Thursday, November 18, 2010

POST 4: ISLAMIC REFORM, MAD SAM, AND THOMAS PAINE




"The Night Bivouac of the Napolean Army during Retreat from Russia, 1812"

Oil on Canvas, Historical Museum, Moscow, Russia. Painting by Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin, 1896-1897.



Let’s start with a pop quiz: Israelis and Palestinians will make the most progress toward a lasting peace settlement by adopting which of these three options:

1 – Continue talks, but outside, naked, in Fargo, North Dakota this January;
2 – Continue talks, but about the rising price of gold last year in Burkina Faso;
3 - Discontinue talks until the Palestinians accept Israel’s right to exist. [Answer at end.]



Islam needs reformation immediately for the sake of Islam’s populations. The world outside Islam can’t do this for them. This is the main theory of these writings.

Free expression within Islam would be a tremendous step in the right direction, many of those outside Islam might say in 2010. I used to think it was a matter of teaching the populations of Islam the basics of free speech.

Now, however, I think Islam's movers and shakers understand free speech quite well because they so often use it -- misuse it, actually -- as a kind of modeling clay. With this ideological clay, Islamic radicals, activists and terrorists seem increasingly able to maintain their own oppressions, justify them.

Notice events in Iran in this first week of November, 2010. The despotic government there was afraid of rebellion inside the country, so arrested people without charge as a preventive measure. Don’t laugh yet; Iran’s just getting started.

A November 4, 2010 article in the Wall Street Journal by Farnaz Fassihi reported “400 more people would be arrested and ‘paraded’ in the coming days to set an example for anyone planning social unrest."

A spokesman out of Tehran said some would be "charged with 'moharebeh' or 'war against God,' a charge that carries the death penalty and is typically handed out to political dissidents,” according to Fassihi's article, which was filed from Beirut.

While reading the article, I found myself laughing. Who does God have as his attorney? What is this attorney’s hourly rate? Does he actually have an office in Tehran?


LET'S CELEBRATE RACISM AND DESPOTISM!

But wait! The Yemeni-proposed 2011 “commemoration” of the first UN anti-racism conference in 2001 South Africa would be another stage for Iranian nonsense.

The original 2001 event, which ended just days before the attacks of September 11, 2001, was a hate festival against Israel. The next affair would, theoretically, spiritually host the usual dictators like Iran’s Ahmadinejad, Libya’s Ghaddafi and Syria’s Assad to fill us in with the usual slanderous, anti-Semitic vomit. They always make these parties.

(Oh, don’t miss the first-grade numerology of these involved dates. The World Trade Center in New York was attacked September 11, 2001. The proposed date for this “commemoration” is September 21, 2011 at the United Nations, which would also make it conveniently located next to the proposed Cordoba Mosque, scheduled for opening in late 2011. Many in the media announce the mosque has a planned opening for September 11, 2011, but I can’t confirm this intention. I don’t need to, however. I trust you’re getting the point by now.)


IT GETS FUNNIER WITH EACH PASSING DAY

With news like this, I've often thought that Islamic despots have no appreciation of power's limits. Like previous dictatorial systems, Islam seems likely to burn itself out by growing overconfident about itself.

Such systems fly high for some period of time, and then eventually run into the brick wall of reality.

This is what happened to Napoleon Bonaparte when he tried invading Russia in 1812. The image of the painting above is a fair depiction of events, from what I've read. Napoleon thought he could do anything he liked because he kept getting away with stunts in Europe, starting with the French Revolution in 1789.

Then, entering Russia, he eventually had to admit that his troops had basically starved to death, froze, thus were defeated and humiliated and killed in the foolish pursuit of more world authority.

ISLAMIC TYRANTS HAVE NO ACTUAL CREDIBILITY IN MODERN WORLD

We owe Islam nothing and must see this.

Many Islamic activists want to call Americans Islamophobic. The globe knows this is pure fiction.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is on high alert all the time. Modern humanity has let cowardice be its guide and does not see this.

This must end. Now.

It will end in the 21st Century, too. I've no doubts about this. It's time to abandon timidity and fear.

MAKE RULES: FREE SPEECH IN NEGOTIATIONS OR NO NEGOTIATIONS

With all this being the case, I had to pause in the last two weeks with this draft essay. I thought of Napoleon, how he imagined himself too great. How there is no such thing as absolute power.

Dictatorial worlds never last because they leave all sides uselessly heroic and ideologically homeless. Islam will meet the same end unless they abandon their own slavery.

FIRST STEPS

Israelis should demand that the Islamic world accept their existence before any further negotiations. No talks without recognition of Israel by Palestinians. Period.

Jews should not sit at the same table with negotiators who deny Israel exists as a nation and that Jews exist as a moral, modern people.

The Israeli is not The Invisible Man or Woman. Israelis are real people, not fictional characters.

I do not think this stance will necessarily produce a peace agreement next year, but it will force the involved parties to consider new, more practical positions.

It will also encourage the world’s peoples to quit portraying Jews as juvenile delinquents.

WHAT IS FREE SPEECH, ANYWAY?

Islamic law does not seem to understand the underlying philosophies of free expression.

Where do you go to gain some understanding of free expression? One place would be in the writings of John Stuart Mill, his 1859 book, On Liberty. (John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859, London, any local library, or on internet.)

Here are some of my notes from Mill’s work:

“In the part [of behavior] which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute.”

Mill said this philosophy only applies to adults. Not kids or backward states of society. People would find it difficult to get this sort of writing published in 2010, by the way. Somehow, we have increasing social restrictions today in the U.S. and Europe. Mill got really wild, as some more of the following quotes show.

“Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement and the means justified by actually effecting that end.”

“Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.”

“…until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate to find one.”

But for educated peoples, Mill proposes, liberty is necessary. Absolutely.

“The real advantage which truth has consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it…”


Mill’s definition of public opinion would describe modern Islam: “…they are always a mass, that is to say, collective mediocrity.”

Islam needs eccentricity within to gain freedom.

Lack of eccentricity in society was, in Mill's day, he wrote “the chief danger of the time.”

“The greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of Custom is complete. This is the case over the whole East. Custom is there, in all things, the final appeal; justice and right mean conformity to custom; the argument of custom no one, unless some tyrant intoxicated with power, thinks of resisting.”

Why? Because there is no individuality, Mill said. No allowance of singularity. Change okay en mass, ONLY.

Truth is served, ultimately and continuously, by refuting the error let in through free expression.

The state easily over-reaches, interferes with individuality. This is part of what Mill wrote. He was wild for his day.

Thomas Paine, in comparison, seemed nearly insane.


THOMAS PAINE, "AGE OF REASON."

While in a French prison, Paine worked on AGE OF REASON, about 1793.

He disagreed with many, accepted church teachings. His views made him one of the most hated men of his time.

Today, the location of his grave, in England, is unknown.

Yet, he was an American revolutionary.

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY, 1967, LIBRARY

Thomas Paine published COMMON SENSE in January of 1776. This argued for American independence, and avoiding European entanglements. He attacked hereditary aristocracy as well as religion.

“All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”

Paine does not condemn those who believe otherwise, and was not an atheist.

Paine wrote he did not believe any religion has a unique path to God. He did not believe in divine inspiration.

About religion, he wrote “…for my own part I disbelieve them all."

As an average American, Lurene Gisee, I hear and have heard various swipes at religion over the years. Christian Arabs swipe at Moslem Arabs in Jerusalem, Jews at other Jews, Christians at other Christians atheists and agnostics at them all.

You have idea by the time you finish junior high school in the United States that derogatory remarks about religion are propitious to speech in general, as long as some intuitive, reasonable restraint is observed by those involved.


Islam, though, has its greatest difficulties here, and we know this because it is in the news each week; only with today’s Islam do I feel I might make a cartoon that will get me killed.

Paine, for example, thought heathen myths as the more likely author of the Jesus story. It was nothing new, he wrote from a revolutionary France, on his way to prison.

The story of Jesus “sprang out of the tail of the heathen mythology.”

Yet, he does not take issue, he wrote, with “the real character of Jesus Christ.” He found virtue and amity in this. He said there were similar notions in Greece and China.

Jesus did not write a word of his own life story, Paine reminded readers. Yet, he was a man of his own day and age; a normal man.

Paine wrote things that were amazing for his day and time. He said the story of Jesus “has every mark of fraud and imposition stamped upon the face of it.”

The Jews were there. But in the Jesus story, Paine reminded us, "Christians are saying, in effect, ‘I will prove the truth of what I have told you by producing the people who say it is false.’”

Paine today, if in Islam, would be beheaded. Why?

Because Islam chokes such questions from the time they arise. Humor and self- reflection is what Islam lacked in the days of Paine and still lacks.

But Islam needs its own Paine.

IT WILL CHANGE BECAUSE IT MUST

Islam needs free speech.

Here is what American Supreme Court Justice Brandeis wrote in a concurrence in 1927’s Whitney vs. California decision:

"Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of free speech to free men from bondage of irrational fears. . . Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty. . . "

Again: Islam needs free speech.

There is no end to examples of what befalls societies which do not have guarantees of free expression, or have contortions made to that right.

MYTHS IMPORTANT IN ALL DICTATORSHIPS

People like myths because myths make it easier to think in an abstract sense.

If Islam wants a real world, it must learn to love detail, not more myth.

The important point is that Islam’s malcontents will not, stay in hiding forever.

Islam needs reformation.

That reformation, though, if it is to be moderately peaceful and gain real credibility, can't be initiated by the West, but only Islam.

Band; Rush. Song; Free Will.
This song reminds me of what today is facing modern Islam:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnxkfLe4G74

[Quiz at Top Answer: 3}


by Lurene Gisee
November 18, 2010, edited October, 2017

http://bayarealurene.blogspot.com/
http://bayarealureneb.blogspot.com/
http://fecklesspreapproved.blogspot.com/
http://unbelievableanimalstories.blogspot.com/
http://jerusalem2000.blogspot.com/
http://risksinreporting.blogspot.com/
http://genesisoutline.blogspot.com/
https://theworldofoil.blogspot.com/
https://thinairfascism.blogspot.com/
https://assadinsyria1973.blogspot.com/





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