Pornography makes women and men masturbation aids. The actors cease to be human. Their only purpose is to provide physical stimulation. If they don’t do their job, they disappear – the page is turned, the next website clicked.
Pornography de-humanises both actors and users.
If we want to understand the inner workings of terrorists and would-be terrorists, we must seek to understand their entire person, including the relationship—or inconsistencies—between their words and actions. In the case of the 9/11 hijackers who visited strip clubs, and in the case of Abdo and among what seems like an increasing number of terrorists, actions include sexual perversions and pornography use that cannot be squared with what these ideological terrorists and their supporters espouse.
Terrorist acts rely on the ability to dehumanise planned victims. Victims are less than real, less than people. They are to be blotted out.
Bryson asks:
Are there security costs to the free-flow of pornography? If so, what are they? Are we as a society putting ourselves at risk by turning a blind eye to pornography proliferation? I wonder further: Could it be that pornography drives some users to a desperate search for some sort of radical “purification” from the pornographic decay in their soul? Could it be that the greater the wedge pornography use drives between an individual’s religious aspirations and the individual’s actions, the more the desperation escalates, culminating in increasingly horrific public violence, even terrorism?
And no, that’s not jihad in the sense of the inner struggle against sin and weakness. It means the use of violence to achieve the impostion of sharia law and the establishment of a caliphate.
“The Soldier’s Prayer,” written in 1912 by Turkish nationalist poet Ziya Gokalp:
The minarets are our bayonets, the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks and the faithful our army.
During August 2007, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) released “Radicalization in the West — The Homegrown Threat.” This insightful 90-page report evaluated the threat that had become apparent since 9/11/2001, analyzing the roots of recent terror plots in the United States, from Lackawanna in upstate New York to Portland, Ore., to Fort Dix, NJ. Based upon these case-study analyses of individuals arrested for jihadist activity, the authors concluded that the “journey” of radicalization that produces homegrown jihadists began in so-called “Salafist” (“fundamentalist” to non-Muslims) mosques characterized by high levels of Sharia—Islamic Law—adherence.
The landmark study just published, “Sharia and Violence in American Mosques” (Kedar M, Yerushalmi D. The Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2011, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 59-72) sought to expand considerably upon the NYPD’s post-hoc, case study approach—systematically gathering objective survey data, with much greater methodological rigor—and address these two a priori questions: I) Is there a robust association between observable measures of religious devotion, coupled to Sharia-adherence in US mosques, and the presence of violence-sanctioning materials at these mosques?; and II) Is there a robust association between the presence of violence-sanctioning materials at a mosque, and the advocacy of jihadism by the mosque’s leadership via recommending the study of these materials, or other manifest behaviors? …
In brief, survey data were collected from a nationally representative, random statistical sample of 100 US mosques, covering 14 states, and the District of Columbia. …
The study’s results provide clear—and ominous—affirmative answers to the a priori questions posed. Sharia-adherence was strongly associated with the presence of jihad-violence sanctioning materials, and the presence of jihad-violence sanctioning materials was in turn robustly associated with advocacy of jihadism by mosque imams—religious leaders. This key summary finding was highlighted by the authors:
…51 percent of mosques had texts that either advocated the use of violence in the pursuit of a Shari‘a-based political order or advocated violent jihad as a duty that should be of paramount importance to a Muslim; 30 percent had only texts that were moderately supportive of violence like the Tafsir Ibn Kathir and Fiqh as-Sunna; 19 percent had no violent texts at all.
Thus 81% of this statistical sample representative of US mosques were deemed as moderately (30%) to highly (51%) supportive of promulgating jihad violence to impose Shari’a.
Even more disturbing is the fact that only 4.7% of regular Muslim worshippers attend a mosque where no violent jihadist materials are available, because the Sharia/Caliphate/Jihad supporting mosques are better attended.
It would be interesting to see a similar survey of mosques in Australia.
“All this talk of people who burn the Koran and nothing about the people who reacted in such a stupid way. We are always blaming the victim and not holding them — not most Muslims, but at least a large part of Muslim culture that doesn’t condemn their people,” Bill Maher said on his show “Real Time” Friday night.
“There is one religion in the world that kills you when you disagree with them and they say ‘look, we are a religion of peace and if you disagree we’ll fucking cut your head off,'” Maher said. “And nobody calls them on it — there are very few people that will call them on it.”
“It’s like if Dad is a violent drunk and beats his kids, you don’t blame the kid because he set Dad off. You blame Dad because he’s a violent drunk,” Maher concluded.
Quite frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn if someone wants to burn a book, any book. If a person’s paid for a book, he can do what he likes with it.
I am not going to join the chorus proclaiming Pastor Terry Jones a try-hard loser. I don’t know anything about the man. I suspect he is more sought by the media than seeking the media.
What I do think is that his burning of the Koran was a reasonable act of protest.
This is a book which inspires murder, torture, the mistreatment of women and minorities.
It is a book which, read through the lens of the example of Muhammed, a serial rapist, torturer, murderer and child molester, means misery for hundreds of millions of human beings.
It is the book of a religious group whose default emotional setting is inflamed.
It is the book of a group of people who thinking burning a book (their book – burning other books is OK) justifies burning and beheading people who look like, or may have once have been in the same country as, the people who burnt the book.
So go ahead and burn it. The trouble is not with the burning, but with the cringing.
He then went on to say that the fury this had aroused was an understandable passion.
No it isn’t.
Burning a nasty, racist, violent book is a legitimate act of protest. Burning and beheading people who had nothing to do with it is murderous brutality.
Jones was right. The reaction to his little protest proves there is something to protest about.
Kow-towing to bullies does not work. They need to be told stop it and grow up.
Forgiving bullies does not work, unless they have first shown that they have changed and will bully no longer.
Otherwise making excuses for inexcusable behaviour merits the warning JP Donleavy gave about forgiveness in general (no link, but from the Unexpurgated Code):
“Forgiveness. Be careful, those getting this then do the unforgivable. Which is frequently a lot worse than the first lousy thing they did to you.”
Ann – I am not a political activist. I am the owner of three small businesses who looked around two and a half years ago and said, “Oh, HELL no.” Politicians make me ill. I can never and will never be a politician. For the last two to three years I have been focusing heavily on explaining and exposing Marxism, Islam and the fraud that is Obama. But that is triple-redundant, isn’t it?
iOTW – What is your take on what is known as the Ground Zero Mosque?
Ann – They can build a mosque at Ground Zero when we can build a Catholic Cathedral Basilica over the top of the Kaaba in Mecca. You know what? Check that. They still couldn’t build a mosque at Ground Zero, because Ground Zero is the sacred burial space of 3000 people that THEY MURDERED. No mosque at Ground Zero E.V.E.R.
iOTW – Islam uses the constitution to their advantage. How do we do battle with Islam without trampling the constitution?
Ann – Declare war against the Caliphate, just like we did against the Third Reich. Same bloody thing. And I’m not kidding.
iOTW- What do you think of General Petraeus and his assertion that inciting Islam puts our soldiers in harm’s way?
Ann – I have an offer for General Petraeus. I’ll GIVE him one of my balls. Then I’d still have two, and he would have one. He is a politicking coward who cares only about his pension and cashing in on his rank after he retires. The suicidal, defeatist Rules of Engagement he oversees are the unequivocal proof of that. He should resign in disgrace – yesterday, and then present himself to each and every family of our war dead and BEG their forgiveness for failing in his duty as their son or daughter’s commanding officer.
Here’s a bit more, complete with Koran with bacon bookmarks:
You may disagree with some of what she says, or the way she says it.
Freedom of speech, and safety to speak what we believe, is a great privilege. To lose it is to lose civilisation.
US Department of Justice statistics show that although they constitute only 1% of America’s population, Muslims have been responsible for 186 of 228 terror cases investigated since 9/11.
The Tamil Tigers and Columbian FARC are next with 32 cases between them.
Why are Muslims in America and Australia so over-represented in terror related offences?
It is a question I would have thought moderate Muslims were as anxious to answer as the rest of us.
Yet the response to Republican Peter King’s investigation of the extent of radicalisation of American Muslims and the response of the Muslim community to this radicalisation has been protest rallies and personal attacks including death threats.
Why this has developed into such a wildly controversial matter says more about those who are threatening, smearing, and hysterically criticizing King than it does about radical Islam. When the left allies itself with extremist groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in order to wave the flag of political correctness in America’s face, you realize that the problem is bigger than simply rooting out extremism. The exaggerated, over-the-top, self-righteous posturing coming from media outlets like The New York Times bespeaks a refusal to face up to the challenge of radical Islam in America and how to combat it.
And if we’re not prepared to address the threat of extremism in our own country, how can we possibly fight it overseas?
Leftists and their Muslim grievance-monger allies are deliberately seeking to block efforts to discover the extent of the problem of terrorism by viciously attacking the New York congressman. They are opposing King in the name of some misguided belief that because terrorism comes from a specific religious group, we must blind ourselves to the danger, else we would be guilty of “bigotry.”
Let’s be clear about this. Most Muslims are decent people.
That does not mean there is no problem with Islam.
Consider some of the brutal attacks carried out in the name of Islam over the last few days. These are not crimes which just happened to be committed by Muslims.
Christians, Hindus and Buddhists commit crimes. These were crimes perpetrated by people who claimed that these acts were justified or commanded by their faith – that they were following the example of Muhammed:
2nd March 2011 (Islamabad, Pakistan) – Taliban gunmen kill Shahbaz Bhatti, the only Christian in Pakistan’s cabinet.
2nd March 2011 (Frankfurt, Germany) – Two US airmen are killed and two civilians wounded when Arif Uka, a 21 year old islamist, fires into a bus.
1st March 2011(Mardan, Pakistan) – Nineteen are injured when the Taliban throw a grenade into a girl’s school.
1st March 2011 (Bara, Pakistan) – Islamic militants behead a civilian and dump his head and torso in separate areas.
1st March 2011 (Miranshah, Pakistan) – Four villagers are abducted and executed in captivity by Sunni fundamentalists.
28th Feb 2011 (Srinagar, India) – An engineer and father of three dies from shrapnel injuries suffered from an Islamist grenade attack at a market.
28th Feb 2011 (Baramulla, India) – A shopkeeper is murdered by Mujahideen gunmen.
28th Feb 2011 (Dabwak, Nigeria) – A Christian mother and four of her children are slaughtered in their home by Muslim militants.
27th Feb 2011 (Landi Kotal, Pakistan) – A tribal elder is abducted and murdered by suspected Lashkar-e-Islam.
27th Feb 2011(Pattani, Thailand) – A 54-year-old salesman is shot to death by Muslim militants.
He was “committed to an extreme jihadist and religious cause” and was “determined to seek martyrdom”, jurors were told.
These are examples from just the last few days.
If Christians started behaving this way, and saying they were doing so in the name of Jesus, I, and every Christian leader in the known world, would be saying as loudly and clearly as we could that such actions were repulsive and utterly incompatible with Christianity.
But Muslim leaders, even those who claim to be moderate, do not do this – or at least, not clearly and consistently.
Watch this video from France:
OK, so that’s France. This is Australia:
So tell us please, Mr Wilkie, how does being concerned about this make someone a racist?
But there is a problem. Don’t believe me? Try taking the Gay and lesbian Mardi Gras through there and see. Or see how you go organising a sausage and wine streeet party.
The last few minutes are especially horrifying. The murders are over by then, and then these men take out their mobile phones, get their souvenir photos of the mutilated bodies, and casually stroll back to their families.
The courage of the one policeman who tries to stop them is amazing.
The violence comes less than three months after US President Barack Obama visited Indonesia and praised its “spirit of religious tolerance” as an “example to the world”.
Imran Muchtar, a lawmaker from the Democratic Party, said he agreed with the solution offered by the minister. “First, Ahmadiyah members should repent, recognize their mistake and come back to the mainstream Islam,” he said.
“The second option they have is to leave Islam and declare a new religion. Otherwise the conflict will never end.”
Hazrul Azwar, a lawmaker from the Islam-based United Development Party (PPP), called for stronger action.
“The Ahmadiyah should be disbanded permanently, as long as the government is not strict enough the conflict is never going to end,” he said. “The fake prophet is a disgrace to my religion. Clerics in the whole world have banned Ahmadiyah, why is the government not doing the same thing?”
Nor can a culture. We all just have to accept one another and learn from one another.
Yes. Lovely. Except that accepting this lovely idea means ignoring virtually the whole of world history.
Andrew McCarthy at the NRO notes a particularly egregious example of sharia in practice – a fourteen year old girl who had been raped by a forty year old neighbour was sentenced to 100 lashes for illicit sexual activity, but died after 80 lashes.
14 Year Old Hena Begum Died After Receiving 80 Lashes for Having Been Raped
Andrew notes:
When I catalogue the horrors of sharia, I frequently hear in response that I am oversimplifying it, that I am relying on incorrect interpretations (oddly said to be inaccurate because they construe Islamic doctrine “too literally”), or that I fail to appreciate the richness and nuances of sharia jurisprudence that have made it possible for moderate Muslims to evolve away from the law’s harshness. Some even claim sharia is not a concrete body of law, just a set of aspirational guidelines — as if Sakineh Ashtiani, the woman sentenced by an Iranian court to death by stoning, will merely be having advice, rather than rocks, thrown at her …
These criticisms miss the point … It should by now be undeniable that there is an interpretation of sharia that affirms all its atrocious elements, and that this interpretation is not a fringe construction. It is mainstream and backed by very influential scholars who know a hell of a lot more about Islam than we in the West do. That makes it extremely unlikely that this interpretation will be marginalized any time soon. There is no agreed-upon hierarchical authority in Islam that can authoritatively pronounce that various beliefs and practices are heretical. The closest thing Muslims have is the faculty at al-Azhar University in Egypt, and it is a big part of the problem. Whether this fundamentalist interpretation is accepted by only 20 or 30 percent of Muslims — or whether, as I believe, the percentage is higher, perhaps much higher — that still makes it the belief system of almost half a billion people worldwide. That’s not a fringe.
No it’s not. And, pretending it is means we are blind to the likely outcome of elections in Egypt – another hardline islamist state – and to the infuence of that outcome on the rest of the Middle East.
59 percent of Egyptian Muslims want democracy and 95 percent want Islam to play a large part in politics. 84 percent believe apostates should face the death penalty. That is what Egyptian democracy will look like. A unanimous majority that wants an Islamic state and a bare majority that wants democracy. Which one do you think will win out? A democratic majority of the country supports murdering people in the name of Islam. Mubarak’s government does not execute apostates or adulterers. But a democratic Egypt will. Why? Because it’s the will of the people.
The cheerleaders shaking their pom poms for Egyptian democracy don’t seem to grasp that the outcome could be anything other than positive …
We fought to free Korea and Vietnam from Communism, but we lacked one basic thing. Ground level support from the people we were fighting to protect. Today South Koreans like Kim Jong Il more than they like us. We fought to free the tyrants of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein. As a reward, they financed the terrorists who have been killing us ever since. We fought to free Iraq from Saddam, and the entire country imploded into armed camps. Our “Victory in Iraq” came about because we cut a deal with the Baathists against the Shiites and Al Qaeda, essentially restoring a broken version of Saddam’s old status quo. We fought to liberate Afghanistan, and now we find ourselves allied with some Muslim warlords who abuse women and rape little boys– against the other Muslim warlords who abuse women and rape little boys.
Handing out democracy like candy does not fix existing cultural problems. It does not end bigotry, free women or stop murder in the name of Allah. Open elections are only as good as the people participating in them. And the 84 percent of Egyptians who want to murder apostates have issues that democracy will not solve. The problem with Egypt is not Mubarak– but the Egyptians.
Let’s take another example. In Jordan, the next target on the freedom tour, King Hussein passed a bill to criminalize the honor killings of women. And their democratically elected parliament voted 60 to 25 to strike the bill down. It took them only 3 minutes. That’s what democracy would mean for the Jordanian girls murdered by their husbands, brothers and fathers. The right of the people and their duly elected representatives to legalize the murder of women …
Egypt’s period of greatest liberalization was under British rule. Since then its cosmopolitan nightspots have been torched and it has drifted closer to Islamization. Even Egypt’s current level of human rights under Mubarak is above that of most of its neighbors. And the reason for that is Mubarak’s ties to America. The more democratic Egypt becomes, the more its civil rights will diminish. Its rulers will see social issues as an easy way to compromise with the Muslim Brotherhood. As Egypt’s cultural ties to the West diminish, so will its freedoms …
A people who do not believe in the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will not be free no matter how many times they go to the polls. You can place voting booths outside every home and run elections every week, and it will still do no good. Freedom may be the birthright of every man, woman and child on earth– but it cannot be theirs until they claim it. As long as they believe in the right of the majority to oppress the minority, in the value of order over liberty, and the supremacy of the mosque over any and all civil and legal rights– then they will never be free. Never. Their elections will either give rise to chaos or tyranny. That is how it is in the Middle East. That is how it will always be until they claim their birthright by closing the Koran and opening their minds.
Nine News reports that four Perth taxi drivers have been charged with sex offences. No names. Nothing about cultural differences.
Perth Now covers the same story, but notes that two or three (Singh could be Sikh) of the four have islamic names. One of them is called Arshad. Seriously.
Perth Now also notes:
The allegations against the drivers have prompted police to concede there are some “cultural issues” within the taxi industry which need eradicating.
Detective Senior Sergeant John Hindriksen of the Police Sex Assault Squad said the majority of WA taxi drivers were doing a “great job” but that a small minority were bringing the industry into disrepute.
“Certainly there are some cultural issues within the industry,” Det Snr Sgt Hindriksen said.
Nine News makes a deliberate choice to leave out that information. Why?
I foresaw that there could be an uprising in Egypt that would empower the Brotherhood right after I heard Obama’s Cairo speech. Losing Egypt and perhaps more other countries may be Obama’s legacy. Obama has empowered the Islamists not only in the Muslim world, but also inside in the U.S. Could anyone have imagined the U.S. president support the building of a mosque on Ground Zero against the wishes of his own people and the families of the victims?
None of these are places I would choose to live. And since Islamic states generate most of the world’s refugees, I guess lots of other people would choose not to live there either. If they had the choice.
So it is not surprising that residents of those countries want things to change.
Bookworm Room has some interesting, and only partially tongue in cheek thoughts on this, sugggesting global warming hysteria is a major root cause of the present riots:
…
2. As part of their apocalyptic battle against rising seas and dying polar bears, warmists declare ethanol is one of the answers (never mind that it turns out that it takes 1.5 gallons of fossil fuel to produce a gallon of ethanol).
3. Did I mention that ethanol comes from corn? In the old days, people used to eat corn. Now they drive it.
4. To satisfy the panic-stricken need for drivable corn, food crops are diverted into fuel production.
5. The cost of staples rises substantially around the world.
5. In 2008, food riots break out, including riots in Egypt.
Whatever the intial cause of the rioting – hunger, a desire for greater freedom, perceived alliance of some leaders with the West, trouble-making by Mossad (wait for it) – radical islamists are using the widespread dissatisfaction to grow their own powerbases.
The same is true in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood are supporting Mohamed ElBaradei. Mr ElBaradei is not a liberal, or even a moderate, despite his history of involvement in Western organisations.
These are not pro-democracy protests. The Muslim Brotherhood is not a democratic organisation. It regards democracy as contrary to the Koran, and the practice of sharia.
I hope I am wrong about this, but I see nothing hopeful for the West, or democracy, or North Africa or the Middle East, in the current political unrest in the Arab world. It could very well be the beginning of a widespread political implementation of sharia and radical Islam.
With extensive shark and vulture training programmes, and bombing churches in Egypt and Iraq.
The scary thing is that some people really do believe these things, as the last link above demonstrates.
A brief quote:
Prior to the fascist, destructive, genocidal US-UK-Israeli occupation of Iraq, Sunni and Shia, Muslims and Christians, Arabs and Kurds lived together in a harmonious atmosphere of brotherhood and unity that paralleled that of occupied Palestine before the Zionist occupation in 1948. It is egregious, disgusting, despicable, ignorant, absurd and erroneous on every factual basis to assert that the aforementioned ethnic and religious groups are now massacring each other, when in reality, they are being massacred by the murderous occupation armies.
Dividing Iraq via partition and driving it into a hell of ethnic cleansing was a Zionist plot …
Of course. All that trouble between Iran and Iraq, and the murder of Kurds and Shi-ites by Saddam Hussein, and the brutalisation and torture of Iraqi citizens, that never happened, it was all just Zionist propaganda.
I remember seeing a guy a guy who had been asked to leave several supermarkets interviewed on TV.
He objected to being told ‘Have a nice day’ by checkout operators.
Fair enough. It is a silly, empty phrase.
But he responded by abusing the employees. These were mostly teenage girls in their first jobs, who were doing what their employer had asked them to do.
Abusing them was pointless bullying.
I feel the same about airport employees who are now required to implement intrusive and embarrassing security measures, incuding full body scans or searches.
After Muslim terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab of Nigeria tried to detonate explosive material in his underwear over Detroit last Christmas, the government began requiring nude body scans at airports.
The machines, which cannot detect chemicals or plastic, would not have caught the diaper bomber. So, again, no hijackers were stopped, but being able to see passengers in the nude boosted the morale of airport security personnel by 22 percent.
This is amusing, but unfair. It is like blaming checkout operators for ‘Have a nice day.’
I am sure most security personnel find it embarrassing and frustrating to have to pat down nuns and three year olds.
They are not responsible for the utterly ridiculous policies implemented by their political masters.
Ann Coulter again:
It’s similarly pointless to treat all Americans as if they’re potential terrorists while trying to find and confiscate anything that could be used as a weapon. We can’t search all passengers for explosives because Muslims stick explosives up their anuses. (Talk about jobs Americans just won’t do.)
You have to search for the terrorists.
Fortunately, that’s the one advantage we have in this war. In a lucky stroke, all the terrorists are swarthy, foreign-born, Muslim males. (Think: “Guys Madonna would date.”)
This would give us a major leg up — if only the country weren’t insane.
Terrorists are not all foreign born. And I wouldn’t be surprised if islamists started using 3 year olds to carry explosives onto airplanes.
But the key word in that sentence is ‘islamists.’
There are no Jewish, Presbyterian, Baptist or Buddhist groups which have an announced policy of destroying the West, and who have proven their seriousness by repeatedly blowing up embassies, churches, and schools.
Targetting Muslims may be unfair to the majority. But as long as a substantial number of muslims living in the West believe suicide bombings and violence in the cause of Islam are acceptable, and as long as Muslim leaders do not consistently, clearly and frequently denounce such violence, the rest just have to wear it.
Is that unfair? Yes.
But it is less unfair than implementing security procedures which humiliate everyone while achieving nothing.
A woman named Hanan al Samawi has been arrested in Yemen. The Telegraph headline says she is an engineering student, while later in the text it reports: She was arrested at a house in a poor area in the west of Sana’a, where she is studying medicine at the university.
Engineering, medicine, whatever. These are not areas of study which the poor usually take up.
There are three points here.
First, the Telegraph needs to get some new copy editors. Accuracy is important. It is not good enough in a major national daily to have a headline contradicted by the text immediately below it.
Second, the female of the species is as dangerous as the male. There is no justification for policies which discriminate against men in relation to being held in detention centres, for example, on the basis that they are likely to be terrorists whereas women are not.
And finally, terrorism does not have its roots in poverty. There is a great deal of talk about understanding the causes of terrorism. The commonly identified causes in such talks are Western imperialism and Western monopolisation of consumer goods.
This is nonsense. The major source of terrorist activity is radical Islam. Thai Buddhists, African animists, and Orthodox believers living in Siberia, all of whom suffer poverty compared with the West, are not burning down schools and blowing up planes.
Osama Bin Laden, of course, is a multi-millionaire. Terrorism has nothing to do with poverty.
It has everything to do with what its perpetrators keep telling us is the reason for their actions: They hate infidels, and believe they are commanded to destroy them.
