Hate-Mongers Beware...
All hate-mongers out there need to realize that one of their kindred spirits, Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher, was found guilty at the Nuremberg Trials and sentenced to death even though he never directly participated in the Holocaust. Rather he used his Der Stürmer newspaper to warn of the supposed "insidious dangers" that Jews posed, thus building up hatred of Jews amongst the German people. His hate-mongering and "inciting the extermination of Jews" got him convicted of crimes against humanity for which he was executed by the Allies on October 16, 1946.
I wonder if any of the hate-mongering Muslim-hating hypocrites out there, like the ones who seemingly think freedom of speech should be absolute, want to defend Julius Streicher's right to free speech? I doubt it, since these same defenders of freedom didn't seem bothered when their allegedly absolute freedom was curtailed in order to prevent Jewish sensibilities from being unsettled. Well you can't have it both ways...unless you're a complete hypocrite.
And just to make sure that I'm not misunderstood, I want to state clearly that the Nazi extermination of six million Jews (and roughly three million non-Jews) is a mutawattir substantiated historical fact. The half-baked theories that attempt to deny it are driven by self-serving and hateful agendas that have the historical veracity of other such revisionist histories, such as the ones that claim there were only a few Bedouins living in Palestine when the first Zionists settlers arrived. Again, you can't have it both ways...either you accept half-baked revisionist history or you don't...and I don't.
Personally, I feel that idea that Muslims are the "New Jews"--since it's okay to hate them, stereotype them, claim they have a propensity towards violence, have no moral values and pose a threat to society at large--is very substantiated, thus I don't think that internment camps (or worse) are out of the question if another large scale terrorist attack takes place on U.S. soil or elsewhere. Indeed, one well-known pundit has actually tried to make a case for the mass arrest, internment and deportation of Muslims and Arabs (and I say that because the author seems to think...or at least she did when she wrote the book...that being Muslim is some sort of "Racial" thing). This conclusion-based pick-and-choose piece of historical scholarship (and I use that word loosely) is entitled In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror.
The book's author, Michelle Malkin, who is essentially an Ann Coulter wannabe, has managed to extend her fifteen minutes of fame by being a hate-monger. She currently has one of the most popular conservative (or neo-conservative) blogs on the web which produces a steady stream of Islamophobic postings. As with her book, morally-challenged Michelle is quite a master at ignoring everything that doesn't support her case while presenting everything that seemingly does--regardless of how unreliable, far-fetched or ambiguous. All I can say is that Julius Streicher, and Joseph Goebbels for that matter, would be proud.
It's at times like these that I really feel thankful to Almighty God for guiding me to Islam. Sure, most of us get frustrated by the often misguided antics of Muslims these days, but just look at the hate-mongers out there whose daily work consists of making the world a more hateful and less tolerant place...and they're doing so by misrepresenting a religion and overgeneralizing the acts of some of its misguided followers. Not good things to have on your record unrepented from--since that door's always open--when The Horn blows...which just makes me think: Thank you God for guiding me to Islam!
Finally, as our previous posting Islamophobia and the Next Holocaust explained, hatred and distrust of Muslims is rife in Europe...so don't ever think it could never happen again. If you think I'm just being paranoid, ask a Bosnian Muslim.
Deen On...
Labels: Holocaust
posted by @ 1:36 AM
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12 Comments:
This is such a good post. I really understood it too!.
I usually shudder to click on this blog and some others due to my unfortunate lack of proficiency in English, I am trying to learn though Insh'allah.
I was really confused as to why they really hated us so much. I know some of the misguided ones have done pretty horrifying things, but that's prevalent in every religion, than why hate Islam and Muslims so much? I just didn't understand where all this hate was coming from.
This is what horrified me. I couldn't believe some of the comments that were posted. I still think that they really couldn't hate us this much??..
Jazakallah khair.
You might be interested to read this
article.
assalamu 'alaykum
I do not hate Muslims. I do however hate and abhor radical Islam.
To paraphrase Malkin:
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When it comes to speaking and writing on unpleasant matters, I learned a long time ago to stop apologizing. It is a waste of breath, time, and energy to preface every discussion with "I'm not saying all [People X] are [this way or that way]." Or: "Of course, I don't hate all [People Z] and please don't misunderstand me, yadda yadda yadda."
Liberal guilt is a defect I don't suffer. And, in these times, none us can afford it. Such pandering merely distracts from the issue at hand: the incomparable, systemic violence inherent in wide swaths of Islamic culture.
Because of my unwillingness to preface my arguments with Kleenex-wetting clauses, I am invariably accused of being motivated first and solely by hatred, bigotry, racism, sexism, whatever-ism--whether the topic is the abortion, election reform, national security, or the threat of radical Islam.
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I take no joy in the horrible reaction in the Muslim world to mere cartoons. But I'm not surprised by it, and I will not kow-tow to overly sensitive sensibilities.
Again, my thanks. I should be packing for a trip overseas at the moment, but I've been absolutely transfixed by reading and learning...
I was really ticked off (for faray: it means angry) when I read about the Danish editor who refused the "Jesus" cartoons but who found it fine to REQUEST cartoons guaranteed to stir up anger and mutual distrust...
Faray, there are those who can hate anyone, for any reason, or for no reason. You and I are united--we seek peace, and those who hate fear peace.
I've bookmarked this blog, because I want to be part of bridge-building, and this is a very accessible, thoughtful place to start.
My thanks,
in friendship
Laura Grace
Atlanta, Georgia USA
ps--for those of us unfamiliar with terminology, thank you for the parenthetical explanations!!)
I do not understand how you can back up the claim that it is a few radical Muslims who are causing trouble throughout the world. You state the Jewish Holocaust is a historical fact, yet the leader of Iran claims it is not. The leader of Iran was ELECTED by millions of Iranian Muslims. The Palestinians ELECTED a recognized terrorist group (Hamas) to almost every position of power in their government. If it is true that most Muslims are peace loving and are against violence and terrorist acts then why are they not showing it at the voting box.
To: Queer Conservative
Thanks for the feedback. However, Malkin's thoughts completely miss the point. If simply having a fact-based discussion on "unpleasant matters" was all that she was doing, well that would be one thing. However, spreading twisted and bigoted misinformation that breeds hatred and ill-will against a large religious community is quite another (and what the Nuremburg court concluded about Julius Streicher seems to be relevant here).
Likewise, when a person states things that are incorrect or fans the flames of hatred just to put forward their agenda, they should apologize. Decent people apologize when they've done someone wrong, which is why the likes of Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter and Daniel Pipes no longer fit in the category of decent people. In Malkin's case, I think she says the types of things that you've included above just to encourage the Ann Coulter wannabe-tough girl persona that she seemingly so desperately wants.
While we're on the subject of Ann Coulter, I took her to task awhile back, so please read Why does Ann Coulter think that Jesus Christ smelled bad? if you want to see some glaring examples of how sloppy her thinking is.
While I'm no fan of bleeding-heart liberals either, the self-righteous and unapologetic attitude that many on the Right put forward is quite disgusting (especially in light of the fact that many of them claim to be devout Christians). Some people (like Malkin) seem to want to have one set of standards for themselves, but quite another set for their opponents. The fact that she refuses to apologize for her antics but wants Muslims (who are a single-minded monolithic whole in her seemingly paranoid mind) to apologize for criminal acts that not only contradict explicit teachings of their religion, but that 99.999% of them have nothing to do with anyway, is a clear demonstration of this. And she has the gall to accuse liberals of being emotion-driven and irrational...
In addition to this, the glaring fact remains that Michelle Malkin et al couldn't get away with using the type of strong rhetoric and sloppy overgeneralizations that they reserve for Muslims in regards to African-Americans, Jews or other such minorities. Sure, they might be able to maintain a voice out there somewhere, but it they'd be ostracized from the mainstream media.
I don't dispute that there are serious problems in the Muslim World today, but why not seek to understand the reasons for these problems? Isn't that how societal problems are resolved in America? If George W. Bush's misguided attempts to fix the Middle East were sincere (and they're really just a smoke screen), you'd think there would be some serious attempts to actually understand the region. However, it seems that most all of his advisors and supporters see the world through a set of very slanted lenses, thus most of their policies only exacerbate the problems instead of help solve them. This isn't helped by the fact that many pro-Republican pundits think that hateful rhetoric and mindless bashing have something to contribute to all this.
One of the most asinine things I've noticed is that they seemingly want people to learn about Islam and the Middle East, a religion and a region that they unapologetically loathe, by listening to them. Gee, I wonder if they'd support this same methodology for those wanting to learn about the conservative movement and the Republican party (i.e. they'd be encouraged to only read and listen to the unqualified views of conservative-hating Democrats)? Now there's another entry for the "double-standards" column, if not the "sloppy thinking" one as well.
Based on years of personal, thus rather unscientific, observation, it seems to me that far too many people out there are just stooges of the media. They don't have a clue about what authentic Islam really stands for, what's really going on in the Muslim World or what has gone on there in the past. I know that it's wishful thinking, but people need to stop thinking that watching selective (and often inflammatory) news stories from less than unbiased sources equates to getting an education. Instead, I really wish that they'd crack a book once in awhile and learn to think on their own. My most recent Book-of-the-Month selection has some intelligent things to say about this.
Which again brings me to your comments, which seem to indicate that you've bought into some of these media distortions and don't even recognize your own rather convenient double-standards. That violence in the Muslim World is "incomparable" and "systemic" is largely pure rubbish. Sure, we have militant radicals who periodically conduct terrorist attacks, semi-regular suicide bombings in Iraq and Palestine, some rioting the past few weeks and other such things (many of which are situations where Muslims are simply trying to defend themselves). But what makes this "incomparable" to Israeli violence against the Palestinians (far more of whom are killed each year than Israelis), the ongoing genocide in Chechnya by the Russians, and the often reckless way that the U.S. military fights in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Indeed, one way to decrease the violence in the Muslim World would be to get the invading U.S. military out of Iraq, the Israelis out of Palestine, the Russians out the Chechnya, the Indians out of Kashmir and a whole slough of Western supported autocratic regimes out of a whole host of Muslim countries. That so many people are blind to this reality continues to amaze me.
Also, if we just look a little further back in the past, it seems that you've also rather conveniently overlooked the mass rapes and executions that Serbs carried out in Bosnia, the genocide in Rwanda (which was the most Christianized country in Africa, by the way) and the massacre of about 1,800 Palestinian civilians by Lebanese Christians back in 1983 (with the tacit approval of Ariel Sharon). I could add dropping atomic bombs and the carpet bombing of civilians in World War Two to the list, but I think that's enough for now. Personally, the only violence that I've reflected on lately that I'd dare to call "incomparable" are the racist lynchings, complete with children in the audience, which used to took place regularly in the American South. To compare this to what angry people did in Fallujah after losing homes and loved ones when excessive force was employed by an army conducting an illegal invasion is really quite "incomparable" (although still not justified).
However, in order to reach an understanding I'd be willing to admit, after putting all of the above evidence aside, that the Muslim World is no doubt experiencing a severe trauma at this point in its history. This is something that all civilizations experience at some point, but we just happen to live in a time when the Muslim World, partly due to the harsh experience of European colonialism that ended quite recently, is going through such a painful transition. The reason that I'd be willing to admit this, other than the fact that it's obviously true, is that the main thing that I want people to recognize is that none of this, as such, has anything to do with the religion of Islam. It should come as no surprise that when a civilization is in crisis, members of that civilization tap into their religion in both right and wrong ways in order to weather the storm. That this human phenomenon has now manifested itself in Muslims no more detracts from the actual teachings of Islam than the horrible actions of masses of Christians during the Crusades and Europe's bloody Wars of Religion undermine the true teachings of Jesus Christ-peace be upon him. As I've said before, if religions were proven false due to the bad actions of their followers, then Christianity would have been proven false long before Islam came on the scene.
As far as the violence in the Muslim World being "systematic", well the recent riots were largely emotional reactions to a frustrating legacy of hatred and double-standards. One should also reflect on what percentage of Muslims have actually participated in these misguided events. I'd surmise that worldwide it's probably only in the tens of thousands, so with between 1.2 and 1.5 billions Muslims in the world (depending on who you ask), what percentage are we talking about here?-and thus falls your "wide swaths of Islamic culture" assertion. So even if we do have militant extremist wackos in the midst of our once proud Ummah (and indeed we do!) who commit acts of terrorism in a "systematic" way...what the heck does that have to do with the moderate majority of mainstream Muslims? Well the answer is NOTHING, but the problem is that even seemingly intelligent intellectuals have had their heads so filled up with junk when it comes to Islam and the Middle East that many of them have seemingly lost the ability to think clearly. The often heard generalizations that imply, at a minimum, that monolithic "Islam" is to blame, or that Muslims should at least apologize whenever criminal acts are carried out by a misguided Muslim sect, are a product of this state of mind. The current cartoon crisis only continues to manifest more and more examples in the on-going stream of sloppy thinking that has been coming from a far too large a sector of the Western intelligentsia for far too long.
Anyway, to get back to the original point, we're not calling for conservative pundits and others to be teary-eyed and spineless wimps, but it would be nice if they'd get their facts straight, stop trying to encourage stereotypes (and you're denying reality if you don't concur that these abound and that Malkin, Coulter, Hannity et al lend credence to them) and refrain from using such logical fallacies as overgeneralization and "two wrongs makes a right" in order to justify their views. In short, stop having double-standards, spewing misinformation and fomenting hate.
Which leads me to your final statement about not wanting to "kow-tow to overly sensitive sensibilities"-well who defines this? Even though religious sensibilities may seem foolish to people who don't hold the same views, they certainly shouldn't just be dismissed as "overly sensitive", since when it comes to the Holocaust, racist remarks and some other things, the "overly sensitive" defense isn't employed.
Additionally, almost all people will eventually be offended by something, it's just a matter of how high you'll have to raise (or lower) the bar before they ask for protection under the law. There are laws against obscenity, a definition for which is just as elastic has a definition of "sensibilities" is likely to be, currently on the books just about everywhere in the world, including the United States. So it's not a matter of having no standards (a.k.a. absolute free speech) versus standards (a.k.a. limited free speech), since even in the United States the latter situation is what we're already in-whether some people realize it or not. I think this was articulated very well in a recent commentary in The Sunday Times (London): "Nobody has an absolute right to freedom. Civilisation is the story of humans sacrificing freedom so as to live together in harmony. We do not need Hobbes to tell us that absolute freedom is for newborn savages. All else is compromise...Every day newspapers decide on the balance of boldness, offence, taste, discretion and recklessness. They must decide who is to be allowed a voice and who not. They are curbed by libel laws, common decency and their own sense of what is acceptable to readers. Speech is free only on a mountain top; all else is editing." Touché!
And finally, it's rather ironic that so many on the Right are suddenly so worried that their freedoms might be infringed upon (and stating such concerns is just a façade, since the current crisis has its roots in strong xenophobia among some sectors of the Danish populace and their desire to manufacture a crisis in order to defame Muslims), but at the same time they just kow-tow to the efforts of the Bush administration to trample the U.S. Constitution. They seemingly haven't read what Benjamin Franklin wrote more than two centuries ago: "Those who would give up essential liberty in the pursuit of a little temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security". Personally, I don't consider hateful and blasphemous rhetoric to be "essential to liberty", and I'd guess that it was probably not allowed in Ben Franklin's day (at least in regards to Christianity). The government stepping in to put limits on the free exchange of ideas is one thing (and we already have some limits on speech, so this is not a slippery slope), but pointless hatemongering that just breeds ill-will is quite another. In addition to Ben Franklin's aphorism, I think Mark Twain's maxim that "Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it" is worth taking to heart, since we have far too many blind-following sheep out there.
I might not have the time to maintain this level of dialogue in the coming days, but I'm enjoying it so far...
Thanks again for taking the time to comment.
hsg said that:
"I do not understand how you can back up the claim that it is a few radical Muslims who are causing trouble throughout the world. You state the Jewish Holocaust is a historical fact, yet the leader of Iran claims it is not. The leader of Iran was ELECTED by millions of Iranian Muslims. The Palestinians ELECTED a recognized terrorist group (Hamas) to almost every position of power in their government. If it is true that most Muslims are peace loving and are against violence and terrorist acts then why are they not showing it at the voting box. "
The same argument can be raised against the Israeli people. If they are so tolerant and peaceful, then why did millions of Israelis elect a terrorist Arial Sharon, a man who has more blood on his hands than all Palestinian groups combined? But, of course, that will not lead hsg to conclude that most Israelis are racists, bigots or murderers.
Similarly, how about the American people not using their votes to oust a terrorist such as Bush whose policies, as all Human Rights organizations have acknowledged, have seriously undermine human rights throughout the world and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civillians?
As for the Iranian leader, he was not elected by the Iranians due to his denial of the holocaust. He had nothing to say about this subject during the elections. It is only recently that he made his holocaust related comments - also remember that he did not deny the holocaust but claimed that less than 6 million Jews died, something I personally disagree with. Therefore it is quite absurd to paint all Iranians and Muslims with the same brush. Just as the American people do not necessarily support each and every word and claim ever uttered by Bush, the same goes for the Iranians and others.
Moving on to the Palestinians electing Hamas, then they did that generally because of the corruption of the previously American backed Fatah party. Despite what you have to say against Hamas, it is an organization that has done much to help and poor and the needy in occupied Palestine by setting up schools, hospitals etc. Their social work has assisted millions of poor people and primarily for this they have been elected.
The rest of the world looks at Islamic controlled areas and sees a complete intolerance for any other religion. Try opening a Christian Church is Saudi Arabia, for example. Look at the actions of the Taliban in Afghanistan. It looks at the religion of "peace" and sees people who react with violence to any perceived set back.
The fact is that Muslims, not cartoonists, are responsible for the public image of the religion, and frankly that image degrades by the day. Cartoonists reflect that reality, they don't create it. You need to be spending more time asking the question of "why do people see us this way" and less on the messenger.
The Taliban were an exceptional case - they only took over Afghanistan at all because all the other power centres had been destroyed by years of Russian occupation followed by years of civil war.
As for Saudi Arabia - Muslims did not consider it unjust to exclude non-Muslims from peninsular Arabia because before the 20th century (when the oil was discovered) the area was considered to be worthless barren desert. The Persians didn't conquer Arabia, Alexander didn't conquer Arabia and Rome didn't conquer Arabia because it wasn't considered worth conquering.
Great post. Malkin is a rabid right wing idiot and republican red light district whore, and the "Queer conservative" is a bigger one for pasting her diatribe. I've noticed that this bone smoker has a habit of trolling Muslim blogs.
You hate "radical Islam" do you? Except that the definition includes pretty much any Muslim who doesnt agree with your illiterate viewpoints.
Let the hate mongering scum choke on their hatred.
Hate Speech, Free Speech: Europe Needs To Learn The Difference
Interesting, however, the difference is that Jews never posed any danger to anybody. Islam inspired Jihadi terrorism is a very real danger though, as evidenced by the many thousands of Jihadi Terrorist acts in the past few years.
Sure, I get it, most Muslims are not terrorists.
But, MOST modern terrorists ARE Muslims.
Can the peaceful Muslims defeat the terrorist Muslims?
absurd thought -
God of the Universe hates
infidel bloggers
getting truth out makes him mad
keep the people in the dark
.
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