What I Remember About the Satanic Verses, Before I Reread It

About fifteen years ago I read Salman Rushdie’s the Satanic Verses. I knew nothing about Islam at the time–well, only what a typical American “knows”: Muslim men can have four wives, some Muslim girls’ genitals are mutilated, images of the prophet are not allowed, and so on.

I’m going to re-read it, since it occurred to me that I might enjoy it more now that I’ve studied Islam a little bit. But this morning I read a piece on Cracked.com where the claim was made that the upset about the book was due to a mistranslated titled and not because in the book Muhammad’s revelations were delivered by a demon rather than an angel.

Well, I don’t remember that much about the book except that it was way more artsy than I like anymore and that it was a chore to get through and that I could see very well why Muslims would get upset at the book, as in the book the prophet Muhammad’s revelations were delivered by a demon rather than an angel.

Anyhow, I’m going to reread it soon. And also, as far as I remember, the meaning of the phrase the Satanic verses, while in real life may refer to some verses excised from the Qur’an, had nothing to do with the book. A lot of people seem to think it does.

So stay tuned. And share your opinion.

 

On Jihad, Ignorance Stands Still

The Washington Post had an article the other day about an ad campaign in DC to inform the public on what ‘jihad’ actually means.

With a four-week ad buy in the Shaw, Waterfront, Rockville and Dunn Loring Metro stations, organizer Ahmed Rehab, who is also executive director of the Chicago branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, says that he is hoping to change the narrative around the word jihad.

“We kind of got tired sitting there watching people tell us what we believe or what we don’t believe.”

The posters feature photos of Muslims sharing their religious struggles, and uses lines like “my jihad is to build bridges through friendship” and “my jihad: modesty is not a weakness.”

Twelve years after 9/11 and the initial bout of screaming American ignorance, the country’s morons are still as ignorant and still as vocal as ever. Some comments from the WaPo:

You can try to give a newer softer meaning to the word “jihad” but it is too late.
For too many non muslims, the word jihad is associated with terrorism.

This is not a newer, softer meaning. This is the meaning.

Painting Jihad in any other way than getting rid of whoever believes differently is like sprinkling sugar on blood or painting lipstick on a pig’s snout.

“Lipstick on a pig” will always remind me of Sarah Palin.

Jihad means islamic holy war and it has no any other meaning.Jihad in german language is Mein Kampf.
Jihad does not mean to build bridge through friendship.
Jihad is war,jihad means killing infidels/non-muslims.
Jihad is an obligation in House of War/Infidel Country(America,Europe)
Jihad ads at metro stations are Lie Propaganda and Deception

Congratulations, you’re exactly wrong.

But I’m happy to say that the really awful comments I saw the other day have largely been addressed by thoughtful, patient people, and there’s real discussion going on in the comments today.

And people can still see the humor:

My jihad is to get laid this weekend

That’s not quite the meaning, but good luck to you, ma’am.

Parody Lowe’s Muslim Commercial

I found this on Loonwatch, a terrific blog that I highly recommend.

Merry Christmahanukwanzika to all!

NYPD Shadowed Folks Whose Names Sounded Arab

http://news.yahoo.com/ap-impact-nypd-shadows-muslims-change-names-070530735.html

Wow, it’s been a long time since I posted. And this is a good thing, in the sense that Arab- and Islamophobia are being addressed on big blogs and in real news stories nowadays.

As for novels, it’s just been a while since I’ve read one that had silly stereotypes and misinformation about Arabs. But I’m still reading voraciously, so I’m bound to find something eventually.

But here’s something I didn’t see blogs picking up: the New York police department had a policy of following people who changed their names from Arab-sounding names to “normal” sounding names, and vice versa.

NEW YORK (AP) — Muslims who change their names to sound more traditionally American, as immigrants have done for generations, or who adopt Arabic names as a sign of their faith are often investigated and catalogued in secret New York Police Department intelligence files, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

Like other NYPD intelligence programs created in the past decade, this one involved monitoring behavior protected by the First Amendment.

Monitoring name changes illustrates how the threat of terrorism now casts suspicion over what historically has been part of America’s story. For centuries, immigrants have Americanized their names in New York. The Roosevelts were once the van Rosenvelts. Fashion designer Ralph Lauren was born Ralph Lifshitz. Donald Trump’s grandfather changed the family name from Drumpf.

NYPD spokesman Paul Browne did not respond to messages left over two days asking about the legal justification for the program and whether it had identified any terrorists.

Early on, police added people with American names to the list so that if details of the program ever leaked out, the department would not be accused of profiling, according to one person briefed on the program.

Whatever an “American name” is. Sheesh.

The NYPD’s rules also prohibit opening investigations based solely on activities protected by the First Amendment. Federal courts have held that people have a right to change their names and, in the case of religious conversion, that right is protected by the First Amendment.

In fact, of those who agreed to talk at all, many said they Americanized their names because they were being harassed or were having problems getting a job and thought a new name would help.

Sad.

It’s a long article. I recommend it. Surprised it hasn’t gotten more attention.

It’s Never Too Early to Assume the Killer is a Muslim

Wonkette culled some comments from Free Republic. These guys know what religion the killer is. Gotta be Muslim, right?

Nobody knows what’s really going on in Oslo or at the holiday camp island in Norway where a bombing and a shooting have left many people dead, but it’s always safe for American Idiots on the Internet to jump in with a suspect (“Muslims”) and a verdict (“guilty”) and a list of co-conspirators (“Obama and the liberals”) and a punishment (“kill ‘em all”). No matter that a tall blond man of “Norwegian appearance” and wearing a police uniform is described as the shooter on Norway’s Utoya Island — thee muslins are increasingly able to appear as whatever people or things they want to appear as, just like the Cylons or Harry Potter. Here’s what the foreign policy experts at FreeRepublic.com are saying about the attacks right now:

* But thank God we’re safe here in the US with the man-thing Janet Napitalano focusing on “white terrorists” rather than worrying herself about Muslim terrorists. /s

* As tragic as this is, at least when and if we ever get a president who really wants to fight terror, we’ll have reliable allies in the effort.

* Execute everyone involved!

Indeed! Execute all tall blond men of Norwegian appearance.

* “Wipe them out….All of them!”

Insightful tweet:

* RayburnThompson R. Alex Thompson
Dems just blocked a balanced budget, and there’s a terrorist attack in Norway… and #whenblackpeoplegetpaid is the top trending topic?

* This will not stop until a real war on islam begins… and we all know that it is muslim demons that are doing this.
The Norwegians need to round up every Muslim in the country and send them packing, immediately. We need to do the same thing, but of course we never will.

* That’s one thing the appeasers just don’t get. Sure they might not blow you up while you’re slowing giving up your way of life to theirs, but any holdups in that process will poush the warfare from cultural to general violence very quickly. Basically, submit or die. It’s what the islamics say and it’s what anyone with any sense understands. The PC types have no sense.

* That second explosion is a fake.

* Obviously this was retaliation by Islamic terrorists for the publication of cartoons 5, 6, years ago depicting Mohammad. As you can see Muslims never forget an affront… they are still fighting the invading Crusaders from 1500 years ago! We’re fighting this war on terrorism the wrong way. Instead of us just reacting to the threats and spending trillions of dollars in the process, what we need to do is that every time there’s a terrorist bombing we should select a Muslim city, at random, and bomb a few square blocks, equal to the terrorist bombing. That will give them something to think about…!

Haha, yes, the Crusades that began 1500 years ago. Before the birth of Muhammad, apparently.

* Interesting you mentioned them running the drug trade, I see reports the muslims push drugs in many non muslim countries. Interesting for such a devout people but they are victimizing non muslims, so it’s ok. I’ve also read they carry out Hatfield-McCoy type clan killings and wipe out muslim families down to the babies. They decide if you did something “wrong” to their family your whole seed is imperfect and they kill everyone. Meanwhile, we are taught how bad Christians are.

It’s simply beautiful that this commenter doesn’t see the irony of referring to the Hatfield-McCoy feud.

CNN called this a RANDOM act of terror
No. RANDOM would be if they killed Christane Amanpour.

Ugh.

Here’s an AP article about the attacker, which says he was “a right-winger with anti-Muslim views but no known links to hardcore extremists.” Disappointingly but not surprisingly, it does not mention his religion. I’m guessing it’s not Islam.

UPDATE: Let’s preemptively kill/arrest/deport everyone who looks like this? Yeah, that’ll fly.

UPDATE #2: The Guardianhas an article profiling this guy. Guess what! He is a Christian. Shocker.

Another significant event was being baptised into the Protestant church of “his own free will” at the age of 15. More recently, however, he had expressed his disgust at his own church. “Today’s Protestant church is a joke,” he wrote in an online post in 2009. “Priests in jeans who march for Palestine and churches that look like minimalist shopping centres. I am a supporter of an indirect collective conversion of the Protestant church back to the Catholic.”

And for the sake of search engines: Christian terrorism Christian terrorism Christian terrorism.

Two Chiefs of Staff Say US has Overreacted to Islamic Threat

Story found at Crooks and Liars.

The report says Americans are overreacting to Islamic extremism, underinvesting in their youth, and failing to embrace the sense of competition and opportunity that made America a world power. The United States has been increasingly consumed by seeing the world through the lens of threat, while failing to understand that influence, competitiveness, and innovation are the key to advancing American interests in the modern world.

Indian Islamophobes Also Wrong

Washington Post article here.

DEWAS, INDIA – When a series of bomb attacks ripped through Muslim neighborhoods, mosques and shrines in India in recent years, suspicion fell firmly on a familiar culprit: Islamist terror. After each incident, scores of Indian Muslims were rounded up, and many were tortured. Confessions were extracted, the names of various militant “masterminds” leaked to the media and links with Pakistan widely alleged.

Never mind that most of the victims were Muslims; it seemed natural to many people, from New Delhi to Washington, to assume the attacks were the work of extremist Pakistani militants and their Indian Muslim sympathizers, intent on fanning religious tensions in India and disrupting the peace process between the nuclear-armed rivals.

But those investigations, and the assumptions behind them, were turned on their head early this year by the confession of a Hindu holy man. Swami Aseemanand told a magistrate that the bomb makers were neither Pakistani nor Muslim but Hindu radicals, bent on revenge for many earlier acts of terrorism across India that had been perpetrated by Muslims.

His statement, subsequently leaked to the media, alleged that a network of radicals stretched right up to senior levels of the country’s Hindu nationalist right wing. It also exposed deep-seated prejudices within the police against the country’s minority Muslim population.

This quote sounds so familiar…I’m pretty sure I’ve heard something really similar lately around here…

In India, there was sober reflection in some quarters about prejudices against Muslims. The Hindu right’s old adage, that “while not every Muslim is a terrorist, every terrorist is a Muslim,” could no longer be trotted out with a straight face.

More damaging were Aseemanand’s accusations against high-ranking members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, a religious group that spreads its Hindu revivalist ideology, known as Hindutva, through a network of schools, charities and clubs.

The RSS, the ideological parent of the country’s main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, is also engaged in a sometimes violent contest with Christian missionary groups operating in India.

Non-Muslim religious conservatives committing terrorism. Hmmmmm!

The Arab World Is On Fire Lately

Figuratively, in the media, I mean it’s almost as news-worthy as Lindsay Lohan or Charlie Sheen nowadays. I mean, eight years of war in Iraq had to fight for a few minutes on the news here and there, but now it’s all about the people’s uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, and so on.

Even on the subject of Islam and Muslims the good blogs are trouncing me at my own game. Here’s Wonkette a couple days ago with three posts about Muslims in America: one on jackasses hired by the govt to give misinformation about Islam, one about Christians throwing crosses at a Muslim man praying, and one about a crowd of good Americans chanting insults and curses at a Muslims attending a charity fundraiser.

I think you can see how full of God’s love these Christians are in the videos posted on Gawker.

And here’s a CNN article from late last year about how some whites in the US now perceive themselves as a minority. Yes, the group that is extremely well represented in both houses of Congress, all the nation’s CEOs, and who fielded 43 of 44 US presidents, feels oppressed.

A recent Public Religion Research Institute poll found 44% of Americans surveyed identify discrimination against whites as being just as big as bigotry aimed at blacks and other minorities. The poll found 61% of those identifying with the Tea Party held that view, as did 56% of Republicans and 57% of white evangelicals.

Conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh argued in a radio show that Republicans are an “oppressed minority” in need of a “civil rights movement” because its members willingly sit in the “back of the bus” and “are afraid of the fire hoses and the dogs.”

Conservative news outlets ran a number of stories last summer highlighting an incident from the 2008 elections, in which activists from the New Black Panther Party appeared to be intimidating voters at a polling place. Those claims were never proven.

Peter Brimelow, author of “Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster,” asserts that much of white America’s anxiety derives from living under a black president and changing demographics.

Diversity, he says, “is not strength.”

James Edwards, host of the “Political Cesspool” radio show, isn’t shy about naming those interests. He says white Americans have become the “dispossessed majority” and that coming demographic changes may turn the United States into a “Third-World flop-house.”

You know what would turn the US into a third-world flop-house? Continuing its course of anti-intellectualism, believing that Fox News presents news, putting faith before reason, weakening public education, closing libraries, ending integration programs, downplaying and undermining scientific data, failing to keep church and state separate, and a host of other actions that large segments of the white, Christian population are embracing with open arms.

Now whites are victims of pervasive racism, Edwards says.

“They’re the victims of it every day. Anything a white conservative does that a liberal doesn’t like is called racism.”

Funny: Finding a Place to Pray Unobtrusively

Wajahat Ali has a very funny and also enlightening piece over at Loonwatch about finding a place to pray in public without making a spectacle of oneself. It answered some of my lingering questions about how Muslims accomodate their daily prayers in a community that isn’t set up for that.

Excerpts:

A Muslim who prays in public is like James Bond, but without the bling, sophisticated gadgets and entourage of gorgeous women eager to bed him. Both brilliantly fail at every attempt at stealth. Like the fictional secret agent, a Muslim, despite his best intentions and clandestine efforts, sticks out like a pink elephant when forced to offer his ritualistic prayer, salat, outside the comforting cocoon of his home or mosque.

and

Instead, I discover I have 15 minutes left to pray the afternoon Asr prayer and I’m stuck in a crowded, Valley Fair mall in San Jose, Calif. Realizing that I’d probably be tazed and shot by Homeland Security if I decided to bust out my Arabic tai chi at the Orange Julius, I seek temporary refuge for my prayer woes in the most obvious location: the fitting room at the Gap.

And there are more illuminating anecdotes in the comments.

Muslims Shield Christians with Their Bodies

The wail of the Islamophobes is, “Why don’t moderate Muslims speak out against terrorism?” Meaning, “Why don’t I bother to search the internet for stories of Muslims speaking out against terrorism, instead of just trusting that if Fox News didn’t show it, it didn’t happen?”

Personally, I would never have found this story if a Facebook friend hadn’t posted it. The newspaper is Ahram Online, an Egyptian paper, and the story is Egypt’s Muslims Attend Coptic Christmas Mass, Serving as “Human Shields.”

Egypt’s majority Muslim population stuck to its word Thursday night. What had been a promise of solidarity to the weary Coptic community, was honoured, when thousands of Muslims showed up at Coptic Christmas eve mass services in churches around the country and at candle light vigils held outside.

From the well-known to the unknown, Muslims had offered their bodies as “human shields” for last night’s mass, making a pledge to collectively fight the threat of Islamic militants and towards an Egypt free from sectarian strife.

Among those shields were movie stars Adel Imam and Yousra, popular preacher Amr Khaled, the two sons of President Hosni Mubarak, and thousands of citizens who have said they consider the attack one on Egypt as a whole.

“This is not about us and them,” said Dalia Mustafa, a student who attended mass at Virgin Mary Church on Maraashly. “We are one. This was an attack on Egypt as a whole, and I am standing with the Copts because the only way things will change in this country is if we come together.”

In the days following the brutal attack on Saints Church in Alexandria, which left 21 dead on New Year’ eve, solidarity between Muslims and Copts has seen an unprecedented peak. Millions of Egyptians changed their Facebook profile pictures to the image of a cross within a crescent – the symbol of an “Egypt for All”. Around the city, banners went up calling for unity, and depicting mosques and churches, crosses and crescents, together as one.

The New York Times did not cover this story. The Associated Press did not report this news. Reuters has nothing about it.

Not too long ago I saw this post on MyRightWingDad.net:

Couldn't find it today at MyRightWingDad.net so this is from another WordPress blog

Of course we won’t hear what the islamophobes have to say about Egyptian Muslims volunteering as human shields to protect their Christian neighbors, because no major news source is reporting it.