Veil issue

[Fraggle Rocker]

again you know nothing of what my religion may or may not be. You assume my religion is abrahamic, assumption is the mother of all fuck ups

This is not an assumption but an uncontroversial worldwide consensus including your own people. Two entire pages of Google hits--from sources religious and secular, academic and lay, Christian, Muslim, Jewish and non-Abrahamist--are unanimous over the fundamental fact that Christianity, Judaism and Islam are the three Abrahamic religions. Only the weakest and most specious arguments have been offered against this. For example, some turn on the fine point of missionaries. They insist that although Abraham ultimately effected the conversion of the entire Hebrew people to Judaism, he was not a "real" evangelist, so Christianity and Islam cannot be called Abrahamic because they are evangelical.

Ibrahim--or Abraham with the Hebrew vowels--has even been argued by some Islamic scholars to be the founder of Islam because he submitted to the will of Allah by offering to sacrifice his son. This is the defining trait of a Muslim and indeed what the word "Muslim" means.

This place is called SciForums because most of us, especially those of us who try to serve as the elders of the community, do our best to conduct ourselves like scientists. When we lapse someone immediately jumps up and calls us on it, which is the essence of the scientific method. If you're going to make statements like "Islam is not an Abrahamic religion" that contradict even what your own people have been telling us outsiders about yourselves for generations, this falls under the principle that "extraordinary assertions require extraordinary substantiation." The scientific method requires you to provide the source and reasoning behind this statement.

you have no idea on cognitive level how any muslim community behaves, you have no personal experience of how any muslim community behaves.

I beg your pardon? I spent most of my life in Los Angeles, which has a huge, thriving Muslim community. I worked in civil service, the sector that prides itself on "diversity" and probably employed most of those Muslims in those days. Now I work in Washington, DC, which is the most "diverse" place and has the largest Middle Eastern and North African community in America. Some of my Muslim friends are devout and some are secularized. Some were raised Muslim and others converted. They are Shia, Sunni, Wahhabi, and Sufi; Lebanese, Iranian, Iraqi, Moroccan, Pakistani, Indian, Filipino, Egyptian, and born here of European or sub-Saharan African ancestry.

Where you in that court? Let the court decide on how to deal with that matter.

It did. This has already been posted on SciForums, I guess you missed it. The judge threw her out. In America it is a fundamental principle of law that one has the right to confront one's accusers. You cannot confront someone who is hiding behind a damn fool MASK like a robber. You can't even tell if they got the right person.

just because a woman decides to wear a burqah doesn't make her a "damn fool" this is pure conjecture and subjective, biassed opinion.

My point is that it accomplishes exactly that in our society. People do not walk around hiding their faces from other people here any more than they walk around displaying their genitals to other people in your country. It is rude, it is outrageous, it is offensive. To hide behind a mask and look like a ninja about to rob or kill someone is just about as "damn foolish" as one can be in America. There are many places where people will unleash their dogs and have her run off the street like the common criminal she chooses to resemble. Even our dogs are smart enough to understand that civilized people have no reason to hide from each other.

 

[stu43t]

And so, because Saudi Arabia doesn't allow crosses, Britain should retaliate and adopt those backward measures by not allowing veils?

Are you serious?

You really wish to stoop down low to the same level as Saudi Arabia?

What makes Western nations great is that they are nations of tolerance and acceptance. If you take away the tolerance and acceptance aspect of Western nations, well...

Terrorism is already taking away tolerance in Western nations

 

[S.A.M.]

Update

A month after ex-foreign secretary Jack Straw suggested that Muslim women who wear veils over their face can make community relations harder, what do people within the Muslim community in the UK think of his remarks?

Jack Straw's comments on veils have been good news for the owner of The Hijab Centre in the MP's constituency of Blackburn.

"I used to sell two or three a week but now I am selling five to six. They are mainly being bought by young, British-born Muslim women," he said.

"These women are experimenting with the wearing of the niqab. Their mothers often do not cover themselves but they seem to want to do it."

The wearing of the veil has always been a controversial practice and there is no consensus amongst Islamic scholars.

There are roughly two schools of thought, one which says that it is obligatory and another that believes it is highly recommended but ultimately a matter of personal choice.

Mr Straw's intervention and the ensuing political storm have changed all that.

It now appears that British Muslims are less willing to publicly criticise those tiny minority of women who wear it.

A recent statement issued by nearly 30 Islamic groups, including one of the largest Muslim organisations - the Muslim Council of Britain, tells Muslims to "remain united, regardless of their differences of opinion in the wearing of the veil ... and to defend the veil with all their ability".

It also asks them to "avoid seeking to capitalise on this debate to further political or personal interests".

This statement has annoyed some Muslims but they are now choosing to remain silent.

They think it is open season on Muslims and do not want to be seen damaging the community anymore by offering support to the anti-veil lobby.

 

[S.A.M.]

Jack Straw:

He told the Three Faiths Forum: "Simply breathing the same air as other members of society isn't integration.

"Britishness is thus an identity available to Anglicans, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and those of other religions and none, and a central element of that identity is the principle that everyone has the freedom to practise their faith not as a matter of tolerance but of right."

He added: "There is no inevitability that our communities will splinter and divide.

"Nor is there any inevitability that our attempts to heal divides will succeed. Progress depends on our willingness to engage."

 

[stu43t]

MUSLIM BEHAVIOUR in the U.S. and Europe

http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatc...ves/013758.php




The difference in Muslim behavior in the U.S., as compared to that demonstrated in Western Europe, is owed primarily to several factors.

First, and most important, the Muslim population is a much smaller proportion of the American population -- scarcely 1%. And of even that 1%, most of the Muslims are homegrown Black Muslims, whose own easygoing and at times even syncretistic interpretation of Islam in the past caused the orthodox at Al Azhar to refuse to recognize Elijah Mohammad's group as really Islamic at all.

But what if there were not 3 million Muslims (two million of them identified as belonging to the "Black Muslims") but rather 15 million -- that is, 5% of the total population -- or even 30 million, or 10% of the total population, as may already be true in France? Wouldn't local Muslims, already so aggressive and unyielding in the demands of their so-called representative groups (e.g. CAIR), be far more aggressive and even more demanding, even more uncooperative with the authorities on matters of security, even more aggressive in demands to changes in our legal and political institutions, in our schools, in our social understandings and arrangements, in our everything?

Second, the non-Muslim population of the United States contains far more believing Christians and self-identifying Jews than anywhere in "post-Christian" Western Europe. They are powerful and self-confident, and will not yield as the French and English have yielded. America is a more violent society. Part of that violence includes a willingness, even an eagerness, to have those who threaten that society suppressed -- thank god -- unapologetically.

Third, the pre-existing mental pathologies that have helped Muslims to find allies of sorts in the countries of Western Europe are antisemitism, which remains a permanent presence in the Western world which nothing can eradicate, but which in the United States, for all sorts of reasons (including the identification of so many Americans, including the earliest Puritans, with the Israelites, and the role of the Old Testament in American intellectual and religious history) has been reduced far below its European levels.

The second pre-existing mental pathology cleverly exploited by Muslims and their willing collaborators in the countries of Western Europe has been anti-Americanism, strongest in France and England, less strong in Germany and especially, thank god, in Italy -- and visible on this side of the Atlantic only among media figures.

Fourth, Muslims are not provided with as many benefits paid for by Infidel taxpayers as they are in Western Europe, and so cannot rely on the dole for their every need, nor on fiddling the system to the degree that is now de rigueur in England and France.

They need, therefore, the good will of non-Muslim customers and employers. This may -- for a while, even a long while -- inhibit open political activity for the advancement of Sharia principles. After all, if one realizes that one's contribution to CAIR or one's open support for Muslim goals may cause direct economic losses, one may hesitate.

Fifth, in this country there are many more non-Muslim refugees from Muslim lands -- Christians who are descended from those Maronites who arrived between 1880 and 1940, or Jews who left Arab lands but did not go to Israel, or pockets here and there of smaller sects, including Assyrians and Chaldean Christians -- who are able to provide to those around them unpleasant monitory truths about Islam and its tenets, its attitudes.

Sixth, there are far more people in this country who have remained in possession of their senses, and who are quite capable of refusing to accept the party line of the members of MESA Nostra, and to find out for themselves about both the theory or doctrines of Islam and about Islam in practice -- as evidenced by 1350 years of Islamic conquest of non-Muslim lands and by the subsequent subjugation, and killing or forced conversion or reduction to the status of dhimmi, of the vanquished non-Muslims.

Seventh, given all that, it is cleverer to wait, to bide one's time. Who knows what will happen in ten years, or twenty? Why make moves too soon, when there is such a danger of imperiling oneself and one's ability to remain in this country, at this point?

But no one should remain sanguine. Look at Mike Hawash in Oregon, that Intel engineer, earning $360,000 a year, with his American wife and Little-League playing children, and the stout stand-by-your-man support of Intel executives, who nonetheless returned to that old-time religion. That old-time religion turned out, for "Mike" (Maher) Hawash, to be Islam.

So after 9.11.2001 it was off to western China in the hopes of reaching Afghanistan and killing fellow Americans who were, for Mike Hawash and all the Mike Hawashes of Islam, not fellow Infidel citizens of an Infidel nation-state, but enemies to be killed -- because they were Infidels, and because they stood in the way of, represented an obstacle to, the spread and future dominance of Islam.

And the would-be murderer in Chapel Hill, Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, gunning his SUV and running over non-Muslim students, was the son of secular Iranians in exile -- but he, too, in a moment of intellectual and vocational confusion, apparently found Islam. And in finding Islam, he became the would-be Jihadist who would kill Infidels who had done nothing to him.

Why? Because that was what Allah wanted, that was what Muhammad wanted. He spelled it all out in long handwritten letters written while in custody. And there are many such -- people who are outwardly fine, until one fine day they are not so fine, and then, whatever the reasons, they have at hand someone to blame, someone to kill -- the Infidel.

In Afghanistan, in Chapel Hill, or in New York City, or anywhere at all.

 

[S.A.M.]

Does that mean that Western secularism and democracy is not the answer to militant Islam?

Then what is the US doing in Iraq?

 

[stu43t]

Does that mean that Western secularism and democracy is not the answer to militant Islam?

Then what is the US doing in Iraq?

They are doing the same thing as the UK - They are following orders from the governments, even the top notch British generals are against the idea of British troops still being there.

The sooner we get our troops out of that place of evil the better.

 

[S.A.M.]

They are doing the same thing as the UK - They are following orders from the governments, even the top notch British generals are against the idea of British troops still being there.

The sooner we get our troops out of that place of evil the better.

Unfortunately, I have an idea that a lot of it is going to stick for many years to come, regardless of when the troops pull out.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

Does that mean that Western secularism and democracy is not the answer to militant Islam?

Many scholars see Islam on the cusp of its own Reformation, Renaissance and Enlightenment. After all it has tracked very closely to six centuries behind Christianity in its phases since its creation six centuries after Christianity. It was an ugly, violent time for Christendom but the result was a vast improvement over the Dark Ages. It has been suggested that the best thing for us to do is just let the Muslims resolve their own issues by fighting among themselves and serve as an example of a functional liberal civilization to the progressive faction among them, rather than distracting them by meddling.

Then what is the US doing in Iraq?

It is strictly an economic endeavor just like the war in Vietnam was. Our leaders didn't give a damn about the Vietnamese people, but war was good for business. Ditto for today's leaders and the Iraqis.

The ties of our leaders to key companies and key industries are obvious. Cheney's buddies in Halliburton get no-bid contracts for everything in Iraq including, I'm sure, port-a-potties. Bush's family are connected to the moguls in the energy industry and Bush's hand-holding gay boyfriend is an Arabian prince with a major interest in the petroleum industry.

This war has nothing to do with democracy or terrorism, those were just easy pretexts to justify starting it.

 

[stu43t]

Yeah - not to mention oil