Adam and Eve and The Time Machine

I recently came across a web site called dawanet.com. The stated purpose of the site is "A network, where Muslims come to learn from each other on how best to convey the message of Islam with beauty, wisdom and tolerance; so that the souls of humanity may find peace by connecting with their Creator, Lord of the Universe." The site also has links for non-Muslims to learn about Islam.

Dawa, by the way, or Dawah, is an Arabic word meaning to invite, and is commonly used to mean proselytize.

Curious, I pulled up a few of the pages. I don't mind saying that I quickly got pretty creeped out. Consider the following line from this page: "Definitely, leaving our children with non-Muslims more hours a day than they spend with Muslims is potentially dangerous." Oh, my. There's a voice of tolerance. Then there's this line from the same page: "In addition, we can share the message of Islam with our child's teacher, an excellent Dawa opportunity." Yikes. Nearly as scary as an Amway sales rep.

In fact, on page after page, I found the common thread was that everything is a Dawa opportunity! Going to an infidel neighbor's house for a cookout? Dawa! Meeting your kid's new school principal? Dawa! Yeesh.

So, with some trepidation, I clicked on this link for non-Muslims. It links to another site called Islam 101. The first line that caught my eye was this: "Islam was the religion of the first couple, Adam and Eve." Huh?

Let's see...Islam was founded by Mohammed in the 7th century. That means Christianity pre-dates Islam by more than 600 years. Judaism long pre-dates Christianity, and was founded by descendants of Adam and Eve, so that means Adam and Eve pre-date even Judaism. So, in order for Adam and Eve to have been Muslims, that can only mean they had...a freakin' time machine!!

That's it. My head hurts. I think I'll go help my wife cook a turkey. Happy Thanksgiving!

Something Stinks in Washington

A couple of days ago, on November 20th, an exotic plant called Titan Arum bloomed at the US Botanical Garden in Washington. The plant, found naturally only in Sumatra, exhudes a powerful stench, similar to that of rotting meat. It's also known as the corpse plant. The plant blooms only every few years, but its timing couldn't have been more appropriate.

In another part of Washington, Democrats are pumping out their own rank odor with their calls to withdraw from Iraq. It's not so much the demands that stink as it is the motivation behind them.

The Democrats know full well that to leave Iraq now would cause that country to descend into all-out civil war. This would allow the Democratic party, in coming elections, to point fingers at the Bush administration and say "See? Look what they did to Iraq!". The Democrats' worst nightmare is success in Iraq, in which the Iraqi people are living in a free society, with a freely elected leadership.

The Democratic party has proven that they care not one bit about the Iraqi people, or about national security. They'd rather do what's right for their party rather than what's right.

Proper Image for a Wartime President

When I saw this AP photo on the Fox News web site, I was hoping the caption under it would read "President Bush takes fashion tips from Mongolian President Nambaryn Enkhbayar". Alas, that wasn't the case.

But damn! How cool would that be?! Screw the $800 suits and striped red ties...put on a helmet and some body armor and get on a horse. Hoist a broadsword or maybe a battleaxe, and have your staff do the same.

Go around the country on horseback making speeches promoting the war on Islamofascism looking like that, and maybe people would sit up and take notice!

Just as a point of note: Mongolia may only have 160 troops in Iraq, but that makes them third in per capita troop contributions there. And during the visit, President Bush recognized two Mongolian soldiers who took out a suicide truck bomber in Iraq before he could reach a mess tent. Good on ya, guys.

Arab World Rises Up Against Terrorism...

...well, sort of. Almost. Not really.

The Washington Times is reporting that some 200,000 Jordanians demonstrated against Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi's bombings that killed 59 people, many of them family members attending a wedding party.

Over at Little Green Footballs, some are hailing this development as an indicator that the Arab street is finally waking up and taking a stand against Islamic radicalism. How I wish that were the case.

Nearly all the dead and injured in the Jordan hotel bombings were Muslims, and that's really what's being protested. I suspect that if a few dozen Americans and/or Israelis had been killed, there'd be 200,000 Jordanians celebrating instead of protesting.

Selective Outrage

On October 30th, our local paper, the Fredericksburg Freelance-Star, ran an editorial piece by Paul Akers, the Freelance-Star's opinion pages editor, titled "Why Islam Didn't Conquer The World". The article discusses the Battle of Tours in 732, in which a Muslim army led by Abd er Rahman was defeated by a European army led by Charles Martel. I can't attest to the accuracy of all the points made in the article, but it made for interesting reading.

Within a day or so, letters to the editor of the Freelance-Star started pouring in from all over the country. The vast majority of those out-of-state letters were from Muslims expressing outrage over the depiction of Islam, and included rants about the Christian Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, etc.

The sheer volume of the letters led me to wonder if the article had been picked up by other newspapers. To the best of my knowledge, opinion pieces from our little ol' hometown paper are not widely syndicated. So, what led to this rapid response in defense of Islam?

A quick Google search for Mr. Akers' article revealed only a handful of hits -- 18 to be exact, ten of which Google deemed "relevant". One of them was my own blog entry prior to this one. A few were the article itself from the Freelance-Star's web site and a few blogs which included or referenced the article. One of those blogs was islamdaily.net, which claims to be "Watching global Islamic relations for better understanding".

Islam Daily appears to be one of those sites that trolls the 'net for relevant news items, in their case relevant meaning news items relating to Islam. That's fair enough, and the site seems to carry a fair balance of views with regards to Islam. If you search the site, though, what's notably absent are any articles covering such recent events as the beheading of Christian schoolgirls in Indonesia or the attack on a Christian church in Egypt by Muslim mobs.

This indicates to me that while America's Muslim community is ever so vigilant for anything deemed insensitive to Islam, that same community completely disregards atrocities committed in the name of their faith. Where is their outrage when their co-religionists lop off the heads of teenaged Christian girls? Where is their outrage when Muslims in southern Thailand force shopkeepers to observe the Muslim sabbath at the risk of having their ears cut off?

The silence of the supposedly moderate Muslim world makes them complicit in these acts. Until moderate Islam speaks up and starts condemning these acts in both word and deed, the non-Muslim world will continue to view Islam with suspicion.

Why Islam Didn't Conquer the World

Last Sunday, our local paper, the Fredericksburg Freelance-Star, ran an editorial by Paul Akers discussing the Battle of Tours in 732. This was a battle in which a Christian army under Charles "The Hammer" Martel defeated a numerically superior Muslim army invading Europe. Conventional wisdom has it that if the Muslims had won, we'd all be Muslims today.

Naturally, the article touched off a storm of letters expressing outrage over this "defamation" of Islam. Of course, I felt compelled to respond in this letter which I hope will be published:

I read with interest the flurry of letters in response to Paul Akers' piece, "Why Islam Didn't Conquer the World". Predictably, the majority of those letters expressed varying degrees of outrage at this latest "defamation" of Islam.

A few of the letters are quick to mention that in lands conquered by Islam, Christians and Jews were allowed to live under the protection of the Islamic state and the state even "tolerated their religious practices". While this is more than can be said of some of the civilizations taken by Christian conquerors, it only tells half the story.

The rest of the story is that these non-Muslims were considered "dhimmi", meaning that while they were under the protection of the Islamic state, they remained non-Muslims and considered less than equal to Muslims. Furthermore, they were only protected for as long as they paid the "jizyah", a tax levied on non-Muslims who agreed to subservience in exchange for a degree of tolerance.

In just the past week or two, we've seen three Christian schoolgirls beheaded by Islamic paramilitary death squads in Indonesia, Muslim mobs storming and burning a Christian church in Egypt, and the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran calling for Israel to be "wiped off the map". There have been Muslims rioting in Denmark and France, and Muslim attacks on non-Muslims in southern Thailand. There's been no Muslim outrage over these events, yet there's plenty of seething over Mr. Akers' article.

It will be up to moderate Muslims to rein in the militant practitioners of the religion, and prove to the rest of the world that Islam is the tolerant “Religion of Peace” the PC pundits say it is.

From Traitors to Folk Heroes

The First Post has a great editorial comparing the fate of Guy Fawkes to modern-day terrorists. Fawkes conspired unsuccesfully 400 years ago to blow up Parliament.

Required reading.

Updated to correct link.

Hindus Take Offense to British Stamp

Today's Daily Telegraph has an article describing the offense taken by Hindus over a stamp being issued for Christmas. The stamp is a detail of a 17th century painting showing a Hindu man and a Hindu woman worshipping the baby Jesus.

Absent, however, is the burning of churches and beheading of Christian schoolgirls made popular by the other "Religion of Peace".