A good article that unfortunately will miss its audience. To put "western" reason in front of a stone wall will not budge it an inch.

Islam CANNOT and WILL NOT separate state from mosque.

WHY? because it is part and parcel of the whole religious deal as dictated by their god through their prophet and sealed in a concrete block in haeven...

To change one accent or punctuation from the qur'anic text is alledged to change the whole religious message.

Islam is doomed from its beginnings.

It can only exist and make itself noticable in the world arena but by violence and manipulation of the ignorant masses.

Have to underline Coach'es words and raise him a few exclamation marks.

But lame humor aside, this is not a matter which one needs to be emotional about, it is simply a fact of Islam that the goal is always a 'state' under Mohammed. They would claim 'under God' but given that I disagree that Mohammed had any connection to divine revelation, (apart from that which he gleaned from the real Scriptures of Christ via Christians he encountered) I have to state it that way.

His goal from the outset, and it is described this way in all Islamic histories/biographies, was to create an Islamic state'.
The future was only seen in terms of fulfilling that goal for the rest of humanity.

Well, history caught up with him, and a well trained, disciplined Army at Tours under Charelemaigne demonstrated that their previous victories were not about 'Allah being with them', as much as the opposing armies not being up to speed.

The problem today is not a separation of church/mosque and state in the minds of Muslims, it is "how can be acheive an Islamic state here and now"

-Demography 'outbreed em' or out 'migrant' them
-Demonize the host country for 'picking' on them.
-Destroy those who dig their heals in and refuse to have their food spat on each weekend (Cornullla background)
-Deny that this is their goal.
-Delude people into accepting the 'sugar coated' version of Islam which says nothing about the negative aspects of the life of Mohammed.

So, don't hold your breath for a 'separation' of mosque and state.

A very well written article.

Recalling history will always shine a light into the future, unless of course our pollies try to cover up and hide issues that don't fit with their 'truth'.

It is interesting that Irving got three years for 'doubting' history.
Didn't Windshuttle do that to this countries genocide of its indigenous inhabitants.

Oh I get it Pierre. You begin the article as though you are attacking the worst aspects of Islam and then you associate unacceptable behaviour with George Bush. Uh huh. A novel approach.

Voltaire once said that religion began "When the first fool met the first sly rogue." Pierre, I would like to introduce you to SneekyPeter.

Look mon ami, if you want to bash the yanks then you will have to do better than that. And next time La France loses another war, don't go crawling to the yanks to pull you out of le ordure again. The feeeelthy Amis have got long memories. And next time they will tell you Frogs to go and get boised.

A Muslim cannot be allegiant to a democratic nation state. For a Muslim to say that man's law is superior to shari'a, Allah's Law, is apostasy.

In order for a Muslim to be a citizen of a nation state he must renounce Islam.

..........................

REALIST, "Love Australia or leave it."

LIBERALIST/IDEALIST, "Love or hate Australia, but if you hate Australia, then I tolerate you and will not discriminate against you and I encourage you to stay and continue your hatred - while your at it i encourage you to intimidate society, hassle, threaten and rape Austrlain gilrs - afterall, it is your Islamic culture and I tolerate that, and I don't want anyone to use the R word to describe me."

It is ever so interesting that it was Muslim scholars who introduced early Greek reasoning to the barbarian West by means of the French monk Peter Abelard in the 11th century AD, St Thomas Aquinas later being influenced and releasing the Christian Church from a Dark Age lasting nearly a thousand years.

It is so interesting that Islam should lose its interest in Socratic philosophy as some say - meaning that we can find real goodness by use of deep meditative reasoning, by which means the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, much later taught that we can find God.

Some might ask how nomadic desert Arabs who accepted Mohammed's message of Allah so easily should also at the time accept much of what some call Golden Greek Reasoning. But no surprise for those with top marks for early Middle East history, for most of the Middle East which became Muslim, such as Egypt, Iraq and Persia, now Iran, had also benefitted intellectually through the conuests of Alexander, the great library of Alexandria in Egypt having had great attendance from all those countries.

Such historical information can be obtained from any university library, but not from lower school libraries

I think the article completely misses the point. Separation of church and state means that church officials are not automatically functionaries in a government (bishops are not automatically senators)

Of course religious leaders can run for political office just like anyone else. Whether the population takes their lifestyle advice from priests, life-coaches, magazine editors or celebreties has nothing to do the separation of church and state.

To say that the Islamic world is full of tyranny etc does not mean that the tyranny is caused by Islam. Tyranny is a feature of human nature. History knows more tyrannies than democracies. Even most of the democracies in Europe that came into existence after the first world war had reverted to dictatorship on the eve of the second world war. Many atrocities were committed by Christians, Muslims and atheists alike during the war.

We have also seen that "enlightened" American jailers can be just as cruel as Iraqi ones.

The underlying issue is that the former colonial world has been asked to westernise in a few generations. That is a formidable change, the west took 10 generations and many wars for the transition. To have adopt completely different values than what your parents and grand parents had is always going to lead to some resistance.

As Iraq, the nation state, does not have a long proud history, (in fact Iraq was created by the same team that brought us the former states of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia), the population will look towards another common identifier, in this case Islam and its various denominations. What we are seeing in the middle east is similar to the nationalist awakening we saw in Europe during and after the Napoleoic wars.

When we query some of the fundemantals of Islam we then question the identity of people who strongly identify with Islam. Many of us have dropped God, Jesus, the trinity and the saints for a veritable pantheon of celebreties, sport starts and consumer brands. When one disappoints we just switch to another. No wonder we are so puzzled about the reaction to the cartoons.

So much is written of the ills of others ignoring our own. Christianity was and to the fundamentalist still is one of domination of unbelievers as aim whilst somehow abiding by Christian love and rule though shalt not kill. One who is so rare as to behave decently is promptly hailed Christian and deified, weary Dunlop being an example. Current and past international wrangling claiming difference from terrorism and purity of purpose by the West is Christian?
Lies for war, lies to the people surely merely Herman Goering’s dictum yet again.
God given purpose? Which God which propaganda station?
Religions have muchtin common, many are at heart possible tools for power by those who would use them. One can answer in the rightist red necked way of kill them all or the way temporarily in popular vogue after 1945 dispute resolution compromise and sharing before the law, international law. All thrown away as we revel in he is evil I am pure.

PIERRE, to quote you, "l'nfame will be doing the crashing of freedom as we know it". Are you using this as a mere slogan or as a call to action? If you are using it as a slogan you can make your appeal to liberal democracies, such as France and Germany, which are not prepared to take action against it. If you are using it as a call to action, then you have to make your appeal to America that is DOING the action. Yet you denigrate Bush, and by association Blair, Berlusconni, and Howard, whose nation is the only one among all other nations, that can defeat DECISIVELY l'infame.

Did you expect Bush, after the crashing of l'infame into the twin towers to finish up as a political paralytic?

Blog: NEMESIS http://congeorgekotzabasis.blogspot.com

Is someone permitted to agree with Pierre? And won't someone who isn't a Moslem give Islam a break? In its fundamental tenets, apart from the creation thing and people hearing God's voice, which it shares with Christianity, it involves considerably less a departure from the world of reality than Christianity (virgin birth, a demi-god/guru who could walk on water, wine turning to blood when the right spell is uttered), and therefore on first blush is more worthy of sitting in partnership with rational government, if you're prepared to contemplate such a thing.

Which I'm not, as it happens, but nor are all Moslems. There are several examples of nations in which Islam is the dominant religion of the people but which are not islamist states - most notably Turkey, Malaysia, and Iraq (OK, it was a dictatorship, but so was most of South America), as there are of predominantly Christian nations in which the Catholic Church has a firm grip on the tools of the state (Philippines, to a degree Ireland, and South America again). And the degree to which the so-called Christian Right is getting its tentacles into government in America is truly scary.

I don't notice many Christians outside of the mainstream Protestant faith groups protesting about that. Could it be that they don't care about a single religious fraternity running the world, so long as it's their own? Why can't they just be content to overrun Heaven?

PS I posted the following in response to the another article, but it fits better here (apologies to those for whom it is a boring duplicate):

I get the impression from certain professed Christians on this forum that they are just as much theocratic fundamentalists as the Islamists they criticise.

One of the most noticeable trends in the Western world since Osama took over the mantle of Marx as Mr Evil, is the surge in activity of fundamentalist christianity. As a secularist/pluralist/democrat, I feel increasingly like a raison* in an overcooking fruitcake.

*[linguistic pun alert: raison = Fr. "reason"]

The implication of the article is that Islam was peaceful to start with and that the followers are not living up to it's ideals.

More likely it was violent during Mohammad's life time and continues to this day.

You might want to look at the skeptics annotated Quran http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/quran/

Or some of the histories on www.thereligionofpeace.com .

If someone can prove that Mohammad didn't endorse mutilation, the killing of apostates, and a "convert to my religion or I'll kill you" approach, I'd be prepared to consider otherwise.

Coach says this is a "a good article that unfortunately will miss its audience." Correct on the first point and proven in the second. Pierre Tristam says: "The threat to the West is as familiar as the reactionary next door."

Redneck calls Pierre a Frog and to not go "go crawling to the yanks to pull you out of le ordure again." This is very amusing stuff from Redneck, especially if one knows that Pierre is American!

His grievous attack on Scout in another thread was far less amusing.

David BOAZ provides a list of some very imaginative fears. He is obviously unaware that Turkey has had separation of religion and state since the 1920's. I've asked him repeatedly now to check his facts before he posts.

Thor says, "In order for a Muslim to be a citizen of a nation state he must renounce Islam", which is "apostasy", which is a capital crime in Iran according to Amnesty Intl. So the millions of Muslim citizens in Western Nations are going to demand Sharia law and then have themselves killed?

Pulling apart these extremist posts is getting easier and easier.

Themistocles: Try not to fit the article into a post 9-11 frame of reference. It doesn’t work. The article is about the dilution of traditional liberal-democratic values, which Pierre is saying is and always has been our best defence against terrorism and against fundamentalist religion/Islam. I'm not convinced they have been that diluted.

And to be fair to the truth, Skeptor, I agree with your post in principle however Muslims do believe in Jesus and the virgin birth. Iraq and Malaysia are officially Islamic countries. Turkey, Indonesia, Albania, Syria and Lebanon are not, although Ache province has Shari’a courts and the President of Syria must be Muslim. Lebanon is officially multi-religious and has Shari’a courts for its Muslim majority.

A nice clarification there, David, although I must put in that Muslims do not accept the divinity of Jesus Christ, and I'll do some reading-up on the virgin birth matter. Either way, something doesn't add up (but then, if it did, there wouldn't be a requirement for faith, would there?)

The Shari'a court situation in Lebanon is interesting. There is a parallel in Australia, in the availability in some jurisdictions of courts based in part on traditional Aboriginal customary law. In that case, it is the defendant's option to choose which court system will deal with their case. I wonder if such a system could be more widely applied, and how much latitude for each jurisdiction could be tolerated by the majorities in each nation/region (Aboriginal courts cannot order leg spearing, so would a Shari'a court be able to order hand-chopping? It would contradict the longstanding abolition of corporal punishment under secular law and be unlikely to work under a voluntary system).

I can't imagine any such system becoming established in Australia, certainly not under multicultural-hostile Liberal government, but perhaps in 50 years when, according to Dana Vale's favorite Imam, Muslims will be in the majority?!

Vernon, you can point out all sorts of nasty things that God is purported to have authorised or inflicted in the Old Testament, and to tub-thumping reactionary Presbyterians to compare with similarly unpleasant bits of the Koran or the Islamic world, but that would be to tar all Christians with the same, and a very old and frayed brush.

Islam is not, to all Muslims, about slavish devotion to a singular interpretation of the text of the Koran, any more than the Bible is to all Christians or the Constitution of Australia is to all of the Justices of the High Court.

David Latimer

Yes, I agree, Pierre does say that, "about the dilution of traditional liberal-democratic values", but he also condemns Bush in a post 9/11 context, when he says 'the lawless, lying, fear-baiting warmongering president". So you are impeccably right by half, and impeccably wrong by the other half.

A very good article, and some thoughtful postings.
For the last four years or so heard a lot about Islam, from believers and others. However, I started to doubt the veracity of what I was hearing, and so started reading.
One thing that has become very clear is the correction that was made in the English speaking world some years ago about Islam meaning peace. It does only in a very limited way. In English, a much closer translation is submission. That is, Islam is peaceful towards those who submit to it, and not to those who don't. Another way of saying this is that for Islam, its Islam's peace or the peace of the grave.
Another aspect of this debate is becoming clearer. All religions desire political influence. Islam desires political control. In this, it is not really a religion but a political system pretending to be a religion.
Hence, to separate church from state makes no sense when the church is Islam. Islam will have to change to something quite unrecognisable before any separation can occur.
This change may be occuring - it is visible in the extent to which many western Muslims obviously haven't read or understood their Koran. Their preparedness to accept democracy, and the subservience of Islamic law to secular law, is testament to that. The problem is, there are so many Muslims who obviously have read their Koran and understand it's thirst for blood - Islamic and otherwise. It's these who will determine how Islam relates to secular rule, through their preparedness to murder and hence terrorise other Muslims who don't agree with them.
And as an atheist in Australia nowadays, I too am truly frightened about the influence of the christian religion in our political process, and that of many western countries. It's long time to separate church and state again here.

One day people may realise that we live in the year 2006 and we should start acting like it but instead we are creating a twisted world, a new dark ages, where right is wrong and wrong reigns supreme. It's a world full of insane people reduced from being citizens to being brainwashed slaves imprisoned by their bluddy teddy (i.e. invented fantasy god) fairytales and magic.

The fact that we have individuals who believe this delinquent claptrap is the problem. It is also a chilling fact that most of the world's leaders have this mind virus and believe in these nonsensical teddies (i.e. invented gods) that do not exist and magic that could not possibly be true. We are driven to war after war, violence on top of violence to appease mad people who believe in gory mythologies.

History always tells us that people in times of stress will first turn to these spooky beliefs of silly religious magic for answers which as we always find, simply leads to self fullfilling prophesies of destruction. There are no solutions in pure selfishness and ignorance. We get "So long as my eternal soul is with teddy (i.e. invented fantasy god) I don't care if the world ends tomorrow and I won't do anything about it" or "I'm not afraid, teddy will save my soul". Till kingdom come we get this pack of weirdos believing it is their teddy preparing his armageddon for the sinners.

How can people in all seriousness continue to want for the end of the world? We even have our Australian Parliament begin proceedings with such a religious playpen ritual known as a prayer to a fantasy god which goes something like this: "Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us. And lead us not into temptation."

It's abysmal, it won't stop, nobody is listening and for myself here, it's just a big vomit.

Response to Themistocles:

Is said: "Try not to fit the article into a post 9-11 frame of reference. It does not work." You said: "lawless, lying, fear-baiting warmongering president." He says that in rejection of the 9-11 frame of reference, in particular the idea that it 9-11 requires us to change our values, such as on pre-emption, domestic intelligence.

Let me explain in depth. In your first post you talk about l'infame as though it were the terrorists. There is no question that terrorists are rouges, horrible and infamous. But from the authors perspective he is saying l'infame is unchecked authority, collusion and demagoguery.

You also talk about France and Germany doing nothing, which only makes sense in terms of the Iraq War. Hence the l’infame has been effective in making people believe that France and Germany are soft on terrorism, when they are soft on making pre-emptive strikes on a country that was despotic but not an immediate threat.

For the record France has 550 troops and Germany 800, in the International Security Assistance Force, the peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan sanctioned by UNSCR 1386 on Dec. 20, 2001. These figures are from a 2002 report from the Center for Defense Information in Washington DC.

Response to Keiran:

Australia does have effective separation of church and state. The prayer in parliament is the exception rather than the rule