Dutch sociologist Jolande Withuis has written an essay exploring the motivations of radical women Muslims, coming to the conclusion that they are motivated by the promise a thoroughly meaningful life through complete devotion:

“Faith offers radical women Muslims a ‘total’ identity that isn’t limited to certain occasions and which is considerably more serious than anything else. It demands effort and renunciation, yet offers fulfilment and peace of mind. Boring or tiresome rules, such as covering oneself or not being allowed to eat certain foods, become a source of self-awareness. They are like anorexics, who derive satisfaction in overcoming hunger, even if it is harmful to their health. Correspondingly, these women occupy themselves to the point of absurdity in trying to determine whether things are ‘haram’ or ‘halal’ – and this occupies their time and gives them the pleasant feeling of pursuing a meaningful life.”

Clearly this is largely a description that does not apply solely either to women or to devotees of Islam, though. In most other established religious traditions such behavior is generally restricted to those who choose to withdraw from life into monasteries, nunneries, wilderness retreats, hermitude etc. Islam on the other hand shuns monastic life (and clergy) and offers a completely directed way of life, down to the last minutiae, giving opportunity for utter servitude in every act or decision. It does after all mean Submission. But this is perhaps but an empty exoteric shell of a real spiritual devotion. Ritual for ritual’s sake. Not everyone is made out for such a path and the void can’t be filled by the hollow.

The above extract is from signandsight.com, the original is in Dutch and can be found here.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is in town and we have seen the predictable reaction from various representatives of the Muslim community. Yawn.

Whats more disconcerting is the criticism Hirsi Ali has received, particularly in Europe, from various intellectuals and philosophers, cultural relativists in-denial and morally obtuse apostles of the coming great Multiculturalist Utopia, some of whom had the gall to call her an “Enlightenment fundamentalist”. This attack on Hirsi Ali, and the accompanying championing of “moderate Islamist” Tariq Ramadan was the subject of a momentous debate I posted about earlier, which serves as the background for this post.

The cover story of the current issue of The New Statesman is called “Who’s afraid of Tariq Ramadan?” (and doesn’t Ramadan ever look the part of a modern philosopher?), by Paul Berman, and contains the most erudite, complete and clear defense of Ayaan Hirsi Ali against the lot above, yet. The whole essay is very long, broken up over 12 pages, so I recommend heading straight for the “print” version, which allows you to view it in one page. Feel free to search the page for “Ayaan” to get the relevant part (not that the whole thing is not worth reading, it is).

Here’s Berman’s explanation of why these people attack Hirsi Ali:

If you open either of her books and read a few lines at random, you will discover one reality that you would hardly guess from reading those attacks. Buruma–and he is not the only one to do this–presents Hirsi Ali as a diehard enemy of Islam, dedicated to hurling insults, which, to be sure, she does do, and with gusto. But this is not her major theme. In her books, and in the little film that she made with van Gogh, she dedicates herself mostly to something else, and that is to describe and to decry the miseries of women in the portion of the Muslim world that she knows best–in East Africa and Saudi Arabia, together with the immigrant zones of Europe. Her account of her own genital mutilation as a little girl, and of the botched genital mutilation of her sister, and the sister’s tragic life and suicide; her portrait of girlhood and marriage in Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia, not to mention her own forced marriage, which she fled; the portrait of her grandmother, the Somali nomad, and the patriarchal customs of the past, which do seem to have lingered on; her sense of horror, as a girl, at seeing the women of Saudi Arabia for the first time, these women who have no faces because of their veils and whose black garments hang so shapelessly upon their bodies that, in order to know which way the women are facing, you have to look to see which way their shoes are pointing; her account of the shelters for abused Muslim women in Holland; her account of the terrors of refugee existence, and the double terrors of refugee existence for women–all these passages express something that can never be detected in a certain kind of high-minded cerebral journalism today. It is a visceral anger at oppression. A moral indignation, and not just a wistful pragmatism.

But mostly these passages in Hirsi Ali’s books raise the issue of women’s rights, and not from an outsider’s point of view, regardless of how many times she has been denounced for making herself an outsider to Muslim life. Hers is a story marked by knives–the knife at her own genital mutilation, and at her sister’s; the knife at the murder of her friend and colleague, pinning to his chest the sheet of paper threatening her own life. This is not a Swiss professor! Here is the actual insider; the real thing. I suppose that all this unironic indignation can only be annoying in the extreme to a certain kind of refined sensibility. Something about those knives takes away the quality of abstraction that allows a social issue to be shrugged off. It is always good to be subtle and nuanced, but Hirsi Ali’s writings have the effect of making a large number of nuanced subtleties look ridiculous.

About Hirsi Ali we do not have to wonder: where does she stand on the question of stoning women to death? Or on the obligation for husbands to beat their wives? Read one page by her and you will know the answer; and if you read two pages, you might begin to suspect that, on the television screens of France, the man who defended the oppressed of the oppressed in the poorest neighborhoods of Europe was Nicolas Sarkozy. But that has got to be the problem from a perspective like Buruma’s. This talk of women’s rights–doesn’t it point ultimately in directions that ought to be regarded as (here is the mystery of our present moment) conservative? Better the seventh century than Nicolas Sarkozy.

If there is an intellectual establishment, and I suppose there is, the attacks on Hirsi Ali radiate from its center. And this, the campaign against Hirsi Ali–this, like the anti-Semitic mob assault during the Paris peace march of 2003, or like the spectacle of millions of Britons marching under the leadership of an Islamist organization, or like the calm discussions in The New York Times of why it would be wrong to condemn with any vigor the stoning of women to death–this does represent something new. Here is the new development among journalists and intellectuals, the development that Ramadan’s career has served to illuminate. Something like a campaign against Hirsi Ali could never have taken place a few years ago. A sustained attack on an authentic liberal dissident crying out against injustices in remote parts of the world and even in the back streets of Western Europe, a sustained attack that appears nearly to have erased the very mention of women’s oppression and the struggle for women’s rights from discussion–no, this could not have happened yesterday, except on the extreme right. This is a new event. This is a reactionary turn in the intellectual world.

And delving deeper, past “the reactionary turn”, we happen upon a nose-dive:

[the French writer Pascal Bruckner] wrote a criticism of the leftist doctrine that in [the seventies] was still known as “Third Worldism”–meaning the hope and the expectation that, around the world, the impoverished countries, the former colonies and semi-colonies, would generate, as an aspect of their struggle against Western imperialism, a worldwide revolutionary alternative, a soulful new kind of socialism, a new and revolutionary culture. This was the doctrine that venerated revolutionary leaders such as Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro not because they were communists but because they were the leaders of the Third World revolution.

But Bruckner, in writing about the “Third Worldist” idea, noticed that among the good-hearted leftists of the Western countries, sympathy for oppressed people in the former colonies had turned into a kind of dehumanizing contempt for the oppressed people in the former colonies, without anyone having noticed. He called his book The Tears of the White Man, and in its pages he served up a spectacular exposé of left-wing European clichés about the poor and the oppressed in faraway places–an enormous catalogue of Noble Savage imagery and other fantastical pictures of the superior qualities of downtrodden people in poor countries, compared with their former oppressors in Europe. The book was a demonstration of how, through a combination of guilty consciences and patronizing ignorance, the European intellectuals had ended up re-creating the worst sorts of racist and colonialist imaginings of what people in other places and with other skin tones must be like: their wisdom, virtue, selflessness, brilliance, and, above all, their profound quality of being different.

Bruckner has returned to this topic from time to time over the years, and just last year he came out with a sequel called La Tyrannie de la Pénitence, or The Tyranny of Penitence, updated to our own age, in which the “Third World” of yore has been renamed the “south,” and the imperialists have been renamed the forces of globalization. And the sequel has led Bruckner to take a new glance at how, in our own time, the progressive intellectuals of the Western countries, out of a continuing self-contempt and feeling of guilt for the Western crimes of the past, have likewise updated their fantasies about the wronged and inscrutable people of other regions without really changing them. Ian Buruma, because of his sundry books, was the ideal person for The New York Times Magazine to assign a profile on Tariq Ramadan; and Pascal Bruckner, because of his own books, has turned out to be the ideal person to write about Ian Buruma. Bruckner noted the peculiarities of Buruma’s campaign against Hirsi Ali. He took note of Timothy Garton Ash’s contribution to this campaign in The New York Review of Books. And Bruckner offered a philosophical analysis.

Buruma and Garton Ash, Bruckner concluded, had fallen for the intellectual miasmas of the postmodern sensibility, and the miasmas had led, via the errors of relativism and an indiscriminate multiculturalism, to the simplest of philosophical mistakes. This was the inability to draw even the most elementary of distinctions. In the postmodern idea, the Enlightenment has come to be looked upon as merely one more set of cultural prejudices, no better and very likely rather worse than other sets of cultural prejudices–a zealotry that is unable to control its own excesses. From this point of view, someone like Hirsi Ali, who grew up in an atmosphere of Islamist radicalism and the Muslim Brotherhood in Africa and has taken up a new outlook committed to rationalism and individual freedom, has merely gone from one fundamentalism to another–not much different, seen in this light, from van Gogh’s murderer.

So sayeth Albert Einstein.

And apparently a growing number of scientists believe that although the illusion is a rather persistent one people can and do see past it… into the future. Sometimes, maybe.

Full story in This is London.

I believe I’ve had experiences that at least appeared to be premonition as they describe it and know others who have also. And yet I remain skeptical to a degree. The brain is an incredible instrument with an uncanny ability to cherry pick and catalog seonsory data in support of whatever happens to be its current focus of identification. Further to that our memory is notoriously unreliable. And human beings have a hard-wired desire to believe in the extraordinary.

Self-deception is contagious and consensus hallucinations abound. So I’ll wait and see.

And now a word from the skeptics:

Research in this matter is subject to the element of selective recall, whereby individuals tend to remember when a dream or hunch turns out correctly and forget it if it fails. Therefore, anecdotal reports are not of much value.
In 1983, an examination was made of the evidence offered by 127 persons who responded to a U.K. newspaper feature on premonitions. A questionnaire was accompanied by a personality test. Most who answered were female, average age was forty-six years, and 80 percent of them said that they were correct 70 percent of the time. The personality test showed that these persons were significantly more neurotic than average and scored high on a “lie scale.” Some 85 percent of their predictions involved death or other tragedies. The investigator concluded that the ability to have premonitions is important since it warns females and thereby provides a “survival advantage to the species.” No comment.

Hey, maybe neurotic middle-aged women really can foretell the future better than everyone else. If I was persistently yanked into the future by visions and foreboding of impending catastrophes I’d probably be neurotic too.

Below is an extract from an interview in which Argentinian historian Mariano Fazio explains the positive aspects of secularisation, from a Christian viewpoint, and why secularisation rose out of the Christian world. Professor Fazio is the head of the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. He recently published a book called “A History of Contemporary Ideas: a reading of the process of secularisation”. Extract:

MercatorNet: In your recent book, you distinguish between “strong” secularisation and “weak” secularisation? What do you mean by this?

Mariano Fazio: “Strong” secularisation implies that man has absolute autonomy. That is, it contends that man, and more generally speaking, earthly realities, are self-sufficient. They have no need for transcendence, for God. By “weak” secularisation I mean the growing awareness since the 16th century of the relative autonomy of the secular world. The distinction is between “absolute autonomy”, as represented by Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, and “relative autonomy”, and “relative autonomy”, as understood by the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church, especially in the document Gaudium et Spes. The latter means that earthly realities have their own laws, but that at the same time, these laws ultimately have their source in God.

MercatorNet: Is it possible to see a positive side to secularisation?

Mariano Fazio: From a Christian standpoint, the positive aspect of secularisation is “declericalisation”. Let me explain. Clericalism asserts that there is no distinction between the natural order and the supernatural order, between political power and spiritual power. This clericalism was a common feature of the Middle Ages. Modernity as “weak” secularisation implies that we are applying the Gospel injunction to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.

[..]
MercatorNet: It seem curious that secularisation sprang from within Christendom, and not in, say India or Saudi Arabia. How can this be the case?

Mariano Fazio: The doctrine of creation, one of the pillars of Christianity, underlies secularisation correctly understood. The world has been created by God and God himself has given it natural laws. God has given reason to men so that they can discover the structure of reality. It also makes it possible to access the deepest realities of life through faith. Harmony between faith and reason — a key theme of the teaching of Benedict XVI — leads to respect for the relative autonomy of earthly realities.

True, in traditionally Christian societies a radical separation between faith and reason has often appeared. This has led to secularisation in its “strong” sense, ie, to laicism and moral relativism. But such are the risks of freedom.

In other religions this is not even possible. They tend to be sceptical about man’s capacity for reason and man’s role is merely to accept revelation; there is no room for rational inquiry. This is what happens in Islamic fundamentalism (which need not be said of all Islam): citizenship in the political order is equated to citizenship in the heavenly order and political laws are derived directly from religious revelation. In such an environment, the possibility of secularisation is eliminated by a religious totalitarianism which denies the fundamental human rights.

[..]

You can read the whole thing at MercatorNet.

Another excellent instalment from Pascal Bruckner in the Multiculturalism debate on signandsight.com (my initial post on the debate here):

[..]

At the heart of the issue is the fact that in certain countries Islam is becoming Europe\’s second religion. As such, its adherents are entitled to freedom of religion, to decent locations and to all of our respect. On the condition, that is, that they themselves respect the rules of our republican, secular culture, and that they do not demand a status of extraterritoriality that is denied other religions, or claim special rights and prerogatives such as unisex swimming pools and separate gym or other classes. A tense international context surrounds this problem. Today a fundamentalist wave is bearing down on Europe, seeking to re-Islamise the Muslim communities accused of tepidness, and ultimately to place our entire continent of infidels under the law of the Prophet. This proselytism is carried out by all kinds of revanchist groups, the Saudi Wahhabists, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists, all of whom rival each other in zeal. The birth of an enlightened European Islam takes on importance in this context, one which can serve as a model for Muslims all over the world.

I repeat: two directions lie open to us here. The first, inspired by the Anglo-Saxon tradition, stresses strict differences, basing itself on the respect for religious adherence. Here multicultural Canada is the key reference. The other, more French in inspiration, is based on an equally strict separation of church and state, and the subordination of beliefs to civil law. Even if both models are currently undergoing a crisis, as Timothy Garton Ash rightly notes, it seems to me that in all respects the principle of secularism remains the best compass.

Modern France was formed in the struggle against the Catholic Church, and remains extremely sensitive to religious fanaticism. And I maintain that Jacques Chirac, supported by the commission headed by Bernhard Stasi, was right to put a law to parliament on the banning of religious symbols in school and public administrations. This initiative passed easily, with few opposing voices. Supporters included a majority of French Muslim women keen to safeguard their emancipation, among them Fadela Amara (news story), founder with Mohammed Abdi of the association \”Ni putes, ni soumises\” in the suburbs (more here).

\”In conflicts between the weak and the strong, liberty helps suppress the weak, while the law protects them\” said Abbé Grégoire at the time of the revolution. It\’s so true that many English, Dutch and German politicians, shocked by the excesses that the wearing of the Islamic veil has given way to, now envisage similar legislation curbing religious symbols in public space. The separation of the spiritual and corporeal domains must be strictly maintained, and belief must confine itself to the private realm.

It\’s not enough to condemn terrorism. The religion that engenders it and on which it is based, right or wrong, must also be reformed. Can one understand the Inquisition, the witches burned at the stake, the Crusades and the condemnation of heretics without referring to the dogmas of Roman Catholicism? The time has come to do for Islam what was done for Christianity as of the 15th century: by bending it to modernity and adapting it to contemporary mentalities. It is too often forgotten that the fight against the Church in Europe was one of outrageous sectarianism, with unheard of violence on both sides. Cathedrals were burned; priests, bishops and nuns were hung or guillotined; the clergy\’s goods were confiscated. But in the end this fight liberated us from the tutelage of the cassock, radically limiting ambitions on the part of Rome and the various Protestantisms to direct the social order and govern not only people\’s consciences, but also their bodies. There is no reason why Islam, as soon as it enters the Occidental democratic sphere, should escape secularism and enjoy a favour that is denied to other confessions.

[..]

Read the whole thing.

“Is Islam compatible with Democracy?” is the latest multipart essay in progress by the brilliant Fjordman. Check out parts one and two. At least three more are still to come.

And I like it.

[..] The question is, how do we find our way out of the wilderness that has grown in the heart of man? How does a society, a whole civilization, that is on the skids and bound for destruction, arrest its slide? I pose this today in the broadest possible way, because I think it is the one, common, practical, and even political question that should remain near the front of all minds capable of charity and goodwill.

The obvious answer, to those who realize that our civilization was built not only by human hands, but under the guidance of Church and religion, is to counsel a re-centring, a return to God. But for those who have moved and been moved so far away, that the very idea of God chills them, what paths lie open?

I think there are quite a few, and that all have in common this mysterious element of joy. I think art, broadly, offers many alternative means to the kind of regeneration — moral, and ethical, as well as aesthetic — that can help us out of our enclosed spaces. Learning to draw, from nature; to sing, in key; to dance, in pattern; to write, metrically; even to sew, or to master carpenter’s joints — all such enterprises offer the lost soul an individual direction out of the jungle.

The reason why, is that each is a discipline that restores us to harmony with the natural order of things. Each offers a way of seeing into God’s creation, and puts us in the presence of what is infinitely greater than ourselves.

To be able to draw a single flower, with full attention to all its colours and parts, is to be lifted out of one’s tawdry self into a realm where good, truth, and beauty still prevail. It is to recover joy.

Thank you kindly for the reminder.

In the October issue of Quadrant (which turned 50 this month, btw) Ross Tirrell, author of “Mao: A biography”, tracks the ideological evolution of Mao from an ardent individualist in his youth, albeit with a revolutionary streak, to a ruthless blood-Emperor, who saw the Chinese people as a crude blank mass for him to sculpt into a neo-Spartan utopian nation with word and sword. And its fascinating reading.

IN THE EARLY 1990s, according to a story told by many Chinese taxi drivers, an eight-car traffic accident in Guangzhou resulted in injuries to seven of the drivers involved; the eighth, unscathed, had a Mao portrait attached to his windshield as a talisman. The incident fuelled a Mao fever (“Mao re”), a neo-folk religion with superstitious overtones.

Shopkeepers offered busts of Mao that glowed in the dark and alarm clocks that featured Red Guards waving Mao’s Little Red Book at each tick of the clock. Even Mao temples appeared in some villages, with a serene portrait of the Chairman on the altar. A transmuted use of Mao as folklore goes on today. In Beijing there are nightclub singers who croon songs that cite Mao’s words. Youths dine in “Cultural Revolution-style” cafés off rough-hewn tables with Mao quotations on the wall, eating basic peasant fare as they answer their cell phones and chat about love or the stock market.

Such non-political solutions to the burden of Mao Zedong are an escape that fits a Chinese tradition. When floods hit the Yangtze valley and farmers clutch Mao memorabilia to ward off the rushing waters, it is reminiscent of Chinese Buddhists over the centuries clutching images or statues of Guan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, to keep them safe and make them prosperous.

Following the eclectic nature of Chinese popular beliefs, Mao is added to the panoply of faith.

But where is Mao the totalitarian?

Read the rest of “Mao’s Battle with Freedom”

The following article is from the LA Times, 26 May 1968

Israel’s Peculiar Position
ISRAEL – Held to Different Standards

By Eric Hoffer

The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it, Turkey threw out a million Greeks, and Algeria a million Frenchman. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese-and no one says a word about refugees.

But in the case of Israel the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab.

Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis. Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace.

Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world. Other nations when they are defeated survive and recover but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed. Had Nasser triumphed last June he would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews. No commitment to the Jews by any government, including our own, is worth the paper it is written on.

There is a cry of outrage all over the world when people die in Vietnam or when two Negroes are executed in Rhodesia. But when Hitler slaughtered Jews no one remonstrated with him. The Swedes, who are ready to break off diplomatic relations with America because of what we do in Vietnam, did not let out a peep when Hitler was slaughtering Jews.

They sent Hitler choice iron ore, and ball bearings, and serviced his troop trains to Norway.

The Jews are alone in the world. If Israel survives, it will be solely because of Jewish efforts. And Jewish resources.

Yet at this moment Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. And one has only to imagine what would have happened last summer had the Arabs and their Russian backers won the war to realize how vital the survival of Israel is to America and the West in general.

I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish the holocaust will be upon us.

Eric Hoffer was a Non-Jewish American longshoreman turned into a social philosopher. He was born in 1902 and died in 1983, after writing columns for newspapers, nine books and winning the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His first book, The True Believer, published in 1951, was widely recognized as a classic.

The more things change…

Have a read of these great quotes from this remarkable man. Further quotes from some of his books here.

Here’s a few of my selections:

“Both the revolutionary and the creative individual are perpetual juveniles. The revolutionary does not grow up because he cannot grow, while the creative individual cannot grow up because he keeps growing.”

“How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization.” [TOD: One for the budding martyrs in the audience]

“Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, “to be free from freedom.”“

“Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.“

“Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.”

“It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power—power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.”

“There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless. When hopes and dreams are loose on the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows, and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. Though ours is a Godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image. Whether we line up with him or against him, it is well we should know all we can concerning his nature and potentialities.”

“It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from the sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression. St. Vincent De Paul cautioned his disciples to deport themselves so that the poor “will forgive them the bread you give them.”"

“He would rather “work, fight, talk, for liberty than have it.” * The fact is that up to now the free society has not been good for the intellectual. It has neither accorded him a superior status to sustain his confidence nor made it easy for him to acquire an unquestioned sense of social usefulness. For he derives his sense of usefulness mainly from directing, instructing, and planning-from minding other people’s business-and is bound to feel superfluous and neglected where people believe themselves competent to manage individual and communal affairs, and are impatient of supervision and regulation. A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual’s sense of worth as an automated economy is to the workingman’s sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual.”

“The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.
It is not love of self but hatred of self which is at the root of the troubles that afflict our world”.

” All the ‘true believers’ of our time-whether Communist, Nazi, Fascist, Japanese or Catholic-declaimed volubly[..] on the decadence of the Western democracies. The burden of their talk is that in the democracies people are too soft, too pleasure-loving and too selfish to die for a nation, a God or a holy cause.This lack of a readiness to die, we are told, is indicative of an inner rot – a moral and biological decay. The democracies are old, corrupt and decadent. They are no match for the virile congregations of the faithful who are about to inherit the Earth.”

“Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep.”

On a related note John Howard said the following at the Quadrant dinner last night:

Today, free and open societies face a new tyranny: the tyranny of Islamist terrorism, one with at least a family resemblance to the great struggles against forces of totalitarianism in the past. A Czech writer once wrote with great prescience: You can’t build utopia without terror and before long terror is all that’s left.

Terrorism is but a symptom of the problem. The problem is the “mass movement”, as referred to by Eric Hoffer above, of Islamism, or Islamo-Fascism, if you will. It is the same old tyranny.

update: I meant to note that the “Czech writer” John Howard is referring to is in fact Eric Hoffer, according to at least one source, and he is of course not Czech at all. I can’t find further confirmation of this, but it certainly very much sounds like something he would say.

Democratic Muslims is a new political movement created in Denmark last February, following the Motoons controversy. (their Danish language site here)
It was founded by Naser Khader, a Syria-born member of the Danish parliament for the Social Liberals and you may be interested in what he has to say:

The real significance of Jyllands-Posten’s impious portfolio was that it had appeared “at the right time, and in the right place” to be exploited by people who wanted to foment “confrontation,” which could be milked for “money and support.”

To grasp exactly why Khader thinks that “money and support” might be required, and by whom, is to glimpse a far darker future than conventional pessismism about Europe would have it. Given profound cultural differences, made even more difficult by continued mass immigration, integrating the continent’s new Muslims minorities was never going to be easy, but as Khader sees it there are now those with a vested interest in making matters worse. He’s not a believer in the much-advertised clash of civilizations, an idea with something of a bleak, tectonic inevitability to it, but in a different sort of conflict altogether: something more controlled, planned, and directed.

It’s a conflict being promoted, Khader believes, by Islamists (“well organized,” he argues, and established worldwide) set on “controlling Muslim society in the West.” After that, the next objective will be to establish regimes more to their liking in the Muslim heartland. And then? “A global jihad. That’s why we have to stop them now.”

As can be expected the Democratic Muslims have already received plenty of death threats and abuse for their troubles.

The organisation held a conference in Copenhagen on Saturday called “The Impact of the Cartoons”. Two of the speakers were Wafa Sultan and Irshad Manji.

Below are videos of their speeches.

Irshad Manji:

Here’s my transcript of the first part of Irshad’s speech, captured in this video. The video is only the first 3 and a half minutes of the speech, unfortunately.

Shalom, Salam, and to the atheists in the audience, how the hell are ya?

Such a pleasure to be here, thank you so much for the invitation.

The question before us is, how have the Danish cartoons impacted Muslims and the World.

Well. Let me veer from a point that I think is going to be made later on. That more and more reform-minded Muslims are coming out of the closet since the cartoons.
This organisation, Democrat Muslims of Denmark is a powerful testimonial to that fact. But I am happy to ?? to all of you that it is not the only testimonial.
During the cartoon riots my own email [and blog?] through my website overflowed with messages from Muslims from all over the world who said “Enough is enough. Whilst offended by the cartoons I am even more offended by the violence that is happening in the name of Islam over these cartoons. Irshad, sign me up for the call for reform.”

Now you know, ladies and gentleman, that God works in mysterious ways when Copenhagen becomes the Mecca of the liberal Islamic reformation.

The reaction to the cartoons has woken up many Muslims to something else. To the violent power of a certain strain of Islam. And let me describe the kind of Islam I am talking about by drawing, not cartooning, drawing a mental picture for you.

Imagine grains of sand blowing from a 7th century desert well into 21st century cities. I use the metaphor of the desert not simply because of the power that Arabia still has on the Muslim imagination but also because the challenge that all of us are facing right now is granular, like sand itself. It easily slips through the hands, it is difficult to grasp and hang on to. We know that the winds are gusping and the sand is getting into our eyes and what once only felt as an irritation now is stinging and that the vision of the open society, a vision that both Muslims and non-Muslims can easily promote and support.. that vision is becoming blurred by whats blowing our way.

And whats blowing our way is a particular approach to Islam, that I call Foundamentalism. Not fundamentalism. Foundamentalism. Foundamentalism sanctifies the founding moments of Islam. And what are the two cornerstones of the founding moment of Islam? The prophet Muhammed and the Koran. Both have been made utterly untouchable… [END VIDEO]

I will try and track down the rest of the speech, because I am certainly liking what she has said so far. Funny, brave, imaginative and open-minded. Fantastic.

Wafa Sultan:

Hat tips: Snaphanen, Gates of Vienna

UPDATE (Oct 5th): Here’s another recent video of Wafa Sultan. As far as I can deduce on the same day as appearing at the Democratic Muslims event above she also did this interview for a show called Deadline on the Denmark’s DR network. In the interview, which goes for 9 minutes, she talks about the Motoons saga as being the first “crack in wall” of an Islam incapable of self-criticism and evolution. She finishes by saying that she believes Islam certainly has a place in the modern world, but she does not believe that Islam can be reformed, but that instead it must be transformed and that we are witnessing the beginning of that process. (via Hot Air)