NC reminds: Mr. Hamid was interviewed on No Compromise Radio which you can listen to here
by Tawfik Hamid
The film “Fitna” by Dutch parliament member Geert Wilders has created an uproar around the world as it linked violence committed by Islamists to Islam.
Many commentators and politicians — including the British government, which denied him entry to the country last month — reflexively accused Mr. Wilders of inciting hatred. The question, however, is whether the blame is with Mr. Wilders, who simply exposed Islamic radicalism, or with those who promote and engage in this religious extremism. In other words, shall we fault Mr. Wilders for showing photos of the hanging of homosexuals, or shall we fault those who actually promote and practice this crime?
There is a certain schizophrenia among many Muslims who seem to believe that it is acceptable to teach hatred and violence in the name of their religion, while at the same time expecting the world to respect Islam as “a religion of peace, love and harmony.”
Scholars in the most prestigious Islamic institutes and universities continue to teach things like Jews are “pigs and monkeys,” that women and men must be stoned to death for adultery, or that Muslims must fight the world to spread their religion. Isn’t, then, Mr. Wilders’s criticism appropriate? Instead of blaming him, we must blame the leading Islamic scholars for having failed to produce an authoritative book on Islamic jurisprudence that is accepted in the Islamic world and unambiguously rejects these violent teachings.
While many religious texts preach violence, the interpretation, modern usage and implementation of these teachings make all the difference. For example, the stoning of women exists in both the Old Testament and in the Islamic tradition, or “Sunna” — the recorded deeds and manners of the prophet Muhammad. The difference, though, is that leading Jewish scholars agreed to discontinue these practices centuries ago while Muslim scholars have yet to do so. Hence we do not see the stoning of women practiced or promoted in Israel, the “Jewish” state, but we see it practiced and promoted in Iran and Saudi Arabia, the “Islamic” states!
When the British government banned Geert Wilders from entering the country to present his film in the House of Lords, it made two egregious errors. The first was to suppress free speech, a canon of the civilized Western world. The second mistake was to blame the messenger — punishing, so to speak, the witness who exposed the crime instead of punishing the criminal. Mr. Wilders did not produce the content of the violent Islamic message he showed in his film — the Islamic world did that. Until the Islamic clerical establishment takes concrete steps to reject violence in the name of their religion, Mr. Wilders criticism is not only permissible as “controversial” free speech but justified.
So, Islamic scholars and clerics, it is up to you to produce a Shariah book that will be accepted in the Islamic world and that teaches that Jews are not pigs and monkeys, and that declaring war to spread Islam is unacceptable, and killing apostates is a crime. Such a book would prove that Islam is a religion of peace.
Mr. Hamid, a former member of an Islamist terrorist group, is an Islamic reformer and senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.
captain trips
on Mar 9th, 2009
@ 9:06 am:
Oh God.
Read Islams “holy” book(s) and YOU TOO can learn the truth about it
It’s a religion of murder and killing.
That’s all.
Anything else ?
Sorry, I know there are still plenty of morons out there that think it’s something else.
There will always be fools just as there will always be the poor, the dislabled etc etc.
No Compromises
on Mar 9th, 2009
@ 9:12 am:
Exactly, Cap’t! If people want to see the suras that promote the murder, theft, and humiliation of non-believers in the political death cult known as islam go here and scroll down into the comment section:
http://gto7.wordpress.com/allah-is-nothing-but-the-pagan-moon-god/
There you will find about four comments in a row with the violent portions of the kkkoran!
Islam Needs to Prove It’s a Religion of Peace
on Mar 9th, 2009
@ 10:12 am:
[...] No Compromise When it Comes to Being Right! [...]
Claymore
on Mar 9th, 2009
@ 12:56 pm:
Christianity needs to prove it’s a religion of peace
captain trips
on Mar 9th, 2009
@ 1:06 pm:
Yeah clay you’re right.
Especially after some Christian sumbitches hijacked some airplanes and flew ‘em into buildings here in America. Especially after some rotten bastard Christians took over a school and killed a bunch of kids in Russia. Espe,….
Should I continue ? Ahhhh I’m confused
Christ never preached “kill or convert.”
Must be my alzheimers kicking in early.
No Compromises
on Mar 9th, 2009
@ 1:52 pm:
LOL! That’s all I can do right now!
captain trips
on Mar 9th, 2009
@ 2:38 pm:
I know.
It’s funny that there are STILL people that will defend this religion of murder and mysogyny.
Then it’s kinda creepy and a tad scary too.
Hmm. . we can laugh in fear ? New way of humor I suppose
It won’t be entertaining for too long though. Even the idiots will eventually come to the right conclusion. Or be killed trying NOT to.
No Compromises
on Mar 9th, 2009
@ 4:11 pm:
What’s so funny is that in the face of actual real evidence they still don ‘t get it. It must be that gub’ment school eduKation huh?
captain trips
on Mar 9th, 2009
@ 7:57 pm:
Yeah probably.
Which is why I’m going broke to keep my kids OUT of that crap. What really chaps my hide is that I STILL pay for pubic indoctrination even though I’m not subjecting MY offspring to it. Sending them into pubic education is child abuse as far as I can tell.
- misspelling on purpose here
Here’s a writing I assembled from a few different sources. Enjoy:
Thanks to the hard work of thousands of government workers at the Department of Education and well-paid teachers’ union employees, American schoolchildren perform worse on education tests for every year they spend in a public school.
Rather than educating, public school teachers busy themselves indoctrinating our children with hateful anti-American and anti-family propaganda.
In fourth grade, the earliest grade for which international comparisons are available, American students outperform most other countries in reading, math and science. Fourth-graders score in the 92nd percentile in science, the 58th percentile in math and the 70th percentile in reading, where they beat 26 of 35 countries, including Germany, France and Italy.
But by the eighth grade, American students are only midrange in international comparisons.
By the 12th grade — after receiving the full benefits of an American “public education” — Americans are near the bottom.
Public schoolteachers are lethargic incompetents who kick off around 2 p.m. every day and get summers off. Actually, that’s not fair: Some teachers spend long hours after school having sex with their students.
By “education,” progressives don’t mean anything a normal person would think of as education, such as learning how to speak well. “Education” means creating lots of useless bureaucratic jobs, mostly in Washington, having nothing to do with teaching.
No Democrat since Jimmy Carter has been stupid enough to send his own children to a public school yet American citizens are forced to fund failed public schooling with their taxes !
Nothing irritates public schoolteachers more than being asked to teach. While 80 percent of the employees of private schools are teachers, only half the employees of public schools are. The rest are “coordinating,” “facilitating” or “empowering” something or other.
The Department of Education alone provides more than 4,000 jobs that have no connection with teaching.
Mainly thanks to the teachers “unions,” public education has become an expensive and shameful disgrace that we shouldn’t allow our children to be abused by.
Public schools are government schools. That obvious statement has important implications. Government is the institution that has a monopoly on the legal use of force in a society. Most significantly, government obtains its revenues by force — taxation.
What does the presence of taxation indicate about the schools? It indicates that those who run the schools have an access to revenue that no one outside government has.
The compulsory funding of schools creates a distinctive attitude in school administrators and teachers that is not found in owners of shoe stores and other private enterprises. The people who come into the shoe store are potential customers, free to walk out without buying. In contrast, the citizens of a school district are taxpayers, who have no choice but to pay their tax bills. Sure, they can move to another jurisdiction. But they face the same compulsion there.
The system’s inherent lack of accountability insulates the administrators from those who foot the bill and suffer the educational results. It also enables them to form close alliances with education professionals, who are seen as the experts who understand the “science” of education and child development, although there are excellent reasons for believing that those are bogus disciplines.
That mystification of financing creates fertile ground for bureaucratic irresponsibility. The financing of public schools has skyrocketed in recent years. It is unlikely that most taxpayers are aware of that fact. The system has been arranged to keep taxpayers in the dark. No, they are not prohibited from acquiring the information. But such acquisition is made so difficult that most people, busy as they are raising their families and making a living, will not have the time to navigate the backwaters of the bureaucracy. The division of labor, normally a blessing, is perverted so as to discourage people from exercising self-responsibility.
These facts have made public schooling a corrupt mockery of the true intentions of education. Little or no real education is happening there.