Islam Has Different Meanings for the Same Words

This is a problem of semantics.

There is a basic problem of constant miscommunication between the West and the Muslim world.

Practically every major word or concept in their communication has a different meaning for us and them.

In reply to the article by Robert S. Leiken and Steven Brooke, “The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood” in Foreign Affairs, Jonathan D. Halevi writes:

Leiken and Brooke were deeply impressed by the support given by the Muslim Brotherhood for "democracy," but they failed to understand that for the Muslim Brotherhood and the West, the word has two completely different meanings. As far as the Muslim Brotherhood is concerned, Islamic rule expresses "true democracy," and that is the only kind to which they are committed.

The Muslim Brotherhood poses a serious threat to the West. It hides behind ambiguous terminology, which makes the organization appear moderate and enables it to operate freely in its host countries, thereby establishing a convenient base from which to disseminate radical Islamic ideology among the growing Muslim communities. [Emphasis addded]

Since in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood won the presidential elections with 52% of the vote, combined with other Islamists - the ultraconservative Salafist Al-Nour party - won 70% of the seats in the Parliament's Lower House, and won 58.33% of the seats in the Parliament's Upper House (80% adding together Al-Nour, which came second with a quarter of all seats), that must also be the majority of Egyptian Muslims' idea of democracy.

That Muslims must intend for "democracy" something completely different, it's also obvious from the results of opinion polls in Muslim countries, results which otherwise would be impossible to comprehend.

In an opinion poll among Muslims, in Egypt, just to take an example, 59% of respondents said democracy is preferable to any other kind of government; but 82% supported stoning for adulterers, 77% were in favour of chopping off hands of thieves, and 84% backed death penalty for apostates, i.e. Muslims who leave Islam. Their idea of democracy must be different from ours.

Similarly, concepts like "innocent", "terrorism", even "murder" are different.

This kind of Western misunderstanding is particularly acute in the case of the crucial concept of "peace".

When Muslims say that Islam is a religion of peace, they don't even need to lie to Western media who are, like most Western people, ignorant of Islam - ignorance which allows The New York Times to write without blushing: "[The Muslim Brotherhood] virtually invented political Islam" -, fact which Muslims in the West exploit to their advantage.

They can play on the different meaning of "peace", because what they actually mean is the Muslim concept of peace, which is somewhat similar to the pax Romana, the peace that followed Rome's conquest of almost all the known world.

So, Muslims can say on Western TVs that Islam is a religion of peace because that is the final goal of Islam, but is a peace that will follow a constant war against the infidels and will be achieved after the whole world will be submitted to Islam: so in fact the final goal of Islam is peace, but their peace is not certainly what Westerners think of when they hear this word.

Another example of this miscommunication is the concept of "charity". When Muslim people like the UK's Baroness Warsi, co-Chairman of the British Conservative Party, appear on the TV saying that charity is a duty for all Muslims, as I watched her say some time ago, they "forget" to add that in Islam the meaning of "charity" is not the same as ours: charity is a duty only to other Muslims.

The Pakistani Christians, during that country's 2010 devastating floods, were victims of systematic discrimination in the distribution of aid - essential to survival - ironically donated by the historically Christian West.

By not explaining the difference in meaning, Warsi contributed to the misunderstanding and created in her audience a non-realistic view of Muslim ethical virtues.

This is indeed a problem common to all contrasting doctrines. Each theory redefines the concepts used in other theories. "Time" and "space" in Newtonian physics are not the same as "time" and "space" in Einstein's relativity.

Mali Islamists Cut Off Thief's Hand

The Islamist group Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) two days ago cut off a thief's hand.

Ten days earlier Ansar Dine (Defenders of Faith), an armed Islamist group occupying the north of the country of Mali and trying to expand to its south, publicly stoned an unmarried couple to death.

Both groups have links to Al-Qaeda.

An armed Islamist group occupying northern Mali said Thursday it hopes to win over the country's south to its ideology and create an Islamic state.

Ansar Dine is one of the groups holding key northern cities in a four-month occupation which has effectively split the west African nation in two.

"We hope to be able to peacefully convince the people of this country (southern Mali) to join us so that all our efforts can be directed against the common enemy," Ansar Dine spokesman Senda Ould Boumama told an Islamist website called "Defenders of Jihadists".

The "common enemy" was described as non-Muslim "miscreants".

Enforcing Islamic law, sharia, is a way to impose Ansar Dine's authority in the region, hence the maiming and stoning.

Honour Killings Are Much More than Domestic Violence

In light of the recent guilty verdict for the parents of Shafilea Ahmed in the UK, the Warrington, Cheshire, teenager murdered by her mother and father in an "honour killing", it is interesting to look at the results of an extensive analysis of more than fifty reported honour killings, entitled "Are Honor Killings Simply Domestic Violence?".

The study by Phyllis Chesler, professor of psychology and women's studies at the City University of New York, appeared in 2009 in The Middle East Quarterly, a peer-reviewed publication, and begins:

When a husband murders a wife or daughter in the United States and Canada, too often law enforcement chalks the matter up to domestic violence. Murder is murder; religion is irrelevant. Honor killings are, however, distinct from wife battering and child abuse. Analysis of more than fifty reported honor killings shows they differ significantly from more common domestic violence.[1] The frequent argument made by Muslim advocacy organizations that honor killings have nothing to do with Islam and that it is discriminatory to differentiate between honor killings and domestic violence is wrong.

... A 2008 Massachusetts-based study found that "although immigrants make up an estimated 14 percent of the state's population, [they, nevertheless,] accounted for 26 percent of the 180 domestic violence deaths from 1997-2006." [Emphasis added]

The report shows very clearly different patterns in honour killings and domestic violence, including the facts that in the former whole families participate to restore the honour of the family, that "unlike most Western domestic violence, honor killings are carefully planned", that "In some cases, taxi drivers, neighbors, and mosque members prevent the targeted woman from fleeing, report her whereabouts to her family, and subsequently conspire to thwart police investigations.[19] Very old relatives or minors may be chosen to conduct the murder in order to limit jail time if caught. Seldom is domestic violence celebrated, even by its perpetrators. In the West, wife batterers are ostracized. Here, there is an important difference in honor crimes. Muslims who commit or assist in the commission of honor killings view these killings as heroic and even view the murder as the fulfillment of a religious obligation. A Turkish study of prisoners found no social stigma attached to honor murderers."

In addition, "In both North America and Europe, family members conducted honor killings with excessive violence—repeatedly stabbing, raping, setting aflame, and bludgeoning—in more than half the cases. Only in serial-killing-type scenarios are Western women targeted with similar violence; in these cases, the perpetrators are seldom family members, and their victims are often strangers."

And 99% of perpetrators of the honour killings studied in the research were Muslim, while rest were Sikh.

It concludes:

While the sample size is small, this study suggests that honor killing is accelerating in North America and may correlate with the numbers of first generation immigrants. The problem is diverse but originates with immigration from majority Muslim countries and regions—the Palestinian territories, the Kurdish regions of Turkey and Iraq, majority Muslim countries in the Balkans, Bangladesh, Egypt, and Afghanistan. Pakistanis accounts for the plurality. The common denominator in each case is not culture but religion.

At at the trial of Shafilea Ahmed's parents, the judge Mr Justice Roderick Evans, giving them a life sentence with a minimum of 25 years in prison, told them: "Your concern about being shamed in your community was greater than the love of your child."

This may sound totally implausible, even incredible to Western ears, but can be better understood when one knows about the individual and community psychology prevailing among Muslims and how it differs from the Western one, as well explained in Jihad Watch by Nicolai Sennels, a Danish psychologist with professional experience in the Copenhagen youth prison Sønderbro and acute observer of Muslim behaviour in Denmark:

Secondly, most Muslims are not allowed to integrate. There is an exceedingly strong social control in the Muslim society. Everybody is keeping an eye on everybody, and if someone does not follow the cultural or religious code they are met with criticism and risk severe consequences, such as being banned from their community or even from their own family. In the worst cases – and there are many of those – Muslim women in particular live under a constant death threat that deprives them of basic human rights, such as the freedom to choose one’s own sexual partners, clothing style, friends, religion and lifestyle. Most of my Muslim clients saw their religious and cultural background as the height of civilization and morality – leaving it would be seen as a kind of cultural and religious apostasy and degradation by their kinsmen. And there are not needed many killings, kidnappings, beatings and other honourable kinds of behaviour before the rest do as they are expected to.

... Many of those Muslims who actually manage to go all the way live under constant threats from the traditional Muslim community that see the integrated Muslims' lifestyle as apostasy, punishable by the strict Sharia laws. These social and psychological hindrances have convinced me that Muslim integration will never happen to the necessary extent. It will happen in some places to a certain extent, but the vast majority will not overcome the psychological, intellectual, cultural, religious and social challenges. [Emphasis added]

Human Rights Are Not the Problem

I continue here my discussion of the issue of human rights which I started on the previous post Is There Something Wrong with Human Rights?, so I take it from where I left.

As in my previous article, I will concentrate on the arguments found on Islam versus Europe (henceforth IVE) because, as far as I know, that blog is the only Counterjihad voice to have attempted a systematic attack on human rights.

Throughout this piece I'll refer to human rights using the singular pronoun "it" because the reference is to the concept.

Interestingly, during our discussion IVE says that it advocates only two principles: democracy narrowly intended as majority rule, and nationalism. But later on it reveals that it also supports free speech. What is that if not a classical human right? When somebody says that he believes in free speech, what he means is that he believes in the "right to" free speech: it would not have any sense otherwise.

IVE talks about strategy and asks for a strategy, which is obviously a complex issue that IVE oversimplifies.

IVE doesn't really have a strategy. What it has is an aspiration, doing away with human rights, but doesn't know how to do it: a strategy would require to spell out how to achieve that.

That human rights is a false enemy you can see from a simple example.

Let's take freedom of religion, a typical example of human rights. Let's look at Cameron/Clegg's plan in the UK to force the Christian clergy to go against their religious principles and marry "gays" in church. If the British PM and deputy PM really believed in the right of people to act in accordance with their religious beliefs, they would not do that.

Much more difficult is to justify a "right" of homosexuals to use the services of an established Church in a way that contradicts the tenets of that Church.

Here you can see that the elites don't necessarily believe in human rights, they just use it arbitrarily to favour whomever, for non-human-rights ideological reasons, they like (in this case, homosexuals) when their interests (not rights, but desires) conflict with those of others who don't enjoy their favour (in this case the Christian clergy).

Human rights is just a tool they use because it's there and it's handy, but if they were deprived of it they would find another means.

The real problem is in the ideology of the elites, human rights is just a paper tiger and a false target.

IVE might say that human rights serves well any of the elites' unfair agenda because of its plasticity but, as I explained in Is There Something Wrong with Human Rights?, all legal and ethical principles, all laws need to be balanced against each other, so anything else they could use would have the same ambiguity and the same effect desired by them.

It's a case of appropriation. The current PC, pro-Islam elites have appropriated human rights for themselves and used it for their own agenda and purposes. We must take this principle back and show that it's been distorted and how it can be returned to its original, restricted, better defined meaning.

Many of the constantly-claimed “rights” are actually not rights at all, they are privileges. The definition of “right” these days has become so broad that what people really mean when they say they have a right to something is simply that they have a need or desire for something, as you can see when debt-burdened governments have to cut spending and people say they have a “right” to those benefits or services that are being cut or closed, even down to local libraries. Here's an example of this use of the term:

I believe in our community and its right to our library.

Basically, anything that anybody wants gives rise to a “right”, but this is simply a misnomer of the real concept. It is not difficult to show that these are misinterpretations.

It goes back to my original idea that the principle of human rights is in this predicament because it’s wrongly applied. The distinction between negative rights (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) and positive rights, which we could call for short the never-ending proliferation of “entitlements”, pointed out by Gates of Vienna and vederso of EJBron, is fundamental.

That's the goal of our strategy on human rights. As for the means, this is a good, old-fashioned battle to truly, not just superficially, get public opinion on our side and for power through democratic elections, as it would be anyway, human rights or not.

These are the scenarios, if we concentrated on abolishing human rights:

Outcome 1) We succeed in getting rid of human rights. To achieve that we must have garnered so much power that human rights would no longer represent a problem anyway because, as I explained, the problem is just how the current elites apply and use this principle.

Outcome 2) We don't succeed and we've wasted precious time and resources in fighting a false enemy.

In summary, the real enemy are the ideology and goals of the present elites, not human rights, which is only the means they use to implement that ideology and achieve those goals and would be easily replaced to the same effect.

In the next posts I'll deal with other examples cited by IVE in support of its position.

BBC Unconvinced that Syrian Christians Are under Threat

Last night the BBC reported about the plight of Syrian Christians.

It's a monumental effort for the BBC to cover the topic of Christians persecuted just for being Christian. Despite the daily constant coverage of events in Syria it has talked of the country's Christians perhaps only once before, in April with a short report. And when it does it's always in an iffy way, as if it couldn't bring itself to accept that it's a real problem.

The newsreader who introduced the short, filmed report was so unfamiliar with the topic that, just before giving the percentage of Christians among Syrians, she hesitated and then got it wrong by a long shot, saying 2% instead of 10%.

The programme mentioned an interview with a woman whose "family had fled Syria for Lebanon because it was simply too frightening now for Christians, she insisted."

The report concluded:

The events of the Arab Spring have revitalised Syria's Brotherhood.

However one of the group's leaders, Molham al-Drobi, told the BBC that Christians had nothing to fear.

The Muslim Brotherhood would not try to establish an Islamic state.

"We are not working towards a religious state," he said.

"We don't think Syria is a place where you could have a religious state because Syria has different religions, different ethnic groups, different races."

That does not seem to have deterred Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood from its intention to impose Sharia law on all Egyptians, as this video of President Morsi, translated by MEMRI, shows:





Why should we believe what Brotherhood members say to us Westerners? Do they have any interest in telling non-Muslims what their intentions are? We know the answers to these questions, especially in the light of the Islamic doctrines that consider lying to unbelievers in order to further Islam's cause permissible and even desirable. War is deceit.

Wake Up, Animal Rights People!

To see that the animal movement has left the initiative of fighting against the huge spread of halal meat in Britain to the BNP, who organized a protest in Sunderland against Subway sandwich shops selling it (and there many of them all over the country) is shocking and saddening.

I wrote in Islam in the UK, in my site Britain Gallery:

When I first arrived here, the word “halal” was unknown to everybody except the people involved in animal welfare, who knew that the Islamic method of slaughter was bad news indeed for the animals. Now you only have to take a 30-minute drive around London (any part) and you’ll see dozens of Halal signs in shops and restaurants.

It's true that animals should not be killed for food, as vegetarian nutrition is not only adequate but in fact much better for human health than meat eating. It's true that animals always suffer during the process of farming - especially industrial farming -, transport to the point of slaughter, and in the slaughterhouse due to terror and maltreatment. It's true that even so-called "humane" slaughter can sometimes go wrong and animals may be conscious when their throats are cut or they are otherwise killed.

But we can point out all these things and still be opposed to halal and kosher methods of slaughter.

Stunning animals before slaughter is certainly better than not doing that, whatever else is true about farm animals exploitation and suffering.

Sweden has banned ritual methods of slaughter, so this shows that it is a realistic objective in the UK as well.

To find out what ritual slaughter involves, read this post and watch the video.

There is a growing opposition to halal meat among the British people, based on both animal welfare and the just rebellion against being disposessed of the culture and ethics of one's own country.

We should be at the forefront of this protest, which can ony be good for animals because, among other things, will provide a model example of a widespread protest for animal welfare popular among the general public.

This is only one of many ways in which Islam is an obstacle to animal liberation and animal welfare. In the Netherlands, when Muslim politician Hasan Küçük, a Turkish-Dutch representative on The Hague city council for the Islam Democrats, called for a ban on dogs in The Hague, Holland's third-largest city, because dogs are "unclean" in the Islamic legal tradition, it was left to Paul ter Linden, representative of Geert Wilders' PVV on the city council, to reply: "In this country pet ownership is legal. Whoever disagrees with this should move to another country." The Dutch Party for the Animals, whose proposal to make The Hague a dog-friendlier city had prompted Küçük's call for banning dogs, was silent.

Since the number of Muslims in the UK and Europe is doubling faster than you can say "Ramadan", there will be many more times in the future when we'll face this choice: are we going to give in each time? In the long battle ahead are we going to choose political correctness or the animals?

New Study Shows Half of USA Global Warming is Artificial

Meteorologist Anthony Watts, author of one of the best known and most widely read global warming skeptical blogs, Wattsupwiththat, has released a scientific discussion paper challenging the data used by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to support its climate change claims.

Watts and the study's other authors concluded: "reported 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled, with 92% of that over-estimation resulting from erroneous NOAA adjustments of well-sited stations upward." [Emphasis added]

Breitbart interviewed one of the paper's co-authors, Dr. John R. Christy, climate change expert of international fame, who said:

In 2010, the World Meteorological Organization adopted a new standard for temperature collection stations. This discussion paper is the first to apply that standard. The finding is that when the new class scheme was applied to weather stations, the stations considered compliant had cooler trends than non-compliant stations. [Empahsis added]

The first application of the recent WMO-approved standard, then, led to a correction of the temperatures downward.

The study's lead researcher Anthony Watts' decision to pre-release it as a discussion paper for public review, before peer-reviewed journal submission, is new in academic research. Climate change "converted skeptic" Richard Muller is the only researcher to have done this before.