A great post by Geographic Travels is up, which presents the powerpoint slides of his AAG (American Association of Geographers) presentation
This is a really cool follow-up to his earlier presentation, United Caliphates of Europe.
Tag Archives: islam
Want to buy a Koran at UNL?
Good luck.
Daily Nebraskan – Muslim students buy out Qurans in protest
Religious sensitivity made its way into the classroom early this semester for University of Nebraska-Lincoln students in an Introduction to Islam class.
When Michael Huston went to the bookstore to buy a copy of the Quran for the class last month, he learned it was sold out. However, it wasn’t bought out by students from the class.
Huston. a senior art major, learned that a few students from the Pakistan Students Association had bought all the books because they didn’t want non-muslim students to accidently deface the Quran.
“It seems more like a protest in general to get people aware of their stance,†Huston said about PSA students’ sensitivity to the Quran’s usage. “It’s kind of bizarre that they would go to that extent.â€
Summayia Khan, president of the Pakistan Students Association, declined to comment.
Misuse or defacement of the Quran, which is highly respected within the Muslim faith, can be considered blasphemy.
“The concern from the Pakistan Students Association over whether it was appropriate for non-muslims to use the Quran was resolved in a pleasant, collegial conversation between the instructor of the class, the president of the Pakistan Student Association and myself,†said Sidnie Crawford, chairwoman of the classics and religious studies department at UNL.
Of course, the Pakistan Students Association has a right to protest against non-Muslims handling the Quaran, and they did so peacefully and in a way that brought some coin to the university bookstore. Still, this hardly demonstrates a respect (or even tolerance) for liberty, as their actions were specifically aimed at limiting the ability of those not in their religion from reading their religious texts.
Of all the trials that students in the Pakistan Students Association have gone through, joining the Scientologists in hiding their beliefs from others is perhaps the dumbest.
Inbreeding becomes politically correct
While this blog suggests clearing the ghettos and using bio-chemistry to instill better behaviors, Noah Feldman seems to want to go in the opposite direction:
The Way We Live Now – The New Pariahs? – The Rise of Anti-Islamic Bias in Western Europe – NYTimes.com
Even Britain, which has afforded Muslims a more welcoming environment, has had some worrying moments. A few years back, a Labor M.P. called for an end to “the tradition of first-cousin marriages†among Pakistanis and other South Asians in Britain. The basis for her suggestion was the claim that Pakistanis in Britain were more likely than the general population to suffer from recessive autosomal genetic disorders. Of course, so are Ashkenazi Jews, but you can hardly imagine an M.P. proposing to limit Jews’ marriage choices for this reason, especially given the historic Nazi allegation of Jewish genetic inferiority.
Matrimonial incest is a pretty good definition of the Gap. It’s also bad for the health of a people. Children of first-cousins are not as healthy as children in the general population. This is true, no matter how many times you cry “Nazi!”
Canadian Dhimmitude
Canada’s surrender to dhimmitude continues. Ezra Levant has been hauled before a “Human Rights” officer in Canada for the crime of speech.
These videos, “I don’t answer to the state” and “Violence in Alberta” are from EzraLevant.com. Hat-tip to The Corner.
Submission to Allah, whether you like it or not
Islam and Europe
Earlier this year, Catholicgauze posted “The United Caliphates of Europe,” which he had earlier presented at the yearly meeting of the Association of American Geographers in San Francisco.
For those who messed it, another lesson in the danger of importing Islamic microsotates is from in the International Herald Tribune‘s “France stunned by rioters’ savagery (hat-tip to Glenn):
In retrospect, it was not a good idea to have left his pistol at home. Called to the scene of a traffic accident in the Paris suburbs last Sunday, Jean-François Illy, a regional police chief, came face to face with a mob of immigrant youths armed with baseball bats, iron bars and shotguns.
What happened next has sickened the nation. As Illy tried to reassure the gang that there would be an investigation into the deaths of two teenagers whose motorbike had just collided with a police car, he heard a voice shouting: “Somebody must pay for this. Some pigs must die tonight!â€
The 43-year-old commissaire realised it was time to leave, but that was not possible: they set his car ablaze. He stood as the mob closed in on him, parrying the first few baseball bat blows with his arms. An iron bar in the face knocked him down.
“I tried to roll myself into a ball on the ground,†said Illy from his hospital bed. He was breathing with difficulty because several of his ribs had been broken and one had punctured his lung.
His bruised and bloodied face signalled a worrying new level of barbarity in the mainly Muslim banlieues, where organised gangs of rioters used guns against police in a two-day rampage of looting and burning last week.
As the European Union follows the United States in adding members to increase its labor and land, Brussells must be careful to minimize its exposure to whatever is wrong in Islamic cultures. The West Balkans and Ukraine are logical next steps for integration. Contra Secretary Miliband (hat-tip to Tom), integration of Muslim countries, such as Turkey, or states that may be Islamic by the end of the century, such as Russia, should be delayed for the time being. (Economic and business ties, of course, can expand and their natural rate.)
Terror Doctors
No one should be surprised that several of the (latest) British terrorists are highly educated Muslims. Two years ago, a respected special ed teacher was one of the 7-7 bombers.
While we disagree with Osama bin Laden’s goal of “civilizational apartheid,” it nonetheless may be wise to minimize the globe’s commerce with the Arab world while pushing as much humiliating feedback to her as possible.
“Modern Islam is Radical Islam,” indeed. This is the fault of a deeply sick Arab world that we must do our best to transform into something human.
Blog Update Links
No central thread to today’s links, other than that they touch on topics previously discussed.
- Hamas stages a false-flag operation against Mickey Mouse on children’s television (hat-tip to Drudge Report). Still, Islam is the answer.
- The Metropolis Times join Econolog, gnxp, PurpleSlog, Unqualified Reservations, and myself in discussing New Atheism as a form of Mainline Protestantism.
- ZenPundit links to Scientific American articles on punishment and economic irrationality. I’ve studied the same things with lower-tech tools and reported the results on this blog, twice (see “The Wary Guerrilla” and “The Wary Student“).
- Lastly, my perl net:ftp upload problems go away when I try under another ISP, meaning that Lincoln’s Time Warner (which is already in hot-water for bad service) is the problem.
That’s all for now!
Violent Intolerance
Catholicgauze has posted his really cool powerpoint slides for “United Caliphates of Europe,” which he presented at AAG ’07. CG looks at retaliatory violence through the group level of analysis:
Behead those who insult Islam
Earlier, in “The Wary Guerrilla, I looked at the phenomonon on the individual level:
Blah blah blah
Stay tuned to tdaxp for an expanded version of “The Wary Student,” which will follow up previous research by looking at classroom settings. Or even check out the attack on Mike Daisey for another example of this sort of intolerance.
Politically correct. Yes. Realistic? No
Slashdot links the Guardian‘s summary of what the UK Ministery of Defense fears the world may look like in 30 years. Some thoughts below:
Actually, this would be a revolutionary petite bourgeious…
“The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx,” says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: “The world’s middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest”. Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the “sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism”.
And this:
Resentment among young people in the face of unrepresentative regimes “will find outlets in political militancy, including radical political Islam whose concept of Umma, the global Islamic community, and resistance to capitalism may lie uneasily in an international system based on nation-states and global market forces”, the report warns. The effects of such resentment will be expressed through the migration of youth populations and global communications, encouraging contacts between diaspora communities and their countries of origin.
… is perhaps optimistic. Of greater concern to Europe are European Islamic No-Go Zones.
Nice bit about China though:
Tension between the Islamic world and the west will remain, and may increasingly be targeted at China “whose new-found materialism, economic vibrancy, and institutionalised atheism, will be an anathema to orthodox Islam”.
The world would be very different in 9/11 had been directed against Shanghai and Beijing. Perhaps, as China connects with more and more New Core powers and threatens Islamic ruleset absolutism, that day may still come.