Mosque Chairman Tells School Kids "Non-Believers are Dogs"
Children from the Amsterdam multi-cultural elementary school De Horizon visit various religious institutions. At the El Mouchidine mosque the 10-year olds were told by the chairman of the mosque that non-believers are dogs. The school has sent a letter to the parents of the children saying that this is unacceptable.
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
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11 comments:
Been around dogs all my life, unlike these Islamist bigots, and the one thing you do learn about dogs is they can be your best friend or your worst nightmare, ...it's all a matter of how you treat them...treat them cruelly and you will lose an arm someday ;-)
Obviously a lesson that escaped the Caliphate Islamist douche bag who was lipping off about how to treat dogs...ask him how many of his fellow foamy-mouthed fanatics have been ground up by the dogs of war in Afghanistan and Iraq?
Frankly I find the sociopathic orthodoxies of these loons to be prone to self-destructive ends.
This is an all too common problem among religious zealots whether they are Muslim, Christian, Jewish, etc. In my own experience as an undergraduate student of the sociology of religion I encountered this kind of thinking among Christians who often referred to non-believers as "Godless" in a contemptuous tone of voice. In addition, this label was commonly slapped on people who were Christian, just members of different denominations and sects.
I think you will find this kind of thinking is common among Muslims and Jews as well. Sunni and Shia Muslims look down on one another. Orthodox Jews look down on Reform Jews and vice versa.
Some religious folk look down on agnostics and atheists with the disdain expressed by the chairman of the mosque. I am not excusing his behaviour any more than I would that of a Christian or a Jew who held such a bigoted point of view. Good for the school authorities who censured this ignoramus.
Pongo when is the last time you read a media report where a guest speaker ANYWHERE called non-Christians "Dogs". Stop lumping us in with Radical Islamists, my faith isn't the one spreading hatred and strapping bombs on our kids. Frankly as a Christian I'm fed up with being lumped in with Radical Islam by PCers like you to justify violence by Islamist.
We aren't the ones killing in the name of Jesus globally, we're tired of it being infered we are.
Allah Akbar.
I cannot recall seeing media reports of Christians calling non-Christians "dogs." However, I have seen people, some of whom purport to be Christian, in online chatrooms and blogs refer to Arabs as "rag heads" and "sand niggers." The Reverend Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church has publicly referred to Jews as "turds" and gay people as "apostate fags" and "sodomites."
It is you who infers that I am lumping you in with Islamists, although I am impying no such thing. My beef is with religious zealots and bigots of any stripe. I have no use for political correctness. I vote for the Conservative Party of Canada. I support the mission in Afghanistan. I am appalled at the antics of the various Human Rights Commissions and Tribunals to act as censors.
pongo,
So, you've discovered that resentment is a universal human trait, a relationship to the sacred. Now what? The next question for the serious humanist, it would seem to me, is What are the disciplines by which we limit and transcend our resentments? Why don't you compare resentment-mediation disciplines, if you want to know what religion is in good part about.
SO, have a read of the Koran. Count how many times it curses the unbeliever (on pretty much every page). Now I'm not saying that all that cursing isn't a strategy for mediating or deferring resentment, it is, even as it potentially furthers it. But it is not necessarily the best possible strategy available to the religious mind.
Instead of descending into mindless "all religions are the same" kind of thinking, consider the relevant historical fact that Islam comes in the wake of Judaism and Christianity and has to find ways to deny or own the truths held by the latter. It takes the view that the Kaffirs are corrupted, that real Judaism and Christianity was, in the beginning, Islam. But the damned kaffirs have screwed it up, requiring the final and complete revelation of the eternal Koran.
An unbeliever, and a cursing thereof, has a very specific and central role in the world view of Islam. To lazily compare this to other forms of resentment that are a popular but not official (liturgical or textual) part of other religions is to ignore entirely the cultural and historical specificity of Islam. That's not what a serious student should do. You should respect Islam for what it is. I know you probably have lots of professors who do the lazy relativizing thing too, preferring sleazy political correctness to intellectual rigor. But that's no excuse.
As for the school, I hope they sent a letter to the mosque too.
In my experience, most Christian faiths, no matter how extreme, just keep wringing their hands and praying for you. Or knocking on your door and giving out leaflets. Or - the horror! - telling you you're part of God's creation and smiling at you. It's annoying, but i don't find it insulting...or threatening.
Can you elaborate on the cultural and historical specificity of Islam, please?
I assure you the last thing I want is to be subject to the dictates of any religious institution and I do fully appreciate the threat posed by Islamists. I remember very well during my student days, as a student of religious studies, learning about attitudes in the Islamic world of the late 20th century. There was a professor on the faculty who embraced the relativist and politically correct attitude you desribe. He talked about practicing Christianity alongside Hindus in India at their temples. The Hindus took his silliness in stride apparently. A more reasonable member of the faculty pointed out to the class if you were to pull this stunt in a madrassa in the Indian subcontinent a Muslim would probably spit in your face. Nowadays I expect you would suffer a much harsher fate.
pongo,
I am no expert on Islam, just a citizen trying to inform himself about this culture. There are many people to read; if you really want to start a reading list, let me know.
What I meant by "cultural and historical specificity" is that each and every religion is different, marked by the specific and historical nature of its founding revelation. Yes, each revelation in some ways speaks to what is universal or original to our shared humanity, but by the same token each is also revealing, in new ways, something unique about the inexhaustible possibilities inherent in that shared origin.
The central historical fact of Islam is that it it the third major attempt to define monotheism. The first attempt was that of the Jews, with their Mosaic revelation that called on them not to invoke or name or figure the one God, but to start to define him as both universal (everyone's one God) and in a particular covenant with the Jews. This revelation set into motion a Jewish culture that is marked by its belief in an unfolding series of prophetic revelations: it is a religion that lives in (Biblical) history, with Jewish success and failure therein being understood as a sign of God's (dis)pleasure with how the Jews are living up to and developing their covenant.
When the Christians came along they proclaimed the New Testament or Covenant, indicating their continuing belief in an unfolding history of revelation, though they also tend to interpret the revelation of the cross as some kind of (sacred) historical end point where the sacrificial violence of earlier religion is fully revealed and human sinfulness fully illuminated. After this, our choice is to embrace a religion of love, or suffer some dark apocalyptic end.
Islam comes into the world 600 years after Christianity, and yet tries to make a claim to the ultimate truth of the monotheist tradition. What does it have to offer? (Not much, it seems to me - is it a Judeo-Christian heresy, a form of Gnosticism?) What is its strategy? Does it proclaim the New New Testament, fully recognizing the truths of the previous two Bibles and adding its own? No, I suspect it is a heresy because it shows disrespect to its forerunners and offers little new of great human insight (it seems to me); instead, it makes a gesture of claiming the earlier Judeo-Christian prophets for Islam, saying the Muslims love Abraham, Jesus and Moses, etc., but it does not embrace the earlier holy texts. It proclaims the Koran as a book that stands outside of history. It is the literal word of God, eternal and uncreated. The earlier Judeo-Christian prophets never had the full and complete revelation, only parts thereof. They had never been trusted with the complete Koran, and the Islam they had been given was later corrupted by the followers. Hence Judaism and Christianity as they exist today are fallen or incomplete religions, and their followers are Kafirs, unbelievers.
This understanding of history and culture is what fundamentally marks Islam, which relentlessly divides the world into camps of believers and unbelievers. It is the historically specific revelation that denies its historical specificity. It denies that it comes after Judaism and Christianity. Islam is the eternal truth. In other words, it denies what might seem obvious to the non-Muslim reader of the Koran, especially the reader of the later and more authoritative verses written at Medina (when Mohammed started spreading the faith by the sword): that the Koran is full of resentment towards the earlier forms of monotheism, that it can never stop cursing the Kafir or Unbeliever.
None of this is to suggest that I don't believe in the possibility of good Muslims who don't live in unending resentment of the unbelievers. There are indeed such Muslims, but their achievement would seem to be one that requires they not take good parts of the Koran and other holy Muslim texts too seriously or literally to heart. There are many good Muslims, but today they don't tend to be in positions of cultural authority, in the mosques etc. Fundamentalist or orthodox interpretations are ascendant and being fed with billions of oil dollars.
One could go on in this vein for a long time. But the internet and library is full of material to read, and you will find more polished material there. Consider, for example,
Merry Christmas, Infidel
By Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, December 19, 2006
This is not the first year jihadists have chosen the Christmas season to ratchet up their threats – which, even if they never materialize, are useful in themselves to “to strike terror into (the hearts of) the enemies” of Allah (Qur’an 8:60). Jihadists would want to sow this terror during one of the holiest seasons of the Christian year not just to maximize the potential for terror, but to emphasize that theirs is, as they see it, a holy struggle. The suitability of Christmastime for a jihad attack is an outgrowth of the idea that, in the words of Islamic preacher Husayn Mahfooth Shu’ayb, one of “the most critical manifestations of loyalty towards the infidels” is “celebrating their religious festivals.” Some Islamic clerics have even exhorted Muslims not to extend Christmas greetings to Christians, for that would be seen as an endorsement of their holiday, which they consider has no legitimacy; however, other clerics have rejected this view.
Nevertheless, the idea that Christian belief and observance is illegitimate is deeply rooted within Islam. The Islamic prophet Muhammad composed for the Muslims a brief prayer, known as the Fatiha (Opening), that became the cornerstone of Muslim prayer (it is recited seventeen times a day by the Muslim who performs the five daily prayers) and the first sura of the Qur’an:
In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.
Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds,
The Beneficent, the Merciful.
Master of the Day of Judgment,
Thee (alone) we worship; Thee (alone) we ask for help.
Show us the straight path,
The path of those whom Thou hast favoured;
Not the (path) of those who earn Thine anger nor of those who go astray. (Qur’an 1:1-7)
Even this, which has a status among Muslims analogous to the centrality of the Lord’s Prayer for Christians, has a polemical edge. Traditionally Muslim divines have identified those who have earned Allah’s anger with Jews and those who have gone astray with Christians. The Qur’anic commentator Ibn Kathir (1301-1372) explains that “these two paths are the paths of the Christians and Jews, a fact that the believer should be aware of so that he avoids them. The path of the believers is the knowledge of truth and abiding by it. In comparison, Jews abandoned practicing the religion, while the Christians lost the true knowledge. This is why ‘anger’ descended upon the Jews, while being described as ‘led astray’ is more appropriate of the Christians” (Tafsir Ibn Kathir, vol. 1, 87). Late in his life Muhammad received revelations that were among the harshest toward Jews and Christians than any that he had ever received before, including one that asserted that Jews called Ezra a son of God, just as Christians called Christ the Son of God, and declared that both groups had thereby incurred Allah’s curse (Qur’an 9:30).
If the Christians’ having gone astray is epitomized by their calling Christ the Son of God, and Christmas celebrates Christ’s birth, then what better time to strike terror into the hearts of infidels? Here again, jihadist behavior becomes clear with reference to Islamic beliefs and assumptions. It is good that authorities in Britain and elsewhere are closely monitoring holiday terror threats. It will be even better when they begin to realize the importance of being thoroughly versed in the Islamic theology which motivates and guides jihadists – for only by knowing the enemy thoroughly can he ultimately be defeated.
Spencer Link
Or Confronting Islam and A never ending war also from Front Page.
“The irony of Multiculturalism is that multiculturalism is a product of a single culture, you’d have a hard time finding it in Saudi Arabia or Cuba or China" (Mark Steyn)
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