Should Christians burn the Qur’an? asks college lecturer
Since my retirement on March 31, 2011, I have fallen behind in my reading of Challenge Weekly, New Zealand’s Christian newspaper, which the publisher sends to my former office at the Manawatu Standard in Palmerston North. But here are two interesting columns by Mark Keown, lecturer in New Testament at Laidlaw College, published on April 11, 2011, and May 16, 2011, respectively.
The first article is unremarkable until we reach the last paragraph, where we read: “The Qu’ran [sic] is not to be burnt by believers [Christians], despite what it leads a small minority of extremist Muslims to do” [emphasis added].
Needless to say, the claim that the Qur’an — not the American/Israeli invasion and occupation of Muslim lands, and the massacre of millions of Muslims* — prompts some Muslims to commit terrorist acts is another example of Christian/Western propaganda. Since we in the West are the “good guys”, and since everything we do in the Muslim world springs from the noblest of motives, we can’t possibly be at fault. So if a Muslim sets off a bomb somewhere, he must be acting in accordance with “instructions” in his holy book.
To me, this raises a fascinating question: As the Qur’an has been around for a rather long time, and was certainly around when I was a boy in the 1950s, why was there little or no “Islamic terrorism” before the 1980s?
There was terrorism, especially in connection with the Algerian struggle for independence, but it was never, as far as I recall, identified as “Islamic”. Indeed, that was the period of pan-Arab nationalism, when the organizations and movements of the day, with the possible exception of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, were keen to keep (potentially divisive) religion on the sidelines.
As late as the 1970s, any list of leading terrorist organizations comprised such names as the Red Army Faction (the Baader-Meinhof Gang), the United Red Army of Japan, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the IRA, the Black Panthers, the Tupamaros, ETA, al-Fatah, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. All were either secular or Marxist-Leninist.
What were committed Muslims doing in those days? Weren’t they reading the Qur’an — and those ayahs that allegedly encourage them to commit acts of terrorism?
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The second column (below) reveals an uncritical acceptance of the “official line” that is typical of superficial Western commentators. “Surely, if anyone’s death is justified, this man’s [Osama's] is,” Keown writes. “After all, he masterminded Sept 11…”
But hang on a minute! Where is the evidence that Osama masterminded the attack on the World Trade Center? (See “FBI says it has ‘No hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11′” at Information Clearing House.)
One also looks in vain for explicit recognition of two key facts: that an extra-judicial execution is murder, and that torture is illegal in all circumstances under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which the United States signed. Instead, we find wishy-washy statements and questions, like “I feel sad” and “Is this [torture] ever right?”
Oh for a little Islamic rigor here!
* Keown acknowledges, in the second article, that millions have died “across Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan” as a result of the so-called war on terrorism, but apparently does not see those deaths as a possible cause of Muslim outrage and further acts of terrorism.
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Bikini vs hijab
Cartoon from the Manawatu Standard of January 7, 2011. The cartoonist is Malcolm Evans.
Clash of civilizations?
Thanks to Abdullah Drury for sending me this. It’s apparently from Des Jenson / Rex Features.
Crescent International, July-October, 2010
   
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Great covers from the four most recent issues of Crescent International: Bottom left: Crescent International, July 2010. Bottom right: Crescent International, August 2010. Top left: Crescent International, September 2010. Top right: Crescent International, October 2010.
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Islam and the West: Column from Challenge Weekly
The above article appeared in the September 27, 2010, issue of Challenge Weekly, New Zealand’s Christian newspaper.
Contrary to Mark Keown’s assertion, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are primarily a result of the United States desire to achieve “full-spectrum” dominance. Plans for the invasion and occupation of these strategic areas were laid in the 1990s — long before 9/11 provided a convenient casus belli. (See Section V of Rebuilding America’s Defenses, a publication of the Project for the New American Century. This section is entitled Creating Tomorrow’s Dominant Force, and includes the sentence: “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor”.) The destruction and dismemberment of Iraq (and soon of Iran?) also served the important purpose of removing yet another obstacle to Israel’s total dominance of the Middle East.
Later in the article, the reader’s interest is further piqued by the sentence: “One senses that the the future of the world is increased instability and perhaps in Europe, suppression of Islam, ethnic cleansing and dare I say it, ultimately even war.” Needless to say, there is no way in which Islam can be “suppressed”. (See the Telegraph article of March 25, 2008, which says: “The projections show that, if the Churches do not reverse their historical decline, there will be more active Muslims than Christians in Sunday services across Britain before the middle of the century.”) It’s already far too late for any program of “suppression” to be successful. And any attempt to remove the population of 2.4 million Muslims in Britain (which has grown by 500,000 in just the past four years) would result, quite simply, in the destruction of British society. Ditto the societies of France, Germany and other European countries with rapidly expanding Muslim minorities.
Keown is right when he says “we [should not] condemn all Muslims on the basis of the lunacy of a few”. But if he is seriously concerned about “lunacy”, he should examine United States foreign policy. He could begin by reading Robert Dreyfuss’ Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Metropolitan Books, 2005). He will then realize that these people he describes as lunatics are, to a large extent, the creation of policies pursued by the US at the height of the Cold War, when it sought (a) to contain Arab nationalism and Russian communism , and (b) to nurture a Sunni radicalism that could be used as a “weapon” against its enemies — in much the same way as it used Saddam as a “weapon” against Iran during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.
Actually, the list of US/Israeli lunacies is far too long to be reproduced here. This incredibly destructive alliance has killed millions of people throughout the world during the past 50 years or so, and has also succeeded in poisoning large areas of the planet — with dioxins in the case of Vietnam, and with depleted uranium in the case of Iraq and other countries where DU munitions have been used. These toxins will remain teratogenic (i.e. a cause of hideous birth deformities) for hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of years.
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Intolerance at Ground Zero
What’s wrong with this cartoon? Well, it implies there is a symmetry of invective: that every curse from the “Christian” side is reciprocated by a curse from the “Muslim” side. And I don’t think that is true in the case of the “confrontation” at Ground Zero. Although there have been some intemperate comments from Christians opposed to the building of an Islamic cultural center near the site of the Twin Towers, all the comments that I have heard from the other side have been eminently reasonable.
The cartoon is from The Dominion Post of September 13, 2010.
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NZ strategic for Muslims, says Aussie ‘scholar’
From Challenge Weekly, New Zealand’s Christian weekly newspaper.
Who’s concerned about the burqa?
Cartoon from the Manawatu Standard of August 14, 2010.
Taliban ‘working for a better yesterday’?
The problem, here, is that Dominion Post cartoonist Tom Scott doesn’t know what the Afghanistan of “yesterday” was like. In reality, it was a country that was confidently moving into the modern age — although the record shop on the left, in a photo from the 1960s, was not the kind of place you would have found outside Kabul. (To see more pictures from that era, go to Once Upon a Time in Afghanistan…) The cartoon was published on August 11, 2010, and is a comment on the case of Bibi Aisha, who was allegedly mutilated by her husband, allegedly on the orders of a “Taliban court”. (I put the latter words in quotation marks because I doubt any court purporting to be Islamic would come up with a sentence for which there is no provision in Islamic law.)
Ann Jones, who says she knows Aisha, says in The Nation (August 12, 2010): “She told me that her father-in-law caught up with her after she ran away, and took a knife to her on his own; village elders later approved, but the Taliban didn’t figure at all in this account. The Time story*, however, attributes Aisha’s mutilation to a husband under orders of a Talib commander, thereby transforming a personal story, similar to those of countless women in Afghanistan today, into a portent of things to come for all women if the Taliban return to power.”
*Time magazine cover story of August 9, 2010.
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Nuns brace for ‘burqa bans’ in Europe
Cartoon from the Manawatu Standard of April 26, 2010.
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