Tags
Christianity, Christianity and Islam, Counter-Jihad, Defend the modern world, English Defence League, Eurabia, Islamic Defenders Front, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Mark Steyn, miley cyrus, Multiculturalism, Muslims, No to Turkey in the EU, Pamela Geller, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, Saudi Arabia
When trying to convince a person of something, it’s often best to reduce the subject concerned to its fundamentals. By doing so, the essential message is easier to understand, and once understood, tends to strike harder. It also helps if your argument involves concepts and actors familiar to the person one is trying to persuade.
With this in mind, a good way to proselytize about the Islamic threat is to highlight the fate of popular culture should the Muslims win. Though such arguments might appear frivolous relative to those within tomes like Lewis’s ‘What Went Wrong’ or Berman’s ‘Terror & Liberalism’ (both worth reading incidentally), it may be the only language younger generations understand.
Take for a start the case of Lady Gaga and her planned 2012 concert in Jakarta, Indonesia. Just weeks before this (sold-out and heavily anticipated) concert was scheduled to take place, organisers were forced to cancel it. The reason? Threats of violence by a Muslim collective calling themselves ‘The Islamic Defenders Front’ (FPI). According to spokespeople for the militant group, Gaga was targeted because her dance moves would ‘corrupt’ and ‘sexualise’ the country’s youth.
After the concert’s cancellation was announced, a member of the FPI exclaimed – ‘This is a victory for Indonesian Muslims. Thanks to God for protecting us from a kind of devil.’
Whatever your views on Lady Gaga, or indeed the effect her example has on young people, you can surely smile at how this must have embarassed Western liberal opinion. Not much was made of it at the time, but we’d do well to make a point of it now.
If a young person likes Lady Gaga, or indeed Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, or whoever else is in vogue on the Western pop scene, they cannot simultaneously like Islam – or at least not without being exactly hypocritical.
Gaga will not soon be performing in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan or Somalia. Why? Because she stands in direct opposition to everything Islamic clerics promote and fulfills everything they condemn.
An Islamised West – by extension – will have no room for music of any kind, save for the spirit-numbing chantings of Qur’anic verse. Music and orthodox Islam are opposed. Totally. And since one cannot have both, one must choose one or the other.
So why, you ask, are there so many liberals who defend Islam one minute and listen to Katy Perry the next?
Although it looks like hypocrisy on their part, one mustn’t discount simple ignorance as a factor. Many people simply don’t know that Islam prohibits music, or if they do know, cannot believe that such a prohibition could be enforced. Such people must be helped.
To do so, ask them (without sounding obviously sarcastic) to produce a list of their favourite musicians from countries run along traditional Islamic lines. If they’re stubborn, they’ll google ‘Arab musicians’ – something entirely different – and return with a list of Maronite and Coptic singers now based in the West. It’s highly unlikely that they’ll return with a Jazz-Fusion collective from Jeddah, or a punk band from Kabul.
After this, simply walk your point home.
This rule holds true not just for music, but for comedy, fashion, and most kinds of sport too. Beneath the surface, almost every Western citizen is (by lifestyle and social preference) actively anti-Islam. ‘Islamophobes’ are merely those who don’t care to hide it.
D, LDN.
Well said.
Thank you.
re Lady Gaga: there’s something else about her, namely, that she has also passed the ‘Israel test’ with flying colours. She has performed in Israel twice: both times in the face of pressure (and probably threats) from the usual suspects. She has even come on board with a group called ‘Creative Community for Peace’ that was formed to raise awareness among artists – musicians, performers, composers of all types – of the campaign that is being waged to impose an artistic and intellectual boycott on Israel; and to encourage said artists to resist and to defy the threats.
http://www.creativecommunityforpeace.com/
By the way, another useful ‘pressure point’ to raise Islamo-awareness with people, is dogs. If someone keeps a pet dog – not a guard dog or working dog but simply a dog kept as a friend/ companion animal – they are in breach of sharia. There are some really nasty stories in the Hadith describing Mohammed’s hatred and rejection of dogs; on one occasion he’s supposed to have ordered an orgy of dog-killing. The Islamic world is rife with cases of cruelty to animals…and dogs are singled out for especially cruel treatment. (Ask any veteran of Iraq or Afghanistan; they’ve likely seen it happening). Like the classical sharia ban on music the sharia ban on pet dogs (Muslim-in-name-only people in Iran who flout the ban by surreptitiously keeping a pet dog, are likely to be *arrested* if they are caught in the street *taking their dog for a walk*) is one of the most profoundly antihuman things about Islam.
Preventing people from keeping pet dogs (and, indeed, teaching people to hate and despise dogs), like trying to prevent people from singing, making music, or drawing faces, is fundamentally antihuman and inhuman. It criminalises and anathematises behaviour that was and is perfectly normal in practically every other human society/ cultural group, whether sophisticated or primitive, ancient or modern, of which we have any knowledge at all.
Interesting I didn’t know she had any views on Israel. Celebrities are usually so vacuous. As for dogs, you’re right. English people in particular should be told about the dog ruling. Dogs are an integral part of English culture. Clashes on this issue are becoming more common. There have been reports of Muslim bus drivers refusing to allow blind people on board. It’s quite astonishing. Let’s hope the media cover it more intensely.
I admire your tenacity in proselytizing about the Islamic threat to the simple minded, and the previous commenter’s lesson on Islam re man’s best friend. Perhaps you are right, perhaps there’s a lesson on Islam in the little things. I doubt it and will explain why in a moment but first a small concession that I may be wrong – there’s precedent. Perhaps parables, easily grasped, easily remembered, are the way to go – here’s mine:
Confucian (signifying ancient wisdom instead of dead white men’s Judeo/Christian ethics) parable:
”When the stables burned down, on returning from court and hearing the news, Confucius said, ‘Was anyone hurt?’ He did not ask about the horses.”
Mohammaden practice:
When the girl’s school burned down the girls ran for their lives. On returning from razzia and hearing the news, Mohammad asked, “Was honor preserved?” He did not ask about the girls.
I would editorialize that Confucius might very well be welcome in any Western Society and the insufferable Mohammad should be welcome nowhere but where the poet put him – in hell – and his Mohammedanism with him. But that’s just me being me and I wouldn’t suggest it as it smacks of judgmentalism and might get you schooled in return – on intolerance – so skip the editorials.
Here’s why I have doubts.
The peculiar religion that is Leftism, which has charge of our children’s schooling, has as its main tenet the immutable conviction that the greatest faith is the faith that can support antinomies. So what is right is right and one right will coexist with its antithesis on the basis of both being homologous, i.e., their both being right. This faith makes it possible, for example, to advocate for women and homosexuals, and, simultaneously, the free exercise of Islamic tenets.
Faith can withstand reason and rhetoric – ask a Muslim. Ask the Leftists. Ask the educated.
I agree that reasoning with hardened Leftists is a fools errand. The people I think we CAN reach are those young people who are committedly neither right nor left. Many young people have fallen in line with Leftist thinking almost by accident, and do not invest it with any conviction. These – I believe – can be educated. Leftists on the other hand are a lost cause.
You wrote that “An Islamised West – by extension – will have no room for music of any kind, save for the spirit-numbing chantings of Qur’anic verse. Music and orthodox Islam are opposed. Totally.”
Please look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd6foM1uj68 .
You wrote that “This rule holds true not just for music, but for comedy, fashion, and most kinds of sport too. Beneath the surface, almost every Western citizen is (by lifestyle and social preference) actively anti-Islam.”
This statement is a little contradicting with the Counterjihad’s claim that the West will be soon Islamised, because most of Western support Islamisation or don’t care about, don’t you think?
Typical liberal loves to cherry pick. Music is haraam by ALL Salafist and Radical sect. Your logic is flawed and similar to me saying ALL Christians don’t drink coffee bc Mormons are against it (Sufis and other moderate sects are okay with Music as many Arab nations and African Nations which are or were majority Sufi have a very strong music scene like in Libya, Morroco, and Egypt etc but Salafist do not like in KSA, UAE etc)
Please read up on Islam and stop spreading you ignorance.
And these are only a few of the English speaking ones.
Salafists preachers ex Zakir (funded by Saudi Arabia) like a lot of the islamist radicals (in Jakarta, you should read up on the islamists wanting to make the once open Buddhist and hindu nation islamic through violence like in Thailand and Philippines) preach the Islam Taliban and terrorist want to implement. NOT the “moderate Islam” (which terrorists and salafists view as the false islam), as Sharia around the world.
Zakir like many salafists are for islamist violence like the Taliban to get Sharia implemented (which they believe is God’s Law, superior to Man’s law)