The Council Has Spoken! The votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week’s Watcher’s Council match up.
“”You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?” – Adolf Hitler
“I studied the Qu’ran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. As far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion more to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself” – Alexis de Tocqueville
“All this talk of people who burn the Koran and nothing about the people who reacted in such a stupid way. We are always blaming the victim and not holding them — not most Muslims, but at least a large part of Muslim culture that doesn’t condemn their people… There is one religion in the world that kills you when you disagree with them and they say ‘look, we are a religion of peace and if you disagree we’ll f**king cut your head off, and nobody calls them on it — there are very few people that will call them on it. It’s like if Dad is a violent drunk and beats his kids, you don’t blame the kid because he set Dad off. You blame Dad because he’s a violent drunk” - Bill Maher
This week’s winning essay, Joshuapundit’s The Chicken Or The Egg? looks at some elements of Islamic culture and asks: is it Islam that promotes the extreme violence and misogyny associated with Muslim societies? Or is that just [art of a tribal society that persists in spite of Islam? Here’s a slice:
Unless you’re in a coma, you’ve probably noticed that a great many of the violent and barbaric acts in our modern world can be attributed to followers of Islam.
In the Islamic world today, aside from homicide bombings, jihad and terrorism directed against dar harb ( the part of the world not ruled by Islam), honor killings, female genital circumcision and other forms of violence against women are commonplace, and homosexuals are routinely brutalized and murdered. Non-Muslims are treated as barely human in much of the Islamic world, if they’re allowed to exist at all. Warfare carried out by Muslims is done with modern tools of the trade provided by the despised infidels, but is a relic of the good ol’ primitive and tribal days. Hostages, beheadings and the deliberate killing of civilians are all fair game, and the language of jihad is essentially the same heady stuff used back in the 7th century against the infidel. And through it all, there remains the miasma of seething violent rage at things like the Danish cartoons that simply doesn’t exist in other religious groups.
The question nobody wants to ask keeps floating to the surface: Is Islam to blame? Or, to put it another way, are the perpetrators simply bad Muslims or are they actually good ones who are simply more in tune with Mohammed’s message than the majority? Does Islam itself promote violence? Or are the acts simply a product of primitive tribal society that persists in spite of Islam?
Actually, this is a trick question. I personally believe that Islam and the primitive tribal culture combined back in the day to sustain each other and can’t be separated by their very nature…even though some valiant attempts have been made in the past, and are being made today.
Let’s look at honor killings, for example. Probably the oldest recorded one is in Genesis 34, when Jacob’s daughter Dinah was seduced (or raped, depending on how you interpret the text) by a man from the town of Shechem (modern day Nablus). Afterwards, Jacob’s sons Simeon and Levi instigated the killing of the town’s men in revenge. But the Torah also tells us how Jacob denounced the killings and actually took the time to bad mouth his sons for the deed from his deathbed. Not only that, but you’ll notice a profound difference from the Islamic way of handling this – the onus of punishment fell on the male, not the female.
his isn’t the only honor killing mentioned in the Bible, but they were never condoned or part of Jewish law, just merely reported.
Islam, on the other hand, not only sanctions honor killings but is quite clear about its position in the matter. Killing or flogging an adulteress or a female that has relations with a non-Muslim male are part of sharia ( Qu’ran: 4:15, for example) – provided an Islamic court orders the punishment rather than an individual male family member going off on his own.
Even at that, Islamic courts today in the Muslim world frequently view male family members taking the law into their own hands fairly leniently. In Jordan, for example, many brutal honor killings have been punished by as little as a three month sentence under Jordanian Public Law 340. Moreover, in the context of Islamic society such murderers are often celebrated and held up as role models. Just as homicide bombers and terrorists who kill infidel civilians often are.
But what if a Muslim feels himself disrespected and lives in say, Britain or New Jersey? If no Islamic courts are available, is it permissible to take the law into one’s own hands? Probably. There’s not much in the way of Islamic rulings or commentary on that particular subject, but the near silence of most Muslim clergy in the West when it comes to denouncing honor killings speaks volumes…one of those little inconvenient truths Western apologists for multiculturalism and Islam constantly run up against when a number of Muslim clerics themselves insist that honor killing, female genital mutilation, and stoning of adulterers are mandated by Islam. And, as you’ve probably guessed by now , that’s one of the unspoken reasons behind the push among many Muslims in the West for sharia courts to handle those messy domestic problems that come up with uppity females from time to time.
Violent death penalties for women caught in adultery is fairly typical of a primitive society, but only Islam continues the practice into the present day. No Christian court has ever condemned a woman to death for adultery. And although the death penalty for adultery is found in the Book of Leviticus, there is no record of such a sentence ever carried out by any Jewish court. The same is true of homosexuality; while both Christianity and Judaism consider it ‘a sin and an abomination’ only Islam clearly mandates the death penalty for such activities and carries it out in our present day.
So why does Islamic society persist in these practices ?
Much more at the link.
In our non-Council category, the winner was Daniel Greenfield’s – Obama’s Treason Is The New Patriotism submitted by The Noisy Room. Daniel has some very hard hitting things to say about President Obama and a number of his questionable actions..and the tendency by the usual suspects to name anyone whom disagrees with the Regime a ‘traitor.’
Here are this week’s full results. GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD and Rhymes With Right were unable to vote this week, but were not subject to the usual 2/3 vote penalty for not voting:
Council Winners
- *First place with 2 1/3 votes! – Joshuapundit - The Chicken Or The Egg?
- Second place with 2 votes – Bookworm Room – Trevor Loudon tells enthralled Marin County audience that victory in 2016 requires uniting and inspiring conservative base
- Third place with 1 1/3 votes – VA Right! - Is the Location of Hillary Clinton’s Email Server 75 Broad St New York, NY 10004?
- Fourth place *t* with 1 vote – Nice Deb – President Bystander Blames Bush For ISIS – Even Though He Funded Them and They Metastasized On His Watch
- Fourth place *t* with 1 vote – Ask Marion – Beating The Odds
- Fourth place *t* with 1 vote – Don Surber – Prime Minister: “Australians are sick of being lectured to by the United Nations”
- Fourth place *t* with 1 vote – The Right Planet – The Silencers
- Fifth place with 2/3 votes – The Noisy Room – The Faustian Pact Between Obama And Iran
- Sixth place *t* with 1/3 votes – The Glittering Eye - The History of ‘Advice and Consent’
- Sixth place *t* with 1/3 votes – Rhymes With Right – But The Obama Administration Assured Us These Folks Were Poor People Who Just Needed Jobs!
Non-Council Winners
- First place with 3 votes! – Daniel Greenfield/FrontPage Mag – Obama’s Treason Is The New Patriotism submitted by The Noisy Room
- Second place with 2 1/3 votes – Michael Totten – Let Iraq Die: A Case for Partition submitted by Joshuapundit
- Third place with 2 votes – James Rosen/Playboy – Dick Cheney Interview: ‘Obama is The Worst President Of My Lifetime’ submitted by The Watcher
- Fourth place with 1 vote – Walter Russell Mead – The Way Forward on Iran submitted by The Glittering Eye
- Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Michael Douglas/LA Times – Michael Douglas finds Judaism and faces anti-Semitism submitted by Don Surber
- Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Richard Epstein/Hoover Institution - Race Baiting And Ferguson submitted by Nice Deb
- Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote -Veronique de Rugy/The Daily Beast – On Ex-Im Bank, the Democrats Are the Real Corporate Shills submitted by The Razor
- Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote -Victor Davis Hanson/PJ Media - A Tale of Four Droughts submitted by Bookworm Room
See you next week!
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