NZ Centre for Political Research

The Biblical worldview has always accepted reason and rationality as God given attributes inherent in the 'Image of God' and deriving from the Divine logos. Reason is not of necessity in conflict with faith and obedience. Whether or not professing 'Christians' have accepted reason is another matter...many have mixed and matched worldviews and so there is an inconsistency between what they profess to believe and what they actually believe...drives me bananas...

As I recall, 'The Closing of the Muslim Mind' noted the claimed nature of Allah as providing for the basis for the irrationality inherent in Islam, and that the failed move to accomodate reason within Islam failed because it rejected fundamental aspects of the claimed nature of Allah. As I also recall, it contrasted this with the nature of Yehweh which provides the basis for reason and rationality.

(By the way, your position provides no basis for reason or rationality, because as a devotee of AR, ultimate reality for you is non-personal and non-conscious - material...not possessing reason or rationality, thus providing no means to either get or support reason and rationality...and ironically is the same basis held by Marxists/Facsists/...Socialists, which AR adamantly opposed. A river doesn't run higher than its source...you can't get reason from that which lacks it.)

Genesis 1. The accommodation of reason.

The movement of Christian away from the Augustine doctrine of total faith and obedience, as expressed in his work The City of God. Total faith and obedience also advocated by al-Ghazali now dominates the Islamic world.

Both totally rejected Aristotle.

It's quite a while since I read 'The Closing of the Muslim Mind' and it's on loan so not handy to peruse...

Expand on what you mean by 'Christianity being fixed up'...

Just reading a critique of Ayn Rand. Clearly she needs to be 'fixed up' and on more points than I have already noted...

(By the way, I'm not necessarily opposed to anything that AR said re civil government, the market and free choice therein etc. just the foundation on which she built was inadequate and inconsistent...)

Genesis 1, Christianity was fixed up, so can Islam.

We have both read The Closing of the Muslim Mind, which showed how close Islam, came to being fixed.

Al - Ghazali’s words p94. Aristotles philosophy……… can be divided into three portions : “the first contains maters justly chargeable with impiety, the second is tainted with heresy, and the third we are obliged to reject absolutely.”


It was the influence of Aristotle’s that changed Christianity.

Such people end up dead...

Islam can't be 'fixed'. It is false...

An extract from R.W. Tracinski's T.I.A. Daily 2/3/12

6. What Went Wrong?

Turkey has been rising as the new Middle Eastern model of "Islamic democracy," so it's no surprise to see that the new sensation sweeping the country is a Turkish-produced film glorifying the Muslim conquest of Constantinople in 1453.

The message of the film mirrors the Turkish model of "Islamic democracy"—which is to say that it's pretty long on the Islam and pretty short on the democracy. As one secular Turkish reviewer describes it:


While it feeds on the common paranoia of seeing the West as an unwelcoming and disreputable crowd, it reinforces our collective consciousness' aspirations for superiority in two very contradictory ways: initially by promoting the nation's virile and authoritarian drive for power and crushing toughness but then by trying to make amends with an all-embracing and tolerant attitude as brought forth in the final scene in which Mehmet II, having entered Ayasofya, holds a blonde child in his arms and declares, "Not to worry, people of Constantinople, you can practice your religion however you like."
These last words are indeed historical fact, but how should we digest this final scene after watching 160 minutes of muscular male bodies building weapons of war, violent battle scenes and gatherings of detestable Byzantines without any hint of this tolerance sprinkled throughout? You can't just get away with a peaceful one-liner after breeding so much enmity.

Oh, yes, and that part about being able to practice their religion? "Ayasofya" refers to the Hagia Sofia, the main Christian cathedral in Constantinople. The Turkish conquerors turned it into a mosque. "Freedom of religion" in the Muslim world usually takes the form of the second-class citizenship known as "dhimmitude": you won't all be slaughtered, so long as you obey your Muslim overlords.

But the bigger story is one that the Muslims still don't want to face up to. The conquest of Constantinople was not a sign of the Muslim world's rise but a final turning point of its decline. One of the immediate consequences of the fall of Constantinople was an exodus of classical scholars—particularly Aristotelian scholars—from the Byzantine Empire to Italy, where they would add fuel to the Renaissance. After that, the Muslims would find themselves evicted from Spain and driven back at the gates of Vienna, and they would lose battle after battle up to the present day.

A few Muslims do grasp this. I was interested to see a thoughtful article in The National, a newspaper published out of the United Arab Emirates, about the decline of the Islamic world after its rejection of secular philosophy and science in the 11th century, just at the point those ideas were awakening in the West. (I found it by way of a similar article on the exploits of 14th-century explorer Ibn Battuta, the Islamic world's Marco Polo.) The author, Hassan Hassan, lays out the common explanation for the Muslim world's decline: the influence of a kind of Islamic Immanuel Kant, who undermined Arab science and philosophy.


Academics have long maintained that the great Islamic theologian, Abu Hamid Al Ghazali, who lived from 1055 to 1111, single-handedly steered Islamic culture away from independent scientific inquiry towards religious fundamentalism. In a remarkable intellectual shift, he concluded that falsafa (which literally means philosophy but included logic, mathematics, and physics) was incompatible with Islam.
After writing his book, The Incoherence of Philosophers, Algazel as he was known in medieval Europe, is said to have "stabbed falsafa in such a manner that it could not rise again in the Muslim world." Thanks to his unparalleled mastery of falsafa and Islamic law, he injected repugnance among Muslims for science that ultimately led to its decline and, in the process, the decline of Islamic civilization.

Hassan then offers an alternative culprit:


Abu Ali Al Hassan Al Tusi (1018-1092), better known as Nizam Al Mulk, the grand vizier of the Seljuq dynasty, was in fact the driving force.
Nizam Al Mulk had created a system of education known as "Nizamiyah" that focused on religious studies at the expense of independent inquiry.... Shia Islam was gaining prominence and Batiniyya (groups that adhered to esoteric interpretation of Sharia) began to take root in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt. The purpose of Nizamiyah colleges, where Al Ghazali taught but later left, was to counter those growing non-Sunni currents. The Shafii school focused on fundamentalist principles of Sharia and disdained the rationalistic approach....

Graduates were given priority in key government jobs, namely in the judiciary, hisbah (Sharia enforcement or police) and istifta (jurisprudence).

Of course, there's no reason why both explanations can't be right. Al Ghazali undermined falsafa in theory, while Nizam al Mulk wiped it out in practice by eliminating it from the Muslim world's educational institutions. In an attempt to beat back religious heresies, the Muslim world committed intellectual suicide.

The only good news is that there are some Arabs and Muslim who know what went wrong and want to fix it.

Yep, Pat Condell is often on the button, especially regarding Islam, but he's explicitly philosophically inconsistent in this one...given he's an atheist...

Our own dear Helen is over at the UN...I guess she's barracking for the Muslim men who will be on the Conference of Women (or whatever it's called)...

Yes yogi7, U.K. gent Pat Condell is always good value.


Also entitled: The Muslim Trojan Horse.)

In 1978-9 I was living and studying in Denmark.
But in 1978 - even in Copenhagen , one didn't see Muslim immigrants. The Danish population embraced visitors, celebrated the exotic, went out of its way to protect each of its citizens. It was proud of its new brand of socialist liberalism - one in development since the conservatives had lost power in 1929 - a system where no worker had to struggle to survive, where one ultimately could count upon the state as in, perhaps, no other western nation at the time.

The rest of Europe saw the Scandinavians as free-thinking, progressive and infinitely generous in their welfare policies. Denmark boas ted low crime rates, devotion to the environment, a superior educational system and a history of humanitarianism.

Denmark was also most generous in its immigration policies - it offered the best welcome in Europe to the new immigrant: generous welfare payments from first arrival plus additional perks in transportation, housing and education. It was determined to set a world example for inclusiveness and multiculturalism. How could it have predicted that one day in 2005 a series of political cartoons in a newspaper would spark violence that would leave dozens dead in the streets - all because its commitment to multiculturalism would come back to bite?

By the 1990's the growing urban Muslim population was obvious - and its unwillingness to integrate into Danish society was obvious. Years of immigrants had settled into Muslim-exclusive enclaves. As the Muslim leadership became more vocal about what they considered the decadence of Denmark 's liberal way of life, the Danes - once so welcoming - began to feel slighted. Many Danes had begun to see Islam as incompatible with their long-standing values: belief in personal liberty and free speech, in equality for women, in tolerance for other ethnic groups, and a deep pride in Danish heritage and history.

The New York Post in 2002 ran an article by Daniel Pipes and Lars Hedegaard, in which they forecasted accurately that the growing immigrant problem in Denmark would explode. In the article they reported:

"Muslim immigrants constitute 5 percent of the population but consume upwards of 40 percent of the welfare spending."
"Muslims are only 4 percent of Denmark's 5.4 million people but make up a majority of the country's convicted rapists, an especially combustible issue given that practically all the female victims are non-Muslim. Similar, if lesser, disproportions are found in other crimes."
"Over time, as Muslim immigrants increase in numbers, they wish less to mix with the indigenous population. A recent survey finds that only 5 percent of young Muslim immigrants would readily marry a Dane."
"Forced marriages - promising a newborn daughter in Denmark to a male cousin in the home country, then compelling her to marry him, sometimes on pain of death - are one problem"
"Muslim leaders openly declare their goal of introducing Islamic law once Denmark's Muslim population grows large enough - a not-that-remote prospect. If present trends persist, one sociologist estimates, every third inhabitant of Denmark in 40 years will be Muslim."
It is easy to understand why a growing number of Danes would feel that Muslim immigrants show little respect for Danish values and laws. An example is the phenomenon common to other European countries and the U.S.: some Muslims in Denmark who opted to leave the Muslim faith have been murdered in the name of Islam, while others hide in fear for their lives. Jews are also threatened and harassed openly by Muslim leaders in Denmark, a country where once Christian citizens worked to smuggle out nearly all of their 7,000 Jews by night to Sweden - before the Nazis could invade. I think of my Danish friend Elsa - who as a teenager had dreaded crossing the street to the bakery every morning under the eyes of occupying Nazi soldiers - and I wonder what she would say today.

In 2001, Denmark elected the most conservative government in some 70 years - one that had some decidedly non-generous ideas about liberal unfettered immigration. Today Denmark has the strictest immigration policies in Europe . ( Its effort to protect itself has been met with accusations of "racism" by liberal media across Europe - even as other governments struggle to right the social problems wrought by years of too-lax immigration.)

If you wish to become Danish, you must attend three years of language classes. You must pass a test on Denmark's history, culture, and a Danish language test. You must live in Denmark for 7 years before applying for citizenship. You must demonstrate an intent to work, and have a job waiting. If you wish to bring a spouse into Denmark , you must both be over 24 years of age, and you won't find it so easy anymore to move your friends and family to Denmark with you.

You will not be allowed to build a mosque in Copenhagen . Although your children have a choice of some 30 Arabic culture and language schools in Denmark , they will be strongly encouraged to assimilate to Danish society in ways that past immigrants weren't.

In 2006, the Danish minister for employment, Claus Hjort Frederiksen, spoke publicly of the burden of Muslim immigrants on the Danish welfare system, and it was horrifying: the government's welfare committee had calculated that if immigration from Third World countries were blocked, 75 percent of the cuts needed to sustain the huge welfare system in coming decades would be unnecessary. In other words, the welfare system as it existed was being exploited by immigrants to the point of eventually bankrupting the government. "We are simply forced to adopt a new policy on immigration. The calculations of the welfare committee are terrifying and show how unsuccessful the integration of immigrants has been up to now," he said.

A large thorn in the side of Denmark 's imams is the Minister of Immigration and Integration, Rikke Hvilshoj. She makes no bones about the new policy toward immigration, "The number of foreigners coming to the country makes a difference," Hvilshøj says, "There is an inverse correlation between how many come here and how well we can receive the foreigners that come." And on Muslim immigrants needing to demonstrate a willingness to blend in, "In my view, Denmark should be a country with room for different cultures and religions. Some values, however, are more important than others. We refuse to question democracy, equal rights, and freedom of speech."

Hvilshoj has paid a price for her show of backbone. Perhaps to test her resolve, the leading radical imam in Denmark, Ahmed Abdel Rahman Abu Laban, demanded that the government pay blood money to the family of a Muslim who was murdered in a suburb of Copenhagen, stating that the family's thirst for revenge could be thwarted for money. When Hvilshoj dismissed his demand, he argued that in Muslim culture the payment of retribution money was common, to which Hvilshoj replied that what is done in a Muslim country is not necessarily what is done in Denmark. The Muslim reply came soon after: her house was torched while she, her husband and children slept. All managed to escape unharmed, but she and her family were moved to a secret location and she and other ministers were assigned bodyguards for the first time - in a country where such murderous violence was once so scarce.

Her government has slid to the right, and her borders have tightened. Many believe that what happens in the next decade will determine whether Denmark survives as a bastion of good living, humane thinking and social responsibility, or whether it becomes a nation at civil war with supporters of Sharia law.

And meanwhile, Americans clamor for stricter immigration policies, and demand an end to state welfare programs that allow many immigrants to live on the public dole. As we in America look at the enclaves of Muslims amongst us, and see those who enter our shores too easily, dare live on our taxes, yet refuse to embrace our culture, respect our traditions, participate in our legal system, obey our laws, speak our language, appreciate our history . . we would do well to look to Denmark, and say a prayer for her future and for our own.

Susan MacAllen is a contributing editor for FamilySecurityMatters.org

I urge you all to listen to this UK gent.......what he outlines is extremely disturbing.
Just click on the link below.........

http://dotsub.com/media/b5ee5ada-5b37-4b0b-9916-e0896337ec4b/e/m

Obama: 'Son of Islam'?

by Raymond Ibrahim

Stonegate Institute
February 27, 2012

Many in the media are indignant with Reverend Franklin Graham, head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Invited on "Morning Joe" last Tuesday to discuss Christian persecution, the hosts turned the focus to interrogating Graham on whether he thought President Barack Obama was Christian or not. Though the Reverend concluded that Obama "has said he's a Christian, so I just have to assume that he is," he appeared skeptical, suggesting Obama's policies disagree with Christian principles, and thus earning the full ire of much of the fourth estate.

[PHOTO...Obama bowing before the Saudi King, 2009]

Intrinsically trivial on many levels, this incident nevertheless brings several important points to the fore.

First, Graham was absolutely right to say that, "under Islamic law, the Muslim world sees Barack Obama as a Muslim, as a son of Islam": according to Sharia, if one's father is Muslim, one automatically becomes Muslim. In fact, the reason behind last week's church attack in Egypt, when thousands of Muslims tried to torch a church and kill its pastor, is that a Christian girl fled her father after he converted to Islam: she did not want to be Muslim, and was rumored to be hiding in the church. (This would not be the first time in recent months that churches were attacked on similar rumors.)

Because of this automatic passage of Islam from father to son—with the death penalty for those seeking to apostatize, the condemned Iranian pastor being just the most visible example—and because Obama attended a madrassa (a Muslim religious school) during his youth in Indonesia, many Muslims are convinced that Obama is a "secret" Muslim. In a Forbes article, "My Muslim President Obama: Why members of the faith see him as one of the flock," writer Asma Gull Hasan elaborates:

[S]ince Election Day, I have been part of more and more conversations with Muslims in which it was either offhandedly agreed that Obama is Muslim or enthusiastically blurted out. In commenting on our new president, "I have to support my fellow Muslim brother," would slip out of my mouth before I had a chance to think twice. "Well, I know he's not really Muslim," I would quickly add. But if the person I was talking to was Muslim, they would say, "yes he is." …. Most of the Muslims I know (me included) can't seem to accept that Obama is not Muslim. Of the few Muslims I polled who said that Obama is not Muslim, even they conceded that he had ties to Islam…. The rationalistic, Western side of me knows that Obama has denied being Muslim, that his father was non-practicing, that he doesn't attend a mosque. Many Muslims simply say back, "my father's not a strict Muslim either, and I haven't been to a mosque in years." Obama even told The New York Times he could recite the adhan, the Islamic call to prayer, which the vast majority of Muslims, I would guess, do not know well enough to recite. [Read the entire article, which is more eye-opening than the author probably intended.]

Another reason why many Muslims believe Obama is Muslim (a reason Ms. Hasan's article understandably omits) is that, under the Islamic doctrine of taqiyya, Muslims are permitted—in certain contexts even encouraged—to deny being Muslim, if so doing secures them or Islam an advantage. Accordingly, Islamic history is full of stories of Muslims denying and publicly cursing Islam, even pretending to be Christian, whenever it was strategic.

In other words, if an American president was a secret Muslim, and if he was lying about it, and even if he was secretly working to subvert the U.S. to Islam's advantage—not only would that be justified by Islamic doctrines of loyalty and deception, but it would have ample precedents, stretching back to the dawn of Islam. Such as when Muhammad commanded a convert from an adversarial tribe to conceal his new Muslim identity and go back to his tribe—which he cajoled with a perfidious "You are my stock and my family, the dearest of men to me"—only to betray them to Islam's invading armies.

Graham further upset "progressive" sensitivities by saying "All I know is under Obama, President Obama, the Muslims of the world, he seems to be more concerned about them than the Christians that are being murdered in the Muslim countries," adding that "Islam has gotten a free pass under Obama."

Yet who can deny this? Whether by expunging any reference to Islam in U.S. security documents, or enabling Muslim persecution of Christians, or ordering NASA to make Muslims "feel good" about themselves, or bowing to the anti-Christian Saudi king—the President has made his partiality for Islam very clear: Islam is undoubtedly getting a "free pass" under Obama.

What Franklin Graham's critics fail to understand is that, when it comes to Obama's religious identity, the Reverend probably has Jesus' dictum in mind: "By their fruits shall ye know them"—that is, pro-Islamic actions speak louder than Christian words.

US Military Burns Bibles but Condemns Burning Korans

by The Godfather
February 24, 2012
Comments (171)

If reports are accurate, it looks like those who burned Korans that had been written in to deliver secret messages to other prisoners may have to stand trial. We’re not hearing anything about whether those who killed US troops over the affair will suffer a similar fate.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai had accused a United States officer of “ignorantly” burning copies of the Koran. As a result, rioters took to the streets. So far, 11 people, in addition to the two U.S. servicemen, have been killed.

Demonstrations have drawn thousands of angry Afghans to the streets, chanting “Death to America!”

“NATO officials, in response to a request for the trial and punishment of the perpetrators … promised this crime will brought to court as soon as possible,” Karzai’s office said in a statement.

President Barack Obama sent a letter to Karzai apologizing for the burning of the Korans, after Afghan laborers found charred copies while collecting rubbish at the Bagram Air Base.

I don’t know if the President has said anything about the deaths of two United States soldiers and he wants an apology from Afghan President Karzai. Apologies these days are mostly a one-way street. We’re doing all the apologizing.

Our government apologizes for burning a few Korans, and yet it burns thousands of Bibles at the same Bagram Air Force Base. Here’s a CNN story from 2009 that is not getting any media attention:

Military personnel threw away, and ultimately burned, confiscated Bibles that were printed in the two most common Afghan languages amid concern they would be used to try to convert Afghans, a Defense Department spokesman said. The unsolicited Bibles sent by a church in the United States were confiscated . . . at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan because military rules forbid troops of any religion from proselytizing while deployed there, Lt. Col. Mark Wright said. . . .

“The decision was made that it was a ‘force protection’ measure to throw them away, because, if they did get out, it could be perceived by Afghans that the U.S. government or the U.S. military was trying to convert Muslims,” Wright told CNN on Tuesday.

Troops at posts in war zones are required to burn their trash, Wright said.

According to the military, the Bibles were “trash.”

The one thing that would help the blood-crazed Middle East, military rules say it must be destroyed. Is it any wonder that we are not making any progress as the body counts continues to mount? God is not mocked. We are trying to win a war with bullets, missiles, and drones instead of God’s Word. What’s worse, shooting bullets or dropping Bibles all over the Middle East?

On May 28th, 1849, Robert C. Winthrop (1809–1894), descendant of Governor John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, addressed the Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Bible Society in Boston, and said in part, “Men, in a word, must necessarily be controlled, either by a power within them, or by a power without them; either by the word of God, or by the strong arm of man; either by the Bible, or by the bayonet.”


screeminmeeme · 2 days ago
1. IMO, Our military leaders ought to send those who burned the Qurans home to America right away. Get them out of a country that wants to see them dead. (We should get out of Afghanistan, anyway, as soon as possible, and leave them to their own devices).... Those primitive Afghani tribes have been ruled by Islam for hundreds of years and so thoroughly indoctrinated that they will never accept a democracy. ....The CONCEPT OF LIBERTY IS ALIEN to their belief system.

GW's speech after 911 about how everybody in the world would jump at the chance to live free if given the opportunity was indicative of his cosmic ignorance of Islam's powerful hold on dedicated, genuine muslims.....especially those who live in muslim theocracies.


Nathan M. Bickel · 2 days ago
If more of the American people would actually know how influential all our Afghanistan military effort has been, I'm convinced that they would be screaming for the US to uproot our efforts there, and be done with! All the years that we've been there; the American blood spilt, and all the monetary resources expended, and then, Afghanistan still has a Muslim government in place to persecute people of other religions. Jeffersonian American Constitutional Republic democracy will never work in that Islamic culture.


screeminmeeme · 2 days ago
2. If our government agrees to allow the Afghan government or itself decides to try these soldiers ( you can bet the officers who ordered it wouldn't be tried) for burning those books, Americans ought to go on the war path, descend on DC, and loudly demand the honorable release of the soldiers involved.

3. The burning of Bibles by the military would never have been ordered or tolerated by any other of our Presidents. Anyway, the military could have simply sent those cases of Bibles back to the sender ....but instead, by destroying them, sent a clear message of contempt for the Christian faith.

4. The burning of the Qurans was no accident....nor was the burning of the Bibles. Yet the murderous muslims get the abject apology from the head honcho and Christians are expected to tolerate and acquiesce to the increasing disrespect and disdain for them shown by our government. Anti-Christian sentiment has been promoted by Obama and the military is following suit.

Obama: Sharia Enforcer

Robert Spencer
Frontpage.com

Madness has overtaken Washington, and the world. Every day this past week has brought fresh reports of more people murdered in Afghanistan over the burning of some copies of the Qur’an at Bagram Airfield. In response, every day new apologies come from American officials. Barack Obama, Leon Panetta, the commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan, General John Allen, and others have all issued abject apologies to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the “noble people of Afghanistan,” and everyone else in sight.

Even the most minor of officials are getting into the act: Peter Lavoy, acting assistant secretary of defense for Asia and Pacific security affairs, scraping the bottom of the barrel for a suitable object for his abject submission, apologized to Muslims in the Washington, D.C. area.

Some have rightly skewered Obama and his cohorts for their cowardice and eagerness to appease the Afghan mobs, especially as the death toll steadily mounts. No one, however, has noted the most remarkable aspect of this entire episode: the United States Government has, no questions asked, eagerly embraced Islamic law (Sharia) regarding the treatment of the Qur’an, and assured the Afghans that it will be enforced.

In his apology letter to Karzai, Obama said that the Qur’an-burning was “inadvertent,” but that nevertheless “we will take the appropriate steps to avoid any recurrence, including holding accountable those responsible.”

If it was “inadvertent,” why does Obama intend to hold them accountable? Accidents will happen. If he is going to adopt Sharia to the extent that he thinks that anyone should be held accountable for this at all, is he going to adopt Sharia punishments for this “crime” as well? Will he have the U.S. soldiers whom he finds to be responsible for the Qur’an-burning beheaded?

If not, why not?

If burning the Qur’an is now a crime for Americans, and we are thus now subject to Islamic law, how much Sharia are we under? To what extent have we capitulated? Where does Obama draw the line, if anywhere?

Will there be stonings of adulteresses, amputations of the hands of thieves, and beheadings of apostates from Islam and blasphemers of Muhammad on the Mall? If you think these are absurd questions, consider that these are all elements of the same Islamic law that Obama has now vowed to enforce in regard to the burning of the Qur’an. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Clinton has held a closed-door meeting with the Secretary-General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in order to discuss strategies for enforcing Sharia restrictions on free speech regarding Islam in Western countries. Obama’s Justice Department has gone to court more than once to compel American businesses and educational institutions to change the way they operate in order to accommodate particularities of Islamic law and practice.

What will be the outcome of all this? No one knows or cares, because even conservative news outlets are now bowing to delicate Islamic sensibilities and dropping coverage of jihad news. It’s over ten years since 9/11, and nothing much has happened since then, right? And there is so very much election coverage to be gotten to.

Never mind that the jihad’s continued advance is best illustrated by Obama’s eagerness to appease, and by the collective Western failure to stand up and say what should be said to what General Allen called the “noble people of Afghanistan”: “What madness has overtaken you? None of the people you have killed ever burned a Qur’an. And are your Allah and your Muhammad so fragile that burning one copy, or even a few copies, of a book of which millions and millions of copies exist, really hurts them so much that you think killing people who had nothing to do with it is a proper response? No killing is appropriate in this case, even of those who did this. You people have gone mad. All decent people should rise and condemn you.”

The jihad terrorists who struck America on 9/11 were doing so in order to weaken the U.S. to the extent that eventually our free society would surrender to the rule of Islamic law. And now it is happening – but as the OIC’s agenda of stifling every critical word about Islam also advances apace in the U.S., fewer and fewer people will know about it. How will they find out? The Left is complicit, and the Right is afraid to tell them.

Has the conquest of a great nation ever been this easy?

Qur’an Burning and Destructive Double Standards

Bruce Thornton
Frontpage.com

The riots and violence in Afghanistan over some accidentally burned Qur’ans are following a script that by now is all too drearily familiar. As we have seen over the years with the riots over the Mohammed cartoons, Pope Benedict’s comments about violence in Islam, or false rumors of Qur’ans flushed down toilets, violent Muslim overreactions to slights are immediately followed by anxious apologies from American leaders. Rather than defusing the anger, however, such groveling merely encourages more contempt and violence.

So too with the current riots, which have killed 30 people, including 4 U.S. soldiers, two of them in the high-security Interior Ministry. Another seven Sunday were wounded in a grenade attack by demonstrators. This violence, moreover, has been encouraged by mullahs in mosques, teachers in madrassas, and members of parliament. Predictably, the Taliban––with whom our government is eager to talk peace––has encouraged people to “turn their guns on the foreign infidel invaders.” President Obama has responded to this incitement and violence by offering his personal “sincere apologies,” professing his “deep regret,” and vowing to hold those responsible accountable. Defense Secretary Panetta and NATO commander John Allen also apologized.

But no reciprocal apology has been demanded from President Hamid Karzai for the incitement to violence on the part of government and religious leaders, or for the deaths of two of our troops at the hands of an Afghan soldier we trained and armed, and another two inside a government ministry. Newt Gingrich had the best response to this sorry spectacle: “There seems to be nothing that radical Islamists can do to get Barack Obama’s attention in a negative way and he is consistently apologizing to people who do not deserve the apology of the President of the United States period,” Gingrich said in Washington D.C. “It is Hamid Karzai who owes the American people an apology, not the other way around. This destructive double standard whereby the United States and its democratic allies refuse to hold accountable leaders who tolerate systematic violence and oppression in their borders must come to an end.”

The administration and the military, of course, rationalize their indulgence of this double standard as motivated by “the safety of American men and women in Afghanistan, of our military and civilian personnel there,” as Obama spokesman Jay Carney put it. But as one demonstrator in Kabul said, “We don’t care about Obama’s apology. We have to protest to be responsible to our god. They are burning our Qur’an. An apology is not enough.” Most Afghans obviously agree, since rioting and killing have intensified despite apologies from our highest government and military officials. Indeed, over the past few decades, no amount of apologies for alleged “insults” to Muslims has stopped Islamists form attacking us. Nor have the good deeds benefitting Muslims, from rescuing Bosnians from genocide to liberating Libyans from Gaddafi, stopped jihadists from wanting to kill Americans for an endless list of reasons. The past decades of such incidents have shown instead that apologies are useless, and merely confirm the impression among Muslims that we are spiritually inferior, and so endorse the perverse logic that accidentally burning a book is worse than murdering our soldiers and citizens. Why else would we publicly flagellate ourselves over such “insults” even as we say nothing about the Muslim murders of Christians in Egypt and Nigeria, or the Muslim laws prescribing capital punishment for converts to Christianity, or the Muslim vandalizing and destruction of 300 churches in Cyprus, or the Muslim slow-motion extermination of Christians in lands that worshipped Christ for 6 centuries before Islam even existed?

As Gingrich pointed out, these double standards are counterproductive and have been proven over and over to make Muslims despise us rather than like us. What we refuse to accept is the intolerant chauvinism inherent in Islam, the belief that Muslims are the “best of nations” and destined to rule the world. Accepting the double standard merely confirms their superiority and our inferiority. After all, to let someone behave according to one set of principles or standards while demanding that you be subjected to others is to validate a claim of superiority that justifies the disproportionate and unjust behavior. It’s acting like a battered wife, who accepts a beat-down from her husband as justified punishment for burning his dinner. This double standard also reflects incoherent thinking, a failure to apply consistently a principle that presumably has universal validity. Hence we celebrate and practice “tolerance” at the same time we enable, ignore, excuse, and rationalize intolerance. In the West’s struggle with Islamic jihad, our doubts about the superiority of Western beliefs have coupled with this breakdown in ethical reasoning. The result is the appeasement of jihadist aggression and the confirmation of the jihadist estimation of the West’s weakness and corruption.

This record of appeasement, then, has encouraged many Muslims to demand from Westerners a hypersensitivity to Islam, all the while that Christians and Jews in Muslim countries are subjected to harassment, assault, vicious insult, and murder. In the West, respect for Muslim holy books and practices is supposed to be granted as a self-evident right beyond argument or debate. Yet Western ideals and principles, such as tolerance for different creeds, are derided, disrespected, and rejected as self-evident evils. Worse yet, we pretend that our appeasement of jihadist violence is an expression of tolerance, the liberal-democratic virtue that simply has little meaning in Islamic theology. Why would any pious Muslim “tolerate” an infidel culture that jeopardizes the eternal souls of Muslims, and that stands in the way of others’ converting to Islam? As the Ayatollah Khomeini said, “Those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world. All the countries conquered by Islam or to be conquered in the future will be marked for everlasting salvation.” Such confidence is reinforced when we acquiesce in a standard whereby burning a Qur’an or insulting Mohammed with a cartoon is worse than killing people.

We know why many of our leaders accept this double standard. They have bought into John Lennon’s juvenile utopia in which there is “nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.” Shorn of their transcendent, non-negotiable foundations, all our beliefs are now contingent and negotiable, easily traded away for security or comfort. At the same time, multiculturalism bestows on the non-Western “other” a finely calibrated sensitivity to his culture and religion, no matter how dysfunctional or oppressive, all the while the West refuses to extend such consideration to its own. Why would it? Haven’t generations of Western intellectuals and artists told the world how corrupt and evil the West is? Haven’t they asserted, as Pascal Bruckner put it, that “every Westerner is presumed guilty until proven innocent”?

Having culturally internalized this self-loathing and lack of conviction, we are vulnerable to those who are filled with passionate intensity about the rightness of their beliefs and the payback due to us for our alleged historical sins such as colonialism or imperialism or globalization. And then we wonder why the jihadist considers us ripe for conquest, and destined to be subjected to the superior values of Islam.

Published: 9 hours ago WND

Barbara Simpson, "The Babe in the Bunker,"
- as she's known to her KSFO 560 radio talk-show audience in San Francisco, has a 20-year radio, TV and newspaper career in the Bay Area and Los Angeles.

The headlines from Afghanistan are astounding!

Christians rioting in the streets!

Destruction everywhere!

People injured and the death toll increases.

The U.S. Embassy was stormed by emotion-crazed zealots, including priests and nuns and ministers.

It’s all because American military brass ordered U.S. troops to throw away any unsolicited shipment of Bibles that were sent to Bagram Air Base by a U.S. church, which had the Bibles translated into two local languages.

Since troops are required the burn their trash, the Bibles were ultimately burned.

The military said they didn’t want the Afghans to think the U.S. was trying to convert them.

The burning is what sent the Christians into a rage.

Appalled by what happened, the president – Barack Obama – didn’t miss a beat and sent personal letters of apology to the pope, the archbishop of Canterbury, the U.S. Conference of Bishops and the heads of the various Protestant denominations.

The Pentagon did the same, offering words of apology to all Christians, saying the destruction of the Christian Holy Book was not meant as an insult to Christians or even to God Himself. They said it was only done to protect American troops from being attacked for trying to convert Muslims.

There’s no estimate as to when the violence will end. Christian leaders are demanding that the troops who trashed and burned the Bibles be arrested, tried and punished.

No word on what punishment they demand. No one has ruled out crucifixion.

I’m holding my breath to see the headlines tomorrow.

NOT!

Oh. Wait a minute. I got that wrong!

It wasn’t Bibles that were burned a couple of weeks ago. They were Qurans.

It’s not rioting Christians. It’s Afghans, both civilian and military, as well as the Taliban.

But please note, in case you’ve forgotten: The Bible burning did happen in 2009 for the reasons explained above.

But, there was no rioting, no destruction, no killing of Afghans or allied military, no Christian religious raging and no apologies by the president or the military to Christians for an “insult” to their religion and no apology to the church that sent the Bibles with all innocent intent.

Apparently, it’s OK to destroy the Christian Holy Book. Christianity must be a religion of peace, because Christians don’t riot if their Holy Book is deliberately destroyed.

But it’s different with a Quran.

Now, the aggrieved are Muslims, and everyone knows how sensitive they are.

Now there is destruction, spreading mob violence and more innocent people killed.

The Qurans that were destroyed last week were printed in the native languages and were part of the library for detainees at the air base.

According to an anonymous report made to Associated Press by a military official, many of the books “contained extremist messages and inscriptions.” It was feared such communication among detainees would arouse violence, so it was decided to dispose of the materials.

They were thrown away and later burned because troops are required to burn all trash.

When it was realized “what” was being burned, the procedure stopped.

Too late! As soon as word got out, riots began. Mobs shout, “Die, Die, foreigners.” American flags are desecrated, buildings burned, people attacked and the street death toll is over 12.

Americans, particularly the military, are targets. Last week two American troops were shot and killed by a man wearing an Afghan army uniform and, on Saturday, two senior U.S. officers, a colonel and a major, were shot and killed inside the Afghan Interior Ministry, a supposedly secure facility. The shooter, who would have had top security clearance, reportedly was wearing an Afghan police uniform.

The victims were shot in the back of the head. It was no accident.

The Taliban crows that it is responsible for the murders.

The U.S. Embassy is on lock-down because of attacks against it; in fact, all U.S. and NATO facilities in Afghanistan are targeted. NATO has pulled all personnel from Afghan ministries because of the deadly security breach.

Mob violence is spreading across Afghanistan with a U.N. compound attacked and set ablaze.

In Libya, angry mobs tore apart the gravestones and memorials of British and Allied World War II veterans in the Benghazi War Cemetery.

Judging by the latest news reports, things aren’t quieting down.

The immediate, abject apology call and letter from Barack Obama to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the apology by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and that of senior Pentagon official Peter Lavoy, seemingly fell on deaf ears. Lavoy even went directly to a major Mosque Virginia to deliver his multiple apologies during a short speech to members.

Not to put too fine a point on that – a fat lot of good all that did!

Karzai’s office is demanding the perpetrators of the burning be identified and put on trial. Students say if there’s any later “pact” with the United States, they’ll declare a formal jihad.

And in the streets, mobs are shouting for the foreigners – NATO and us – to be taken prisoner, beaten and killed.

They don’t even want a trial. What a surprise.

Tell me again why Obama refuses to admit our enemy is militant Islam and why he caters to their sensitivities.

Tell me again why even one more of our military should be maimed or killed by these fanatics.

Tell me again why we should be in Afghanistan for even a moment longer.

No, don’t tell me. Just get us out. Now.

Not exactly 'recently'.

Not sure when it was but started to be posted on youtube about Dec 1st, 2010...

Now we have Hussain Obama and top US military brass apologising for the burning of Korans - and the rioting...and murders of US personel...continue - but HO and co never apologised when the US military burned Bibles...