Superior Culture?

[sky dancer]

The claim of a 'superior culture' accompanies war, conquest and genocide.

 

[catzmeow]

The claim of a 'superior culture' accompanies war, conquest and genocide.

So, in your book, no culture is ever superior? All cultures are morally equivalent?

For instance, a culture that believes that gays should be killed for their "sins" and that women should be mutilated is just as good as a culture that peacefully tolerates all faiths?

 

[Sunni Man]

I would like to know how someone truly following the Quran, can fully assimilate in a Western society.

The same as a practicing Christian following the Bible, or practicing Jew following the Torah, or a practicing Buddhist following the teachings of Buddha.

 

[catzmeow]

The same as a practicing Christian following the Bible, or practicing Jew following the Torah, or a practicing Buddhist following the teachings of Buddha.

The problem is that none of the faiths you've mentioned incorporate killing infiidels as a tenet of the religion itself. Nor do their modern variations preach the subjugation of women.

 

[sky dancer]

The same as a practicing Christian following the Bible, or practicing Jew following the Torah, or a practicing Buddhist following the teachings of Buddha.

Buddhists do not have a teaching on jihad or justification for war.

 

[Sunni Man]

Buddhists do not have a teaching on jihad or justification for war.

But they do engage in war.

Japan is a Buddhist nation who's people murdered millions of innocents during WWII

 

[sky dancer]

But they do engage in war.

Japan is a Buddhist nation who's people murdered millions of innocents during WWII

You haven't answered the question about Islam. We're talking about America, not Japan. Japan's primary religion is Shinto--not Buddhism.

There are militant Buddhist in Sri Lanka. There are no Buddhist scriptures that advocate war and killing. These Buddhists are heretics--they have what we call 'wrong view'.

The conflict is Sri Lanka is cultural and not just religious.

 

[Anguille]

There's much I agree with, yet it seems a bit harsh. Interesting interview by James Taranto of Geert Wilders:

Geert Wilders: 'Our Culture Is Better' - WSJ.com

The Netherlands has had it's share of wacky politicians. Pyn Fonteine for one. Geert is not the most famous politician there. The Mayor of Amsterdam is. Job Cohen. Female genital mutilation is not a religious or Muslim practice, it is practiced by many mostly rural Ethiopians and Somalis. Christian and Jewish ones do it too.

 

[Anguille]

Once again, read "Infidel" by Ayaan Hirisi Ali. She is a Somali Muslim who moved to Holland to escape to oppression of Islam. She's lived in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Holland.

She insists a free country, which supports human rights, cannot justify allowing the Muslim religion to abuse and traumatize their own people in the name of "religious freedom". She says it is a contradiction in everything that a free society stands for, and the idea of putting up with violence and repression in the name of "tolerance" is ridiculous.

And that is the difference. Christians don't teach children that women are vile and unpure. They don't teach them that they are "half" as important as men. They don't teach them submission in all things, and in fact teach them that we should stand up for what is right and good. We do not earn our way to heaven by accepting beatings by our husbands. We are not considered "evil" if we are raped. Strange men don't come into our homes to beat the crap out of us for wearing the wrong thing on the street.

Hirsi Ali had some interesting things to say about her own life experiences with a grandmother who wished to keep her and her sisters trapped in the old enthic ways and a father who opposed them.When she was on her own she did some remarkable things. Even when she was worked with Theo Van Gogh she did worthwhile things even if she had a limited view and was aware of that.
But now she is paid by a right wing think tank in Washington to spread anti-Muslim hate. She has her own issues to deal with.

 

[Sunni Man]

Lifting the Veil on Ayaan Hirsi Ali
February 20, 2007


Every once in a while, a native informer comes along who is willing to affirm his or her own inferiority in order to help the West rationalize its neocolonial grip on the South. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the latest, and one of the more ambitious among them. This 38-year-old Dutch citizen of Somali origin has built a career on her criticisms of Islam, the religion she renounced after the 9/11, for its “brutality”. Through her unrestrained attacks on Islam, her close friendship with far-right Dutch politican Pim Fortuyn and rabid xenophobia, she rode a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment all the way into the Parliament [on a ticket from the right-wing People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD)] only to leave for the United States after an uproar over lies she had told to obtain asylum. Presently, she works for the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. In 2005, Time magazine named Hirsi Ali as one of its 100 Most Influential People of the World.

As her new book, Infidel, scales the charts to reach the New York Times Bestseller list, let us look at who this intrepid feminist really is.

Over the years, Hirsi Ali has produced three books: The Son Factory, The Caged Virgin and Infidel. The latter, presently sits at No. 6 on the NYT Bestseller list, aided, no doubt, by the glowing reviews it received from Washington Post and New York Times. However, in Britain, reviewers seem less sanguine: The Economist writes:

The facts as Ms Hirsi Ali tells them here do not fit well either with some of the stories she has told in the past or with her tendency in her political writing to ascribe most of the troubles of the Muslim world to Islam…As a young woman, Ms Hirsi Ali’s mother, Asha, does not seem to have inhabited “the virgin’s cage” that the author claims imprisons Muslim women around the world. At the age of 15, she travelled by herself to Aden where she got a job cleaning house for a British woman…Ms Hirsi Ali sounds less frank when she tells the convoluted story of how and why she came to seek asylum at the age of 22 in the Netherlands. She has admitted in the past to changing her name and her age, and to concocting a story for the Dutch authorities about running away from Somalia’s civil war. (In fact she left from Kenya, where she had had refugee status for ten years.)…
However, last May a Dutch television documentary suggested that while Ms Hirsi Ali did run away from a marriage, her life was in no danger…the facts as she tells them about the many chances she passed up to get out of the marriage—how her father and his clan disapproved of violence against women; how relatives already in the Netherlands helped her to gain asylum; and how her ex-husband peaceably agreed to a divorce—hardly seem to bear her out.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not the first person to use false pretences to try to find a better life in the West, nor will she be the last. But the muddy account given in this book of her so-called forced marriage becomes more troubling when one considers that Ms Hirsi Ali has built a career out of portraying herself as the lifelong victim of fanatical Muslims.
In the United States, however, the book received a much different treatment. Both the top newspapers, Washington Post and New York Times, gave it glowing reviews (This is in stark contrast with the treatment they usually meet out to authors critical of Israel: the papers got people who are linked to the Israel Lobby to review books by Norman Finkelstein, Jimmy Carter, Robert Fisk, for instance) Each one offers its own gem for our modest amusement.

Washington Post:“The press began to explore her past, discovering the “inventions” that she had used to get her refugee status…Along the way, Hirsi Ali displays what surely must be her greatest gift: the talent for recalling, describing and honestly analyzing the precise state of her feelings at each stage of that journey.”

New York Times: “Ms. Hirsi Ali, at her English-language school, devoured Nancy Drew mysteries and English adventure series, ‘tales of freedom, adventure, of equality between girls and boys, trust and friendship’.”

Girl Power

While she describes herself as a woman who “fights for the rights of Muslim women, the enlightenment of Islam and the security of the West,” Hirsi Ali, according to Lorraine Ali of Newsweek, “is more a hero among Islamophobes than Islamic women”.

This statement would be clealry unfair if all that she and her sister had to suffer, and all that she has courageously decided to make a stand against, are indeed true. The Economist writes:

Another, even more disturbing story concerns her sister Haweya’s sojourn in the Netherlands. In her earlier book, “The Caged Virgin”, which came out last year, Ms Hirsi Ali wrote that her sister came to the Netherlands to avoid being “married off”. In “Infidel”, however, she says Haweya came to recover from an illicit affair with a married man that ended in abortion. Ms Hirsi Ali helped Haweya make up another fabricated story that gained her refugee status, but the Netherlands offered her little respite. After another affair and a further abortion, Haweya was put into a psychiatric hospital. Back in Nairobi, she died from a miscarriage brought on by an episode of religious frenzy. “It was the worst news of my life,” Ms Hirsi Ali writes.

The Identity Crisis

On May 15, 2006, officials of the Netherlands government cast doubt on Hirsi Ali’s status as a Dutch national, because she had provided false information in her application for refugee status. She had later used the same false information when she had applied for, and been granted, Dutch citizenship. The Dutch minister of immigration and integration, Rita Verdonk, moved to annul her citizenship, a move that was later overridden on the urging of Parliament.

Shilling for the Israel Lobby

Hirsi Ali is at present a resident scholar at the neocon hotbed, American Enterprise Institute and in an interview with the Chairman of the Board of Fellows at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Manfred Gerstenfeld, she expressed a remarkably favorable view of the country.

My main impression was that Israel is a liberal democracy. In the places I visited, including Jerusalem as well as Tel Aviv and its beaches, I saw that men and women are equal. One never knows what happens behind the scenes, but that is how it appears to the visitor. The many women in the army are also very visible…
Whether one arrives from Ethiopia or Russia, or one’s grandparents immigrated from Europe, what binds them is being Jewish. Such a bond is lacking in the Netherlands.
The only problem she saw with Israel, on the other hand, was that the country “has a problem with fundamentalists,” he ultra-Orthodox, “will cause a demographic problem because these fanatics have more children than the secular and the regular Orthodox.”

The responsibility for the “dilapidated” condition of the Palestinians, on the other hand, she lays on Palestinians themselves, and she chides Europeans for seeing an end to occupation as the solution to their problems.

“The crisis of Dutch socialism can be sized up in its attitudes toward both Islam and Israel. It holds Israel to exceptionally high moral standards. The Israelis, however, will always do well, because they themselves set high standards for their actions.
“The standards for judging the Palestinians, however, are very low. Most outsiders remain silent on all the problems in their territories. That helps the Palestinians become even more corrupt than they already are. Those who live in the territories are not allowed to say anything about this because they risk being murdered by their own people.”
Freedom of (Hate) Speech

One of the incidents that propelled her to stardom was her collaboration with Theo Van Gogh on a film, Submission. Van Gogh was subsequently murdered by an enraged Moroccan over the offensive content of the film, who also left a death threat against Hirsi Ali on the corpse. Although Van Gogh was immediately hailed as a martyr for freedom of speech by some liberals — and every Islamophobe — few mentioned the man’s (well known) rabid racism and bigotry, which included calling Muslims “goatfuckers” and suggesting that Eveline Gans, a Jewish historian, “gets wet dreams about being fucked by Dr Mengele”.

www,fanonite.org/2007/02/20/lifting-the-veil-on-ayaan-hirsi-ali

 

[FireGod]

Ooops did it again, multiple replies to multiple replies to multiple posts.

The claim of a 'superior culture' accompanies war, conquest and genocide.

Superiority complex perchance?

So, in your book, no culture is ever superior? All cultures are morally equivalent?

For instance, a culture that believes that gays should be killed for their "sins" and that women should be mutilated is just as good as a culture that peacefully tolerates all faiths?

That is not what she said. I think what she is getting at is when one thinks of themselves as superior to another being then trouble follows for the "inferior"

The same as a practicing Christian following the Bible, or practicing Jew following the Torah, or a practicing Buddhist following the teachings of Buddha.

Really, so do you do your killings in secret? All of those stoning have to happen somewhere.

The problem is that none of the faiths you've mentioned incorporate killing infidels as a tenet of the religion itself. Nor do their modern variations preach the subjugation of women.

Your assertion is that Islam needs to evolve a bit?

But they do engage in war.

Japan is a Buddhist nation who's people murdered millions of innocents during WWII

The only religion in this day in age 2008 who openly advocates war is Islam. Granted it is mostly the fundamentalists ....... still.

You haven't answered the question about Islam. We're talking about America, not Japan. Japan's primary religion is Shinto--not Buddhism.

There are militant Buddhist in Sri Lanka. There are no Buddhist scriptures that advocate war and killing. These Buddhists are heretics--they have what we call 'wrong view'.

The conflict is Sri Lanka is cultural and not just religious.

Do the Buddhists believe in self defense?

 

[Xenophon]

But they do engage in war.

Japan is a Buddhist nation who's people murdered millions of innocents during WWII

Japan was a nation that believed in Shintoism, that was their state religion, not Buddism.

Buddists existed but Shinto is what they followed.

This whole reality thing is giving you lots of problems, isn't it.

 

[Sunni Man]

Do the Buddhists believe in self defense?

Ever watch Kung Fu grasshopper??

 

[Xenophon]

Ever watch Kung Fu grasshopper??

The characters in that followed Taoism, not Budismism.

 

[FireGod]

Ever watch Kung Fu grasshopper??

I know you did not direct me to an old TV show as a reference.

 

[Anguille]

Lifting the Veil on Ayaan Hirsi Ali
February 20, 2007


Every once in a while, a native informer comes along who is willing to affirm his or her own inferiority in order to help the West rationalize its neocolonial grip on the South. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the latest, and one of the more ambitious among them. This 38-year-old Dutch citizen of Somali origin has built a career on her criticisms of Islam, the religion she renounced after the 9/11, for its “brutality”. Through her unrestrained attacks on Islam, her close friendship with far-right Dutch politican Pim Fortuyn and rabid xenophobia, she rode a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment all the way into the Parliament [on a ticket from the right-wing People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD)] only to leave for the United States after an uproar over lies she had told to obtain asylum. Presently, she works for the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. In 2005, Time magazine named Hirsi Ali as one of its 100 Most Influential People of the World.

As her new book, Infidel, scales the charts to reach the New York Times Bestseller list, let us look at who this intrepid feminist really is.

Over the years, Hirsi Ali has produced three books: The Son Factory, The Caged Virgin and Infidel. The latter, presently sits at No. 6 on the NYT Bestseller list, aided, no doubt, by the glowing reviews it received from Washington Post and New York Times. However, in Britain, reviewers seem less sanguine: The Economist writes:

The facts as Ms Hirsi Ali tells them here do not fit well either with some of the stories she has told in the past or with her tendency in her political writing to ascribe most of the troubles of the Muslim world to Islam…As a young woman, Ms Hirsi Ali’s mother, Asha, does not seem to have inhabited “the virgin’s cage” that the author claims imprisons Muslim women around the world. At the age of 15, she travelled by herself to Aden where she got a job cleaning house for a British woman…Ms Hirsi Ali sounds less frank when she tells the convoluted story of how and why she came to seek asylum at the age of 22 in the Netherlands. She has admitted in the past to changing her name and her age, and to concocting a story for the Dutch authorities about running away from Somalia’s civil war. (In fact she left from Kenya, where she had had refugee status for ten years.)…
However, last May a Dutch television documentary suggested that while Ms Hirsi Ali did run away from a marriage, her life was in no danger…the facts as she tells them about the many chances she passed up to get out of the marriage—how her father and his clan disapproved of violence against women; how relatives already in the Netherlands helped her to gain asylum; and how her ex-husband peaceably agreed to a divorce—hardly seem to bear her out.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not the first person to use false pretences to try to find a better life in the West, nor will she be the last. But the muddy account given in this book of her so-called forced marriage becomes more troubling when one considers that Ms Hirsi Ali has built a career out of portraying herself as the lifelong victim of fanatical Muslims.
In the United States, however, the book received a much different treatment. Both the top newspapers, Washington Post and New York Times, gave it glowing reviews (This is in stark contrast with the treatment they usually meet out to authors critical of Israel: the papers got people who are linked to the Israel Lobby to review books by Norman Finkelstein, Jimmy Carter, Robert Fisk, for instance) Each one offers its own gem for our modest amusement.

Washington Post:“The press began to explore her past, discovering the “inventions” that she had used to get her refugee status…Along the way, Hirsi Ali displays what surely must be her greatest gift: the talent for recalling, describing and honestly analyzing the precise state of her feelings at each stage of that journey.”

New York Times: “Ms. Hirsi Ali, at her English-language school, devoured Nancy Drew mysteries and English adventure series, ‘tales of freedom, adventure, of equality between girls and boys, trust and friendship’.”

Girl Power

While she describes herself as a woman who “fights for the rights of Muslim women, the enlightenment of Islam and the security of the West,” Hirsi Ali, according to Lorraine Ali of Newsweek, “is more a hero among Islamophobes than Islamic women”.

This statement would be clealry unfair if all that she and her sister had to suffer, and all that she has courageously decided to make a stand against, are indeed true. The Economist writes:

Another, even more disturbing story concerns her sister Haweya’s sojourn in the Netherlands. In her earlier book, “The Caged Virgin”, which came out last year, Ms Hirsi Ali wrote that her sister came to the Netherlands to avoid being “married off”. In “Infidel”, however, she says Haweya came to recover from an illicit affair with a married man that ended in abortion. Ms Hirsi Ali helped Haweya make up another fabricated story that gained her refugee status, but the Netherlands offered her little respite. After another affair and a further abortion, Haweya was put into a psychiatric hospital. Back in Nairobi, she died from a miscarriage brought on by an episode of religious frenzy. “It was the worst news of my life,” Ms Hirsi Ali writes.

The Identity Crisis

On May 15, 2006, officials of the Netherlands government cast doubt on Hirsi Ali’s status as a Dutch national, because she had provided false information in her application for refugee status. She had later used the same false information when she had applied for, and been granted, Dutch citizenship. The Dutch minister of immigration and integration, Rita Verdonk, moved to annul her citizenship, a move that was later overridden on the urging of Parliament.

Shilling for the Israel Lobby

Hirsi Ali is at present a resident scholar at the neocon hotbed, American Enterprise Institute and in an interview with the Chairman of the Board of Fellows at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Manfred Gerstenfeld, she expressed a remarkably favorable view of the country.

My main impression was that Israel is a liberal democracy. In the places I visited, including Jerusalem as well as Tel Aviv and its beaches, I saw that men and women are equal. One never knows what happens behind the scenes, but that is how it appears to the visitor. The many women in the army are also very visible…
Whether one arrives from Ethiopia or Russia, or one’s grandparents immigrated from Europe, what binds them is being Jewish. Such a bond is lacking in the Netherlands.
The only problem she saw with Israel, on the other hand, was that the country “has a problem with fundamentalists,” he ultra-Orthodox, “will cause a demographic problem because these fanatics have more children than the secular and the regular Orthodox.”

The responsibility for the “dilapidated” condition of the Palestinians, on the other hand, she lays on Palestinians themselves, and she chides Europeans for seeing an end to occupation as the solution to their problems.

“The crisis of Dutch socialism can be sized up in its attitudes toward both Islam and Israel. It holds Israel to exceptionally high moral standards. The Israelis, however, will always do well, because they themselves set high standards for their actions.
“The standards for judging the Palestinians, however, are very low. Most outsiders remain silent on all the problems in their territories. That helps the Palestinians become even more corrupt than they already are. Those who live in the territories are not allowed to say anything about this because they risk being murdered by their own people.”
Freedom of (Hate) Speech

One of the incidents that propelled her to stardom was her collaboration with Theo Van Gogh on a film, Submission. Van Gogh was subsequently murdered by an enraged Moroccan over the offensive content of the film, who also left a death threat against Hirsi Ali on the corpse. Although Van Gogh was immediately hailed as a martyr for freedom of speech by some liberals — and every Islamophobe — few mentioned the man’s (well known) rabid racism and bigotry, which included calling Muslims “goatfuckers” and suggesting that Eveline Gans, a Jewish historian, “gets wet dreams about being fucked by Dr Mengele”.

www,fanonite.org/2007/02/20/lifting-the-veil-on-ayaan-hirsi-ali

I've seen her give different answer to the same questions depending on who is interviewing her. It's also possible to interpret her written words in ways that suit whomever. I believe she does that intentionally because she is a smart operator.

 

[eots]

a Muslim family runs our local grocery store his daughters all work there they ware head covers but have very beautiful smiling faces and a very gentle and dignified way about them..I have never heard the father speak harshly to any of them...

 

[Sunni Man]

I've seen her give different answer to the same questions depending on who is interviewing her. It's also possible to interpret her written words in ways that suit whomever. I believe she does that intentionally because she is a smart operator.

Smart Operator?

Is that a code word for clever liar?

 

[FireGod]

a Muslim family runs our local grocery store his daughters all work there they ware head covers but have very beautiful smiling faces and a very gentle and dignified way about them..I have never heard the father speak harshly to any of them...

I don't speak harshly to my slave in public either. Nor do I make her cover up her punishments though.

Thing is, obey or leave is much more humane than obey or DIE.

There is something to be said for consent.

 

[FireGod]

Smart Operator?

Is that a code word for clever liar?

At least she is better than GWB in that department.