Islam: What the West Wants to Know

Well, not really The West, perhaps, but many of us, and certainly Dennis Prager, who last November posed "Five questions non-Muslims would like answered" in the Los Angeles Times. An abridgment:

(1) Why are you so quiet?

Since the first Israelis were targeted for death by Muslim terrorists blowing themselves up in the name of your religion and Palestinian nationalism, I have been praying to see Muslim demonstrations against these atrocities. Last week’s protests in Jordan against the bombings, while welcome, were a rarity. What I have seen more often is mainstream Muslim spokesmen implicitly defending this terror on the grounds that Israel occupies Palestinian lands. We see torture and murder in the name of Allah, but we see no anti-torture and anti-murder demonstrations in the name of Allah.

(2) Why are none of the Palestinian terrorists Christian?

If Israeli occupation is the reason for Muslim terror in Israel, why do no Christian Palestinians engage in terror? They are just as nationalistic and just as occupied as Muslim Palestinians....

(3) Why is only one of the 47 Muslim-majority countries a free country?.....

(4) Why are so many atrocities committed and threatened by Muslims in the name of Islam?.....

(5) Why do countries governed by religious Muslims persecute other religions?......

Comments

[Jason]

um partial answer to #2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Habash

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

LOL. Such excellent questions.

Questions that would lead to cognitive dissonance in those who affirm and support Islam. Recognition of the implicit causation of cognitive dissonance in these 5 questions is likely to arouse significant anger. This anger then becomes channeled and directed towards the infidel questioner.

A Saturday Night Live sketch or a Monty Python sketch or a South Park comedy sketch could be written to display the hilarity of this scenario.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>um partial answer to #2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Habash<<<

Habash was only nominally Orthodox, and the PLFP was not an Islamist organization, but rather a typical Marxist-Leninist nationalist terror organization. It never made pronouncements couched in the terminology of Islam, but more along the lines of Franz Fanon. Funded in large part by the USSR, the PLFP, like the PLO and Black September, the Japanese Red Army Faction, the Italian Red Brigades and the Bader-Meinhoff Kommando, were all part of a highly sophisticated, Soviet directed international terror network aimed at destabilizing the West (of which Israel obviously was part). That form of terrorism has very little in common with the current breed of Islamist terror organizations. In fact, the latter sprung up mainly as a response to the failure of the former to deliver the goods. Having tried nationalism, then marxism, the Arab intelligentsia is fooling around with Wahabbism as a way of dealing with its perpetual frustrations.

[Nick]

Oh give him his one guy Stuart. We're still not even close to having parity as a percentage of the population.

[wileysnakeskins]

islamists/muslims are all quiet because they too fear the fundamental islamists who are only following the relevant koran, hadith and examples of mohammed, who your not even allowed to draw or discuss. In other words the muslims who don't desire to see islam supreme and sharia law rule the world don't speak up because they truly want these things required by their alleged religion and will as in all other countries that have in recent years been conquered by islam and it's sharia law perform stealth jihad through the systems and freedoms of the government of the land they immagrate to, until they have a population majority and then it becomes jihad by the sword.You only have to look at Lebanon, a Christian country who took islamist palestinians in and then were maimed, murdered and abused until those left alive were forced to immagrate out of their own country. islam MUST rule supreme, it cannot live with any other religion, or law. Sorry, the truth upsets them.

[Orthodox music fan]

" If Israeli occupation is the reason for Muslim terror in Israel, why do no Christian Palestinians engage in terror?"

Yasser Arafat's widow is a churchgoing Christian. Even if they don't engage in terror directly, they've certainly offered moral support to terrorist personalities.

[William Tighe]

"Yasser Arafat's widow is a churchgoing Christian."

Really? I remember when the marriage was announced it was also announced that she had converted to Islam.

[William Tighe]

"Yasser Arafat's widow is a churchgoing Christian."

Really? When I read the announcement of their marriage, years ago, I remember very clearly that it was also announced that she had converted to Islam.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Yasser Arafat's widow is a churchgoing Christian. Even if they don't engage in terror directly, they've certainly offered moral support to terrorist personalities.<<<

>>>Really? When I read the announcement of their marriage, years ago, I remember very clearly that it was also announced that she had converted to Islam.<<<

It really doesn't matter, as I said. First, under the Law of Religions that all Arab countries inherited from the Ottomans, the wife takes the religion of the husband. Second, Arafat was not an Islamist--at least not until it became politically expedient to be one--but rather a secular nationalist of a Nasserite stamp, with later excursions into Marxist-Leninist ideology. Basically, Arafat was a thug. His death from AIDS is a good indication of how seriously he took Quranic injunctions.

[fred preuss]

"Why is only one of 47 majority Muslim countries free?" is a question that's valid but dangerous, especially for Latin Catholics, Orthodox and Baptists.
Why are nearly all Latin Catholic and Orthodox countries poorer and more corrupt than their anglican/lutheran/calvinist protestant neighbors?
Why are places with higher numbers of atheists lower in murder rates, rates of assault, theft and higher in rates of education?
Why, in the USA, are states and areas with higher percentages of evangelical church membership higher in obesity rates, murder, theft and assualt rates, higher in levels of divorce, out of wedlock births and abortions, than unchurched areas, places with lower levels of religious involvement?
Can members of these religous groups answer these questions?

[fred preuss]

By 'Latin' catholics, I mean Latin America/Brazil/Haiti, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France and French Belgium.

[RobG]

"Why, in the USA, are states and areas with higher percentages of evangelical church membership higher in obesity rates, murder, theft and assualt rates, higher in levels of divorce, out of wedlock births and abortions, than unchurched areas, places with lower levels of religious involvement?"

Really? I strongly suspect that urban areas, which are largely "liberal" as respecting religion, would have the high numbers in many of these categories. Rather like the red state/blue state thing: when you break it down by county instead of state, the picture looks quite different than what we're fed in the media.

[Bob]

Those stats probably have more to do with racial makeup than the particular sects that happen to be prevalent among certain ethnic groups.

[W.E.D. Godbold]

Fred, you ought to read Rodney Stark ("The Victory of Reason") on a possible answer to those questions. He's a fairly eminent sociologist of religion (and I don't believe he himself is religious) and teaches at Baylor. He's in his 70s now but he started out as a journalist in Berkeley, CA.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Why are places with higher numbers of atheists lower in murder rates, rates of assault, theft and higher in rates of education?<<<

You mean like Russia, Belarus, Albania and China?

>>>Can members of these religous groups answer these questions?<<<

It has something to do with free will.

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

Orchard Park police are investigating a particularly gruesome killing, the beheading of a woman, after her husband — an influential member of the local Muslim community — reported her death to police Thursday.

Police identified the victim as Aasiya Z. Hassan, 37. Detectives have charged her husband, Muzzammil Hassan, 44, with second-degree murder.

Authorities say Aasiya Hassan recently had filed for divorce from her husband.

“She had an order of protection that had him out of the home as of Friday the 6th [of February],” Benz said.

And now for the punchline:

Muzzammil Hassan is the founder and chief executive officer of Bridges TV, which he launched in 2004, amid hopes that it would help portray Muslims in a more positive light.

Here: Prominent Orchard Park man charged with beheading his wife.

(Hat Tip: Christopher Johnson)

[fred preuss]

Why would race affect the murder rate?
Anyway, go to the South, much more religious than Washington State or Connecticut and see how many more divorces, how much more obesity and the murder rate is much higher.
Or Mexico compared with Minnesota or Wisconsin.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Anyway, go to the South, much more religious than Washington State or Connecticut and see how many more divorces, how much more obesity and the murder rate is much higher.<<<

The murder rate is higher? I would want to check on that. Isn't Detroit the murder capital of the country? isn't Chicago running a close second? As for obesity, it seems rather obscene to equate obesity with a propensity for strapping explosive devices to children, blowing up schools and market places, cutting the heads off of hostages, or stoning women to death because they reported they were gang-raped by adult men.

[Judy K. Warner]

>>>Why would race affect the murder rate?<<<

Do you really believe there is no difference in the murder rate between blacks and whites? What are you smoking? -- it's many times higher among blacks. It's not the color of the skin that affects a person's propensity to murder; it's the culture. Unfortunately fatherlessness, terrible schools, drugs, and many other consequences of decades of the welfare state have created a destructive, inhuman culture in which criminality is accepted, even admired. And now, with the end of welfare reform included in the abomination known as the stimulus bill, we can expect an even more rapid deterioration of what remains of black families in the underclass. (Married middle class blacks, on the other hand, are doing just fine, showing it is not skin color that is causing this plague.)

However, the fact you asked this disingenuous question shows that you are a provocateur, not a serious discussant here.

[bonobo]

Anyway, go to the South, much more religious than Washington State or Connecticut and see how many more divorces, how much more obesity and the murder rate is much higher.

Washington State and Connecticut are hardly representative of the non-South. I doubt you could credibly support your thesis in relation to divorce and murder in any statistically credible way.

As for obesity in the South, that's rather easy to explain without invoking religion. Try "climate" and "traditional dishes", for starters. In regard to diet (if not necessarily obesity, certainly heart disease) consider Scotland, whence the "Scotch-Irish" who populated much of the south originated.

Perhaps Presbyterians are predestined to like chocolate bars fried in batter? Pass the ketchup.

[bonobo]

The whole "Latin South" corruption thesis strikes me as a bizarrely self-serving US/Protestant thesis. Which culture is more corrupt, the one that exterminated the aboriginals or the one that incorporated them, albeit with a heavy dose of slavery? The semi-aboriginal civilizations of South America have some catching up to do. That takes time: witness the (IMHO) most lasting effect of US black slavery, the enduring fatherlessness of that culture.

[Judy K. Warner]

Fatherlessness is not enduring in that culture, Bonobo, but caused by recent circumstances. Walter Williams has pointed out many times that in the 1940s and 1950s the black marriage rate was higher than that of whites. This accords with my experience and my husband's. In Philadelphia where I grew up and in Ypsilanti Michigan where he grew up, we knew many blacks. My elementary school was 90 percent black. A single-parent family was rare, and looked upon negatively by other blacks.

Legal marriage was barred to slaves. The legacy of this was not fatherlessness but a burst of weddings when the slaves were free to marry. Marriage was seen as one benefit of freedom, not a white thing to be avoided. (Of course, in those days poor blacks didn't avoid "white things" like education, training and ambition; they eagerly adopted them when they could.

The only marriage phenomenon among blacks that was different from whites was that it was common and acceptable for a young woman to have one child out of wedlock. She would still get married, to the father or to another man, and the child was accepted. It was this custom, or habit, that made welfare so deadly to the black family when Lyndon Johnson gave us the Great Society in the 1960s. A single woman with one child became eligible for a monthly check from the government. That was a disincentive for her not to get married. In addition, of course, it was an incentive for young women to have children when they wouldn't have otherwise.

The "lasting effect of slavery" idea is common, created by people who refused to admit what welfare had done to the black family. But it is a terrible disservice, making blacks seem like some primitive beings who couldn't act like normal people when given the chance. The black families I knew in my childhood, many of them poor, none of them rich, were far more like white families than lower-middle-class blacks are now. They were strange to me only in that many had recently moved up from the South, and I couldn't stand hominy grits.

[David Gray]

>The whole "Latin South" corruption thesis strikes me as a bizarrely self-serving US/Protestant thesis.

Haven't spent much time in Latin America have you?

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Haven't spent much time in Latin America have you?<<<

I'm with David on this one. It seems to me that Latin America represents a perverse brew of the worst in Iberian culture combined with the worst in indigenous Indian culture, and this, I think, explains the tendency of even the most gifted and resource rich Latin American countries to implode with great regularity.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>The "lasting effect of slavery" idea is common, created by people who refused to admit what welfare had done to the black family. But it is a terrible disservice, making blacks seem like some primitive beings who couldn't act like normal people when given the chance. The black families I knew in my childhood, many of them poor, none of them rich, were far more like white families than lower-middle-class blacks are now. They were strange to me only in that many had recently moved up from the South, and I couldn't stand hominy grits.<<<

Thomas Sowell has pointed out that both poor blacks and poor southern whites can trace a lot of their miseries to what he calls "Cracker Culture"--a culture that eschews personal responsibility, denigrates education, avoids delayed gratification and has poor impulse control. Blacks, I think, have been more sensitive to this relationship than most whites, at least outside of the South. I remember when a friend of mine, a black major in the U.S. Army was showing me around El Paso, TX, with his wife. We turned down a street and were suddenly in a classic urban blight. When I asked where we were, he told me this was where the "PWT" live. "PWT?", I asked. "Yeah--"Po' White Trash".

In the south, poor blacks and poor whites lived side-by-side and thus inculcated a lot of the same values. Unfortunately, in many cases this included "Cracker Culture", whose lineal descendant, "Gangsta Culture", is alive and well.

[Stuart Koehl]

The Weekly Standard's cover story this week is about crime in America. Entitled "Law and Disorder: the Case for a Police Surge", by William Stuntz, it includes the following salient observations:

*****

Readers may be excused for wondering how crime could be a large problem in 21st-century America. Crime fell substantially in the 1990s. In this decade, crime rates have been mostly level; the gains from the 1990s remain intact. Where is the crisis?

The short answer is: in urban neighborhoods that readers of this magazine rarely visit. The most important crime trend of the last half of the 20th century wasn't a rise or fall in overall crime levels. Rather, the key trend was a change in the distribution of serious crime, as Table 1 illustrates:

In 1950, violent crime was mostly a southern phenomenon; of the six non-southern cities listed above, three had murder rates lower than the nation's, and the other three had rates only modestly higher than the figure for the nation as a whole. Today, violent crime is an urban problem--everywhere, not just south of the Mason-Dixon line. Atlanta and Philadelphia are comparably homicidal, as are Houston and Chicago. All but one of the non-southern cities listed above--New York is the exception--saw their murder rates double since 1950; all but two saw murders triple, while the nation's rate rose slightly. And remember: These figures are calculated after the 1990s crime drop.

Those high contemporary murder rates understate the rise in urban violence. Thanks to advances in emergency medicine, a sizable fraction of 1950 murder victims would survive today. For accurate comparison, one must cut the 1950 figures by at least one-fourth. Do that, and a clear picture emerges: Outside the South, American cities are at least several times more violent than they were in the mid-20th century. The same is not true of the small cities and towns where many Americans live: In New York state, 3.2 million people inhabit jurisdictions that saw zero murders and manslaughters in 2007. In most of the United States, violent crime is something that happens elsewhere. In the poorer parts of American cities, crime stories are much closer to home. The 1990s narrowed that gap modestly, but the gap remains large.

Even within crime-ridden cities, violent offenses are geographically concentrated. The safest city neighborhoods are about as safe as those small towns in New York where no murders happen. In the most dangerous city neighborhoods, violent crime reaches levels common in Mexico, Russia, and South Africa--three of the highest-crime countries on the planet. Most of our dangerous communities have two things in common: They are poor, and a large share of their population is African American, as one more pair of statistics suggests. In the United States in 2005, the homicide rate among whites stood at 3.5 per 100,000. Among blacks, the figure was 26.5. Urban homicide rates are strongly correlated with the size of cities' black populations.

This is the core of 21st-century America's race problem. The poorest black neighborhoods are frighteningly crime-ridden. The social cost of that crime, and of the criminal punishment that seeks to hold it in check, is colossal, measured in families never formed and investments unmade, lives ended murderously and other lives slowly crushed by long prison terms. Plainly, the public policy status quo is not working. To stay the course--to resist change in a setting that so needs changing and in which so many lives are at stake--is morally indefensible. That proposition holds true for those of us on the political right as well as for those on the left. Conservatives are not anarchists; we believe governments should be small, not absent. Even the smallest governments seek to maintain a decent level of order and safety in public places. Today, in much of urban black America, that goal is not being met.

[bonobo]

created by people who refused to admit what welfare had done to the black family

Fair enough, Judy; I wouldn't quibble with a thesis on the negative effects of badly-admistered welfare on any race or group.

Haven't spent much time in Latin America have you?

I'm surprised to see Stuart missing the point as badly as David. So where in the former territory of the Cherokees is there a 100-million strong population composed mainly of aboriginals? Get it now?

[bonobo]

BTW, Stuart, I'll say one thing for Iberian culture: it doesn't identify political stability with culture, corrupt or no. I'm not saying that's better, but it requires a different yardstick. Which culture is set to take over in Texas, for example? The one that procreates, is my guess.

[Judy K. Warner]

>>>In the south, poor blacks and poor whites lived side-by-side and thus inculcated a lot of the same values.<<<

Not across the whole south. I don't know where the families I knew migrated from, but they were nothing like crackers. My elementary school had no violence whatsoever. And none of the kids I knew had that honor-culture thing of taking offense at everything, which you see in Scots-Irish and the black underclass. I'm not sure there was a straight line between cracker culture and gansta culture. I think fatherlessness was a new factor that got many blacks off the path they were on to becoming part of mainstream culture.

In addition to my elementary school experience, I taught in Head Start in 1966. Even at that date almost all of the children had two-parent families. And there again I didn't see the eagerness to take offense that is the cause of so much violence.

[Jeff Sawtelle]

Speaking of cracker culture, my daughter the history major introduced me to a book of that name by a Prof. McWeeny, published by the University of Alabama Press. Interesting read.

According to him, the verb "to crack" means "to brag," as in, it's not all it's cracked up to be. So, a cracker is basically a braggart.

The book's thesis is that we have traditionally looked at the differences between the North and South as a replay of the Roundheads and the Cavaliers. According to the good professor, about 40% of the Southerners were of Celtic origin - Irish, Welsh, Scots, Scots-Irish, who in many important ways set the cultural tone of the South. Coming from Northern Europe, they were slow to pick up on the agricultural revolution and had a hunter-gatherer culture. As such, their culture meshed well with both the Indians and the Africans.

These were not the plantation-owning Southerners (Scarlett O'Hara's dad maybe notwithstanding). They were cabin-dwelling small farmers who made most of their income from hunting, fishing, and herding cattle on open range. A lot of what we think of as Southern manners, including generous hospitality and dueling, are celtic in origin, he says.

Worth considering.

[Rob G]

Jeff, what you say is probably correct, and explains why many small rural farmers and hill people in the South fought for the Confederacy even though they had no real stake in some of the main issues of the war one way or the other (the vast majority of them owned no slaves, for instance). Somewhat paradoxically, it probably also explains why a lot of them didn't care about the war one way or the other and decided to stay home, or joined the fray only when threatened by the North directly.

[Nick]

Fred,

Where are you getting those numbers? The UCR doesn't seem to bear you out when you remove those less than religious regions. For example, the South looks much better minus DC and really good if you remove states with large urban irreligious populations like NO or where there isn't mass migrations like in South Texas. Now, if you don't know what the UCR or related reports are, then you don't have a clue what you're talking about and are taking talking points from someone else.

Latin America has been cursed with some of the worst leadership of any region in history. Its also been helped along by proto-marxists Europeans like Garibaldi. Even then South America has seen brief periods of spectacular growth. We tend to forget that Argentina was at one time the worlds sixth largest economy. Those days are gone but the hope lives on.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>eff, what you say is probably correct, and explains why many small rural farmers and hill people in the South fought for the Confederacy even though they had no real stake in some of the main issues of the war one way or the other (the vast majority of them owned no slaves, for instance).<<<

On the other hand, my wife's people came from the up-country in the Carolinas and Tennessee, and these were all hotbeds of Union sentiment. Go to Kevin Phillips' "The Cousins Wars", and you will find some good maps showing the breakout of the secession votes, as well as tables showing the religious and ethnic makeup of those counties.

Also, see the relatively new book "General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse" by Joseph T. Glaathaar, which includes a detailed socio-economic analysis of the rank and file of the Army of Northern Virginia, which shows that for the crucial years 1861-62 (before the Confederacy instituted conscription), volunteers in the Confederate Army were much more highly vested in the slave system than is usually recognized. If a majority of them did not own slaves themselves, they came from slave-owning families or were connected by marriage to slave-owning families. A majority of the troops in the ANV in 1862 had very close relations with the slave system. Once conscription began sweeping up all the available manpower, mostly those too poor to buy their way out of the draft, the percentage of slave-owning or slavery-related troops went down.

[Rob G]

"which shows that for the crucial years 1861-62 (before the Confederacy instituted conscription), volunteers in the Confederate Army were much more highly vested in the slave system than is usually recognized"

Which, of course, stands to reason, as they would be the ones who would initially perceive themselves as most threatened by the Northern invasion.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Which, of course, stands to reason, as they would be the ones who would initially perceive themselves as most threatened by the Northern invasion.<<<

Certainly. By 1864, with the Confederacy falling apart, it was men from the more pro-Union up-country counties who were the most likely to desert. First, they really didn't have a dog in the fight; second, their families were more likely to be on the front lines than those of the down-country slave owners.

[Stuart Koehl]

This seems singlularly--albeit tragically--appropriate:

Headless body in gutless press [Mark Steyn]
Just asking, but are beheadings common in western New York? I used to spend a lot of time in that neck of the woods and I don't remember decapitation as a routine form of murder. Yet the killing of Aasiya Hassan seems to have elicited a very muted response.

When poor Mrs Hassan's husband launched his TV network to counter negative stereotypes of Muslims, he had no difficulty generating column inches, as far afield as The Columbus Dispatch, The Detroit Free Press, The San Jose Mercury News, Variety, NBC News, the Voice of America and the Canadian Press. The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle put the couple on the front page under the headline "Infant TV Network Unveils The Face Of Muslim News".

But, when Muzzammil Hassan kills his wife and "the face of Muslim news" is unveiled rather more literally, detached from her corpse at his TV studios, it's all he can do to make the local press - page 26 of Newsday, plus The Buffalo News, and a very oddly angled piece in the usually gung-ho New York Post, "Buffalo Beheading: Money Woe Spurred Slay".

Oh, really? He beheaded her for some goofy clause in the insurance policy? Not exactly:

An upstate TV exec who set up a channel promoting Muslims as peace-loving people was stressed about his failing business in the days before he allegedly chopped off his estranged wife's head, a friend of the couple said today.

Ah.

"He was worried about the station's future," said Dr. Khalid Qazi, a friend of the couple and president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council of Western New York, who last spoke to the Hassans a week ago...

"Domestic violence is despicable, and Islam condones it in no way whatever," he said.

"Murders are being committed in the US every day by people of all faiths."

Well, maybe. But for sheer news value you'd think this one might stand out. Look at this picture. That's the very definition of "moderate Muslim". Look at the late Aasiya Hassan, beautifully coiffed, glossy-lipped. On countless occasions since 9/11, I've found myself at lunch or dinner in New York, London, Washington, Paris or some other western city, sitting next to a modern Muslim woman like Mrs Hassan telling me how horrified she is at how hijabs and burqas, honor killings and genital mutilation, forced cousin marriages and the disproportionate number of Muslim wives in European battered women's shelters, how all these have come to define Muslim womanhood in the 21st century. Yet Aasiya Hassan ended up no differently - all because her husband's TV network had a cashflow problem?

The media's lack of curiosity is in marked contrast to their willingness to propagandize for the launch of Mr Hassan's station. It also helps explain why the US newspaper business is dying.

(More from Michelle Malkin, and Ed Driscoll)

02/14 08:22 PM

[Stuart Koehl]

Are honor killings "just" domestic violence? See this study:

http://www.meforum.org/article/2067