Islam - not as innocuous as we "liberals" might like it to be

Before I get into why I think that that we should firmly resist any attempt by Islam to gain a foothold of control over how enclaves of American society work – as has been the case in parts of Europe over the course of the past decade - a word about the human use of free will.....

As regards free will, as long as people don't impinge in an unjustifiable or unfair way on the comfort or well-being of others, I'm not going to object.  I might not exactly like what I'm seeing or hearing, but in as much as I value others being tolerant towards me when something I'm doing doesn't exactly sit right with them,  I owe it to society to keep my complaining to a minimum.  In that sense, I have a somewhat liberal outlook on life.  Labels are misleading, however.  If you're an arch conservative, you may see other mid-rank conservatives as liberally inclined.  Whatever you want to call what I subscribe to, I consider it a practical usage of the Golden Rule.

Since people have various understandings as to what the Golden Rule means, I need to be more precise about my own interpretation of it.

I know that many believe the Golden Rule means the same thing in every given circumstance.  In the real world, applying it one way all the time will inevitably trip you up.  For my part, I believe that the Golden Rule can be interpreted positively, from an inclusive point of view, or negatively, from an exclusive point of view.  

Because free will can be used either with love, or with indifference, if you feel the other party is as well-meaning as you are, things will probably work out optimally if you treat that person as you would LIKE to be treated.  On the other hand, if you feel the other party is a calculating person who is out to take cold-hearted advantage of you without remorse, the optimal approach is to treat that person as you believe you would DESERVE to be treated if you tried to do similarly.  For best results, when using the Golden Rule, you need to think like a Doberman Pinscher - a wonderful pet to its family and well-meaning visitors but a formidable deterrent to any malicious intruder.

Within the global collective I subscribe to, when the Golden Rule is applied positively, members attempt to be as considerate toward others as they believe those others would be toward them.  When practiced with pure intent, this courtesy is enjoyed equally by all members, the mighty and the meek, alike.  In that exercise, both my wife and I try to go beyond the minimum.

But not everybody warrants being treated that way.  The fox may put on his best face, but the hens know better than to let him in the coop.

As regards those who, because of their proclivities, fall outside the collective I belong to - those who have no problem denying others the regard they reserve for themselves - to the degree they blithely perpetrate upon others what they themselves would experience as unpleasant or distressing, if they step over the red line of what can be tolerated, they are owed nothing but whatever consequences will relieve society of the burden of their choice to offend.

Don’t take this to mean I’m an advocate of excessive measures in responding to negative behavior - of killing the patient to cure the disease.  I’m not - just what will be conclusively efficacious.  When an individual offends beyond what can reasonably be tolerated, there should be consequences.  In ascending order of degree of severity, those consequences should go roughly as follows:

Expressions of disapproval

Interdiction by legal demand

Civil action in court

Charging with a crime

Fining sufficient to deter re-offending, with or without a mandate to compensate

Interdiction by police action, up to and including lethal response, if necessary

Arrest

Arraignment

Trial in a criminal court

Conviction requiring imprisonment

You’ll note that I did not include capital punishment.  I don’t think that society is ever made better by the cold-blooded killing of offenders, however heinous, by state action.  On the other hand, if criminals get themselves killed in the course of police trying to prevent them from harming innocents or injuring officers and no preferable option exists in the moment of interdiction, then so be it.

This is the dark side of the Golden Rule, and as dread-filled as it may be, it is necessary for the greater good of society, at large, for those with authority appropriate to the occasion to respond in that way.  When the offense is being perpetrated by a group of people, the same line of reasoning applies.

Thanks to that logic, we happen not to be living under the thumb of an ironclad global dictatorship called the Third Reich.  Using the Golden Rule in this manner – first negatively and later positively - the United States and its allies not only put an end to the Axis Alliance, but also helped enormously to rebuild both Germany and Japan, as modern democracies, after their governments had surrendered unconditionally.

In the best of circumstances, if we remain both vigilant and diligent, we can thwart abuse before it occurs by denying would-be malefactors the openings they seek.  In the event the offense intended has been successfully committed, however, a sure response must ensue to compel the perpetrator to make such amends as is deemed fitting AND to discourage a repetition of the bad deed. Failure to do so only encourages malefactors to go one better with their next act of victimization.

This is the interpretation of the Golden Rule I learned in boarding school - protect the weak, resist the strong who go too far and give bullies what-for until they mend their ways.  Once those ends were achieved, everyone was happier for it and things worked much better.

So, while I have a liberal outlook on anything I think won't make a permanent bad dent in either me or my society, it doesn't go any further than that. The brand of liberalism that I definitely don't subscribe to is the lean-over-backwards-as-far-as-they-want-you-to-and-expect-to-be-respected variety, in which nakedly tendentious logic is used to maximize the good side of a potentially inimical thing while minimizing the bad side, on the assumption that being nice to everyone compels everyone to be nice to you.  Obviously, that kind of turn-the-other-cheek approach doesn't always produce the best results for either people or the social groups they belong to, especially when dealing with an ambitious religion which, by virtue of its intrinsic nature, contains a virtually inseparable mix of lambs in the open and vipers in the grass.

In my opinion, all too much of that kind of apologist liberalism has been in evidence in the media, of late, as regards the issue of whether our Western way of life can easily co-exist with Islam, without potentially irreversible damage being done to both the freedoms we cherish and the diverse panoply of social functions that are rooted in those freedoms.

And while we waffle on the issue, not wanting to be politically incorrect, the structures that underpin our liberties are quietly being infiltrated and undermined by doubt, indecision and a growing sense of dread.  One day, not too far ahead, we may well find ourselves waking up in shock and having to reel in a whole lot of backsliding in a heavy-handed way – like in Egypt, under al Sissi - ironically, because we tried to be too nice for too long, instead of being firm and crystal clear from the outset about what kinds of Islamic thinking have to be left behind by immigrants from countries where that religion has gained such power over social mores and the processes of government.   We cannot afford to allow ourselves to be lulled into a sense of false security about this issue, thinking that because America absorbed so many immigrants as it grew, absorbing Islam, lock stock and barrel, can’t possibly hurt us.  It most certainly can and it already has, in the form of terrorist attacks mounted by Muslims residing in - or having legally entered - the United States.  The scale of such attacks ranges from epic to abortive.  The literature on the particulars of those attacks is extensive and it isn’t what I want to focus on.   The only useful point is that they have been occurring, and with Islamic State in the picture now, along with the continued presence of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other radical Islamic organizations spread around the world, there can be little doubt that hostile operatives have been entering the country and connecting with sleeper groups looking for ways to do damage with high media potential.

This still doesn’t cover the more extensive, worldwide picture of the threats we face from attackers using isolated texts from the Quran to justify their actions.  Resolute apologists are quick to defend the global Muslim community against culpability for failing to firmly excoriate terrorists who cherry-pick fragments of scripture to justify their barbarous acts - acts that make an utter mockery of seminal tenets of decency that humans originally created religions to promulgate and protect.  I have no patience with that kind of apologism.  Here’s a link the reader might click on:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3452533/ISIS-execute-15-year-old-boy-beheading-caught-listening-western-music-Iraq.html

Try to rationalize that!

Since 1978, we and our democratic allies have been in a highly contentious global struggle with people motivated by a 7th Century form of Islamic aspirations - the ideal of Islamic rule of the whole world.  As slow as people in this country have been to acknowledge it, the great divide in the human race today is between The Radical Islamic World and the Liberal Democratic World.   We have numbers and better technology on our side, thus far, but they’re catching up fast and, in terms of visceral appeal and intensity, they have us beat by a mile and a half.

Back in 1776, when the forefathers of this nation mandated a separation of church and state, doubtless they were reflecting on the religious interference of the 120-year colonial period predating independence.  How much more adamant they would have been had they been able to see into the future and reflect on the rise of Radical Islam, from the Philippines through to Indonesia, the Indian subcontinent, the Levant, southeastern Europe, and northern and sub-Saharan Africa.  How right they were.  If enlightened government is what we truly want, we can NEVER allow it to be any kind of handmaiden to religion – especially not Islam.

Why especially not Islam?  Because Islam is an insatiable thing, a hundred-headed Hydra, content to conquer by fear and force what it cannot seduce.  And why are people so afraid of it?  Because its seminal texts can so easily be interpreted by its defenders and proponents to advocate death for those who either oppose it intellectually, forsake it or in some way offend it.  Every day, people in Africa, Asia and the Levant die by the hand of their neighbors, having been convicted by some Shariah (so-called) court, because they said or did something that, in this country, we simply assume to be a protected use of free will.  Here's a shortlist of sins that fall into that category; idolatry, witchcraft, blasphemy, heresy, converting to another religion (apostacy), insulting Allah or the Prophet, infidelity, promiscuity, prostitution, cultural immorality (like listening to, or playing, music or dancing), homosexuality, trans-sexuality, sodomy, and bringing dishonor of some kind upon one’s family.   At the same time, under Islamic law, one can keep slaves, beat a wife, and impregnate a 12 year old girl taken as wife.  

There is no way to stop people from interpreting Islamic scripture darkly.   Unlike Christianity, which is firmly rooted in the New Testament injunction to walk in the path of unconditional love, above the inclination to judge, Islam stresses the importance of doctrinal obedience to the deity.  The Quran is not offered simply as food for thought.  It is law and the required consequences for offending said law are, all too often, extremely harsh and primitive.

Such ideas are not compatible with the systems of law we have so painstakingly wrought to protect individual freedom throughout the (so-called) Western World.  It’s an absolute certainty that intractable social frictions arise when people attempt to marry the two mindsets together.  Nowhere in the world do I see where any such attempt has peacefully succeeded.  Look to recent developments in France, Holland and Germany to see what I mean.

One huge question we have to ask ourselves is whether the kind of inter-activeness that information technology has created - the web and all its spin-offs - can continue to be as liberal as it is while madrasas in highly restrictive Muslim theocracies invoke hell-fire and damnation, in the name of Allah, upon the Western World for its licentious excesses, while impressionable young men aching to be loved and possessed by something much bigger than themselves, hang on every word.  I doubt that many westerners can comprehend how savagely all-encompassing that fervor can be.  Consider the case of the Pakistani boy who, after being falsely accused by the local imam and fellow villagers of blasphemy, cut off his own hand and presented it to the imam.  Even more telling is the subsequent approval of said action by family and the overwhelming majority of others in the community.  Any who might have disapproved weren't coming forward to talk to the press.  The fear of retribution for daring to express a contrary view is well justified.

 http://www.jihadwatch.org/2016/01/pakistani-boy-cuts-off-his-own-hand-after-accidentally-committing-blasphemy

That's the psychological entity we're dealing with here and, like it or not, it has inveigled its way into controlling the way governments in many parts of the world work, slowly dragging them backwards in time to the kind of relationship between religion and government that existed in Europe back in the Dark Ages.

Even before I became aware of Islam’s recent awakening, there was one thing I was absolutely insistent about:   that government of the people, by the people, for the people and any kind of religion should NEVER be co-mingled.

During my close-to seven decades on this planet, I've had plenty of time to observe how people think and act, me included.  I've also been able to use the very serviceable education I received to indulge my interest in books and articles about how societies work and what role thought forms (like religion, popular culture, ethnic culture, political ideology, schools of philosophy, ethics, party politics, nationalism and even language) play in shaping trends for the better or worse in the condition of the structures we depend upon, not simply to live, but also, to make the most we can of our lives.

I was introduced at an early age to the seductions of two great thought forms – the doctrines of the Anglican Church (courtesy of two draconian boarding schools), and apartheid, the all-encompassing political system of the only reality I had subjective experience of before the age of twenty-three.

Growing up in South Africa under apartheid, I was faced with a stark choice between two very different ways of being.  The apparently easier path was to unquestioning compliance; that the status quo was how my reality needed to be; that the grown-ups who had made it that way had good reason to do what they did and that the best way to go was to work with them, as best I could.  Under that regime, as a white person, I was expected to understand that I was genetically superior to anyone who wasn't what I was.  An adult role in some kind of supervisory position over those who weren't white like me was so expected that it was never even discussed.

The decidedly more difficult path lay somewhere in the murky realms beyond the point where the easier path was rejected.  In those realms, everything you were told would be subject to intellectual scrutiny.  Schools of opinion would receive no automatic assent.  Liberalism, conservatism, progressivism, libertarianism, privatism, populism, any kind of "ism", in fact, all were open to deconstruction, analysis and deemed worth assessment.

In pursuing that path, I was part of a distinct minority, quite a few of whom ended up in prison for going a step too far with their ideas.

We were not a homogeneous group.  Groups could be targeted and deactivated too easily.  Opposition was a more private thing, carefully shared.  Inevitably, bits and pieces of just about every school of thought would find their way into what became your own unique belief set.  Understand now, there is a world of difference between factual reality and a belief set.  Unlike religion, which requires that you believe all kinds of stuff you will never be able to prove, a belief set is composed only of those ideas you like and can update any time you want - ideas which, to others, may seem weird, even nuts.  The vital difference between a religion and a belief set is that you're the master of your belief set.  Try to do that with a religion and you run the risk of being accused of either heresy or blasphemy.

In following the more difficult path, I did so not because I was a wise or good person, but more because that's where my nose and my appetite for life experience led me.  A lot of it was like trying to get around the house immediately after a late-night blackout.  One tends to bump into a lot of things before you begin to become better oriented.

It took me an incredibly long time to realize how tightly bound I was to the habits of thought I had collected during my life.  Some were just dormant dead-weight, of little consequence, either way.  But others were more like invisible minders - meddling ghosts from the past, ever ready to insert themselves at some critical point in time, in a way that was not constructive or in my best interests.

Believe me, I know what it is to be a boy whose mind is caught in the grip of religion.  I know how dangerous that can be to one's well-being.

Before the age of eighteen, it is safe to say, the mind of the person known by my name at the time, was completely owned by the Anglican Church and the school I was banished to by my parents (much to my dismay).  The most prevalent feeling I experienced during those years was dread, greatly exacerbated by the guilt produced by my first timid explorations into the world of sexual contact.  So great was my fear of "God", that, after the first time I touched a girl's breast (I was perhaps 13 at the time) I thought I would be divinely punished, even to the point of not surviving to my sixteenth birthday.  I thank the onset of a flaming passion for British and American rock and roll for delivering me from the grip of those dark, religiously-driven imaginings.  There just wasn't enough room in my mind for both fixations.

I remember clearly the moment the great apotheosis exploded into my consciousness.  I was in my first car, a Wolseley 1100, waiting to give my sister a ride home from Herschel Girls' School, when it came to me:  if God was indeed infinite, then I had to be an expression of that infiniteness; if not, then God was, at best, nothing more than some sort of finite entity.  The idea that I should let some kind of entity, however large, possess my free will was completely unacceptable.  I liked the infinite concept better.  That way, I was God, being the being I was.  And if the rest of me had, in whatever way, contrived to make the dimension into which I had popped in 1948, it sure as hell would not have been for the purpose of living under the thumb of a religion that made you feel condemned to hell for having manifested the kind of interest that had caused humanity to survive for tens of thousands of years.  It was such a liberating insight that I threw open the car door and pranced around like an idiot in the parking lot.

Now, let me be clear, that insight did NOT lead to a wholesale collapse into the arms of rejecting anything that physics could not prove.  I'm no literalist.  My personal belief set goes way beyond the material causality of this world.  But that's not the object of this essay.

The object of this essay is to draw attention to how vigilant we need to be in maintaining the primacy and the integrity of our painstakingly wrought secular legal system over whatever any in the collection of religions we host put forward as doctrine, with a special emphasis on Islam, simply because so many of that persuasion are headed this way.

I came close enough to being permanently inducted into an external thought form to know how dangerous and powerful such beasts are.  It took me many years after coming to the States to cut loose cultural baggage from my former life that was making it harder for me to live in the US.  Yet, anything I experienced was nothing next to what boys in the Islamic world are subjected to.  It is hard for me to imagine how anyone of those poor boys could completely purge his mind of such mental conditioning during a single lifetime.  These young men are now being displaced by the tens of thousands from the areas they grew up in through actions of war.  They are mixed in with the great flood of refugees headed for what they see as a safer and possibly more prosperous life in countries like Germany, France, Holland, Belgium, England, Canada and the United States.  A minority of them will find peace and prosperity where they end up.  The rest will struggle as perennial outsiders in a strange land.  Their struggles will eat at them.  Between days of tranquility, there will be days of despair, days of anger, days of disaffection and days when they wonder how much better life would have been if only they could have continued to live where they grew up – the simplicity of it, the spiritual purity, the beauty of the land.  They will brood about it, make no mistake.  Those are the hours when disgruntled men seek the company of others who are going through similar troubles.  Those klatches are where enrollers to the cause of radical Islam’s grander objectives do their sworn work.  Nearby, their American-born children will sit, absorbing every heartfelt word – as enrapt as any student in the madrasa “back home”.

Despite this, so that we may continue to rightfully proclaim ourselves a great nation, we cannot turn these newcomers away wholesale.  The righteous are known best by their actions – by their magnanimous readiness to relieve suffering, by their brave acceptance of grand inconvenience in making provision for those who have been displaced, by their patient acceptance of setbacks as an inescapable component of making progress, by their wisdom in learning how to discern the difference between a possible foe and a potential friend.

We must progress beyond political jargon and move more expeditiously toward a system of vetting those coming this way, to the greater long-term benefit of ourselves and the whole human family.

To that end, I have a practical suggestion:  we, the people, have to define, far more clearly, what we are prepared to accept as legitimate religious activity and what we regard as unlawful activity.  For my part, I think religious activity must be regarded as falling into the general class of not-for-profit entities that provide a multitude of different kinds of service to the individual and not in some special class of its own.   Under that definition, legal boundaries on the activities of religions become far clearer.  A secondary benefit would be the making of a much better firewall between religious activity and the legislative process.

To my mind, the only legitimate roles for any religion are the following: 

*The presentation of a religion’s basic articles of faith and its reason for being

*The sharing of writings that underpin a religion’s approach to its reason for being

*The advocacy of human virtues such as compassion, appreciation, gratitude, forbearance, reason, consideration, self-discipline, courage, discretion, temperance, honesty, loyalty, genuineness, respect for both self and other self, gentleness, strength of purpose, personal grace, vision, artistry, inventiveness, flexibility, hopefulness et al, without stooping to pass judgment on those who fall short (to fall short of perfect is, after all, to be perfectly human)

*The providing of relief to those who suffer

*Encouragement for those who strive

*The doing of work that makes the world a better place for all, regardless of affiliation

Activities seen in places where Islam is stronger than government that must be made illegal include (though not be restricted to):

*Edicts, or fatwas, in which clerics incite congregations to treat targeted individuals in a certain way (often, harmfully)

*Edicts pronouncing individuals as heretics, apostates, heretics or some other form of enemy of Islam, Allah or the Prophet

*Incitement, before a gathering, clearly calculated to diminish respect for, or the security of, or generate hatred towards other persons, other groups (regardless of what judgments those gathered may share about such outside groups), other religions, other sects of the same religion

*Incitement aimed at subverting respect for the organs of government, standard government process, the laws of the land, officials of the executive branch, representatives within the legislative branch, members of the judiciary or appointed public officials

*Any kind of deprecation of cultural or recreational activities accepted as legal in the USA

*Hosting or providing material support to any entity whose purpose is to engage in any of the above prohibited activities

Raising money on behalf of any Islamic entity other than the raiser itself for any purpose other than those included under the general umbrella of activities accepted under law

Speech can hardly be considered free if a targeted victim, innocent of wrongdoing, is paying some kind of price for it. 

If those restrictions are rigorously enforced, the way Islam expresses itself here in the USA should end up being roughly on par with the way other religions express themselves in this country.  If not, and there continue to be attacks by people professing to be jihadists, Islam will face the prospect of a showdown with an American public that is fast finding its reserves of tolerance running out.  Nothing can long stand that continues to act as a passive conduit for the kind of unspeakable violence that Muslim radicals have perpetrated on this nation.  Egypt has paved the way with suppressive action that makes anything the US could come up with look tame.

Last, I’d like to dedicate this essay to the memory of Ayham Hussein, the boy who was beheaded by ISIS jihadists in Mosul for listening to pop music.  Those that did this aren’t just fiends, they’re enemies of one of the most sacred gifts the Creator bequeathed humankind – the ability to hear music as something infinitely more meaningful than just sound and to be affected similarly, regardless of origin or language, by each of its myriad forms.  How can you be such a virulent enemy of this celestial gift and not be an enemy of the Giver?  It’s the one great language we all share, the Tower of Babel notwithstanding.  Can anything be closer to the true voice of God?