What Did You Say About Muhammad?! [or why the west are a bunch of weenies]

What Did You Say About Muhammad?!

Which is more likely to elicit an irate Muslim response: 1) public cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, or 2) public proclamations that Muhammad was a bisexual, sometime transvestite and necrophile, who enjoyed sucking on the tongues of children, commanded a woman to "breastfeed" an adult man, and advised believers to drink his urine for salutary health? [...]

This item is mandatory reading for all of our chums that fantasise about mythical "moderate" islam and lecture to the rest of us about our intolerance and "islamophobia". The money shot is deeper in the article -

Of course, one need not agree with Life TV's tactics or evangelical mission to appreciate the lesson it imparts: Muslim outrage—as with all human outrage—is predicated on how well it is tolerated. Continuously appeased, it becomes engorged and insistent on more concessions; ignored, it deflates and, ashamed of itself, withers away.

This isn't Faux or some neocon propaganda sheet. It's far too intelligently written to be that. Raymond Ibrahim has an extensive background in mid-east politics and is an Egyptian Copt by birth. Somewhat more entitled to discuss these matters than any of our whitey apologists.

It has been evident from the start that those that have usurped contemporary Humanism have not achieved anything with their policies of accommodationism and mantras on "tolerance". It is now a valid question to ask - how much does this continual appeasement exacerbate the problems we are now dealing with ?

Tags: accomodationism, alu akbar, fear, god is great, humanists, islamophobia, loathing, religion of peace, reverse racism, self-censorship

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Germaine Greer. A "feminist" who defends FGM because it is done by a non-Western culture.

Other leftists who bend over backwards to make excuses for Muslims, think we had 9/11 coming to us, think cultural relativism is more important than human rights, and otherwise are filled with guilt and self-hatred, are also the equivalent of the right-wing. Their names just are not so "household" as Sarah Palin and Ann Coulter. Maybe they are also perceived as smart, because they went to college and use big words.
OK, those people are just as insane as nazis like Coulter, et al, but they do not have their own 24-hour cable news channel and hordes of zombie followers. It is distressing that so many people equate the dangers of the far left and the far right. The far right has numbers and clout that the far left can only dream of. Let's keep them both at bay, but I'm pointing my pitchfork to the right for now.
That's true, they don't have their own channel and don't have that much influence in the US. But their philosophies have caught on in Europe, and the results have been just as bad. Or maybe even worse, being that leftists are defending ideologies that are much more conservative than the right wing.
Just as bad from what perspective, PRG? Has the left wing in Europe recently started an unnecessary war like the one Cheney/Bush launched in Iraq? Remember that Hussein was a primarily secular despot, who had nothing to do with 9/11, and posed no threat to anybody but his own people, who have arguably fared worse during and after their liberation than under his cruel boot-heel.

I'll grant that the left in Europe is insufficiently opposed to religious bullshit like Sharia, or Arab tribal baggage like the burqa, or the outrage of fatwas on people who voice an anti-Islamic opinion, but I don't see that that accommodationism is really all that potent. Look at the backlash against the burqa and Sharia in France and England, respectively. The European left is not universally self-loathing or incapable of defending their own cultural values.

On the other hand, the right wing, particularly in the US, is extremely effective at advancing their agenda of bigotry, ignorance, rapacious free-marketeering, broken social safety nets, and self-defeating labor classes.

If you compare results, compare numbers, the right wing is simply better at their brand of ugly stupidity. I think this is largely because it appears to be congruent with the self-interests of the lower classes. It isn't, but Fox News is good at making the lower classes think that poverty = liberty. The message of the extreme left is just not as appealing to the stupid and selfish among the lower classes because it begins with the premise that we make our own problems, that we deserve them. The right, appealingly, always blames the outsider. This is a considerably easier sell.
The soviet communists wouldn't accept modern genetic knowledge nor the consequences of evolutionary theory. The science didn't jive with their political notions of one-size-fits-all work, pay and government. Modern hippies or New Age proponents are almost exclusively in the liberal camp. They advocate using aura treatments or checking someone's horoscope over going to the doctor or watching the news.
idk that watching the news is all that useful these days...
I'm sickened by the amount of bias on non local news channels, not including faux news. Needles to say people without an eye for personal bias are usually suckers to them.
If you don't publicize them, they will go away...

this is true of Coulter and others who are mostly money/attention whores...jihadists? Not so much.
Yeah, Epstein was raised in another thread. I hate to use a Coulter-ism, but when I read these kinds of mewlings and hand-wringings the first word that springs to mind is "treason". Islamism, for want of a better definition is raw anti-humanism. It boggles me how much effort is spent in defending the rights of those whose raison d'être is to obliterate all rights and reduce the whole species to mindless holy text regurgitating automatons. Whether it's an expression the Pollyanna principle or just deliberate wilful ignorance I don't know. But I consider it a betrayal of all the liberal values we hold dear.
Excellent write up. Thanks for the link!
Bill: What the frick is a "humanist chaplain" anyway?

Greg Epstein - he's the poster child for humanist inclusivity. It's not enough to be a just a rainbow anymore. Interfaith is the buzzword for the new millenium. He is also one of the prime movers of "New Humanism". From Wiki (therefore a lie) -

The recent movement of New Humanism was created in order to address a growing concern over what many in the Humanist, Agnostic, and Atheist communities were seeing as an undesirable emphasis being placed on strident, inflammatory anti-clericism by some of the more prominent and outspoken proponents of Atheism. Epstein, seeing this concern, helped to clarify the issue, and gave voice to many who felt uncomfortable about how these philosophical schools of thought were being treated in the media. Epstein, in referring to the online journal The New Humanism that he publishes, explains how this came about:

The New Humanism is produced by the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard University and is named after the 30th anniversary conference our organization held in April 2007. At that event, the title was chosen to contrast with "The New Atheism," as the media have dubbed the work of writers such as Oxford scientist Richard Dawkins, Stanford doctoral student Sam Harris, and journalist Christopher Hitchens, each of whom had recently published a bestselling book promoting atheism. The intention was to use our conference to draw attention to the idea that Humanism, like atheism, is nontheistic and not traditionally religious, but unlike some popular atheism, Humanism is not necessarily an antireligious ideology. We also hoped our conference could serve as an exploration of the best ways in which Humanism can be more positive and constructive than what the general public had been seeing in the New Atheism. Our speakers, topics, and other conference events were chosen in order to highlight these distinctions.

Accommodationism. Forced tolerance (and by extension, intolerance of those it arbitrarily labels "intolerant", like Geert Wilders). Appeasement. Lather, rinse, repeat.
GFT! I had to think about that for awhile. Get Fucked Tonight? Oh, he meant Go Fuck Themselves...it's usually GFY, so it threw me off.


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