There is an alarming amount of either ignorance or denial here about the imsidious influence the Islamists are having on our universities. We have the appalling situation at Griffith University where the Vice Chancellor is prepared not only to plagiarise from Wikipedia, but to print the academic nonsense of so-called "Islmaic Science" "scholars." Come on! What on earth would Griffith University know about medieval history, or Theology of any religion, let alone Islam? http://culturewarriorwatch.blogspot.com/2008/04/queenslands-professors-of-terror-or.html

Now, we have Islamists interfering in university Literature courses. http://culturewarriorwatch.blogspot.com/2008/04/radical-imans-pressure-uws-for-control.html

And finally, we have Islamic imams - with barely any academic peer-reviewed publishing record being held out as a "leading scholar."
http://culturewarriorwatch.blogspot.com/2008/04/griffith-unis-professor-of-unity-needs.html

Wake up people!

ANZAC.....thanx for that link to the memo of the Council of Imams(read "Censorship board of Australian education")

Here is an interesting snippit from it (the memo)

<<The two major sources for Islam are the Quran (Divine revelation) and Hadith (sayings of the Prophet) neither of these will convey their complete meaning if they are taken out of context or taken literally without appropriate explanation.>>

APPROPRIATE EXPLANATION?
What pray tell is.."appropriate explanation". These are THE original and founding documents of Islam, the appropriate 'explanation' is..what they say about themselves, and Islam, and Mohammad.. and the context IS...those documents themselves.

There is little to 'explain' as these ARE the earliest sources and all other 'explanations' rely on these documents.

HUMAN CARNAGE.
Thus..there is little to 'explain' when a hadith says that Mohammad arranged systematic mass killings of a surrendered Jewish tribe, (Qurayza)or..that he ordered the hacking off of hands and feet and destroying of eyes with hot rods of prisoners in his power. There is nothing to 'explain'...he did it..or he did not.

The 'explanation' usually takes the form of "In Islam we believe in equal justice" then..the hacking off of limbs and blinding of eyes is said to be "what the prisoners did to Mohammads shepherds".
Of course, you don't need to have the intellect of Stephen Hawking to realize that if a man rapes his daughter in a cellar and keeps her there for 20 yrs.. Islam would thus have us "rape the man and keep him in a cellar for 20 yrs"

So, clearly, the 'appropriate explanation' is not very appropriate.

There is no escaping the fact that the history of Islams prophet is littered with human carnage, death and the loss of property and wives and daughters. (who are then subjected to the 'sensitivities' of surah 23:5-6 which allows their new masters to use them for sexual pleasure.

The only reason Islam is attacked so vehemently, by thinking non Muslims, is that it has so much wrong with it... at the 'foundation' level.

Boaz my Friend,

The Christian Church has the same History of wars, invasions and changing doctrines centuries after-the-fact. After Nicaea until at least Constantinople Christtian behalfed in a manner similiar to Taliban today,

I mentioned thse in earlier posts.

Both religions should go back to the first decade of their respeice foundings.

O.

Hi goodthief,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaming
Flaming (Internet), the act of posting deliberately hostile messages on the Internet.
Hope that helps.
Susan Prior - editor

Too right, Mustafa. Attitudes towards moderate Islam are often conflated with extremism and militant Islam while all the Muslims I know are very peaceable, if a little peeved at being caricatured as potential terrorists. “Nuance” plays a great role in how figures like Pipes influence the general audience. As mac has underscored, criticizing a faith is not racism but I think it leads to the same behaviour.

A pity DB you didn’t get the gist of the article. No-one’s calling Muslims ‘underdogs’. As for duelling dogmas - the bible says this, the Qaran says that - well, good luck. Anyone convinced by such reasoning can contact me and I’ll sell them a bridge. It’s in Sydney, right on the harbour…

Personally I’m sick of being approached by strangers who, apropos of nothing at all really, launch into criticizing all the foreigners and especially Muslims taking our jobs, threatening our way of life yada yada. That this happened three times in three days suggests Daniel Pipes is halfway to realising his dream - rejection of all ‘foreign’ cultures in deference to our inherently superior ways. Of life, of thinking, of praying.

Has anyone ever listened to American evangelist radio? It’s just as objectionable as the stuff broadcast my Muslim extremists. The ‘West’ has no monopoly on temperance, John Greenfield.

I’m going out on a limb here to mention viking13’s reference to Iran’s president saying “Israel will be wiped off the map”. The source of that quote was the New York Times, which referred to the sentence “Israel’s regime will be removed from the pages of history”. The “wiped off the map” version plays much better however in fora such as this. It’s a bit like the dogma wars, eh DB? Propaganda for the bigoted, packaged and ready to fire.

Finally, thankyou to SusanP for trying to put a little perspective into this debate. OLO posts can be informative but some here should be subscribing to other sites. Y’know, the ones with a flag in the top left corner and a gun on the right.

Bennie, the translation of "removed from the pages of history" into "wiped off the map" came from the Iranian newsagency IRIB, and was an attempt to translate the Farsi term into idiomatic English. The situation is not new, if you remember Keating's "recalcitrant", describing Mahathir, translated into Malay as "coarse, uneducated".

While I concur with your comments about "stangers approaching you about immigrants" (having an immigrant, non-European wife myself) I object to wandering the Islamic sections of Sydney and being (along with my wife) subjected to evil glares from people in flowing robes.

As for evangelistic radio (and TV) we at least have the ability to not tune in. Even "moderate" Muslims, if they attend mosques regularly, are exposed to "fundamentalist" sermons from ill-educated imams (in the sense that a major prerequisite is the ability to memorise most or all of a book in an language not even spoken today, and certainly remote from many adherents' native tongues) and furthermore are exposed to high-handed judgementalism from neighbours as well as (in many places) raucous, reverberating "calls to prayer" from loudspeakers. So what I am saying is, that non-Christians in a Christian (if one exists) country can ignore overt Christian representations, while Muslims in an Islamic (or Islamised area) often cannot, especially when the laws of the land are also Islamised (even "moderate" Islamic nations often have "religious police").

If it is "racism" for westerners to discuss Islam in an objective fashion, what is it when western symbols like the Cross of St George (or the Swiss Cross!) are banned, demands are made for halal menus, and women are told to "cover up" to protect hyper-sensitive Muslims from affront (or to protect over-sexed males from temptation)?