Noting the shadiness and creepiness of public remarks by Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind the plan to build a mosque blocks away from the former site of the Twin Towers, Christopher Hitchens is nonetheless repulsed by the tactics adopted by his opposition. Starting with Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, he writes: [...]
In a nutshell, the question is, what proof is there that there is one god and not multiple? Your Thoughts?
EuroNews.net writes: A law banning the wearing of a full Islamic veil in public in France has been adopted by the lower house of parliament. The ruling UMP and the New Centre party voted for the ban on the burqa or niqab while the Socialists, Communists and Greens abstained. The law goes to the upper house in [...]
The New York Daily News reports: A CHARISMATIC terror leader linked to the botched Times Square car bomb has placed the Seattle cartoonist who launched “Everybody Draw Muhammed Day” on an execution hit list. Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki – the radical who has also been cited as inspiring the Fort Hood, Tex., massacre and the [...]
Saudiwoman writes: I have to tell you what I was up to last night. My very dear friend Tine has finished her time here in Saudi and is leaving soon. Unfortunately, being cooped up in expat compounds; she has never had a chance to see muttawas in action. These lions of Saudi morality are a [...]
“Islam” means “submission to the will of Allah”, a doctrine which requires from the individual to become a slave. In my view, it’s bad. Islam limits the imagination to what you can find in the Koran and to follow in the example of the prophet Mohammed. I think that’s bad and that’s what keeps people [...]
A while back I highlighted the story of a Maldivian man who was attacked by a crowd for expressing his lack of belief in Islam during the Q&A session by a the visiting Indian scholar Dr. Zakir Naik. Maldives is a state where it is illegal to not believe. Now, via Atheist Media Blog, here’s video [...]
BBC Radio 4 analyzes the pope’s catchphrase, “a dictatorship of relativism”, used for describing the secular West. Here’s the program description: The idea that no one has a monopoly on the truth seems to be fixed in the modern Western psyche. But it’s an idea that is under attack. Pope Benedict claims that we are [...]
Nicolai Sennels spent several years working with criminal Muslims in Copenhagen (where as of March 2009 “70% of the prison population in the Copenhagen youth prison consists of young man of Muslim heritage.”) He writes the following about the different ways that Westerners and Muslims view the locus of control: There is another strong difference between the [...]
Thanks to Das for the hilarious find: “Sometimes I think God drinks my tears and pees them back on my life.” Your Thoughts?
I already highlighted Penn Jillette’s Vanity Fair interview in which he praised Christians for being better at taking criticism than Muslims, but this quote from his new Las Vegas Weekly interview, which I found via Boing Boing and Reddit, conveys his feelings as much as his thoughts, and those feelings are both depressing on the one [...]
The New York Times reports: MADRID — In a significant escalation of Spain’s debate over how to handle radical Islam, the Senate on Wednesday narrowly and unexpectedly approved a motion to ban Muslim women from wearing in public the burqa or other garments that cover the whole body. The vote, 131 to 129, was another setback [...]
Any religion, or interpretation of a religion which takes the view that the law of God can be above human rights cannot be immune to violating human rights. In this case, we have an Iranian cleric calling for unveiled women to be treated like criminals as though they were drug traffickers, robbers, or terrorists: Guardian [...]
Bruce Bawer is a gay liberal and the author of Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom and While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within. And below is a powerful speech. If you don’t have time for the whole thing, at least make time for the first part: The description of the video [...]
Last week we mentioned that a proposed street festival of pork and wine protesting Muslims praying in the streets was prohibited from occurring in Paris. Here is footage of such prayer sessions, which apparently are meant to be an act of civil disobedience: Thanks to Tony for the link. Your Thoughts?
The weak, cruel, unjust, and barbarically stupid misogyny of laws in the Islamic world never ceases to sicken or anger me: A court in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has convicted an 18 year old girl (”LH”) to one year in prison for “consensual sex.” The UAE court convicted her because she agreed to be alone [...]
And that’s not all: On Osama bin Laden, [Zakir Naik] has said: “If he is terrorizing the terrorists, if he is terrorizing America the terrorist, the biggest terrorist, every Muslim should be a terrorist.” And now he is coming to Toronto in a couple of weeks for what “is being described as the largest Islamic [...]
In response to “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day”: Last month, according to English-language Pakistani newspaper The News International, a Pakistani High Court judge summoned the police after lawyer Muhammad Azhar Siddique filed an application for a First Information Report (FIR), claiming that the owners of Facebook had committed a heinous and serious crime under Section 295-C of [...]
An interview from June 10 with the author of Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations: Click through the video to see all 5 parts. Your Thoughts?
From Reuters’s FaithWorld blog: A giant “sausage and wine” party planned later this week in a Paris neighbourhood with many Muslim residents risks sparking disturbances and will therefore be banned, police in the French capital announced on Tuesday. The event, announced on the social networking site Facebook late last month (see page here in French), [...]
(Image: “God Is Great” by Makan Emadi) Betwa Shermer has a really interesting piece about Muslim artists in America who incorporate nudes into their art. Defenses of nudity in art as permissible by Islamic standards: The Lebanese-born artist, who now lives in New York, insists that the taboo stems from a conservative society and not [...]
Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, claims it is: Dr Rowan Williams told Radio 4′s World at One that the UK has to “face up to the fact” that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system. Dr Williams argues that adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law would help maintain social [...]
A couple of days ago, I saw Dan’s post of a Ayaan Hirsi Ali video, in which she was explaining that the willingness of fundamentalists to kill people cannot be only blamed on their destitute situation (for two reasons: 1. not all of the fundamentalists who become terrorists are poor, 2. not all poor people [...]
So despicable. Your Thoughts?
I’m as troubled by Islam’s authoritarianism of thought and practice as any one but Christian crusading is is not much better. This is called “Geert Wilders The Lion Heart” and unless it’s just an exceptional satire, it’s a really unsettling, unrestrained glorification of Christian warfare against Islam. How long until the Christian theocrats begin embracing [...]