even if you say you are Rwanda.

It is because these hardcore Northerners are embarrassed to admit what really is behind this thing. They are embarrassed to admit it. And on the other side, they are inhibited, they don’t want to say it’s North versus South, it’s not even that. It’s a minority versus the rest. And I say it’s not even against the South. It’s a minority versus the entirety of the nation.

PDP is at the heart of the trouble, it’s within PDP they have been making this dirty bargain. “You rule for so long, it’s my turn.” It is not in the constitution. So it’s the PDP members, who really should go and sort out this problem among themselves. But the nation is the one paying the penalty. This is not comfortable because they can protect themselves. They are the ones that divided the country into two–the North and then, the South.

I think that the reason which you might say is on paper, in terms of political planning, are the six geo-political zones. This ‘two’ business, I don’t understand. But they are using this division of North versus South the same way as they are using religion. The issue is completely political. But with toxic element of religion infused into it, it gives them the leg to ally with international terrorist bodies based on religion. Those are only too happy to be of assistance.

It is the same way, as in the days of ideological bifurcation of the world, the Eastern bloc versus the Western bloc. All you had to do was to go the Eastern bloc and say I am a revolutionary, I’m a Maxist-Leninist, Troskyite, Maoist something, and they give you training right away and they embrace you, and are ready to send you even outside your own country to go prove your mettle there and come back.

And, of course, the capitalists would go to the former Nicaragua under Somoza and other nations and they also got their training. So, we are right inside an international programme. And a lot of people don’t understand; it’s not extraordinary, it’s only that we are hiding the truth under blocs, hoping that somehow it will fizzle away.

When we talk about a national conference, it’s because we realise there are serious polticial issues into which religion has also been cropped and that is a very lethal cocktail. But the basic thing is political. Religion is invoked. I am not surprised by the recent revelations being made in the papers such as ‘we have been on the payroll of this governor’. It may be true, it may be half true, it may be totally untrue.

But all these go back again to Maitatsine. In the Maitatsine days, governors courted the sponsorship of Maitatsine. I remember a former governor of Kano admitted that at the beginning, he used to go to Maitatsine, when elections came close, to get support. But he said: ‘I stopped doing that when I realised that it’s a very dangerous organisation.’

The politicians are so desperate; they are the ones who utilise religion. They are not alone. We saw Goodluck Jonathan kneeling before a Christian prelate for his blessing. The only difference is that I am not aware that Goodluck Jonathan has been sponsoring any militant fundamentalist Christians. People turn to religion. We shouldn’t be surprised at this; it’s the extent at which you want to go into religion that makes it a normal aberration, a contradiction in terms by the way or an acceptable kind of aberration. Whether one destabilises, whether one gives you psychological advantage over the followers of that particular religion, there is nothing we can do about that. But when we reach a point where the product of that alliance is destroying us, then I think it’s about time we all spoke up and let these people now admit what they have known, what they have always suspected, so as to assist the security people in determining where the criminal line exists and to take action.

Many people are worried that what Boko Haram is doing may lead to the dismemberment of the country, while some others are saying: “we are too interwoven to split”. On what side do you queue?

If Boko Haram succeeds in its stated agenda to make the country ungovernable, if Boko Haram succeeds in goading those areas that have victim citizens in the northern part of the country into reprisal actions on the nearest targets, not only will this cause a break-up, it will be very messy. That is the reason some of us have been issuing appeals to community leaders to make sure it doesn’t happen in their communities.

It isn’t the break-up as such. Other nations were broken up, but the way in which we will break up will be intensely irremediable, it will be extremely messy. I can reveal to you, for instance, what the third phase of Boko Haram is supposed to be.

The security people know it. I am making it known publicly because I am disappointed that they have not taken action on it. And that third phase is selected assassination of leaders from here. I happen to know for a fact that I am on the list. I am very close to the very top of the list. If you have contact within the security, go and check because I have this information confirmed within the Nigerian security services and from outside security quarters, which I will not name. At least the government security agencies have the responsibility to start protecting those individuals or at least to communicate to community leaders the existence of this threat so that they can take certain precautionary measures. Because if they succeed unfortunately in that particular project, things will be out of control. There are young people, who will not, may not be able to control their reactions.

The reason for this programme, which I know is very much their third phase, is that those pushing this agenda know very well that this could be the last straw that breaks the camel’s back. And they would rather this country broke up and possibly in an inferno, than continue to accept the loss, even the temporal loss of power in this country. For these people, government is the only business around. To the membership of this group that I’m talking about, government is the only business.

We are talking about an unproductive group, who all their lives, have been accustomed to living on the proceeds of power, even when they are not physically in charge. It is the only way of life that they know and so while destabilising the rest of the nation, they want to ensure that they carve out a certain region in which they can dominate, and which they can terrorise through an extreme form of the Sharia, so that they can continue consuming the revenue from that area, such as it is without any opposition. These people believe very much in the divine authority of religious governance.

They secure through terror, total destruction and, paradoxically, they are securing their enclave when they retreat, they have somewhere into which they retreat which is governed on the strictest law of the Sharia. That is their ultimate goal. If they cannot have the entire thing, that is the nation, then they can ally with similar theocratic states and their position is, whatever it is, they are not individual losers, they will be taken care of.

That is why I believe that the country is very much on the verge of disintegration, especially if Bokom Haram succeeds in its agenda, which I outlined. With complete sense of responsibility and with the accumulation of facts, some within the government know what I’m saying, they acknowledge it. Some within the security services, I hope, have reached that analytical truth. I hope so, but they are not acting as if they heard and it is very worrisome.

How do you assess President Goodluck Jonathan’s response to Boko Haram threat and even the President himself as a person?



I don’t believe that President Jonathan understands half of what I have been telling you about. I don’t think that he has a truthful appreciation of the circumstances. I think he is very much some kind of an optimist; he believes certain politicial largesse or panacea here and there will solve this enormous problem. I think he is counting too much on the fact that yes, indeed, there are strongly committed loyalists to his regime from the troubled parts of the country, and ideally that is enough.

He is underestimating the desperation of the forces of the group. I do not believe that he has been able to extract the lesson or lessons of Islamic struggle, that is internal struggle throughout the world. For instance, in Iraq, every year on the holiest day of a certain Islamic sect ( I am talking about the Shiites and the Sunnis) that one group goes and butchers the other, ambushes them, mows them down even on their way to pilgrimage. I don’t think he understands or appreciates the fact that even sanctuaries have become meaningless. Sanctuaries used to hold meanings in all religions. You don’t just assault your opponents when they have taken religious sanctuary. Nigeria is filled with a whole race of mimics.

If one person 419s, tomorrow, a thousand will. They will use exactly the same formula. If they see that this formula has worked in attracting one greedy fellow over there, the next time you will see thousands of people in cyber cafes, using exactly the same formula. If you analyse all the 419 letters, I don’t think you can get more than three models, with minor variations, and yet there are hundreds of thousands of these letters going out. I am sorry to say these are the kind of people who would say: ‘Oh, the Shiites killed just 40 people. Okay, to make ourselves heard, we’ll kill 400.’

That mimic syndrome of the worst kind that is taking place in others areas is somehow very prevalent here. A mistake in London is a style in Nigeria. That is our mentality, which has been carried over into the realm of religion.

And in talking about the almajiri, they are not the “unwashed” faces that you see on the streets now. Some of them who came through the madrasas you see on the streets have gone to universities and some of them have dropped out of universities because of genuine religious convictions. They look around and say: ‘we cannot be part of this sinful environment. This is not true Islam.’ But the more “enlightened” of them just go and carve out their own school of religious thoughts, gather adherents around them and preach and try and convert people. They don’t try and convert, putting a knife to the throat. No, they convert through the soul, through the invisible soul.

Others, however, have come to believe that what is happening in Afghanistan is what ought to be happening here. That they are not true religionists unless they are killing, unless they turn executioners on behalf of Allah. Who appointed them executioners? I don’t know.

But that is what they believe. Unless they are behaving in the most extreme fashion on behalf of their religions, they are not true religionists. And because they have been to universities and because they have travelled, they adopted the sophistication of other religious movements in terms of organisation, in terms of weaponry, in terms of arrogance to look down on those who do not believe in their particular religion, as less than human, as vermin, the extermination of which will make Allah very happy and will guarantee their entry into paradise.

This is the phenomenon we are confronting right now. And, unfortunately, it is not being said and said properly in the right places. The correct people are not being confronted with it. There are only those who understand it and who are willing to exploit it. And those are the hardcore northern Islamists that we are talking about.

There are people who suggest that the solution to this problem is to have a dialogue with Boko Haram. What you think?

I know the Movement for Unconditional Dialogue exists. That may have to do with guilt. In Obasanjo’s case, guilt is definitely involved because it was under his watch that theocratism entered this country in a structured way. And you also note that he cultivated some of these groups because of his own political agenda. So, he owes them, so to speak, in the sense of repayment of the debt. There are others who, for me, have wooly ideas, who believe that, who fastened on dialogue as a magical wand. You dialogue only with those who are willing to dialogue.

These people, as I said, have not articulated what they want to come and discuss at the conference table. You begin talking of dialogue when there is articulation.

They want the suspension of the constitution, they want the enthronement of Sharia…

Throughout the whole nation, and that is why they are bombing us to the table! Alright, those who want to have dialogue with them on those terms, please go and institute the dialogue. We instituted a dialogue without involvement of government in this nation, which was PRONACO. Obasanjo tried to stop it, he threatened us, he charged us for treason. In fact, if you remember, that was when I came into PRONACO. When he said he was going to arrest all those who were organising the conference, I said what? In this country under a democratic dispensation, a group of people cannot meet, and decide and review the constitution and then present their findings to the rest of the nation? And I joined. That was how I came into PRONACO.

To those who believe in dialogue, organise your dialogue. I am not stopping you and then come and give the rest of us what your findings are.

We are not stopping you, but please don’t tell me that somebody attempted to take my life yesterday and then I start begging him, please come to the table. I believe that one should not beg for existence. If the price of not coming to table is that you want to eliminate me, and you can do so, please do so. I am 77.

Please come to the debating table, but you will not persuade me simply because you have the capacity to blow me and my family. You can simply go ahead, blow us up if you think that is the way you can do your conversion. But you will not bomb me to sit with you at the table. Rather, that diminishes me as an individual.

How would you describe the last protests over the fuel price hike?

A huge awakening and I hope a huge revelation, not only for the present governors but for those who want to come. It is a heartwarming event. To mobilise the country in such numbers says a lot of the political enlightenment. I think even if the goal was not achieved immediately, and I use the word immediately because it does not mean the goal will not be eventually achieved, the bill of rights, the bill of claims, is there. It’s being distributed, including the things we went to discuss at the town hall meeting.

For once, such a bill of demand has to be taken seriously because they know that the people have the will and the power and the means of mobilising in support of that. It includes things like what legislators should be earning, removal of tax here and there, transparent investigation of the real killers of society, economic muderers of society, abolition of such offices as first lady, which is not in the constitution.

I know that the movement, which we saw, will be pushing that bill of demands at every opportunity. And if government is dragging its feet on those issues, if it is showing unwillingness, it is trying to be deceitful, doing cosmetic things, I know the people will come out again.

You once said the presidential system of government is too expensive. Why do you consider the other alternative, which is the Westminster model, better, given that it has its own shortcomings?

The human factor is always there. What you do is block the avenues for corruption. And the presidential system is the most corruptible. Even in the United States, from where we copied it, you find that there are so many bye-laws, regulations, even lobbies. But there are rules and laws that have mapped out how far you can lobby, not to declare certain things, areas of interest, and so on. We don’t even have such controls here to start with.

The parliarmentary system, to me has less avenues for corruption. But above all, I think that in this country, what is wrong with having a part-time legislature? Look at the amount of work they do; calculate the man-hours involved in their sitting and tell me why they have to have full time engagement. And all the scandalous allowances.

Do you believe the ongoing probe of the oil sector can yield anything meaningful, given that we have a history of probes that have turned up nothing positive?

Let me first of all say that among the problems, among those who at least delight in Boko Haram and the destabilisation of the nation, are those who have criminal cases to answer and they are across the land. They are not just those we are speaking of now. And so, every kind of attack should be very carefully examined because there are those who jump on the bandwagon to assist in the total disintegration of the nation.

Many people for instance don’t know (let me go back to the opportunistic categorisation) that one of the very first files taken by the EFCC to Obasanjo when he was there, was the file of Ahmed Yerima, governor of Zamfara State. If you don’t believe me, go and check with Nuhu Ribadu. One of the very first files, with prima facie case for serious investigation and prosecution, was the case of Ahmed Yerima.

Some of these people, South, North, East, mouthing dialogue this and that don’t even want dialogue. And they also have very serious criminal cases. I mentioned that in my article in Newsweek.

So, we are waiting to see whether something positive will happen with all the probe going on. The civil society is also waiting on the direction of those probe to see if they are serious. I mean they have asked in that bill that I saw for life sentences for anyone found guilty of corruption. Let’s see how serious, how free these investigations will go.

One of the problems Nuhu Ribadu had, for instance, was that he found himself being circumscribed. I’m waiting to read his book, by the way, to see how much he is willing to tell of what happened during that period.

What do you make of the recent deployment of soldiers in Lagos?

It’s pernicious and it’s a huge blot on Jonathan’s administration that he found it necessary (in a democratic setting, with legitimate demonstrations going on, rallies going on, peaceful, well controlled) to send the military to Lagos. It’s something which should never have happened. I went there. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do the walk that I wanted to because I was being mobbed almost immediately. I got down from the car. I just asked some of the officers there: ‘What are you people doing here and when are you leaving?’

‘We are here to protect you, sir.’

I said: ‘Don’t tell me that; you know very well you are not here to protect me, I don’t need your protection.’

And I had to jump into the car because people were bringing out their cameras and so on. I didn’t really do what I wanted to do. It’s wrong, it’s setting the people against the military and it’s only in extreme cases that you infest a place with military presence.

There are people wondering, given the way Jonathan is going and the helplessness he has shown, if the military would not come back. And if the military should come back, won’t they be accepted?

We have had worse cases of civil unrest in other societies where the military did not come in. And so I will find it totally unacceptable, the incursion of the military. They are part of the problem, they sowed the large part of the problem. And so they cannot say they are coming to solve it. All we just want from the present administration is that Jonathan should widen and diversify his present catchment area of consultation. He should try and bring closer those who have no stake in the governance, who are not seeking advantage, those who are genuinely altruistic about the direction of this nation, those who are not seeking for preferment, not looking for contracts, not looking for jobs, not looking for anything whatsoever. He should try and diversify his area of consultation.

He desperately needs that. I believe that he is doing himself a lot of damage by restricting, I mean he should have more options; I believe he is having only one set of options, the kind of option that made him to antagonise a large section of the civil society by deploying soldiers where they were not needed, where there was that little justification for them. Somebody obviously said to him: ‘Oh you are weak, show that you are in charge, show that you are commander in chief, send the military there’ and he also bought it, I suspect. I don’t believe that it stemmed directly ftom him. It was part of the advice given him. In any case, the buck stops on his desk. He did it and he has to accept responsibility for it, and the penalty which civil society will exact from him. And on the penalty, I’m not talking about the immediate, I’m talking in terms of the kind of support they give to his government. He will come to appreciate that he committed a huge blunder.

He alienated a large section of this population because of that. To militarise any section of society unnecessarily and with the governor saying: ‘I didn’t invite you, please take your people away’; leaders of society saying: “please, take these people’ and then having the military lying and saying “we had this arrangement”. Which arrangement is that? You know where the armed robbers are, go and find them. They are not at Gani Fawehinmi Park.

What do you have to say about the ethnicisation of the protests/struggle?

Oh, what a disappointment, that was. That is also a result of the narrowness of advisory circle that he has. I was very disappointed, I want them to please go back to history, not even immediate past history, and see how civil society conducts itself when there is disagreement with governments at the centre. Let’s go back, under Obasanjo, under Yar’Adua, under Shagari, under Tafawa Balewa, let them go back and please not lose credibility, particularly that language “Our son, our son”. It disgusts me. Who is our son? Who is not our son? Who is our father? Who is not our father? I found that kind of language very depressing and I hope it is an aberration. I like to be able to meet those I still consider my comrades on that side of ethnicity to please, come back into the fold. You can disagree with the cause, there is nothing wrong with that. Even on a parochial level, you can disagree. If you believe, for instance, that the revenue that will come to you will become less, will be reduced, so you have the right to fight for that kind of revenue, but you don’t have to ethnicise it.

When we talk about allocation, derivation, we are not talking about one region alone. Lagos is involved in the same principle of derivation. We have been talking about VAT, we have been saying that it should be proportionate. Where VAT is derived should have a lion’s share of the proceeds. To generate consumption, you put certain infrastructure in place, you spend your revenue. Common justice dictates that in the states, there should be a derivation principle in proportion to what you actually contribute to that common purse. And so we are on the same side.

I don’t say this for any reason. Fashola is not my son, I didn’t know him until he became governor. We are saying this on behalf of human beings, who also actually occupy spaces, not their leadership. Let’s hear the last of “our son, our son”. I don’t want to hear it.

Can we have your take on the judgment (death sentence) on Hamza al-Mustapha and Shofolahan?

This moment of decision would have been arrived at much earlier, if al-Mustapha and his defence had not deployed delaying tactics, including grandstanding efforts to rubbish his judicial process. The delaying tactics were based on the expectation that government would change hands in Lagos State. I know for a fact that al-Mustapha had been assured that the trial would be discontinued with a change of government.

He gambled on this assurance and he lost. Pressure was indeed mounted on Lagos State government to release him. The discontinuance of the case against Mohammed Abacha was cited as guarantee – more of that in another place. Mustapha’s defiance, his confident arrogance, his insults to the process, were based on this assurance. I make no comment on the outcome, I merely remind the Nigerian people once again that political interference with the judiciary remains one of the main issues that must be tackled whenever (if ever) Nigerians take the courageous step to sit together and fashion a new set of constitutive protocols for their co-existence that protects the judiciary in an unassailable manner.

Yeah but you believe in talking snakes, virgin births, angels, demons and the like with absolutely no evidence but a prehistoric book from the bronze ages written by primitive men but reject the evidence of evolution?

Religion makes plausible the most absurd stories! Faith based reasoning is the least effective method of understanding the universe and the world that we live in.

I agree, religious ppl are really funny they believe in all sorts of absurdities without any evidence including talking snakes, virgin births, angels, jinns, trinity, monotheism, transubstantiation, pilgrimages etc etc but refute the evidence of evolution.

If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses? If grace does everything for them, what reason would he have for recompensing them? If he is all-powerful, how offend him, how resist him? If he is reasonable, how can he be angry at the blind, to whom he has given the liberty of being unreasonable? If he is immovable, by what right do we pretend to make him change his decrees? If he is inconceivable, why occupy ourselves with him? IF HE HAS SPOKEN, WHY IS THE UNIVERSE NOT CONVINCED? If the knowledge of a God is the most necessary, why is it not the most evident and the clearest.

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Video located here - http://www.philosophynews.com/post/2012/02/14/Jesus-the-Easter-Bunny-and-Other-Delusions-Just-Say-No.aspx



On January 27th, 2012, Dr. Peter Boghossian of Portland State University presented a controversial thesis to a packed crowd : faith is a belief-producing process that does not lead one to the truth.


In this talk, sponsored by The Freethinkers of Portland State University and published by philosophynews.com, Dr. Boghossian argues that faith-based processes are unreliable and unlikely to lead one to the truth. Since our goal as knowers is to have more true beliefs than false ones, faith, as a process for getting to the truth, should be abandoned in favor of other, more reliable processes. The talk was followed by a question and answer session from the audience.

There are many bad ways of discovering truth about the way the world works like divination, dowsing, sacrificing animals, and lucky guesses. And most people—even people of faith—would agree that these are poor and unreliable. Faith, says Dr. Boghossian, is like these other methods and should be discarded on the same grounds. He shows how the practices of various religious traditions have been shown using the methods of science to be ineffective and lead their practitioners to false conclusions. When confronted with the discomforting evidence, people of faith tend to shift their claim from, “my faith is true” to “my faith is useful.” But this isn’t a valid move argues Boghossian.

In this powerful presentation, professor Boghossian is not interested merely in tearing down faith but in demonstrating how a life guided by reason and evidence can be so much richer and more fulfilling.

Copyright © 2012 by Peter Boghossian and Philosophy News

When are you guys going to realize these middle eastern myths are all fake?

Old lagos vs New lagos, Colonial rule vs Indigenous rule, how are we going to build a functioning Nigeria for the 21st century?

PS I do appreciate all the views in this forum and think everybody contributed some very valid points.

You can thank Boko Haram for this,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16920643


'Lone wolf' terror threat warning Budget cuts are likely to extend to counter-terrorism operations, the think tank warns Continue reading the main story


UK's terror threat level reduced
The UK could face a growing threat from "lone wolf" terrorists returning from fighting overseas in the next few years, a think tank has warned.

The Royal United Services Institute estimates about 50 Britons are fighting with Somali extremists al-Shabab.

Returnees from "wars in Somalia, Yemen or Nigeria" could use their experience on UK streets, Rusi said.

The Home Office said its security arrangements would reflect "the nature of the terrorist threat we face".

It is also feared that the return of Britons from overseas could coincide with the release of people convicted of terrorist charges over the last decade.

BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says the think tank is warning of "a perfect storm of combined threats coming together in the near future".

The UK terror threat level was reduced from "severe" to "substantial" in July last year, but Rusi warned that the threat from jihadist terrorism had not diminished.

Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote
There is a sense in Whitehall that major decisions are being postponed until the [Olympics have] ended in August, with an overriding priority to complete the Games without major incident”
End Quote
Tobias Feakin

Royal United Services Institute
Despite recent arrests and failed plots, "lone wolves" and "self-radicalised" jihadi terrorists were hard to track down and posed a greater security risk, its report said.

'Help and hindrance'

Rusi analyst Valentina Soria said: "There is very little which could justify complacency in the way we perceive the future threat from jihadist terrorism to the UK.

"Although actual capabilities may have deteriorated, the intention to conduct large-scale attacks on British soil remains."

The report also warned that UK counter-terrorism spending and staffing levels could face significant cuts after the end of the London Olympics this summer.

The focus on averting a terrorist threat during the Games had postponed much-needed reform until afterwards.

"The Games are both a help and a hindrance to UK counter-terrorism," said Rusi senior fellow Tobias Feakin. "A help because they have stimulated intense co-operation between the security agencies, but a hindrance because the shadow of the Olympics disguises the landscape for the years beyond.

"As budgetary restrictions are increasingly applied across the public sector, it is almost certain that the security agencies will also have to tighten their belts."

He added: "There is a sense in Whitehall that major decisions are being postponed until the event has ended in August, with an overriding priority to complete the Games without major incident.

"After this, the changes for the various security organisations involved will be inevitable."

Long-term strategy

On Monday, a report by the Home Affairs Committee of MPs warned the government not to neglect the threat to the UK from extreme far-right terrorism.

The report said the government's strategy to combat radicalisation "only pays lip service to the threat from extreme far-right terrorism".

The committee cited the growth of far-right groups with links to similar organisations in Europe.

A Home Office spokeswoman said: "National security is the first duty of any government.

"The UK's counter-terrorism strategy (Contest) sets out our long-term plans to deal with the threat from terrorism. It covers the build-up to the Olympics and the following three years.

"Over that same period we are allocating £2bn a year to the security and intelligence agencies budget.

"The [Contest] strategy is designed to be flexible and we will continue to ensure that the UK's response reflects the nature of the terrorist threat we face."