On Muslim sensitivities

Why is it that no one in this world can say “Islam sucks, you must be really dumb to be a Muslim” without having a fatwa issued against him?
Why is it that a Miss World pageant can end up a civil war when someone remarks that Mohammed would have liked some (or all) of the contestants?
Why is it many Muslims have no sense of proportion?

I’ll tell you why.

Islam is a bullshit religion (well, they all are, but some are even worse than others). Islam feels it isn’t even second-best (that would be Christianity), it comes third! Its followers don’t like to think about it much, but Islam is basically another reformist movement, much like that started by Luther, and for much the same reason (and with much the same outcome: It didn’t replace its predecessors, just drew quite a crowd, which pissed Mohammed off mightily).

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Islam is any better or worse than any other religion (although the average Muslim is certainly my last choice for a new neighbour). Islam’s followers however know deep in their hearts that their lives suck. The lives of all their ancestors sucked, and if it’s up to their religious leaders, their children’s lives will suck even worse. All because they choose to follow and obey primitive fanatics who hate life in general, women in particular and are incapable of genuine laughter and happiness.

Much of this used to be true for Christians as well (and it still is for a small minority of them). Exactly, that was many hundreds of years ago. It’s the dark ages of Islam we are ALL in. Hope the renaissance comes soon…

Update: Googling "death sentence Islam" scores nearly 82.000 hits. So just to compare, I also Googled "death sentence Christianity", and I scored 114.000! But guess what?! All the pages I checked out on this last search turned out to be Christians sentenced to death or under threat thereof BY ISLAM!

On reciprocity

Most people who only know about the Mid-East problems from what the media tell them have come to believe that the blame lies in the middle. That Arabs and Jews are (at best) equally responsible for all the trouble, the violence, the suffering and grief, or perhaps even that really Israel is to blame.

There was a time that it was not so. There was a time when, rationally at least, people were aware of history and how things came to be the way they are now.
No longer. Israel is perceived as the Goliath, the Palestinians as the underdog. Forget about the wars in ’48, ’67 and ’73, all started by combined Arab armies with the explicit intent to eradicate Israel. Israel is obviously strong and able to defend itself, and the Palestinians really are no threat, just a painful thorn in the side of the Jewish state.

Why doesn’t Israel kill all the Palestinians? Really? Don’t get me wrong, I am against such an idea, but who’s stopping them?
What if the roles were reversed? Is there even ONE person on this planet who seriously contends that – if they had the power – the Palestinians would not kill the Jews to the last man, woman and child? In all their Arab radio- and TV broadcasts, in all their newspapers, on all their websites they explicitly say so.
Israeli’s kill Palestinians, almost always in the course of counter terrorism. If Palestinians would cease their attacks, the Israeli’s would stop their incursions, strikes and demolitions. The reverse is not true, and never has been. Before Israel conquered Judea and Samaria in 1967 from Jordan, who had annexed it, there were terrorist attacks daily (but not one Arab - and this includes Arafat - claimed the land for the Palestinians!). The PLO was three years old already, obviously the occupation of “the West bank” could not have been the reason for its existence.

The simple fact of life is: Israeli’s are decent human beings, and are in fact a lot more moderate in their response to terrorism than the US or ANY European country is or would be in similar circumstances. The Arabs on the other hand are barbarians, led by despots, dictators and religious nutcases who have vowed to destroy Israel, don’t give a shit about the suffering of their own people in the process, and who only listen to force.

The real mystery is: Why is the West so anxious to forget this time and time again?

On wearing a veil in Islam

You can talk all you want about this but wearing a veil signifies backwardness and inequality between men and women, at best. The bigger the veil, the worse the inequality.

Muslim women try to rationalize wearing it, as do men. They have to, as there is no religious reason for doing so. The best you can find in the Koran are some statements about women not making themselves attractive, or available, or something similarly vague.

Men and women are not equal in Islam. Men know themselves, and so they realize that other men look at their wives, sisters and mothers as they themselves do. Lacking even the admittedly very modest self-control that Western men have, they solve the problem by keeping their women at home, not allowing them out unless chaperoned and hidden behind a veil.

As I said, Muslim women rationalize wearing it by saying they agree with the idea behind the rule, namely they don't want their appearance to distract from the real person. A principle I agree with, but clearly, hiding yourself is fighting a symptom. Western society is plagued by an emphasis on outward appearances, but trying to fight this by hiding is ludicrous, and indicates a tendency to justify abuse of women who don't "hide". It is up to men to behave, it is not up to women not to "provoke" them. The general idea that 99% of all Muslim men share that scantily dressed Western women are whores and have no rights stems from this same feeling. And placing the responsibility on the women instead of on the men also sends a signal that men are not to blame for whatever they do with (or to) a woman who is not covered up from head to toe.

The Judenrat.

In WW2 there was the phenomenon of the Judenrat, Jewish councils installed by the Germans everywhere they occupied to administer the Jews through their own leadership. Usually the members of this council were recognized leaders from the community. The Germans figured rightly that people who get told the bad news by their own are less likely to rebel than when told by the Enemy. At the same time you can manipulate a small group of seemingly privileged people by appearing to make them part of the decision-making process, by sharing information with them that makes difficult measures easier to accept, while at the same time making it clear that the ordinary people are incapable of digesting that info. It makes the council feel more elite still. Apart from this psychological mechanism, there was always the hope that, being a member of the Council, you had better chances of survival, or could hustle and arrange things that ordinary people could not.

Wether they realized it or not, members of the Judenrat were traitors. They aided the Europeans in general and the Germans in particular in their Final Solution. No matter what they told themselves the benefit would or might be, no matter what small advantages they gained through their actions, they were a powerful tool in the Germans' quest for the destruction of the Jews.

Even if all the members of all the Judenrats were murdered, their spiritual descendants are among us. Jews are among the worst enemies of the Jewish people. Jews belonging to the category I refer to are all the more evil because other Jewhaters still regard them as Jews, and use their opinions and attitudes to show that even Jews themselves are repulsed by Jews.

The Jews I speak of all have certain traits in common:

They regard themselves more as members of the general community they live in than as part of the Jewish community

They value (their idea of) morality higher than the welfare of the Jews.

They greatly value being regarded as objective, or neutral, in any conflict. They place great importance on the opinion of non-Jews where their own position is concerned. They will do everything they can to avoid siding with Israel or the Jews, because they know siding with Israel by Jews is taken for granted by non-Jews.

They have all (in spite of the horrible losses they have ALL suffered in their families) neglected to learn the most important lesson: Israel, the Jews, have very few friends. They have many great and powerful living and thriving enemies, that rejoice at the death of every Jew, past, present and future. They see the Holocaust as a fluke, an event separate from history and separate from presentday events. They are wrong.

The Jews I refer to make many of the same mistakes that non-Jews make when they try to form an opinion on the current situation in Israel. This is in itself understandable. But Jews have a far greater responsibility when openly criticizing Israel. Jews are so few. Jews have been persecuted for as long as history records. Jews now have a tiny country, that most of the world is ready to split, and give one half away to an implacable enemy, one of many.
The Jews don't need another critical voice, there are literally billions of those. They need more friends and allies, not the type that claim to be by "criticizing constructively", but by unconditional support.

If Jews don't stand by each other this way, history IS bound to repeat itself.