The Reporting of Information of Events associated with Islam

Muslims Were The Real Victims Of The Nice Terror Attack, The BBC Explains





Carl Court/Getty
by James Delingpole18 Jul 20161,593
18 Jul, 2016 18 Jul, 2016


More bad news from Nice: we learn from the BBC that local Muslims have been getting the cold shoulder from their kuffar neighbours. “People who yesterday would embrace me warmly are now cold towards me,” says one.

And all because of the unfortunate and terribly unfair coincidence that the man who mowed down over 100 people in a truck just happened to be called Mohamed, of Tunisian descent, and allegedly yelling “Allahu Akbar” as he went about his murderous spree.

“The worst affected by these attacks are us, the Muslims. We have seen an increase in abuse and threats,” complains local man Ahmed Mohamed.​

Another – Abdul Moniem – has some sage things to say about not pointing the finger of blame.​

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“You have to distinguish between different types of crime. Are these crimes that relate to terrorism? Or are these individual criminal acts? In this case what happened was a terrible crime and shouldn’t be treated as terrorism. The criminal who carried out this attack did not pray or fast…he had social and relationship problems. It was this that led him to hurt people.”​

The BBC is very concerned about this outbreak of ‘Islamophobia’. That would be why it sent a reporter – also called Mohamed – to down to investigate.
But I’ve a strange feeling that not many of you reading this – unless, perhaps, your name is Mohammed, or you are LBC’s resident faux-Cockney dhimmi James O’Brien, or you work for the BBC yourself – are going to be shedding bitter tears for Nice’s Muslim community right now. In fact you may well suspect that reports like this are very much part of the problem not the solution.
This is what Douglas Murray argues in a Spectator piece entitled We need to tackle attacks like the one in Nice from the root.


It’s really not much different from the pieces he wrote after the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the Paris massacre. But then, barring a few details – innocents mashed with a truck rather than, as at Bataclan, either shot, blown up or tortured by having their testicles cut off or their vaginas stabbed – the situation remains just the same as it ever did: with the chattering classes, the politicians, most of the media, and virtually the entire Umma still in denial of the nightmare problem facing us.
That problem, gloss it how you will, has something to do with Islam.
No matter how many times you utter the formula about the ‘vast majority of Muslims’ being ‘peaceful and law-abiding’, you’re never going to alter the fact that this upsurge in terrorist atrocities we’ve witnessed in the last couple of decades is not being committed in the name of Hinduism or Judaism or Zoroastrianism or Christianity. It’s very much focussed on one religion in particular. Most people have been aware of this for some time: two years before Charlie Hebdo, 74 per cent of French people said they thought Islam was intolerant and incompatible with the French state. So why isn’t the Muslim “community” we keep hearing about doing more to stop it happening?
Well mainly, as far as I can see, it’s because they’re still in a state of denial.
In a way that BBC reporter I mentioned above has done us all a favour: he has gone to the scene of one of Islamist terror’s worst recent atrocities (in the West at any rate), with the bodies barely cold, and captured verbatim the all-too-typical Muslim response: victimhood; buck-passing; fatalism.


Hence the frustrated tone of Douglas Murray’s concluding paragraph:

Here is a different suggestion: do everything you can to stop people called Mohammed committing mass slaughter in Europe on a bi-monthly basis. Get the hatred out of the mosques and the books, get the bigotry out of the community and the slightest tolerance of it identified as a major part of the problem. Of course most Muslims can’t do anything themselves to stop somebody like last night’s attacker carrying out such a deed, but they can at least have the decency to look like they’re taking part in the kind of criticism and introspection the rest of us would take part in if someone sharing even a jot of our identity had carried out such an attack.​

He’s right. I’ve experienced it for myself on a 2014 debate programme on BBC Three – laughably called Free Speech – where my fellow panelists were: a Muslim Conservative MP; a trendy gay Muslim; a groovy young female feminist Muslim to whose Afghan parents Britain had most generously given asylum. In many parts of the Umma, one of them would be executed by being pushed from a high building, one would be behind a veil and gagged from venturing a public opinion, and one definitely wouldn’t be a politician. Yet all three of them, when asked about the “Islamist” problem, insisted that it had nothing to do with Islam but rather that it was the product of “Islamophobia” and “foreign policy.” Neither the audience nor the presenters challenged this lie. I was the only person to do so.
So it’s really no wonder that atrocities like the one in Nice continue to proliferate. As far as the majority of the Muslim community is concerned it’s just not their responsibility. And they are buoyed in this view by organisations like the BBC and CNN and the liberal media generally – not forgetting the wankerati and all those useful idiots on Facebook – who reassure them: “No it really isn’t your fault. It’s all just a perversion of your wonderful peace-loving religion. And if anyone suggests otherwise we’ll send the police round to arrest them…”

Can you imagine what would happen if, say, these terrorist incidents were being done in the name of Judaism or Christianity or Hinduism? Sure there’d be lots of protestations from believers that these terrible acts represented a hideous perversion of their religion. But there would also be absolutely zero tolerance for or sympathy with the perpetrators. There’d be no sympathetic priests or rabbis giving doctrinal justification for such murders. There’d be no think pieces in the Guardian, explaining it in terms of poverty and injustice. There’d certainly be not a single Jew or Christian quietly celebrating a blow struck for the faith.

I wish the same could be said of Muslims. But does anyone actually believe this is the case?

http://www.breitbart.com/london/201...s-of-the-nice-terror-attack-the-bbc-explains/

 

Calling spades spades. A little Aussie truthsaying!


​

News
Aug 29, 2015
Prime Minister Tony Abbott and the Christian right

Mike Seccombe
As Australia becomes less religious, churches have insinuated themselves into politics and gained particular control over Tony Abbott.


AAP IMAGE
Tony Abbott before reading during a liturgy at St Charbel’s Maronite church.


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Introducing himself to the Liberal Party’s West Australian state council meeting a week ago, the newly endorsed candidate for the Canning byelection, Andrew Hastie, recalled one particularly happy memory of his childhood.
“I was born in regional Victoria in a town called Wangaratta,” he said. “My father started a church there from scratch and I travelled with him in the early years around the vast parish… I have sweet memories of those times.”
A little later in his speech, he identified himself as a regular churchgoer and spoke about the work he and his wife do with their church group.
There’s nothing wrong with any of that, of course. But ask yourself this: how many job applicants in Australia would feel the need to stress their piety in the interview?
This is not a religious country. In the census, more people now identify as “no religion” than identify with any faith except Catholicism. Among those of Hastie’s age – he is 32 – the biggest category is “no religion”. About a third of people identify this way, and their number is growing fast.
Even among those who identify with a faith, it is seldom much more than nominal. Only about 10 per cent are regular churchgoers, and the number engaging in other church-sponsored activities is lower still. A global Gallup poll in 2008 found 70 per cent of Australians considered religion to be of no importance to our lives.
In his address last weekend, Hastie did not only identify himself as belonging to a social minority. Nor did he just tell us something about himself. He told us something about the group he is applying to join, the Abbott government.
If the government seems to be out of step with social expectations it is because Abbott is governing for the far-right numbers that installed him as party leader.

Paradoxically, even as modern Australia continues to become less religious and particularly less Christian, we are governed by probably the most obviously religious government the country has had.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s devout Catholicism and his background as a trainee priest are well known. But it’s not just him. Almost half his frontbench are practising Catholics, a statistic that would no doubt astound the party’s founder, Robert Menzies. Among the rest are several who adhere to Protestant sects that Menzies would have considered decidedly non-mainstream.
There is considerable variance between them, of course. Malcolm Turnbull, whom Abbott supplanted as leader, is counted among the practising Catholics and is also truly liberal in many of his attitudes. So are Christopher Pyne and George Brandis, and Joe Hockey to a slightly lesser extent.
At the other end of the ministerial spectrum we have the extreme Catholic conservatism of Defence Minister Kevin Andrews. In between are the likes of the very devout Barnaby Joyce (agriculture), Andrew Robb (trade) and Mathias Cormann (finance). Among the non-Catholics is the arch right-winger Eric Abetz, aligned with the Christian Reformed Churches of Australia, who use the mission statement “Pray, multiply, train and align”, and Scott Morrison, aligned with the Pentecostal Assemblies of God, one of the few growing faith movements in the country, with its intoxicating blend of showbiz, God and Mammon. The big cheese of the movement in Australia, Brian Houston, wrote the book You Need More Money.
It’s not just the frontbench, either. The standout example is Cory Bernardi, son of Italian immigrants and protégé of one of the godfathers of the party’s right wing, Nick Minchin. Bernardi is the closest analogue in Australia to the Tea Party of the United States. Indeed, he has consciously imported their techniques, including the establishment of the Conservative Leadership Foundation to sponsor young religious right-wingers, and the Conservative Action Network, which he has characterised as “a Facebook for conservatives”.
Bernardi entered the senate in 2006. In his first speech he spoke of the “sacred” nature of heterosexual marriage and the sanctity of life, praised his stay-at-home mother, and promised, “I shall be guided by my conscience,
my family, my country and my God.”

While Bernardi is something of an outlier, he is much less an outlier than he would have been in years and decades past. He is also one of the people to whom Abbott owes his leadership. When Abbott challenged Turnbull in 2009, he split the party room on the issue of climate change. He owed the religious right for his victory. If the government seems to be out of step with social expectations – on the environment, on same-sex marriage, on euthanasia – it is because Abbott is governing not for the electorate that installed him as prime minister but for the far-right numbers that installed him as party leader.

Back in 1998 Paul Pickering, of the Australian National University, produced a long piece for the Australian Journal of Politics and History, a “biographical analysis” of the 36 new conservative members elected in the Howard landslide of 1996, and a comparison of them with another big conservative intake, in 1975. One key difference he noted was that first speeches of 1996’s new members included a plethora of variations on the theme of family values. In 1975 no one even mentioned the family.
“The rise of concern with the family appears to go hand in hand with an increase in religiosity in Australian politics,” wrote Pickering. “Where God received only one reference in the first speeches of the 1975 cohort … the first speeches of the ‘Class of 96’ contain numerous references to God and Christian principles.”
Pickering’s analysis highlighted something else, too, which he described as a “shrill chorus of anger”. He cited numerous examples of new members railing against “minority groups”, about “thought control and social engineering”, and about “political correctness”. And against government itself. Tony Smith, who replaced Bronwyn Bishop as speaker, warned against “the insidious rise and rise of the state”, which he likened to a “great praying mantis”.

There were no such expressions 20 years prior, Pickering noted. He characterised the class of ’96 as “the children of the ‘common sense’ revolution”.
Of course, there is such a thing as common sense. It’s what parents evoke to dissuade children from jumping off the roof. But it is a dangerous thing when applied to more complex matters, as the journalist and writer Chris Wallace noted in a recent article.
“Common sense is such a bogus concept,” she wrote, referring to current politics. “When someone dishes common sense at you, it typically camouflages an emotionally charged, partisan position on something important that the common sense propagator wants to define as beyond debate…”
Interestingly, Bernardi’s blog is named “Common Sense Lives Here”.
But neither common sense nor faith is a reliable guide to rational decision-making. For that, you need evidence. And an evidence-based approach to politics is at the heart of liberalism, says Fred Chaney, who served 20 years in the parliament until 1993.
“My definition of a liberal is a person who looks at the facts and the circumstances and makes a conscientious decision,” he says, and recalls an instance, early in his career, which drove the point home to him.

It was 1975; he was a member of the senate committee reviewing a piece of legislation proposed by the Whitlam government. The committee seemed hopelessly stuck.
“I remember going to [long-serving senator Sir] Reginald Wright, and asking how we would ever reach a conclusion. And he said: ‘My boy, the facts will speak for themselves.’ And they did. The three Labor and three Liberal members recommended the bill be withdrawn.
“That was liberalism in action,” says Chaney, implicitly including the Labor committee members in his definition of liberals.
Chaney was a moderate Liberal and a frontbencher for most of his career. He doesn’t think he would last in today’s party.
Judi Moylan, another 20-year veteran of the Liberal Party, from 1993 to 2013, is quite sure she would not.
“Actually, I was surprised I lasted so long,” she says. “It was far more liberal when I came in, but as time went by it came to be more and more dominated by right-wingers. It hadn’t moved to where it is now, where it is starting to look like the American Tea Party.

“I think, unfortunately, the party will pay dearly for its extreme views in many quarters at the next election.”
Stuart Macintyre, historian and professorial fellow at Melbourne University, cites two factors in the rightward drift of conservative politics.
The first is neoliberalism and deregulation, associated with the dry turn of the Institute of Public Affairs and the changed climate of opinion in the 1980s, in Australia and elsewhere. The other is religious moral conservatism.
“The dries are a bit in retreat now,” he says. “The moral conservatives have the upper hand.”
Macintyre suggests it has a lot to do with the general decline in active participation in politics.
“The party Menzies created was a mass party in which branches included people from all walks of life,” he says.
“But as membership and participation in political parties has declined they’ve become much more vulnerable to the influence wielded by smaller and more ideological sections within them. Religious groups are among those who can take advantage of the vulnerability to exert much more influence than they do in society at large.”
Another historian, Dr Ian Tregenza, of Macquarie University, emphasises the point, but also points to the rise of global terrorism.
“After September 11, 2001, religion has come back in a big way. It brought to the surface some bigger issues, about faith and values – people like [US political scientist Samuel] Huntington, talking about the clash of civilisations. The rhetoric shifted.”

But the connection between religion and conservative politics had changed long before that. When Menzies built the Liberal Party out of the wreckage of the United Australia Party in the early 1940s, it was an almost exclusively Protestant construction. High Protestant, strongly Anglican and Presbyterian.
Labor was the party of Catholics and workers. After Labor split, there was a migration of Catholics to the conservative side, often via the fiercely anti-communist Democratic Labour Party.
“But,” says Tregenza, “people were reticent to talk about religion in public life.” They feared stirring sectarian divisions that were still pronounced in the populace. “The big shift from the 1950s is that the sectarian divisions aren’t there anymore. Now you get a sense from religious people of various sorts, whether Catholic or evangelical Protestants, that they are aligned with each other in opposition to the secular left.”
Well, that’s the way they see it. All the “left” is not secular, however. The Abbott government finds itself regularly at odds with church leaders over issues such as the environment, foreign aid and the treatment of asylum seekers.

“There is a certain selectivity apparent in the current government about what sort of Christian views they pick up on,” says Tregenza. “Abbott, doesn’t say much at all about Catholic social teaching. There are whole areas of Christian doctrine that get overlooked.”
Indeed. Abbott’s Catholicism is that of his friend and confessor George Pell, not that of Pope Francis.
But given that the religious right is exerting increasing power as a consequence of the decline in political party membership, the question arises: Why has it not populated the Labor Party?
The first point is that it has, to some extent, as the ANU political scientist Professor John Warhurst noted in a piece he wrote about five years ago, which analysed the religious beliefs of the 27 Australian prime ministers who had served to that time.
Interestingly, he found that “a clear majority (16) have been either nominal Christians only or agnostic”. More interestingly, he found it hard to even establish what religious beliefs some of them held, which goes to show how irrelevant faith was through much of this country’s political history.

Warhurst said his interest was spurred by the public debate generated by the religious beliefs of two recent prime ministers, John Howard and Kevin Rudd.
“Among many other comments, Rudd has been described as ‘the most sincerely Christian prime minister Australia has had for a very long time’, and as having identified himself more strongly as being a ‘practising Christian’ than any PM since WW2,” said Warhurst.
“Rudd and Tony Abbott… were described as ‘the two most overtly religious party leaders Australia has seen’.”
That said, the influence of the religious right is nowhere near as pronounced in Labor. It has its conservative Catholic rump in the shoppies’ union – the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association – but, says Monash University political scientist Dr Nick Economou, “in Labor the crazies are mitigated by the party’s complex structure. In the Liberal Party, power is more decentralised. As a result it’s much easier for branches to put forward people who are very conservative.”

And this religious conservatism is manifested in policy, even if not always explicitly.
An obvious example was the budget decision last year to spend a quarter of a billion dollars to install chaplains in Australian schools. There would be no money to employ secular, trained social workers to counsel kids. This from a prime minister who endorsed in his book Battlelines the notion that governments should be about pragmatic problem solving, rather than acting as “ideologues” who “want to impose their values on others”.
Same-sex marriage is another obvious one, but others are less apparent, such as immigration policy.
The Howard government sought, quite successfully after the September 11 terrorist attacks, to conflate boat people with terrorists, and to suggest that Australia did not want immigrants, particularly self-selected ones, who did not share our “Judeo-Christian values”.
Abbott took this reliance on faith further, justifying his hardline position on asylum seekers during an appearance on the ABC’s Q&A in 2010: “Jesus knew that there was a place for everything and it’s not necessarily everyone’s place to come to Australia.”

Climate change is another area where the influence of religion is only obliquely glimpsed. As Nobel laureate Professor Peter Doherty told Lateline this week: “It’s not necessarily a characteristic of conservatives that they’re anti-environment. That doesn’t make sense and I think it’s a wrong positioning of the right in politics.”
He suggested economic considerations had a lot to do with the government’s reluctance to address the issue, which is no doubt true.
But it’s also the case that a large number of people on the conservative side of politics – between a quarter and a third of federal members, by Malcolm Turnbull’s estimate – simply don’t believe humanity is changing the climate. Those people are concentrated in the religious right of the Coalition.
In the same interview, Doherty spoke of the “very definite rules” by which scientific endeavour has operated since the 17th century: you do the experiments, you make the measurements, and you publish the results.
“We do try to engage with reality,” he said.

Since the 17th century, religious belief has regularly refused to accept scientific reality. How could Earth not be at the centre of the universe? How could we have evolved from monkeys?
Social science demonstrates that same-sex parents can be as good as opposite-sex parents. Climate science tells us that our dominion over Earth is causing an environmental crisis. But faith is reluctant.
And in a less direct way, the unpopular conservatism of the Abbott government may be seen as being at least partly responsible for its broader policy paralysis.
Macintyre acknowledges the big reforms, such as these times demand, are hard for any government, in view of the fickleness of the electorate. But they are all the more difficult for a government that is wildly unpopular.
“Look at the economic summit going on this week, “ he says. “Business representatives, union representatives, academia, civil society groups. That’s a sign that the government has been unable to present any plan for economic reform.
“It is so difficult for this government to apply itself to any of these questions because political considerations prevail.”
Still, history shows that faith usually, eventually bows to reality. And there’s a reality check imminent. On September 19 we will see if the God-fearing Andrew Hastie wins in Canning. Prayers are surely being offered.

Tags:
Tony Abbott Coalition Andrew Hastie Catholicism Kevin Andrews Barnaby Joyce George Brandis Christopher Pyne Joe Hockey Malcolm Turnbull Scott Morrison
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on Aug 29, 2015 as "Abbott and the Christian right". Subscribe here.
Read more

Mike Seccombe
is The Saturday Paper's national correspondent.

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au...abbott-and-the-christian-right/14407704002308

 

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Zvi Lando ‏@zlando


To know if there can be peace between #Israel / Arabs, all you need is to see what is being taught in their schools #WednesdayWisdompic.twitter.com/7rCuvjJZjF


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Islam's View of Migration!



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Crete: Flyers distributed quoting Qur’an and saying Allah has commanded conquest of the planet

September 27, 2016 1:15 pm By Robert Spencer 19 Comments

“And fight them until there is no fitnah and the religion, all of it, is for Allah.” (Qur’an 8:39)
“Allah’s Apostle said, ‘I have been ordered to fight the people till they say: “None has the right to be worshipped but Allah.” And if they say so, pray like our prayers, face our Qibla and slaughter as we slaughter, then their blood and property will be sacred to us and we will not interfere with them except legally.'” (Bukhari 8.387)


“Authorities investigate mystery flyers citing Koran,” Ekathimerini, September 26, 2016:

Authorities on Crete have launched an investigation after leaflets with references to Allah and excerpts from the Koran were found strewn on the streets of Tympaki in the area of Messara.
According to local reports, the flyers, signed by a group calling itself the Muslim Brotherhood of Crete, said that Allah has commanded the conquest of the planet and that non-believers should not own any land.

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David Wood Video: The Purpose of Debating Islam and Jihad: A Reply to Dr. Craig Considine

September 26, 2016 9:32 am By Robert Spencer 77 Comments



Recently, some people on Twitter suggested that Craig Considine, an Islamic apologist I’ve written about several times (see here and here), debate either the brilliant David Wood or me. I readily agreed, and David suggested a four-man debate, with Considine and Reza Aslan on one side and Wood and me on the other. That was fine with me as well, but Considine haughtily refused, calling us “Islamophobes.”

Now, I’ve debated plenty of imams and Muslim spokesmen, including full-length debates with Anjem Choudhary, Omar Bakri, Moustafa Zayed, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, Mubin Shaikh, and others, and briefer radio debates with Jaafar Siddiqui, Salam Al-Marayati, Hussam Ayloush, Hussein Ibish, As’ad AbuKhalil (the “Angry Arab”), Muqtedar Khan, and others, and TV exchanges with Ibrahim Hooper, Abdul Malik Ali, Abdulaziz Sachedina, and others. I also had an unforgettable discussion on the Qur’an with a London imam on the BBC. But many, many other Muslim spokesmen has refused to debate me, generally on the grounds that I am too hateful to deal with.
David Wood ably dismantles that excuse in this video.


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Huffington Post: Christians should accept Muhammad as a prophet

January 30, 2016 5:06 pm By Robert Spencer

The Leftist establishment continues to shill for Islam. Can you imagine the Huffington Post publishing a piece called “Why a Muslim Can View Jesus As the Son of God”? Of course not. While unstintingly hostile to Christianity, for some unknown reason (Saudi princes lining their pockets?) the Left in the West is intent on making sure that people have a positive view of Islam, and never, ever question whether the jihadis who keep on justifying murder by quoting the Qur’an might have something to do with Islam.
And so once again Craig Considine, who has likened Muhammad to George Washington, hailed Muhammad as a “universal champion of human rights,” and claimed that Christianity has a concept of jihad just like Islam’s. He pulls off these feats of legerdemain by employing a very simple method: ignoring what doesn’t fit his thesis, as he does here.


There is no Considine but Considine, and Muhammad is his prophet


“Why a Christian Can View Muhammad As A Prophet,” by Craig Considine, Huffington Post, January 26, 2016:

As an advocate of interfaith dialogue, particularly between Christians and Muslims, I’m often faced with the issue of conversion. People ask me, “If you admire Prophet Muhammad so much, why don’t you convert to Islam? Why don’t you accept him as “the seal”? I see these questions popping up on my Twitter and Facebook feeds more than you might imagine.​

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Basically, me admiring Prophet Muhammad isn’t “enough” for Muslims; in their eyes, I must take a few concrete steps towards Islam to be fully recognized as a “true believer.” Otherwise, I’m just a weirdo Christian who respects Muhammad, but doesn’t recognize him as a “the man.” Christians, on the other hand, have called me “pseudo Catholic” and “infidel” for my positive writings about Muhammad. For these Islamophobes, I’m quite simply a heretic.​

Note Considine’s usage of the smear term “Islamophobe.” An “Islamophobe” is supposedly someone who has an irrational hatred of Islam — and for what did his Christian interlocutors earn this label? They called him a “pseudo-Catholic” and “infidel” for his “positive writings about Muhammad.” Considering Islam’s rejection of the divinity, crucifixion, resurrection and salvific mission of Christ, it’s perfectly reasonable for these Christians to have considered Considine to have departed from the faith by writing positively about Muhammad. But to Considine, it only means that they hate Islam.

There’s no way around it. Perhaps my work is irritating to Muslims and Christians because I’m pushing a few traditional boundaries and making people question the very heart of their religious traditions and identities.​

Or maybe it is irritating to Muslims and Christians because he is ignoring the manifest contradictions between the doctrines of the two faiths.

Here’s the main issue according to popular narratives: Muslims must recognize Jesus as a prophet of God, as laid out explicitly in the Qur’an. Muslims are’t [sic] at risk of anything when they say “I believe in Jesus.” However, if we switched the situation (“I’m a Christian. I believe in Muhammad as a prophet”), people might start to question my credibility as a self-professed Christian. People might say, “Jesus is the only way. You’ve turned your back on God. You’re no longer Christian.”​

Note the sleight of hand. Considine suggests that Islam is more open-minded and generous than Christianity, since Muslims can say “I believe in Jesus,” but Christians can’t say “I believe in Muhammad as a prophet” without being read out of Christianity. But he can only imply this by rigging his analogy. The actual equivalent of his saying, “I’m a Christian. I believe in Muhammad as a prophet” would be for a Muslim to say, “I’m a Muslim. I believe in Jesus as the Son of God” — which the Qur’an strenuously, emphatically and repeatedly denies. If a Muslim said that, Muslims would tell him, “Jesus is only a prophet. You’ve turned your back on Allah. You’re no longer Muslim.”

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I’m writing this piece to explain why I disagree with the idea that Christians can’t recognize Muhammad as a prophet. Really, what is in question here is the definition of “prophet.” “Prophet” can be defined as “a person regarded as an inspired teacher or proclaimer of the will of God.” Outside of the dictionary, I’ve always understood “prophet” to mean a messenger of a Higher Power who works on earth to bring justice and peace to humanity.​

Let me say this right off the bat: I fully recognize Muhammad’s greatness. He was an exceptional person; he might even be the greatest and most influential human being ever to walk the face of the earth. Prophet Muhammad brought love, peace, and much more to a part of the world that had little of these things.​

Odd, then, if Muhammad brought love and peace, why the Islamic world is in flames. Flat statements such as “Prophet Muhammad brought love, peace, and much more to a part of the world that had little of these things” are simply fatuous, in that they ignore, and expect readers to ignore, the fact that Muslims all over the world are killing people and invoking Muhammad’s words and deeds to justify those killings. Craig Considine’s balloon may never land, but he can’t expect to carry everyone else along on his cloud of self-delusion and denial just by asserting a manifest absurdity.

One of the most overlooked aspects of Muhammad’s character is his fierce anti-racist stance. He made the unprecedented move of considering both white people and black people as equals in the eyes of God. Yet many Christians still refuse to recognize Muhammad as an “inspired teacher or proclaimer of the will of God” (read: a prophet). The issue for some Christians, perhaps, is that Muhammad claims to have the last and universal truth. This rubs some Christians the wrong way. Only Jesus can make this claim.​

In reality, Muhammad was a white man who owned black slaves: “A man entered the mosque on camel and made it kneel down, and then tied his leg with rope. He then asked: Who among you is Muhammad? The Messenger of Allah was sitting leaning upon something among them. We said to him: This white man who is leaning.” (Sunan Abu Dawud 486) “Narrated Umar:I came and behold, Allah’s Messenger was staying on a Mashroba (attic room) and a black slave of Allah’s Messenger was at the top if its stairs.” (Sahih Bukhari 9.91.368) And aside from claiming to have the last and universal truth, other aspects of Muhammad’s message that rub some Christians (and others) the wrong way are warfare against unbelievers, hatred of Jews, women’s inferiority, and more. But Craig Considine thinks so little of his readers that he doesn’t consider such things even to dismiss them.

In conversations I’ve had with Muslims, a frequent topic of discussion is Muhammad is “the seal of the prophets.” They add that both Moses and Jesus predicted his arrival. Christians, however, find it difficult to “find” Muhammad in their Bible. While some Muslims cite John (14: 16-17) as proof that Jesus predicted the coming of Muhammad, many Christians find it difficult to interpret this verse as the “truth.” Perhaps they’re in denial, though it doesn’t even matter. Christians don’t buy it.​

Nonetheless, Christians argue that it is “anti-Christian” to say that Muhammad is a prophet. Because Jesus is the clear-cut revelation of God as noted in the Bible, Christians (the argument goes) must not accept any other figure besides him. However, I see nothing “anti-Christian” in recognizing Muhammad as a prophet. As I mentioned earlier, I like to view the word “prophet” as having a very broad meaning. In fact, I don’t even like to place it in the realm of “religion,” especially not in the Abrahamic tradition. To me, a prophet is someone who has valuable insight and intuition, who is sensitive about the well-being of others regardless of their ethnic or religious backgrounds.​

Even by that standard Muhammad fails. How sensitive was Muhammad to the well-being of Safiyya bint Huyayy? Muhammad killed her father and her husband during the raid on the Jews at Khaybar. After the massacre was completed, on the way out of Khaybar that night, Muhammad halted his caravan as soon as they were outside the oasis, pitched a tent, and consummated the marriage. Remember, her father and brother had just been killed, and then she was raped by their killer. Sensitivity to the well-being of others?
And sensitive to the well-being of others regardless of their ethnic or religious backgrounds? Muhammad said: “I have been commanded to fight against people so long as they do not declare that there is no god but Allah, and he who professed it was guaranteed the protection of his property and life on my behalf except for the right affairs rest with Allah.” (Sahih Muslim 30) So if a non-Muslim doesn’t convert to Islam, his property and life are not protected — is that sensitivity to the well-being of others regardless of their religious backgrounds?

I realize that some Muslims may not be happy with me putting Muhammad on par with other prophets. To be honest, I don’t see Muhammad as the “final prophet.” That’s too limiting for me, but it’s also why I’m able to consider him to be a prophet on equal footing with Jesus and others. To be clear, neither Jesus or Muhammad is the “final prophet” in my mind. I can’t imagine a Higher Power that stops allowing prophets on earth. This world of ours is broken, and so prophets will emerge as the days move forward. I don’t believe in “seals” either. Nothing is “sealed.” My views on life in general are too infinite for that kind of “truth.”​

With that being said, both Muslims and Christians will say that I’m “confused” or “insane.” How can you be a Christian if you say Muhammad is a prophet? Why, then, are you not a Muslim? What are the boundaries of your religious identity? Are you both Christian and Muslim? What is going on with you?​

I understand. It’s confusing, but life is messy, and “religion” perhaps even more so. A clarification is in order: Do I believe in everything that Prophet Muhammad said according to the Qur’an and hadiths? No, I don’t, but I also don’t believe in everything that Jesus or Moses said according to the Gospel or Talmud. Things kind of cancel out, even out. I accept aspects of both, but neither in their entirety.​

When I read the Qur’an, I don’t interpret it as a book for Muslims, but rather for all human beings. The Qur’an (5:47) requests people to “discern what God has sent down to him.” The word “discern” is a crucial one. Literally, discern means to “perceive something.” My mind tells me that Jesus and Muhammad have equally valuable messages. Both men shared some “truths,” but let’s be real: they were human beings. They were prone to error. They made some mistakes. They missed some things.​

All this windy gobbledegook amounts to is that Craig Considine is neither a Christian nor a Muslim in any recognizable or genuine sense, but is fashioning his own religion, placing himself as the judge and arbiter of the validity of what Jesus and Muhammad say. He is ill-equipped for this, however, if he thinks “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” is “equally valuable” as “Slay the idolaters wherever you find them.”
That the Huffington Post would print this gallimaufry of pseudo-profundity and massive intellectual confusion only illustrates how desperate the Left is to burnish the image of Muhammad and Islam: anyone who offers to do that is welcome, even if he is as muddle-headed as Craig Considine.


Obama to visit US mosque to "celebrate the contributions Muslim Americans make to our nation"
UK: Three Muslims gang-raped non-Muslim teen girl in bathroom of hotel where they were celebrating Eid


Robert Spencer in PJ Lifestyle: The Hypocrisy of the Huffington Post’s Praise of Muhammad

January 27, 2014 2:12 pm By Robert Spencer

Over at PJ Lifestyle I explore the latest manifestation of the American’s Left’s infatuation with Muhammad:

The Huffington Post has published yet another article extolling the virtues of the orthodox Christian view of Jesus Christ – no, of course I am not serious. The Huffington Post would never publish something as right wing and sectarian as that. No, what the HuffPo has published is another in a long string of articles in praise of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, who is a much more palatable figure to the American Left.
The latest, “What Studying Muhammad Taught Me About Islam,” published in the HuffPo last week, is as risible as Karen Armstrong’s likening Muhammad to Gandhi, and is as gracefully written as a seventh grader’s book report. But for the Huffington Post, accuracy and quality are of no import: if it downplays the grim reality of Islamic jihad terror, then it’s good enough for them.
The author of the piece is Craig Considine, who has previously likened Muhammad to George Washington and claimed that Christianity has a concept of jihad just like Islam’s. He pulls off these feats of legerdemain by employing a very simple method: ignoring what doesn’t fit his thesis, as he does here.
“In this short essay,” says Considine in his irredeemably clunky prose, “I want to share with you what I have learned about Muhammad and how his legacy informs my understanding of Islam. Muhammad’s beliefs on how to treat religious minorities make him a universal champion of human rights, particularly as it pertains to freedom of conscience, freedom of worship, and the right for minorities to have protection during times of strife.”
That is fanciful enough, but Considine plows on:

“Muhammad initiated many legal covenants with Christians and Jews after establishing his Muslim community. For example, in one covenant with the Christian monks at Mount Sinai, Egypt, Muhammad called on Muslims to respect Christian judges and churches, and for no Muslim to fight against his Christian brother or sister. Through this agreement, Muhammad made it clear that Islam, as a political and philosophical way of life, respected and protected Christians.”​

The document to which Considine is referring, the Achtiname, is of even more doubtful authenticity than everything else about Muhammad’s life. Muhammad is supposed to have died in 632; the Muslims conquered Egypt between 639 and 641. The document says of the Christians, “No one shall bear arms against them.” So were the conquerors transgressing against Muhammad’s command for, as Considine puts it, “no Muslim to fight against his Christian brother or sister”? Did Muhammad draw up this document because he foresaw the Muslim invasion of Egypt? There is no mention of this document in any remotely contemporary Islamic sources; among other anomalies, it bears a drawing of a mosque with a minaret, although minarets weren’t put on mosques until long after the time Muhammad is supposed to have lived, which is why Muslim hardliners consider them unacceptable innovation (bid’a).
The document exempts the monks of St. Catherine’s monastery from paying the jizya. While it is conceivable that Muhammad, believing he bore the authority of Allah, would exempt them from an obligation specified by Allah himself in the Qur’an (9:29), the Achtiname specifies that Christians of Egypt are to pay a jizya only of twelve drachmas.
Yet according to the seventh-century Coptic bishop John of Nikiou, Christians in Egypt “came to the point of offering their children in exchange for the enormous sums that they had to pay each month.”
The Achtiname, in short, bears all the earmarks of being an early medieval Christian forgery, perhaps developed by the monks themselves in order to protect the monastery and Egyptian Christians from the depredations of zealous Muslims.
Considine doesn’t mention any of the questions about the Achtiname’s authenticity. Instead, he just piles on more:

Similarly, in the Treaty of Maqnah, the Prophet stated Jews “may be in peace… you are in security [under Muhammad’s rule]… Towards you is no wrong and no enmity. After today you will not be subject to oppression or violence.” In the Constitution of Medina, a key document which laid out a societal vision for Muslims, Muhammad also singled out Jews, who, he wrote, “shall maintain their own religion and the Muslim theirs… The close friends of Jews are as themselves.” In safeguarding the rights of Jews, Muhammad made it clear that a citizen of an Islamic state did not have to follow Islam and that Muslims should treat Jews as they would their own friends. In developing these agreements with his fellow Muslims, Christians, and Jews, Muhammad clearly rejected elitism and racism and demanded that Muslims see their Abrahamic brothers and sisters as equals before God.​

Here again, both the Treaty of Maqnah and the Constitution of Medina are of doubtful authenticity. The Constitution is first mentioned in Ibn Ishaq’s biography of Muhammad, which was written over 125 years after the accepted date for Muhammad’s death. Unfortunately for Considine, Ibn Ishaq also details what happened to three Jewish tribes of Arabia after the Constitution of Medina: Muhammad exiled the Banu Qaynuqa and Banu Nadir, massacred the Banu Qurayza after they (understandably) made a pact with his enemies during the pagan Meccans’ siege of Medina, and then massacred the exiles at the Khaybar oasis, giving Muslims even today a bloodthirsty war chant: “Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, the army of Muhammad will return.” Funny how we never hear Muslims chanting, “Relax, relax, O Jews, the Constitution of Medina will return.”
Considine then goes on to claim that Muhammad “fought against racism long before the days of Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela.” He says, with his inimitable gift for imitating a seventh-grader’s peroration, that “Muhammad’s final sermon informed me that Islam teaches Muslims to be tolerant of difference and welcome to diversity.”
Yet all too many Arab Muslims have lorded it over non-Arab Muslims throughout Islamic history, and some do today. Why are there so many who misunderstand Muhammad’s clear words here? Perhaps because Muhammad is also said to have declared: “Allah has chosen the Arabs above others” (‘Umdat al-Salik M4.2)….
There is more.


Raymond Ibrahim: Kerry Boasts of ‘Pluralistic’ Syria Once Assad Gone
Murderer Breivik opposed Spencer and other counter-jihadists; identified with them to destroy counter-jihad movement

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Iranian real feminists protest in Teheran against the compulsory wearing of hijab after Khomeini revolution 1979.



Anyone wonder where the 'librated' social justice warrior so called female liberationists of the western intelligentsia have disappeared to?​

 

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Germany: Muslims Threaten to ‘Exterminate’ Nudist ‘Sluts’

They view us as "infidels" and asking them to integrate is viewed as oppression

Chris Menahan Information Liberation - July 27, 2016 474 Comments





Nudist swimmers say a gang of young Muslim men threatened to “exterminate” them “all” and told them all German women are “sluts” who deserve to die.
From Breitbart:


A group of young Muslim men threatened men, women, and children at a swimming pool in Germany because they were offended by the fact the bathers were nude.
A swimming pool in the town of Geldern in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany is home to bathers who prefer a more “natural” form of swimming. Nudists at the pool were verbally abused by a group of young Muslim men who threatened them because they consider swimming in the nude ‘indecent behaviour’. The group of Muslims not only threatened the male bathers but also spat upon them and several women and children, reports Junge Freiheit.
A total of six Muslim men were involved in the incident and are described by witnesses as being in their mid 20’s, all with full Islamic-style beards. The men insulted and threatened the nudists in both German and Arabic, yelling “Allahu akbar” at the bathers along with other Arabic insults.
One of the nudists, a mother, claimed that the young Muslims told her: “We [German] women are all sluts and they would exterminate all of us.” The woman said the men all knew German quite well and at least some of them were likely second or third generation German Muslims. “This contempt, this potential for aggression made me really afraid,” she continued and according to other witnesses the men referred to the bathers as “infidels”.


Statistically, second generation Muslims are 218 percent more criminal than their first generation parents. Muslims on the whole do not integrate into western societies and do not want to integrate.




Watch this interview with a young Muslim girl whining about being asked to integrate in Sweden:


They view us as “infidels” and asking them to integrate is viewed as oppression.
This is not unique to Europe, the same is happening here in America.
Breitbart continues:

A staff member at the pool, Lisa-Marie Theunissen, described the incident to German media saying: “We had asked the men to be quiet,” after visitors to the facility had complained to the staff about being threatened and harassed. According to reports the group of Muslims, described as being “southern looking”, then went to a water skiing facility and extended their threats and harassment to the staff there whereupon they were chased out by one of the staff.
When the group returned to the swimming pool the staff decided to call the local police. The police took the young men from the pool and checked their identification, and though there were no reports of arrests being made the state security service have said they will be investigating the matter further.

This happened just days after an 18-year-old Iranian went on a shooting spree at a McDonald’s in Germany targeting “infidel” children and just a little over a week after another migrant went on an attempted murder spree hacking away at random Germans with an axe. Just two days ago, a Syrian migrant stabbed a pregnant woman to death and another blew himself up in a suicide bombing injuring 12 Germans.



There is no way these migrants are not aware of the current climate in Germany where everyone is on edge because of these Muslim terror attacks, yet they issued such death threats without a care in the world and it appears they weren’t even arrested.

Do you think they’d be committing such crimes in Muslim countries where they’ll chop your hand off if you’re caught stealing?



They know the German authorities, just like those in Sweden and France, will let them get away with anything. Here they were caught threatening to go full-jihad on some German women and children and they weren’t even arrested nor threatened with deportation. This has to change and it has to change fast.

 

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