Mosques

Hosseiniyeh Ershad in Tehran, Iran

Technically, this building is not a mosque, but it is an old Islamic building. RT has a story about the recent election in Iran. It opens with this:

Hosseiniyeh Ershad in Tehran is not just a religious site for Shiite Muslims, but also one of Iran’s most renowned political venues. Before the 1979 revolution, prominent Iranian intellectual and revolutionary Ali Shariati delivered his fiery speeches against Shah Pahlavi here. On Friday, starting at 8am, this beautiful building with its turquoise dome hosted the largest and oldest polling station in the country.

Remember the Shah? 

During World War II, the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran forced the abdication of Pahlavi's father, Reza Shah, whom he succeeded. During Pahlavi's reign, the British-owned oil industry was nationalized by the prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had support from Iran's national parliament to do so. However, Mosaddegh was overthrown in the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, which was carried out by the Iranian military under the aegis of the United Kingdom and the United States. Subsequently, the Iranian government centralized power under Pahlavi and brought foreign oil companies back into the country's industry through the Consortium Agreement of 1954. 

The election isn't going to make much difference, the Ayatollah and his cronies are still in charge. Wikipedia has a page about the building.

Streetview Ad

I got the picture at the top from Google Streetview. Pan 90 degrees to the left and you get this message in Persian plastered over the view. Translated* it reads:

1402

Website design and launch shop

Praise for curbing inflation and production growth

Advertisement of your brand and products on the Google map. Registration of your business on the Google map

09126063498

Vahid is stable

Digital publication ID: 13742

Shamad code: 1-1-870037-65-100

Maneh Culture Development Center in Naft Ber Game

www.241.ir

I wonder if they have hacked Google Maps or are they doing this with the connivence of Google? Surprisingly, the website URL works.

al-Nuri Mosque, Mosul, Iraq

Over in Mosul, Iraq, Aljazeera has a different story:

Iraq: 5 big ISIL bombs found hidden in Mosul’s al-Nuri Mosque

Five large bombs were discovered hidden in the walls of the historic al-Nuri Mosque in the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, a remnant of the armed group ISIL’s (ISIS’s) rule over the region.

The mosque – famous for its 12th-century leaning minaret – was destroyed by ISIL in 2017 and has been a focal point of the UN cultural agency UNESCO’s restoration efforts since 2020.

The UN agency said five large-scale explosive devices, designed for significant destruction, were found inside the southern wall of the Prayer Hall on Tuesday.

“These explosive devices were concealed within a specially rebuilt section of the wall,” a UNESCO statement said on Saturday.

Streetview takes you inside the mosque

* Translate means taking a screen shot, feeding it to Google Lens, picking up the text and feeding it to Google Translate, stuff that was science fiction 20 years ago.

Death to the Supreme Leader of Iran

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

In case you need your blood pressure boosted, this link should do the trick:

Forget Free Speech: Rushdie's Fatwa Is Winning by Giulio Meotti

Islamist killers have murdered a bunch of people and continue to do so. These guys are like your worst nightmare, implacable, relentless and willing to die in the attempt to kill their target. They are like the assassins in a James Bond movie, except they aren't doing their killing for any reason we can accept. I suspect most of them are not too smart. If we catch one alive, we should tie him to a box of dynamite and drop him on Tehran. 

"Salman Rushdie is a champion of free speech, bravely standing up for Western ideals when so many shy away from the fight. If only more people could follow his example, instead of taking the path of appeasement in the name of cultural sensitivity, the long years of murder and mayhem wrought by the Islamists on the West might come to an end... I know all too well the threat Islamism poses. After I came out as an apostate, I was forced into a bubble of protection that still surrounds me to this day. I have 24-hour security. I still receive death threats. My friend, the sweet, vulgar, brilliant Theo Van Gogh was murdered simply for making a film with me. His attacker used a knife to stab a letter into Theo's chest: it said that I would be next". - Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Apparently there is an army of Islamist assassins running around loose in the world and they have a long list of people who are to be killed.

Two Kinds of Muslims

I Want a New Left has a post up about Joan Didion who recently passed away. She was some kind of famous author, her name didn't ring any bells with me. In any case, he posts this bit which is pretty good.

There are two kinds of Muslim immigrants, and we need to find a way to distinguish them. One kind likes the West and is coming here to escape oppressive conditions. The other kind hates the West and wants to impose oppressive conditions on us. We should allow the first kind in, but we absolutely must keep the second kind out. The second kind hates democracy, which they view as merely rule by humans, while they view Islamic law as rule by Allah. (Any secularist should be able to smash that kind of thinking to smithereens.) Like I said, we need to keep this latter kind out, for obvious reasons.

I've said similar things before, here and here.

 

Islam's Most Eloquent Apostate

Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Photo: Sarah Roger/THE DAILY BEAST

I stole my post's title from a story about Ayaan Hirsi Ai that appeared in today's WSJ (paywall). The title seemed a little off at first glance. "Islam's Most Eloquent" makes it sound like she is pro-Islam, but what's this "Apostate" bit tacked on the end? Apostate is someone who renounces their religion, so it's like a big negative, and boy is she negative. According to her, Islam is out to undermine and destroy Western Civilization. I think she may be right. If we don't find a way to counteract it we may be heading for a brutal future.

Looking around for a similar story that wasn't hidden behind a paywall, I found one by Ayaan on the Hoover Institution's website. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Speaking in Youngstown, Ohio, on August 15, 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gave a speech on what he unequivocally referred to as “radical Islam.” He declared:

Nor can we let the hateful ideology of radical Islam—its oppression of women, gays, children, and nonbelievers—be allowed to reside or spread within our own countries . . . [W]-e must use ideological warfare as well. Just as we won the Cold War, in part, by exposing the evils of communism and the virtues of free markets, so too must we take on the ideology of radical Islam. Our administration will be a friend to all moderate Muslim reformers in the Middle East, and will amplify their voices.

Since Mr. Trump’s election victory and inauguration as president, much attention has been focused on hurried and probably temporary restrictions on refugees, visitors, and immigrants from a number of majority-Muslim countries. Almost no attention has been paid to the broader goals outlined in the Youngstown speech.
I argue that the speech heralded a paradigm shift away from President Obama’s doctrine of focusing solely on the violence committed by “extremists” to a more comprehensive approach that seeks to undermine, degrade, and ultimately defeat political Islam (or Islamism) as an ideology and a movement seeking to infiltrate and undermine our free society.

Trump speaks! And he makes sense! Who knew? Not me, I never listen to any kind of news, I ain't got time for that. So this makes it look the media really has a liberal bias. But now I'm thinking that the propaganda-ists might know what they are doing, and so they are promoting this 'Islam is just another religion' idea because if we were to start stirring up people we might get more violence than we want. I am sure there are Westernized Muslims who are content with life here, and you certainly don't want to be subjecting them to any kind of attack, but how can you tell the Westernized Muslims from the died-in-wool fanatics? Especially when the fanatics are masquerading as Westernized?

It's all about what you believe. In the middle of the last century the fascists believed they were right and everyone else was wrong. We showed them that their thinking was incorrect. I am not sure but I suspect Islam's problem stems from not believing the evidence of the senses, but rather relying on mystical religious revelations to reveal the truth. Western Civilization is built on the Bible and Science. Science is a growing influence, but Science doesn't have all the answers. When that happens we can fall back on the Bible. The great thing about Science is the ability to settle disagreements peacefully, but that only works if everyone at least agrees that Science is good. For (some? extremist? devout?) Muslims, Science is no more than a plaything. All truth comes directly into your mind from God. They might be right, but there is also a lot of bullshit that gets into people's minds, so you will excuse me if I am unwilling to accept that you have heard the word of god. Maybe it was God speaking to you, or maybe it was the Devil, or maybe it was just the ghost of a squirrel.

I also found a story by Carla Power on Time.com that says Ayaan is wrong and Islam is okay. Carla is a weasel and an Islam apologist and you should not listen to anything she says.

Update 10 hours later: changed ' I think she maybe right.' to ' I think she may be right.' My inner grammar Nazi spotted this.

Saving Paris From Islam

Beyond Radical Secularism by Pierre Manent

Barton Swain has a review of Pierre Manent's book Beyond Radical Secularism in The Wall Street Journal today (if you can't read it there, you can read a stolen copy here). Here's an excerpt:

The only humane, enlightened way to deal with the Muslim presence in France, then, is to acknowledge France’s Catholic Christian character. France’s Catholic Church, he thinks, will need to assert itself as a “mediator” between Muslims and non-Muslims, with a view to admitting Muslims into a civic life defined by some common practices and a common good. Evidently some, at least, of the most radical Islamists already think of the Catholic Church as somehow representative of French society—the young militants Nabil Petitjean and Adel Kermiche, remember, did not choose a university professor or a journalist or even a politician to murder but an 85-year-old priest, Father Jacques Hamel.

It's pretty great. I recommend it to your attention.

Why Thomas Aquinas Distrusted Islam

Saint Thomas Aquinas
An altarpiece in Ascoli Piceno, Italy, by Carlo Crivelli (15th century)

West Virginny Sharon sent me an article, Why Thomas Aquinas Distrusted Islam by Thomas D. Williams, originally posted on Breitbart dot com. Saint Thomas Aquinas, if you recall, was a 13th Century Italian friar, scholar and priest. Don't confuse this guy with Thomas More (A Man For All Seasons), a 16th Century Englishman, or Thomas Becket, a 12th Century English Archbishop. (Confused yet? I know I was.)
     Mohammed founded Islam in the 7th Century. By this point Christianity was well established in Europe and parts of Africa. Islam got started in the Arabian Peninsula, which is mostly desert, and hot, nasty desert at that.
    So why hadn't Christianity taken hold in Arabia? Perhaps because Christians need water? Maybe the harsh desert climate makes people a little crazy, and it took a crazed warlord to bring a semblance of civilization to that benighted land. So Saint Tom might be right about Islam, but Islam has managed to flourish where Christianity failed to make inroads.

The Breitbart article used a much more modern looking picture of Saint Thomas, though it appears to be from the same era.

P.S. I wonder if Friar Tuck invented Fried Chicken. I mean, have friars ever been employed as friers?

Excitement

Ghoncheh Ghavami

Tam links to Popehat, who is perturbed by a petition to disinvite Bill Maher to speak at a Berkeley commencement ceremony. The petition comes from Change.org. They are unhappy with Bill claiming that Islam is not a religion of peace. Who is Change.org? Never heard of them, so I go to their website, and what do I find? I find this picture (above) of a lovely woman who was jailed in Iran for watching a volleyball game.
Waaaa? On one hand they are condemning Bill Maher for condemning Islam, and on the other they are condemning Islam for being Islam? Do I have that right?

Logical thought is kind of a trick. It sometimes takes a certain amount of work. Not everyone comes by it naturally. Emotions can get in the way. So can years of conditioning. If someone tells you that something is wrong every day for a dozen years, you might start to believe them, no matter how illogical that thing is. Like a woman watching a volleyball game is a sin comparable to driving a car, and we all know that women should never be allowed near any kind of mechanical device, right? Am I right or what?

Sometimes I think studying Computer Science made me like I am, or maybe it just aggravated my natural tendencies. Computers are machines and figuring out how to make them do what you want can be a very frustrating experience. You know what you want, you tell the computer what you want it do, and you tell it no uncertain terms, and it goes and does something completely wrong. Was the computer being illogical? No, you simply missed something, you made some assumption about what would happen, and assumptions never cut it with computers.

I suspect that large segments of the worlds population is unfamiliar with logic and may even be incapable of logical thought. I thought America was above that, but that would be illogical.

Saudi Arabia & Islam Versus Communism & Communists

Kabul, Afghanistan

Saudi Arabia plans to start construction on a new mosque in Kabul.

King Faisal Mosque in Islamabad

The rest of this is from 2012. Sometimes it takes me a while to catch on. Rumor has it that it will be similar to this one that they built in Islamabad.

What does Saudi Arabia care about Afghanistan? A vacuum draws all kinds of opportunists.

Afghanistan is an ideal springboard and battleground for the spread of Saudi Sunni Wahhabism and Iranian Shiite fundamentalism throughout Central Asia; especially out towards the former Soviet breakaway nations that are hungry for any teaching necessary to fill the failed Bolshevik indoctrination vacuum; especially any form of Islam.- Khalil NOURI November 2012

Mecca, Saudi Arabia, October 16, 2013.  The Clock Tower and the Grand Mosque. AFP PHOTO/FAYEZ NURELDINE

 The new mosque will be big, but it cannot hold a candle to the Saudi clock tower in Mecca.

Moderate Moslems, i.e. Westernized or civilized Moslems, need to start differentiating themselves from the terrorist Moslems. As long as both groups are claiming to be Moslems (or is it Muslims? I can never keep the politically correct lingo straight.), there is going to be confusion. Some people will take the time to determine what kind of Musselman a person is. Some people would prefer to just shoot them all and let God, sorry, Allah, sort them out.

All we really need is a new name for one or both sides of the fence. You know, Democrats and Republicans are both capitalists, although you can be forgiven for forgetting that essential element. They make such a big stink about not being like the other guys. And then there are capitalists and communists, though they are getting hard to tell apart. So what can we call these two major factions of Islam? Mudders and Brudders? Mummers and Bombers? Mohammadinians and Abuhasinians? Philistines and Pharaohs? Okay, maybe these aren't too good, but you get the idea, and somehow we need to get these two sides of the fence to start using these new terms. Otherwise someone who can't tell them apart is liable to get pissed off and nuke Mecca. During the haj.

Quote of the Day

Just read a story about the rise of the Nour Islamic Party in Egypt by Wendell Steavenson in The New Yorker. The link just goes to an abstract, you have to be a subscriber to read the whole thing, though I don't how long that will last. Maybe it will become available for free in a week, when next week's issue comes out, or maybe this is some new policy. I dunno. At first I thought Wendell, the author, was a man. I used to know a man in Ohio by that name, but evidently this Wendell is a woman. It figures. Of course a liberal rag like The New Yorker would want a woman's point of view on Islam. Anyway, it's a pretty good story about what's going on in Egyptian politics these days. Some people in Egypt are trying to implement a democracy, and some people are trying to implement Islam's Sharia Law, and that's a bit of a problem. Wendell explains:

Fall of Islam

I have heard how Islam society used to be very advanced in mathematics and science. We (Western Civilization) got the concept of zero from Arabia. They had astronomers and philosophers and doctors and libraries. But all this is in the past tense. Now the only thing we hear about the Middle East is goats and oil, and Jihad of course. So what happened to the Muslim world that caused this change?

So I asked my friend Jack. He is something of a history buff. He definitely knows more about it than I do. His take on it is that the leadership of the Arab world made a conscious decision to cut off contact with the West and to suppress science around the year 1050. This is about the same time that the Crusades were going on in the Middle East, and also about the same time that the Moors suffered a serious defeat in Tours, France. That's what I recall from our conversation anyway. And Jack says that his interpretation based on reading between the lines, but it will do until someone comes up with another theory. And you know, it could have been the Persians and not the Arabs, but that's a distinction that's lost on me. They both follow Mohammed and they are both from the Middle East. I need something substantial to be able to tell them apart.

The Muslim world was not alone in cutting off contact with the outside world. The Chinese did it, as did the Japanese, so it was possible, and with a happy populace and/or a repressive regime, it could be done now.

Geert Wilders

I've been reading about Geert Wilders the last day or so. I've been hearing all kinds of stories about European authorities caving in to the demands of radical Muslims for a while, but I hadn't heard any specifics, just a lot of blubbering. Yesterday I read a couple of news stories about Geert, and today I stumbled across Archbishop Cranmer's blog, and he has a few things to say. One of the comments on this post was particularly good:

"About this notion of 'radical' or 'moderate' Islam: I have absolutely no doubt at all that Iran, for example, has a vast majority of people who would be described as 'moderate', and are appalled at such things as the stoning of women or the slow-hanging of homosexuals. No, I'm not being sarcastic - I really do believe that. However, they don't say a lot about it do they? They don't rise up and overthrow the regime; they don't render the 'radicals' powerless. It would be the same here. The 'radicals' would make the decisions and carry out the atrocities; the 'moderates' would just keep their heads down and do as they were told.

"How many Nazis did it take to wholly control the whole of Germany? I have no doubt that 'moderates' constituted the majority of Germans, but like all 'moderates' everywhere, they just kept their heads down and did as they were told."

The commenter goes on to lump all Islam together, but that's getting away from the main point. It's the radicals who stir up trouble and it's the moderates who let them get away with it. Who was it who said "all it takes for evil to triumph is for men of good will to do nothing." (It might have been Edmund Burke, or Leo Tolstoy).

Terrorism & Cancer

Anatomic woodcut by Laurentius Phryesen, 1518

I had this sort of vision the other day. I was looking at the human population as you might look at a human body. We teach ourselves (adults teach children who grow up to become adults teaching children) what we know about how our bodies work, and how about the systems of government work. But outside of school and our ideals, the real world is not quite so clean and well behaved. There is corruption, greed and evil. Likewise in our bodies there are defects, damage and disease. Most of these deviations from the ideal we can live with, but sometimes you encounter a disease that if left untreated will kill you. Sometimes the ability to cure is beyond our power and the disease will kill you anyway. But we keep looking for a way to beat the disease.

Assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881

Sometimes the disease comes about because of some unrecognized microscopic agent. Many devastating diseases have been conquered by the work of the scientific community. Sometimes it took a scientific beating stick to show that the way people were living was unhealthy, like the connection between cholera and the lack of sanitation. You would think people would realize that living in a cesspool was unhealthy, but it took an act of parliament to get the mess cleaned up.

So I look at cancer and terrorism. Both can be devastating. Both can be treated, but we don't really know what is causing either one. We have found that some cancers are caused by viruses, but we don't know why some people are susceptible and some are not. We know there are Islamic fundamentalist schools in Saudi Arabia that indoctrinate students with a belief that the West and Israel are evil and it is their holy duty to destroy them.

Some dude with a gun

I suspect the schools get their impetus from resentment of the Saudi royal family, but I do not know. Wiping out these schools and executing the teachers could put a damper on terrorism, but that might just be putting a lid on it there, causing it to pop up somewhere else. Kind of like cancer. You might be able to excise the parts you can find, but you never know if you got it all, and you still don't know what caused it in the first place.

The part I like (this is sarcasm) is that we send a billion dollars a week to "our friends" in Saudi Arabia in exchange for multiple boat loads of oil. The Saudis support these schools for terrorists, who we supposedly want to stop. If we were really serious about stopping terrorism, we might want to throw a boycott around Saudi Arabia until they squash these schools for martyrs.

From an article by Ted Galen Carpenter that appeared on cato.org on November 16, 2001.

Worst of all, the Saudi monarchy has funded dubious schools and "charities" throughout the Islamic world. Those organizations have been hotbeds of anti-Western, and especially, anti-American, indoctrination. The schools, for example, not only indoctrinate students in a virulent and extreme form of Islam, but also teach them to hate secular Western values.

They are also taught that the United States is the center of infidel power in the world and is the enemy of Islam. Graduates of those schools are frequently recruits for Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda terror network as well as other extremist groups.

Kind of old, but I don't know that anything has changed.

But this is beginning to sound a lot like the thought police. And the PC crowd at our Universities. Just what do you believe? Should we burn the heretics at the stake?

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I had been thinking about this for a while, but I was prompted to write about it when I stumbled over this post this morning.