NC/McAdam/Craig Minns,

So: Islamic State has declared that Monis was a martyr, a hero, that his murder of two random non-believers washed all his sins away - his alleged murder of his first wife, his alleged forty sexual assaults. He can now get stuck into his 72 virgins.

As you have, in a very roundabout way, suggested that Islamic State is not acting in accordance with the tenets of the Koran or the Hsdiths, we can now join together in declaring that this IS position is disgusting, vile and non-human, and that any attempts to defeat IS must be supported.

Let us all join with the vast majority of 'moderate' Muslims in eliminating this dreadful scourge of reactionary Salafist Islamism wherever it appears.

Joe

Loudmouth Joe Lane,
I am not a Muslim. I am not a Christian. I am not a Hindu, or a Buddhist, or a Taoist, or a Jew, or a Shintoist. In fact, I'm not a follower of any of the great faith traditions. If you read the other thread I've been involved in - notable for the way in which the participants, unlike the mob you are part of, have managed to hold a discussion on a difficult topic - you will know my views on religion a little better. You may need someone to explain the concept of tolerance to you in one syllable words before you start. Here, let me try.

Be nice. Smile, don't snarl. Try to act in the way you would like folks to act with you.

Now, I'm sure you know all that, so why are you acting like a silly old tosser?

IS is nothing to do with Australia. In fact, IS is nothing to do with Islam, as the two nice Muslims posting here have pointed out. Even in the Middle East IS is a tiny minority that is political rather than religious in nature and it will soon be a rather nasty memory best forgotten.

I recommend you and the other silly old tossers rest up, take your blood pressure tablets (take a couple of extras, just in case), get away from the TV (the cricket captaincy decision-making would get anyone's BP up) and the computer for a little while, have a nice cold beer if the doc will allow it, perhaps go and wet a line and watch the young mums and kids having a ball.

In other words, get back to life and stop worrying yourself silly enough to act like tossers.

Hypocritical tosser, but back to the point,

The Quran supercedes any other Islamic holy book yet is still full of exhortations to violence against hypocrites (Muslims not conforming to violent Islam, ie. McAdam & NC who only support non-violent jihad towards Islamic supremacy), apostates and infidels.

By comparison, Christ's teachings, in the New Testament, contain no such exhortations.

Craig, everyone has the right to hold faith, it's just that some want their faith to reign as the only faith. The Quran supports those of Islamic faith who follow a violent path towards this supremacy.

Your soothing words of calm have not helped our Sydney victims of jihad, nor the thousands of others who have died in the name of Allah this year. But 2015 is a new year, and your assurance that it will be better calms me.

This post was written while wetting a line, BTW. Some of us can walk and chew gum.

Hi Craig,

It might come as an unpleasant surprise to you but I don't really give a toss about your religious beliefs. Your political beliefs, however, cause me great concern: I presume you think you are on the left ? Yet, you equivocate about the most vile, right-wing [surely you are not claiming that IS is somehow left-wing, are you ?!] and fascist organisation, you make light of what power it may have now or in the near future, and what evil it may do, at random anywhere in the world.

You don't seem to understand the force of Islamism across the entire Muslim world, or its very long back-history. Nor of its ideological dominance over the minds of many of the 1.5 billion Muslims in that world. Islam provides the dominant, usually the only, framework or prism through which Muslims see the world, and it is invariably reactionary: that, if you like, is their terrible cross to bear, poor buggers.

What ideological alternative - 'realistic' alternative - do Muslims have to Islamist fascism ? Tragically, nothing but to revert back to secular dictatorships, as in Egypt. The democracy that the US thought might somehow flower, obviously hasn't. The ghastly alternatives still seem to be nothing but either vile Islamism or vile dictatorship.

I wish it were not so, I wish with all my heart that democracy could still somehow take root, ultimately allowing for some form of liberal and democratic socialism to struggle into life. But I don't think that will happen in my lifetime, or in those of my putative grandchildren. Or in this century. Power will seesaw between secular dictatorship, exploiting Islam when it needs to, and Islamism, blaming outside forces for all their problems, for a long time yet.

On that score, I feel desperately sorry for people like NC and/or McAdam: they will be locked into a backward way of thinking, wasting their lives on thin-air illusions, for a long time to come.

Joe

A short-history of the image of Muhammad in the West – 1 of 2
This post addresses Kactuz. He appears to have read more than the other three, but writes as an obvious captive of his narrow knowledge-base.

Focus of this post is an overview of the image of Muhammad in the West and the source is Encyclopaedia Britannica (EB).

EB traces the history of the distortions fed to a common western for centuries.

I have tried to summarise it below to save readers’ time, retaining the EB’s words (within quotes) – details are there at the EB’s website.

• “From the time when a polemical work by John of Damascus (676-749) was translated from Greek into Latin, some knowledge of Muhammad’s life was available in the West but was nearly always used abusively.”

• “After the 9th century highly negative biographies of Muhammad appeared in Latin.”

• “During the 13th century European medieval knowledge of the life of Muhammad was “completed” in a series of works by scholars such as Pedro Pascual, Ricoldo de Monte Croce, and Ramon Llull. In these works, however, Muhammad was depicted as an imposter and Islam as a Christian heresy, and in some of them Muhammad was portrayed as the Antichrist.”

• “This highly negative image of Muhammad as a heretic, false prophet, renegade cardinal, or FOUNDER OF A RELIGION THAT PROMOTES VIOLENCE found its way into many other works of European literature OVER THE CENTURIES, such as the chansons de geste, William Langland’s Piers Plowman, and John Lydgate’s The Fall of the Princes.”

• “In the early modern period, the medieval image of Muhammad continued to be promoted by a variety of Western writers.”

• “The general hostility toward Islam formed part of Martin Luther’s polemic against the Roman Catholic church, and the image of Muhammad as the Antichrist appeared in Alexander Ross’s introduction to his translation of the in 1649.”

• “Apocalyptic interpretations of Muhammad continued into the 19th century in America, notably in George Bush’s Life of Mohammed (1830).”
Continued …

Joe, a reference to right- or left-wing makes no sense in the context of a movement like IS. I'd go further and suggest it makes very little sense in any context at all. All it does is to create simplistic categories that reduce complex sets of ideas to ideologies.

IS is a complex phenomenon that is not unlike the early stages of the modern Zionist movement, albeit better equipped and funded for reasons that need not be explored too deeply right now, and I suspect draws more on the lessons of that movement than either modern Israelis or the IS leadership would care to acknowledge. What has changed since the late 19th-early 20th centuries when the modern Zionist movement was at its height is that the capacity to disseminate propaganda is vastly greater and IS has shown great media savvy.

The other difference is that the IS movement is largely aimed at an internecine political struggle between factions of political islam rather than against an external enemy in the form of a largely disinterested British administration.

Don't make mountains out of molehills. This too shall pass.

Luciferase, I hope the fish are biting better than the mozzies have for you...