The Supremacist Nature of Muslim ‘Grievances’

What do they believe? What do you think? Talk about religion as it exists today.

Moderator: JoeWallack

Post Reply
bskeptic
Posts: 76
Joined: Sat Oct 05, 2013 12:42 am

The Supremacist Nature of Muslim ‘Grievances’

Post by bskeptic »

How dare you? The supremacist nature of Muslim ‘grievances’

By RAYMOND IBRAHIM \ 07/10/2013

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Cont ... ces-319440


In 2012 in Pakistan, as Christian children were singing carols inside their church, Muslim men from a nearby mosque barged in with an axe, destroyed the furniture, desecrated the altar, and beat the children. Their justification for such violence? “You are disturbing our prayers…. How dare you use the mike and speakers?”

Welcome to the true face of “Muslim grievance”—what I call the “how dare you?!” phenomenon. Remember it next time “progressive” media and politicians tell you that Muslim terrorism—whether the 9/11 strikes, Fort Hood Massacre, Boston Bombing, or recent London Beheading—are products of grievances against the West. Missing from their analyses is the supremacist nature of Muslim grievances.

The Conditions of Omar, a foundational medieval Muslim text, mandates this sense of superiority over non-Muslims. Among other stipulations, the Conditions commands conquered Christians not to raise their “voices during prayer or readings in churches anywhere near Muslims” (hence the axe-attack in Pakistan). It also commands them not to display any signs of Christianity—specifically Bibles and crosses—not to build churches, and not to criticize the prophet.

If the supremacist nature of Islamic law is still not clear enough, the Conditions literally command Christians to give up their seats to Muslims on demand.

By analogy, consider when black Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to white passengers in a white supremacist environment. Sincere grievances arose: how dare she think herself our equal?

But were such grievances legitimate? Should they have been accommodated?

In my new book, Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians, I document hundreds of attacks on Christians. In most cases, the Muslim attackers are truly aggrieved.

For example, in 2007 in Turkey, a publishing house distributing Bibles was stormed and three of its Christian employees tortured, disemboweled, and finally murdered. One suspect later said: “We didn’t do this for ourselves, but for our religion [Islam]…. Our religion is being destroyed.”

Similarly, in 2011 in Egypt, after a 17-year-old Christian student refused to obey his Muslim teacher’s orders to cover up his cross, the teacher and some Muslim students attacked, beat, and ultimately murdered the Christian teenager.

These Turkish and Egyptian murderers were truly aggrieved: the Conditions clearly state that Christians must not “produce a cross or Bible” around Muslims. How dare the Egyptian student and Turkish Bible publishers refuse to comply?

In Indonesia, where it is becoming next to impossible for Christians to build churches, Christians congregated to celebrate Christmas, 2012, on empty land where they hoped to build a church—only to be attacked by Muslims who hurled cow dung and bags of urine at the Christians as they prayed.

These Muslims were also sincerely aggrieved: how dare these Christians think they can build a church when the Conditions forbid it? (See Crucified Again for a new translation of “The Conditions of Omar.)

Weeks ago in Pakistan, after a Christian man was accused of insulting Muslim prophet Muhammad—another big no-no according to the Conditions—3,000 Muslims burned down two churches and some 200 Christian homes.

Take a look at their pictures; these are undoubtedly people with a “grievance.”

Most recently in Pakistan, when a Muslim slapped a Christian and the latter reciprocated, the Muslim exclaimed “How dare a Christian slap me?” Anti-Christian violence immediately commenced.

In short, anytime non-Muslims dare to overstep their Sharia-designated “inferior” status, supremacist Muslims become violently aggrieved.

From here, one can begin to understand the ultimate Muslim grievance: Israel.

For if “infidel” Christians are deemed inferior and attacked for exercising their basic human rights, like freedom of worship by aggrieved Muslims, how must Muslims feel about Jews—the descendants of pigs and apes, according to the Koran—exercising power and authority over fellow Muslims in what is perceived to be Muslim land?

How dare they?!

Of course, if grievances against Israel were really about justice and displaced Palestinians, Muslims—and their Western appeasers—would be aggrieved by the fact that millions of Christians are currently being displaced by Muslim invaders.

Needless to say, they are not.

So the next time you hear that Muslim rage and terrorism are products of grievance, remember that this is absolutely true. But these “grievances” are not predicated on any universal standards of equality or justice, only a supremacist worldview.
User avatar
Peter Kirby
Site Admin
Posts: 8041
Joined: Fri Oct 04, 2013 2:13 pm
Location: Santa Clara
Contact:

Re: The Supremacist Nature of Muslim ‘Grievances’

Post by Peter Kirby »

Interesting. Thanks, bskeptic.
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
bskeptic
Posts: 76
Joined: Sat Oct 05, 2013 12:42 am

Re: The Supremacist Nature of Muslim ‘Grievances’

Post by bskeptic »

Sam Harris comments on Islam:


Quote:

It’s an interesting pathology in our public discourse. It’s the result of few specific memes doing their mad work, one being that all religion is equivalent. We have one word, religion, which I argue is a word like sports. We have sports like thai kick-boxing and there are sports like badminton, and they basically have nothing in common. Islam is a religion and Jainism is a religion and they have a few things in common, but what they don’t have in common is a commitment to nonviolence, which Jainism has in spades and Islam doesn’t have in principle. That’s a difference worth noticing. There’s that meme that as an atheist, as a secularist, as a scientist, you can only really just talk about religion and to be more fine-grained than that is to be unfairly biased against one community. That’s untrue, and we have to get over it.

The other meme is that the terrorism that we see at this moment has nothing in principle to do with the religion of Islam: It’s coming out of other things, economic inequality, political hopelessness, people have been victimized by the Israelis or somebody else or by the legacy of colonialism; there’s nothing about the actual doctrine of Islam that accounts for it. That is untrue.

There are a lot of people who have a tremendous amount of white guilt, and understandably so. They are attentive to every misstep that western governments make in their foreign policies. So, you get this crazy moral parity claim, which obviously the Israelis suffer from the most. The Israelis are confronting people who will blow themselves up to kill the maximum number of noncombatants and will even use their own children as human shields. They’ll launch their missiles from the edge of a hospital or school so that any retaliation will produce the maximum number of innocent casualties. And they do all this secure in the knowledge that their opponents are genuinely worried about killing innocent people. It’s the most cynical thing imaginable. And yet within the moral discourse of the liberal West, the Israeli side looks like it’s the most egregiously insensitive to the cost of the conflict.

Many otherwise rational-seeming, anti-dogmatic, nonreligious people in the West believe that the Israelis are transparently the bad guys, rationally and emotionally.

I view that as a pathology of liberalism in which people assume that everyone everywhere more or less wants the same thing and ignores the endless supply of people with no obvious political or economic grievance who are willing to devote their lives to jihad. What you don’t hear are jihadis saying, “I was just so desperate, I just saw no way out or me or my family, and it just seemed like the only thing I could do to express my rage at an unfair system.” No, you get the explicit expectation of arriving in paradise.

Liberals imagine they’re taking religion seriously by being endlessly respectful and politically correct in the face of this insanity. Ironically, it’s the most condescending and disrespectful view of religious people—to refuse to accept their account of what they believe. Liberals don’t think anyone actually believes in Paradise. Meanwhile, embassies are burned in a dozen countries and our only response is to get up and say, “Of course we would never do anything to insult the perfectly noble religion of Islam.”

There are people who will use human shields on one side, and there are people who will be deterred by other people’s use of human shields: They’re still worried about killing the children of their enemies. Those are two very different groups of people.

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-an ... m-harris/5






"For weeks after the Boston Marathon bombing, we seemed determined to remain confused about the motives of the perpetrators. Had they been “radicalized” by some nefarious person, or did they manage it themselves? Did Tamerlan, the older brother, have brain damage from boxing? Were his dreams dashed by our immigration laws? Experts on terrorism took to the airwaves and gave their analysis: These young men behaved as they did, not on account of Islam, but because they were “jerks” and “losers.”

Or was it just politics, with religion as a pretext? The New York Times reported that the Tsarnaev brothers were “motivated to strike against the United States partly because of its military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Many people seized on this as proof that U.S. foreign policy was to blame. And yet the only plausible way that Chechens coming of age in America could want to murder innocent people in protest over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would be for them to accept the Islamic doctrine of jihad. Islam is under attack and it must be defended; infidels have invaded Muslim lands—these grievances are not political. They are religious.

The same obscurantism arose in response to the Woolwich murder—when two jihadists butchered a man on a London sidewalk while shouting “Allahu akbar!” Their actions were repeatedly described as “political”—and the role of Islam in their thinking was reflexively discounted. Why political? Because one of the murderers spoke of British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq invading “our lands” and abusing “our women.” Few seemed to wonder how a Londoner of Nigerian descent could feel possessive about Afghan and Iraqi lands and women. There is only one path through the wilderness of bad ideas that reaches such “political” concerns: Islam."

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/no-ordinary-violence
Post Reply