Category Archives: religious conflict

Arabic Students and Speakers, Laugh Along With–errr–*at* Ergun Caner

You know how you might have a friend who lies really often and well, and you just can’t hate the guy because his incredible all-out embrace of lying as a way of life kind of perks you up? This is not that guy, because he is unlovable, but he is the most audacious liar I’ve ever seen in action in my life.

Check out the video of this guy, Ergun Caner. Now, you find all kinds of information about how he lied about his heritage, his birthplace, his early childhood, his late childhood, his dad’s career, etc., but I just want to point and laugh at his “Arabic.”

(Speaking of his curriculum vitae, he’s been a professor and president at more than one “university” and there’s nothing about his education, whatsoever, on his Wikipedia page. How can that be?)

How do you suppose he conducts his daily life these days so as to make sure he never accidentally encounters anyone who actually speaks Arabic? It probably helps a lot to be in GA, but I know there are at least some Arabic speakers there.

Is anyone else bothered as much as I am by his affected accent?

Is “Lying for Jesus” already a tag?

 

Leave a comment

Filed under arabic, language, religion, religious conflict

Song Review: “We Will Fight the Heathens”

This is a guest post by a friend who hasn´t thought up a cool pen name yet.
—————————————————————————

Song Review: “We Will Fight the Heathens”

I had heard the above-named song and I thought of Snarla’s website, and her theme. I thought a review of this song might be fitting. My thanks, Snarla.

And now to the song; I’m a long-time fan of this band, and I rate this song a success. The instrumentals, the beat, the double-edged vocals of Daren Malakien, the rasper and the sonneter, all in one man. And then there’s the lyrics.

They are poignant, they are evocative, they are good. Astride the music they paint a picture of the early crusades.

The lyrics feed our senses, give us what perhaps all good stories give: controversy.

I think the song can be enjoyed– was meant to be enjoyed– without screwing some weighty political tag to its context. We’ve heard that kind of thing before– shame on the Christians, shame on the Moslems, shame on the Jews. I think we’ve had our fill of this. After all, isn’t it that kind of thinking, that kind of blame-me bullshit, that created the strife that inspired the song in the first place? “–beliefs are the bullets of the wicked…”

The song is good and– just for fun– it makes you think. I won’t delve into specifics but rather let you savor that for yourself. Let you find out who the “Partisan Brother of War” is. Enjoy.

Leave a comment

Filed under music, religious conflict

Because Jews Hate Dogs

BBC has an article about a dog being sentenced to death by a rabbi in Jerusalem. Please remember this story the next time “Muslims hate dogs” comes up. Thank you.

Naturally, this story makes me heartily glad that we do not live in a theocracy (yet) here in the United States and with any luck we will continue to honor the wall of separation between church and state, so that blowhards who think we should kill orcas for “murder” will never hold sway over our country.

A Jewish rabbinical court condemned to death by stoning a stray dog it feared was the reincarnation of a lawyer who insulted its judges, reports say.

The dog entered the Jerusalem financial court several weeks ago and would not leave, reports Israeli website Ynet.

It reminded a judge of a curse passed on a now deceased secular lawyer about 20 years ago, when judges bid his spirit to enter the body of a dog.

The animal is said to have escaped before the sentence was carried out.

One of the judges at the court in the city’s ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim neighbourhood had reportedly asked local children to carry out the sentence.

An animal welfare organisation filed a complaint with the police against a court official, who denied reports that judges had ordered the dog’s stoning, according to Ynet.

But a court manager told Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot the stoning had been ordered as “as an appropriate way to ‘get back at’ the spirit which entered the poor dog”, according to Ynet.

Dogs are considered impure animals in traditional Judaism.

Story here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13819764

Also, please stop voting for the kind of moronic lawmakers in the US who think shariah law is a fundamental threat to our country but that Jewish law is just fine and dandy. And that Indian tribal law is no biggie because who cares anyway?

Lawyers’ spirits don’t enter dogs, whether or not a judge orders them to. Also, dogs don’t live twenty years. Dogs should be judged by the content of their character, not the woo-woo proclamations of people who believe in ghosts. And stoning to death is extremely cruel. Are you fucking kidding me, people?

3 Comments

Filed under church and state, religious conflict, Stupidity

Employee Harassed and Fired for “Being a Witch”–in the USA

A competent TSA employee was harassed at her job and then fired after being accused of putting a hex on a coworker’s car’s heater. No kidding. Story here. Sorry it’s a USA Today story and therefore the web page is really annoying.

She was in the top 10 percent in Albany at catching weapons on the X-ray machine. She passed her skills test on the first try. She caught a woman on her way to Vietnam with $30,000 in cash. And she didn’t mind working with the passengers — her training as a massage therapist kept her from being squeamish, as some officers were, about patting down elderly and special-needs passengers.

The assistant director told her he was investigating a threat of workplace violence. He said that her former mentor in on-the-job training, officer Mary Bagnoli, reported that she was afraid of Smith because she was a witch who practiced witchcraft. She accused Smith of following her on the highway one snowy evening after work and casting a spell on the heater of her car, causing it not to work. Well, actually, Bagnoli said she hadn’t seen Smith’s car, but she had seen Smith. “I thought to myself,” Smith recalls, “what, did she see me flying on my broom?”

But people in other countries are crazy, not us.

1 Comment

Filed under bigoted idiots, outrages, religious conflict

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!

1 Comment

Filed under bigoted idiots, church and state, domestic terrorism, Islamic relations, religious conflict

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.”

Leave a comment

Filed under bigoted idiots, church and state, Islamic relations, religious conflict

Doing My Part to Spread This Viral Message About Christmas

From Filtered News, another WordPress blog, here is A Meditation on Keeping Christ in Christmas.

Excerpt:

At the time of the first Christmas, the Samaritans were considered by Jesus’ people as disgusting inferiors and were denounced by the religious leaders of the day as heretics and ethnically impure; sick people were believed to be sinners whom God was punishing; women were deemed unworthy, unclean and inferior; tax collectors and Roman soldiers were regarded as the mortal enemy; the poor, who had neither the time nor the resources to maintain rigorous rites of religious purity, were thought to be beyond God’s grace: Gentiles were seen as ritually, morally, genealogically and carnally impure: Jesus rejected and denounced every one of these barriers between people.**

And another exerpt:

If our Christian faith and love are strong, we feel no bitter, self-righteous need to claim some sort of exclusive or superior right to this holiday season — which, ironically, violates the very spirit of the holiday season. If our Christian faith and love are strong, we are able to gently, serenely accept the “other” as Christ did, with open hearts and open arms. If our Christian faith and love are strong, we are able to make room for the “others” and offer wishes of peace and joy, not divisiveness, not bitter victimization and not anger.

This year anybody looking to get bent out of shape about a “war on Christmas” is in luck. Some churches in parts of Iraq have actually cancelled Christmas festivities (or solemn celebrations, whatever kind they prefer) due to threats made by al-Qaeda in Iraq. So please, if you were inclined to grumble and hiss about people with the temerity to wish you “happy holidays,” take a moment to ponder what a real war on Christmas would look like.

Leave a comment

Filed under miscellaneous, off-topic, Our glorious war in Iraq, religious conflict

Prominent Iraqi Christian Sentenced to Death

Another Christian being persecuted! Somebody tell Voice of the Martyrs!

BAGHDAD — Tariq Aziz, a former top aide to Saddam Hussein, was sentenced to death by an Iraqi court on Tuesday for crimes against members of rival Shiite political parties.

Mr. Aziz’s death sentence stemmed from charges of persecution against members of the religious Shiite Dawa Party, which counts Iraq’s current prime minister, Nuri Kamal-al Maliki, among its members.

Oh, oops. Looks like this Christian was sentenced to death for actually persecuting followers of another religion. Voice of the Martyrs will be so sheepish.

Leave a comment

Filed under arab, church and state, Our glorious war in Iraq, religious conflict

Quote Found on Blog

Found this on Bowman in Arabia, a blog by a young American calculus teacher in Jordan:

Whether it’s fair or not, we will be judged by people like this. What’s that? It’s not right that a religious zealot with weird facial hair, twisting an otherwise peaceful religion to make hateful, condemning comments, via a face-to-camera video proclamation, backed by a small extremist band of followers, should come to represent millions and millions of people – the vast majority of whom completely disagree with him?

Leave a comment

Filed under arab, arabian, Islamic relations, religious conflict

Caption Fail

terry jones koran qur'an burning fail caption

Made me giggle.

Found here at Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion.

1 Comment

Filed under bigoted idiots, religious conflict