Donald Douglas - On Muslims

Updates as I find 'em (archival), or they get writ (current posts):

Saturday, August 21, 2010, 2:00 PM American Power: Right. Right. They're Moderate Muslims. Got It... (or Right. Right. They’re Moderate Muslims. Got It… | Right Wing News, or Theo Spark: Right. Right. They're Moderate Muslims. Got It...), and includes a gruesome video of EXTREMIST Islamist terrorist acts; (beheadings, bombings, etc, with full blood and gore)--because as you know, all muslims everywhere are responsible for what any muslim anywhere does, just like with Christians, Black folks, White folks, Jews, ...) And of course, holding all muslims everywhere responsible for the acts of any muslim anywhere is not biiiiigotry. Surely not. One wonders what collective guilt Donald is carrying around... and what your religious and racial make-up says YOU'RE collectively responsible for, according to him...

Extra bonus: Comments like these:

Diamond Mair said...
I just shake my head at a "culture" that encourages children to behead others - theirs is a "culture" the same way bacteria are, and I'm thinking it's past time for high doses of antibiotics ...........................

Semper Fi'
DM

August 21, 2010, 3:27 PM
Anonymous said...
The only muzlimz that are moderate are the muzlimz that have not blown you up with an IED.
All I will ever need to learn about islam was learned on 911.
another day to live in infamy.
Heltau

August 21, 2010 7:06 PM

Gotta love those crazy wingnuts.

***

August 15, 2010 8:38 PM:
Regular American Power commenter Dave said...

Perhaps once we run B. Hussein Obama's Islamic commie ass off for good, he can then be an imam in this hideous monument to the 9/11 attacks on our country that was carried out by the adherents of this ignorant, cave-man 'religion' known as Islam.

Let the camel-scrubbing illiterate primitives build their trophy Mosque just outside the gates of Hell, where it belongs.

-Dave
-- American Power: How Close Is Close Enough?

Perhaps Donald agrees with this view of the Muslim faith or perhaps he does not, but there's no question that he actively condones this kind of bigotry appearing on his moderated blog (Dr Douglas must approve each comment before it appears, there), and that if he in any way disagrees with this bigoted line of thinking, he does not do anything to indicate it, before or after it's submission and his approval of it on his blog.

***

FRIDAY, JULY 27, 2007, 7:07 AM

(From: Islam in America: A Special Report - Newsweek - Newsweek Society - msnbc.com):

In fact, Muslim Americans represent the most affluent, integrated, politically engaged Muslim community in the Western world. According to a major survey done by the Pew Research Center and released last spring, Muslims in America earn about the same as their neighbors, and their educational levels are about the same. An overwhelming number—71 percent—agree that in America, you can "get ahead with hard work." In stark contrast, Muslims in France, Germany and England are about 20 percent more likely to live in poverty.

The story highlights other, more troubling statistics from the Pew survey: Sixty percent of young Muslims age 18-29 think of themselves as Muslim first, before American. The Pew survey also found that more than a fourth of 18-29 year-old Muslims believed that suicide bombing is justified. Further, 39 percent thought that new Muslim immigrants should remain islolated from the mainstream of American society.

The article quotes Autri Sajadeen, a 21 year-old pharmacy student of Bangladeshi descent:

On 9/11, "it sounds bad to say, but I remember thinking that I didn't care that it happened. A lot of my friends didn't care. I think it's because we're Muslim." For him, the bombing of Afghanistan that followed was much more tragic and painful.

Sajadeen's alienation is apparently representative of a large segment of the American Muslim youth population.

There is something troubling about this information when it's placed in the context of the foundational beliefs of the Islamic religion. Proponents of Islam routinely point out that it is a religion of peace. But an analysis of basic theological holdings of the faith show that Islam's basic creed calls for the destruction of infidels.

According to Bruce Thornton, in a reveiw of Robert Spencer's Amazon.com: The Myth of Islamic Tolerance: How Islamic Law Treats Non-Muslims…, Islam is not a tolerant and peace-loving religion. It's a faith that seeks to eliminate challenges to its dominance, a religion that sanctions aggressive violence against non-Muslims:

*** [I cut out two paragraphs of anti-Muslim bigotry here because Donald is kind of vauge as to how much of it he agrees with. If you're curious, I invite you to follow the link, however.]

I am not a specialist in Islamic doctrine. I do regularly read policy-driven and academic scholarhip on the clash between Islam and the West. I do believe that America's strength is its vastly more inclusive socio-political system than those of the European contintental democracies.

It would be foolish, however, to discount the radicalism of the Islamic faith's younger cohorts, and it would be unwise to ignore the extent to which Islam represents a competing ideology determined to prevail over its competitors.

I think the British case serves as a warning to the U.S. Melanie Phillips, a British conservative analyst, criticized President Bush recently for his tendency to appease domestic Islamic populations. It's contradictory to wage a war on terror, facing radical Islamist forces exclusively, while not speaking out accurately on the forces of extremism in our midst.

We have no interest alienating law-abiding American Muslims who denounce Islamic extremism and place American identity above religious faith. But we cannot kid ourselves in dismissing the considerable dangers on the homefront, be these migrating threats from European-based mujahideen or the global al Qaeda nework's appeal to Islamist start-ups domestically. It will be good to take of comprehensive approach to understanding Islam in America. -- Burkean Reflections: Islam in America: Immigrant Dream or Stealth Jihad?

Here's where we go from criticizing "Islamists" to criticizing "Islam."
Yes, a few of the findings of that poll Donald cites may be troubling, though I'm suspicious about the number of those who the poll claims justify suicide bombing. Seems awful high, to me... As someone in the comments says, it often matters how the questions are asked.

But note how it's moving away from how muslim fundamentalists act, and toward various passages in the Koran and what Muslims therefore believe. From there, it's only a tiny step to bigotry toward all Muslims...

The fact that there are similar violent passages in the Old Testament Bible doesn't hold any sway. The fact that many religions seek to convert non-believers, and explicitly say so, isn't persuasive. Not even the fact that there are more Muslims on this Earth than those of any other faith, and that only a tiny fraction of them have committed acts worthy of condemnation makes any difference.

Melanie Phillips and Robert Spencer (and later incarnations, like blogger Pamela Geller) may've started off trying to do good, warning people about the Islamist terrorist threat. Fundamentalists--especially islamist fundamentalists--are dangerous to free societies. But somewhere along the line, Spencer, Phillips, Geller, and those who eagerly follow them, like Donald Douglas, became bigots, out to libel the whole Muslim religion and culture because Islamist terrorists claim to act in the name of Allah. In doing so, they have strayed from the freedoms on which much of our western civilization--at least in England and America--are based.

***

SATURDAY, JULY 07, 2007, 8:53 AM

Hirsh is confident that Islam and the West are not on a long-range path toward a clash of civilizations.

I'm not so sure. We'd have to refer to the experts, but my reading of the Islamist challenge sees militant forces as implacable, and we risk appeasment at our peril. As commentator Christopher Hitchens noted last week in reference to the London bomb plot and the Glasgow attack, there is a liberal reluctance to confront the fact that Islamists are intent to destroy us. Hitchens argues that we shouldn't "mince words." If there's a "radical evil" tormenting Britain and the West, at least we should recognize it for what is it, and prepare accordingly. For more of Hitchens' recent writings on the Islamist threat, click here.

It's one thing to condemn the evil acts and attitudes of fundamentalist Muslims, but quite another to avoid blaming all Muslims for the acts of these relative few, or to "separate out" the bad Muslims from Muslims, as a whole.

(And from the comments):

Hi Deborah! Thanks for the insightful analysis. Brown at one point said Britons were united and firm, then undercut his message by saying that Muslims shouldn't be singled out. It's a pathetic situation, but that's where we are. Vigilance is in, but beefed-up antiterror efforts are not. Draconian...indeed. - July 7, 2007, 5:25:37 PM EDT - Burkean Reflections: Cancerous Religion? Islam's Cult of Death

Muslims shouldn't be singled out. Evil Muslims should be singled out. And as these quotes will show (especially as they become more recent, says I, from my perch here in August, 2010) Donald becomes increasingly unable to tell the difference between terrorists and Muslims, and begins to show bigotry toward all of 'em.

Also of interest in this post is a section taken from the subject, a Newsweek post by Michael Hirsh, titled 'Exploring Islam's 'Death Cult':

The irony is that this virulent strain began with the removal of Islam from public life during the “modernization” of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, when Western legal structures and armies were created. That led to "the devalidation of Islamic education and Islamic law, the marginalization of Islamic scholars," who until then had collectively acted as counterbalance to tyranny and extremism, Bulliet says. Instead of modernization, what ensued was what Muslim clerics had long feared: tyranny. "You had the implicit notion that if Islam is pushed out of the public sphere, removed from public life, tyranny will increase," says Bulliet. "By the 1960s that prophecy was fulfilled. You had dictatorships in most of the Islamic world." Egypt's Gamel Nasser, Syria's Hafez Assad and others came in the guise of Arab nationalists, but they were nothing more than tyrants.

Yet there was no longer a legitimate force to oppose this trend. In the place of traditional Islamic learning—which had encouraged science and advancement in medieval times—there was nothing. The old religious authorities had been hounded out of public life, back into the mosque. The Ottoman Empire had been destroyed in World War I, and the caliphate was abolished. Arrogant autocrats ruled the political sphere. There was, in other words, no legitimate authority of any kind. Into that vacuum roared a fundamentalist reaction led by brilliant but aberrant amateurs like Egypt's Sayyid Qutb, the founding philosopher of Ayman Zawahiri's brand of Islamic radicalism (he was hanged by Nasser), and later, Osama bin Laden, who grew up infected by the Saudis' extreme version of Wahhabism.

Interesting that some--including Donald himself--are now doing all they can to push the Islamic faith from public life in western culture, as well. Rather than allowing those who wish to integrate here in America and Europe--say, by building mosques in the communities where they live, or serving in the armed forces or in politics--folks on the right are trying to drive them away or underground, out of sight and away from moderating influences... History repeats...

***

SATURDAY, JUNE 23, 2007, 6:18 AM

The underlying issue, for me, is the openness of Britain's democracy, and the effects of multiculturalism on British national identity. Britain's special in its attention to custom and tradition in the development of the political culture and institutions. Is British culture deteriorating? At what point does a nation have a responsibility to limit individual freedoms to protect the dominant culture -- indeed, the national security -- when newer, radically different groups present challenges to the national consensus?

Many suspect that Britain, like the European continental democracies, provides a hospitable, tolerant society for Islamic radicals to organize attacks against Western civilization. Robert Leiken wrote an article on "Europe's Angry Muslims" in the July/August edition of Foreign Affairs. Christopher Hitchens recently wrote of "Londonistan Calling" in the June issue of Vanity Fair.

One of my visitors, Kris Stoke-Newington, who lives in London, directs me to Bel's Blog, the website of a conservative British law lecturer who often comments on Britain's multiculturalism. See also my recent blog post on American reporter Megan Stack's distasteful and humiliating experience wearing the full-body coverings while on assignment in Saudi Arabia. - Burkean Reflections: Muslim Veils Testing Limits of Tolerance in Britain

The issue is Muslim dress--specifically, face veils, though Donald doesn't seem happy with the robes or head scarf, either. So, at what point does the government have a right to step in and limit individual freedoms, such as regulating the wearing a particular piece of clothing? Should the question even be based on "protecting the dominant culture," or on issues of safety and security*? And who gets to decide?

*While it's a tough call, I believe ID photos and court appearances are legit grounds for requiring that people not cover their faces. Similarly, any activity where flowing robes might interact negatively with spinning machinery should be regulated out of safety concerns. Other than that though, people have a right to follow religious or cultural customs in dress, and I would never want any government to dictate otherwise. Those who do, whether they be theocracies enforcing religious custom or otherwise free societies protecting their dominant culture from change, are not as free as they should be.

***

FRIDAY, MAY 25, 2007, 2:05 PM

Hitchens feels out of place when he returns to Finsbury Park nowadays. There's a greater unassimilated refugee flow, with immigrants from Algeria, the Middle East, and Asia (and many more women women who don't shed their chadors or burkas).

...

Hitchens also catalogs some interesting and publicly available cinematic and documentary films, particularly Undercover Mosque, a video detailing the Islamist movement's seething hatred toward the West.

...

I'm no expert on Islam, although I read the widely in the policy and security studies literature on the nature of the Islamist threat. Unlike what many of those sympathetic to Muslims might say, I'm personally not persuaded that Islam's "a religion of peace." For example, I assign in my World Politics course, "Terror, Islam, and Democracy," by Ladan and Roya Boroumand. They note, for example, that Islamist terrorism "is first and formost an ideological and moral challenge to liberal democracy." See also, Robert Leiken's 2005 Foreign Affairs article, "Europe's Angry Muslims," where he notes that Europe's Islamist radicals "endanger the entire Western world." - Burkean Reflections: Londonistan Calling? Britain's Islamist Challenge

The issue of assimilation can be a valid one, but a snapshot isn't the way to judge. Rather, one has to look at where folks are over time. The first generation is often unwilling to give up their own customs and beliefs and adopt new ones. But what about the second, and the third generations? As time goes on, are immigrant families adapting and adopting the customs of their new country? Until you know the details, family by family, it's hard to judge the assimilation of a community.

In terms of dress, I'd think that even that would change as time goes by, though religious and cultural mores can make them harder to change. I guess what matters there is the degree to which one is coerced into wearing a given thing. Parents have the legal and moral right to raise their kids according to their own values, and if a particular mode of dress is a part of that, so be it, whether it's robes, head scarves, and veils, or any of the restrictions we westerners put on our own kids concerning the age at which make-up or pierced ears are appropriate.

As far as "Islamists" and their seething hatred of the west, I take no issue with condemning bigotry and hatred, but all too often, condemning Islamist hatred and terrorist acts turns into condemning Muslims as a whole. You don't fight bigotry by becoming a bigot yourself.