Posts Tagged ‘islam’

Muslim Brotherhood? What Muslim Brotherhood?

Posted: January 30, 2011 by datechguy in middle east, opinion/news
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Turned on CNN this morning just before 7 a.m. and a woman was being interviewed on CNN concerning the revolt in Egypt. I didn’t catch the name since I had literally just walked down the stairs and turned on my PC.) There was a very telling moment, at the end of the interview where the CNN folks asked about the Muslim brotherhood. The response was VERY defensive.

“The Muslim brotherhood is not taking part as a movement” She stressed that the brotherhood was talking part only as “individuals” and called on media not to stress them.

I found that very interesting considering this story:

The leader of Jordan’s powerful Muslim Brotherhood warned Saturday that unrest in Egypt will spread across the Mideast and Arabs will topple leaders allied with the United States.

Hammam Saeed’s comments were made at a protest outside the Egyptian Embassy in Amman, inspired by massive rallies in neighboring Egypt demanding the downfall of the country’s longtime president, Hosni Mubarak.

SISU is going long on this theme.

linking our own tweet (above) a layman’s take on the ongoing Middle East turmoil based upon keeping our virtual ear to the ground in the last period of time:

This is what’s really happening. Muslim Brotherhood poised to co-opt restless populations thoughout Middle East.

“Yes, you are right,” McCotter direct-messaged back. We’re inclined to take the Michigan Congressman’s well-considered assessments seriously.

As I type FOX is on with Lisa Daftari is not ignoring the dangers of an 1979 style revolution when good intentions become co-opted by a more powerful organized group. (forget 1979 think of 1918 in Russia and the blood that followed for nearly a century)

John Bolton continues:

This is a protest that may have been percolated by the Muslim Brotherhood. We all know President Mubarak of Egypt is a dictator, but to compare this protest to the Green Revolution may be foolish.

And lets not forget what polls said in 2007:

In a rigorously conducted face-to-face University of Maryland/ WorldPublicOpinion.org interview survey of 1000 Egyptian Muslims conducted between December 9, 2006 and February 15, 2007, 67% of those interviewed-more than 2/3, hardly a “fringe minority”-desired this outcome (i.e., “To unify all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or Caliphate”). The internal validity of these data about the present longing for a Caliphate is strongly suggested by a concordant result: 74% of this Muslim sample approved the proposition “To require a strict [emphasis added] application of Shari’a law in every Islamic country.”

That is scary. Almost as scary as the concept that Robert Stacy McCain is linking…Robert Fisk?

Cairo now changes from joy to sullen anger within minutes. Yesterday morning, I walked across the Nile river bridge to watch the ruins of Mubarak’s 15-storey party headquarters burn. In front stood a vast poster advertising the benefits of the party – pictures of successful graduates, doctors and full employment, the promises which Mubarak’s party had failed to deliver in 30 years – outlined by the golden fires curling from the blackened windows of the party headquarters. Thousands of Egyptians stood on the river bridge and on the motorway flyovers to take pictures of the fiercely burning building – and of the middle-aged looters still stealing chairs and desks from inside.

Yet the moment a Danish television team arrived to film exactly the same scenes, they were berated by scores of people who said that they had no right to film the fires, insisting that Egyptians were proud people who would never steal or commit arson. This was to become a theme during the day: that reporters had no right to report anything about this “liberation” that might reflect badly upon it. Yet they were still remarkably friendly and – despite Obama’s pusillanimous statements on Friday night – there was not the slightest manifestation of hostility against the United States. “All we want – all – is Mubarak’s departure and new elections and our freedom and honour,” a 30-year-old psychiatrist told me. Behind her, crowds of young men were clearing up broken crash barriers and road intersection fences from the street – an ironic reflection on the well-known Cairo adage that Egyptians will never, ever clean their roads.

I don’t and never have trusted Robert Fisk but he is actually there first hand (talk about a windfall for an international reporter!) so one has to respect that and give his reports the respect that first hand reporting calls for. Yet lets take a peek at once other paragraph from this story:

Their crews, in battledress and smiling and in some cases clapping their hands, made no attempt to wipe off the graffiti that the crowds had spray-painted on their tanks. “Mubarak Out – Get Out”, and “Your regime is over, Mubarak” have now been plastered on almost every Egyptian tank on the streets of Cairo. On one of the tanks circling Freedom Square was a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Beltagi. Earlier, I had walked beside a convoy of tanks near the suburb of Garden City as crowds scrambled on to the machines to hand oranges to the crews, applauding them as Egyptian patriots. However crazed Mubarak’s choice of vice-president and his gradual appointment of a powerless new government of cronies, the streets of Cairo proved what the United States and EU leaders have simply failed to grasp. It is over.

It’s classic Fisk to hit the US on this. But before people get delirious about the future need to read this Michael Totten post from 2005 while he was there with Egyptian blogger Big Pharaoh:

“My biggest fear,” he continued, “is that if the Muslim Brotherhood rules Egypt we will get Islamism-lite, that they won’t be quite bad enough that people will revolt against them. Take bars, for example. Most Egyptians don’t drink, so they won’t mind if alcohol is illegal. The same goes for banning books. Most Egyptians don’t read. So why should they care if books are banned? Most women wear a veil or a headscarf already, so if it becomes the law hardly anyone will resist.”

“How many people here think like you do?” I asked him.

“Few,” he said. “Very few. Less than ten percent probably.”

What was the future he saw:

I asked Big Pharaoh what he thought would happen if Egypt held a legitimate free and fair election instead of this bullshit staged by Mubarak.

“The Muslim Brotherhood would win,” he said. “They would beat Mubarak and the liberals.”

I was afraid he was going to say that.

“I’ve had this theory for a while now,” I said. “It looks like some, if not most, Middle East countries are going to have to live under an Islamic state for a while and get it out of their system.”

Big Pharaoh laughed grimly.

“Sorry,” I said. “That’s just how it looks.”

He buried his head on his arms.

“Take Iranians,” I said. “They used to think Islamism was a fantastic idea. Now they hate it. Same goes in Afghanistan. Algerians don’t think too much of Islamism either after 150,000 people were killed in the civil war. I hate to say this, but it looks like Egypt will have to learn this the hard way.”

“You are right,” he said. “You are right. I went to an Egyptian chat room on the Internet and asked 15 people if they fasted during Ramadan. All of them said they fasted during at least most of it. I went to an Iranian chat room and asked the same question. 14 out of 15 said they did not fast for even one single day.”

How many will end up dying and what kind of war will ensue while the under 30’s learn this lesson?

Meanwhile Joe Scarborough notes something on Twitter.

The Luxor attack and its aftermath explains why the Muslim Brotherhood has gone to great lengths to take no credit for this uprising.

I think its more than that, I think that given the experience of the Iranian revolution and what it produced, and the reality of Islamic terror it is impossible to not understand what an Islamic state would mean.

What is the best move? I’m very torn. I’ve always maintained that people have the right to be wrong. If the people actually WANT this kind of thing what can you do? I think in the end you have to let the people learn this the hard way and deal with things as they come. The best hope is that Egyptians learn from the Iranian mistake. The Egyptian people have the right to make their own choices, and they will also reap what they sow. Part of being free is living with the consequences of your decisions.

  • There are consequences for supporting Islamic terror.
  • There are consequences for going to war with Israel.
  • There are consequences for choosing to be an enemy of the US.
  • There are consequences for supporting Iran
  • There are consequences for closing the Suez Canal

And that doesn’t even touch the consequences internally, but those internal consequences are on them.

Do we have a strong or wise enough administration in the White House to make that case without trouble?

Update: missed Michael’s link, silly me, put in now.

West vs East Men vs Woman

Posted: January 23, 2011 by datechguy in culture
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A person my age or older would be familiar with the term “Shotgun Wedding”. The idea being that a man who got a girl pregnant would be forced by the father of the girl, Shotgun in hand to the altar for the wedding. That line of thinking is in keeping with the idea Stacy McCain advanced about the the economics of love. Roxeanne DeLuca in comments also advanced this very Judeao-Christian idea:

These days, men think there’s just women you sleep with, that’s it. And pardon me if I think that, as a WOMAN, I should have the grounds to say, “If this isn’t emotional for you, if you could do this with any woman, or any woman with the right equipment and the right attitude, then I don’t want it from you.”

As it is, though, we’re expected to act like prostitutes, without the benefits and without the emotional reserve. When sexually loose women are “nice girls”, or tell you that they are, men WILL expect ALL nice women to be sexually loose.

The 60’s revolution ended this bigtime and some are still paying the price but there is one thing about this way of thinking that needs to be pointed out.

The entire idea of the shotgun wedding or the threat of the shotgun wedding is to protect the women and restrain the man. The idea being the man might think twice before trying to be a player if he know that it means he will have to follow through.

In this age of contraception and abortion those restraints are gone and the feminists of the left cheer this abandonment of the traditional Judeao-Christian meme as a triumph for women no matter the result.

There is however another side of the coin that the feminist left isn’t too loud in condemning.

Afshan Azad, 21, who played Padma Patil, a classmate of the teenage wizard, in the blockbuster Hollywood films based on JK Rowling’s children’s books, feared for her life during the three-hour ordeal, Manchester Crown Court heard.

She was punched, dragged around by her hair and strangled by her brother Ashraf Azad, 28, who threatened to kill her after he caught her talking on the phone to her Hindu boyfriend on May 21 last year, the court was told.

During the row at the family home in Longsight, Manchester, which also involved her mother and father, she was branded a ”slag” and a ”prostitute” and told: ”Marry a Muslim or you die!”

Note the cultural difference here. The threats are not against the man, they are against the woman. The threat of violence is not against the man for the advances, it is against the woman. Either way the Judge hearing the case decided to make a statement about violence against women:

Judge Thomas added: ”This is a sentence that is designed to punish you for what you did and also to send out a clear message to others that domestic violence involving circumstances such as have arisen here cannot be tolerated.”

And so he sentenced the guy to….for six months after he pleaded guilty to the assault.

As Cubachi points out:

This is attempted murder, and he’s only getting six months? Azad’s case is well known throughout the world due to her celebrity status, however, this is occurring to young Muslim girls throughout the world who are deemed too “Westernized” or a betrayer to Islam.

Some on the right have highlighted this kind of thing, the left…not so much. Why the difference in reaction to the Judeao-Christian cultural norm and not the Islamic one? Why is one a sign of repressive patriarchy and the other just a cultural difference and any objection Islamaphobia?

It’s a good question and I’d love to hear the answer.

Sudan and Tunisa two changes in government

Posted: January 17, 2011 by datechguy in opinion/news
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The referendum in Sudan is over and the vote is independence:

International observers gave south Sudan’s independence referendum their seal of approval on Monday and said a vote for secession was now “virtually certain” in their first official judgment on the poll.

Early results from last week’s plebiscite suggest people from Sudan’s oil-producing south overwhelming voted to split away from the north after decades of civil war.

Might be a tad premature to say independence but this is now the best shot for the Christians in Southern Sudan to enjoy a modicum of peace.

If they manage to pull it off I would not be surprised to see Christians who are being slain elsewhere on the continent to head in that direction.

Meanwhile in Tunisia although there is violence Michael Totten thinks there is a real shot for shot for Democracy:

Unlike in war-torn Afghanistan or fanatical Saudi Arabia, Tunisian democracy is a real possibility. It’s a bit unlikely as it’s only one possible option of many, but it could happen. Mebazaa himself is now promising, perhaps even sincerely, “a better political life which will include democracy, plurality and active participation for all the children of Tunis.”

I’ve spent time in more than a dozen Muslim countries, eight of them Arab, and Tunisia is — or at least was before this month when things fell apart — one of the most advanced and stable. The majority of its citizens belong to a well-educated middle class, the infrastructure seems no worse than Europe’s, and a high percentage of women in the cities have discarded the veil and the headscarf and dress like Europeans. The latter may sound like a small thing, but in a Muslim country, it visually indicates how much women’s rights have advanced. The overwhelming majority live near the coast in cosmopolitan cities that have traded and been in cultural contact with Europeans for millennia. It’s not a Western country, but it fully belongs to the Mediterranean region and is oriented more toward the West than most Arab countries.

Beirut was once a cosmopolitanism place too. This will be a real test, can an Islamic country when removing a dictator create a state that has freedoms that other Islamic states avoid, or will it become a place where Sharia is either officially or unofficially enforced?

These two stories are going to tell us an awful lot. Let’s make sure we pay attention.

Sad to say they sound alike

Posted: January 10, 2011 by datechguy in opinion/news
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I took an unexpectedly long nap and ended up awake at midnight, looking around the net I saw this via Lisa Graas:

Is it just me, or is there an incredible lack of reason on the Left?

Incidentally, the way I found out about the shooting was through an avalanche of tweets calling Sarah Palin a ‘murderer’. I was even called a murderer for asking people not to point fingers of blame. There is certainly ‘vitriol’…..but it’s not coming from the direction the Left claims.

For two days I’ve been seeing people hurling the vilest accusations at the Tea party in general and Sarah Palin in particular without any factual basis. And if that isn’t enough everyone’s favorite Democratic Pastor Fred Phelps plans on jumping into the fray..

Phelps praises Loughner’s violent acts in this video, where he announces he will be taking his sick protest to the funerals of the victims of the Arizona shooting spree. He also refers to Loughner as an Afghanistan war veteran, even though initial reports of Loughner being a veteran turned out to be false.

It’s pretty bad, almost as bad as this reaction to the murder of another poll half a world away:

Tens of thousands of demonstrators marched in Pakistan’s largest city on Sunday to oppose any change to national blasphemy laws and to praise a man charged with murdering a provincial governor who had campaigned against the divisive legislation.

The rally of up to 50,000 people in downtown Karachi was one of the largest demonstrations of support for the laws, which make insulting Islam a capital offense. It was organized before the governor of Punjab province, Salman Taseer, was shot dead on Tuesday in Islamabad by a bodyguard who told a court he considered Taseer a blasphemer.

Muslim groups have praised the bodyguard, Mumtaz Qadri, and have used Taseer’s death to warn others not to speak out against the much-derided laws.

Now what does a group of religions fanatics Pious Muslims marching have to do with the left?

Simply this. The Governor of Punjab by challenging his fellow Muslim’s belief was a threat to their mind-set. It’s much easier to eliminate people who challenge your religious beliefs than to defend those beliefs, much less thinking involved.

When I look at the left willing to blame Sarah Palin, Andrew Breitbart, the Tea Party and even Lisa Graas for inciting violence while both using violent rhetoric and ignoring their own violent rhetoric in the past the pieces fit together.

The left secular political beliefs have essentially morphed into a religion. The right feelings and opinions are the sacraments (much easier than having to follow actual commandments like traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs) if you have them you are considered righteous.

Conversely if you don’t share those beliefs you are outside, you are the devil and evil, and since you are evil any level of vitriolic rhetoric or action is permissible. Rather than praying for your enemies as Christianity commands one can hate them openly and feel good about it.

This is why above all Sarah Palin is their Anti-Christ. She symbolizes all that they hate, she is a person of action who lives her beliefs and does so publicly and unabashedly. She is a reminder of a reality that their religion needs to suppress. Screwtape 13 had it pegged:

The characteristic of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real, and therefore, as far as they go, give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality. Thus if you had been trying to damn your man by the Romantic method—by making him a kind of Childe Harold or Werther submerged in self-pity for imaginary distresses—you would try to protect him at all costs from any real pain; because, of course, five minutes’ genuine toothache would reveal the romantic sorrows for the nonsense they were and unmask your whole stratagem.
But you were trying to damn your patient by the World, that is by palming off vanity, bustle, irony, and expensive tedium as pleasures. How can you have
failed to see that a real pleasure was the last thing you ought to have let him meet? Didn’t you foresee that it would just kill by contrast all the trumpery which you have been so laboriously teaching him to value?

This is why the right in general and Sarah Palin in particular must be attacked here. Every moment that she is not brings the possibility that realization might strike, that the superficial might be replaced by a foundation in reality and that reality is anathema to all that has come before.

Today Elizabeth Scalia asks the question what is wrong with the world. Chesterton’s spectacular Catholic Answer was “I am” and thus stove to change and improve himself. A great example to all Christians in general and Catholics in particular but self-realization is a tough and painful process and many don’t want to face it. Much easier to carry on confident in one perfection.

Until those on the left can come to Chesterton’s answer and work to correct it we will see more of the same. Remember screwtapes final warning:

The great thing is to prevent his doing anything. As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance. Let the little brute wallow in it. Let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book about it; that is often an excellent way of sterilizing the seeds which the Enemy plants in a human soul. Let him do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will. As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel,

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