Annette Seidel Arpaci, an academic in the German department, said: “This is an academic talk by a scholar, it is not a political rally. The sudden cancellation is a sell-out of academic freedom, especially freedom of speech, at the University of Leeds.” A spokes-woman for the university said that it valued freedom of speech and added that the cancellation of the meeting had been a bureaucratic issue.
“The decision to cancel the meeting has nothing to do with academic freedom, freedom of speech, antiSemitism or Islam-ophobia, and those claiming that is the case are making mischief,” she said.
Garbage. Vile, foaming-at-the-mouth Jew hatred is rife throughout the Arab world. We have to talk about it (read Ruth Gledhill's commentary, in which she summarizes a paper he gave on the subject at Yale last year.) Once again, Ayaan Hirsi Ali's charge of left-liberal cowardice in the face of Islamism is vindicated. Hirsi Ali said the other day that by refusing to stand up to this Islamofascism now, European leftists are paving the way for the coming of a new Euro-fascism, which will stand up to its Islamic iteration. Geoffrey Wheatcroft, a mainstream British commentator, wrote in Slate at the time Muslims were rioting over the Muhammad cartoons:
There can be no separation of church and state for Muslims, because Islam has never accepted "render unto Caesar," [British Islamist leader] Choudary said. It is a religion that is not confined to the mosque but that informs every aspect of social and political life at all times. Censoring transgressive cartoons and books is only a beginning. Sharia law must rule everywhere; the black flag of Islam must fly over Downing Street.
As a severe critic of the Blair regime, even I don't think that would be an improvement. And that's why the most depressing thing I have seen or heard this past week (which is saying something) was from someone who suggested that there was a fundamental incompatibility between Islam "and our democratic secular values." If that's a view that, as I have more than hinted here, I am close to sharing, why was it so depressing? Because the speaker was a leader of the brutal white-supremacist British National Party.
Leave aside the impudent hypocrisy of a bigot and racist invoking secular democracy, something has gone badly wrong when fascists speak for bemused skeptics. Recently, it has been quite easy to think that many Muslims are fanatics who don't understand our values. Looking back over the past week, it's hard to believe that this is entirely the fault of the liberal west.
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There is no comparison between Christianity and Islam. Christianity builds up, Islam tears down. Try this; Google "Christian persecution in Muslim countries", and read about it for days. If the crazy Muslims catch you with a Bible, you get your throat slit. Nice tolerant people! On the other hand, look at the way we treat them in the west; Europe is so "tolerant" that Islam is dictating policy over there. We allow them a level of tolerance here in America that they would NEVER reciprocate. Harvey truly is a secularist know nothing who hates America. Unfortuneately, as mentioned above, the educational institutions and the media also hate America first... Fred Wilson Wrong! Harvey Lacey loves America! And being godlike I see her faults along with her strengths. One of the her greatest strengths is she can have her faults pointed out without sustaining cataclysmic failure. Fred is like the parent who believes their child is perfect and the rest of the world has to be wrong about them being a brat.
Fred, Google Joseph Smith of Mormon fame. Read about his death at the hands of the faithful. Awful Islamic-Christian isn't it? He was slaughtered by Christians because he offered a different view of the Bible btw.......
Is it possible that the "Islam is violent and evil" v. "Christianity is violent and evil" conversation here represents the same sentiments everybody seems bent on criticizing? I'm a Christian. Christians believe we're flawed, finite and fallible. Not only is self-criticism critical to democracy, it's critical to Christian faith, IMHO. Christians have done terrible things, and - to the extent that Christians condone torture, or kill in say, the Balkans -- have done horrible things recently. We also have had quite a lot of successes - MLK comes to mind. That said, I think it IS clear that extreme Islam is imcompatible with Western-style democracy. What really convinced me of this was the reaction - the popular reaction - to the Danish Muhammad cartoon. Confronted with free speech, extremists burned down the embassy of a government that permitted it. If that's not a repudiation of Western conceptions of rights, I don't know what is. I wish the left would acknowledge this more directly. But I also wish the Right would recognize that we do, in fact, drive people to angry ideologies when we kill, torture and maim the people to whom we are bringing "freedom" -- a "freedom" that a significant portion of the population doesn't seem to want, at least for their ethnic enemies.
I wish the left would acknowledge this more directly. ben I can't speak for the left, but as a progressive I do understand Islam as it's currently configured isn't compatible with democracy. Of course Christianity isn't exactly democracy friendly either in it's current form. We only have to look back fifty four years ago to see Christianity feeling threatened and reacting by restricting freedoms. It is interesting that Rod and most of his chorus here on Crunchy Con blog rant and rave about Islam's anti-democracy positions while screaming for more laws supporting their anti-choice position which is based solely upon THEIR faith. Pot and kettle pointing and whistling one oh one alive and well.
Harvey, your skewed reading of western history -- one long Dark Age until, I suppose, the 1960s or thereabouts -- is so bizarre one hardly knows where to begin. But let's try this gem: The Christians not only sent armies with their missionarys, the sent smallpox etc. Compare the conquest of the Americas by Christianity with Islamic pillaging. Christianity wins that comparison easily. Christians did not "send" smallpox to the Americas. They carried it with them, as would any other Eurasian or African people who discovered the New World. The only way the indigenous American peoples could have avoided the demographic catastrophe brought on by smallpox and other diseases to which they had no immunity would have been a hermetic sealing of the western hemisphere for all time. No contact with other peoples, ever. Is that realistic? Desirable? The broader truth about "Native Americans" is that they were literally stone age nomads, often warlike, imbued with various tribal prejudices and leading lives of appalling material hardship punctuated by violence. The destruction of their cultures (not their persons) was no tragedy. And the result would have been no different had the Americas been discovered by Muslims, Chinese, Japanese or Mongols.
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