Iviews.com – No Talks With Hamas?

Posted on January 29th, 2006 by .
Categories: Misc. News.

Iviews.com
No Talks With Hamas?

An opinion article on Iviews.com Uri Avnery. Does not completely represent my opinion, but still it is worthwile to think about it.

No Talks With Hamas? This Was Said About PLO Too ..

If Ariel Sharon had not been in a deep coma, he would have jumped out of his bed for joy.

The Hamas victory fulfills his most ardent hopes.

For a whole year now, he did everything possible to undermine Mahmoud Abbas. His logic was quite obvious: The Americans wanted him to negotiate with Abbas. Such negotiations would inevitably have led to a situation that would have compelled him to give up almost all of the West Bank. Sharon had no intention of doing so. He wanted to annex about half of the territory. So he had to get rid of Abbas and his moderate image.

During the last year, the situation of the Palestinians got worse from day to day. The actions of the occupation made normal life and commerce impossible. The West Bank settlements were continuously enlarging. The Wall which cuts off about 10 percent of the West Bank was nearing completion. No important prisoners were released. The aim was to impress on the Palestinians that Abbas is weak (“a chicken without feathers”, as Sharon put it), that he cannot achieve anything, that offering peace and observing a cease-fire leads nowhere.

The message to the Palestinians was clear: “Israel understands only the language of force.” Now the Palestinians have put in power a party that speaks this language.

Why did Hamas win?
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On Holocaust Exploiters, Deniers, & Heroes – altmuslim.com

Posted on January 29th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Internal Debates.

On Holocaust Exploiters, Deniers, & Heroes – altmuslim.com

For it’s Holocaust Memorial Day 2006. Mas’ood Cajee reflects on the politics of memory and why Muslims should represent the best of Islamic tradition and spirit. A story on altmuslim.com,

Six decades on since the slaughter of World War II and the Nazi holocaust, we hear extremist voices alternately exploiting or denying the Holocaust for political gain. By warping our memory of the Shoah (the Hebrew word for the Holocaust), both exploiters and deniers miss the stark, vital message of the Holocaust and its heroes – those who displayed uncommon moral courage in the face of evil.

Holocaust exploiters

A growing chorus of voices which exploits the Holocaust for political gain has been trying to smear Muslims – and Arabs in particular – with grand accusations of complicity in the Holocaust and support for the Nazis. These voices serve hawkish interests in Israel and the United States who wish to justify and legitimize continued war, violence, and yes – even genocide – against Muslims and Arabs. Identifying Muslims with and as Nazis eases the task of selling continued bloodshed to war-weary publics. Reading the books and op-eds of the smearers, one could almost conclude absurdly that the Nazi holocaust was an Arab Muslim and not a European Christian project. As evidence, the smearers usually trot out the pro-German Mufti of Jerusalem Amin Al-Husayni and the Bosnian Muslim SS “Handschar” division.
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On Holocaust Exploiters, Deniers, & Heroes – altmuslim.com

Posted on January 29th, 2006 by .
Categories: Internal Debates.

On Holocaust Exploiters, Deniers, & Heroes – altmuslim.com

For it’s Holocaust Memorial Day 2006. Mas’ood Cajee reflects on the politics of memory and why Muslims should represent the best of Islamic tradition and spirit. A story on altmuslim.com,

Six decades on since the slaughter of World War II and the Nazi holocaust, we hear extremist voices alternately exploiting or denying the Holocaust for political gain. By warping our memory of the Shoah (the Hebrew word for the Holocaust), both exploiters and deniers miss the stark, vital message of the Holocaust and its heroes – those who displayed uncommon moral courage in the face of evil.

Holocaust exploiters

A growing chorus of voices which exploits the Holocaust for political gain has been trying to smear Muslims – and Arabs in particular – with grand accusations of complicity in the Holocaust and support for the Nazis. These voices serve hawkish interests in Israel and the United States who wish to justify and legitimize continued war, violence, and yes – even genocide – against Muslims and Arabs. Identifying Muslims with and as Nazis eases the task of selling continued bloodshed to war-weary publics. Reading the books and op-eds of the smearers, one could almost conclude absurdly that the Nazi holocaust was an Arab Muslim and not a European Christian project. As evidence, the smearers usually trot out the pro-German Mufti of Jerusalem Amin Al-Husayni and the Bosnian Muslim SS “Handschar” division.
(more…)

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Iviews.com – Islam and the West – Who Hates Whom?

Posted on January 29th, 2006 by .
Categories: Misc. News.

Iviews.com
Islam and the West – Who Hates Whom?
1/24/2006 – Political – Article Ref: AN0601-2885

By: Fahmi Howaidi

The Danish Case

The Danish government’s attitude toward the blasphemous caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published by a newspaper in the country should not be dismissed lightly as it is typical of the manner in which Western governments and intellectuals treat topics related to Islam. The lethargic reaction of the Muslim governments to the European newspaper’s outrageous treatment of the Prophet too deserves censure .

Are we to understand that abusing the Prophet is a less serious offense than an insult to an Arab head of state that would have triggered angry reactions accompanied by withdrawal of ambassadors and threat of severing diplomatic and economic relations. Should it not be feared that official silence over such issues in the Muslim and Arab world would play into the hands of extremists in the Muslim communities who are waiting for an opportunity to choose the path of violence .

The Danish drawings also reopen the question that is often raised whenever the topic of the relations between Islam and the West comes up: Really who hates whom?

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Muslim WakeUp! A Mountain Out of a Molehill Over Danish Cartoons

Posted on January 29th, 2006 by .
Categories: Internal Debates.

On Muslim WakeUp! also a discussion about the cartoons in Denmark. Here one of the articles by Mona Eltahawy

Muslim WakeUp! A Mountain Out of a Molehill Over Danish Cartoons

By Mona Eltahawy

Can we finally admit that Muslims have blown out of all proportion their outrage over 12 cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad published in a Danish newspaper last September?

In the latest twist, both the Organization for the Islamic Conference and the Gulf Cooperation Council condemned a Norwegian newspaper for reprinting the drawings – a decision the publication defended as protecting freedom of expression. Saudi Arabia recalled its ambassador from Denmark for “consultations” and Iraqis called in sermons and demonstrations for an investigation into the Danish and Norwegian publications that published the cartoons.

The initial printing of the cartoons in Denmark led to death threats being issued against the artists, demonstrations in Kashmir, and condemnation from 11 countries. What did any of this achieve but prove the original point of the newspaper’s culture editor, that artists in Europe were censoring themselves because they feared Muslim reaction? He commissioned the cartoons after hearing that Danish artists were too scared to illustrate a children’s book about the prophet.
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While one cartoon was particularly offensive because it showed the prophet as wearing a turban with a bomb attached to it, a great deal of the anger had to do with the mere depiction of the prophet. Muslims seem to forget that just because they are prohibited from representing the prophet in any way, this does not apply to everybody else. Even with regards to the egregious cartoon showing the prophet with a bomb, Muslim reaction was exaggerated. This should have remained an internal Danish issue. Muslim groups in Denmark have been pursuing a legal course and have vowed to appeal a prosecutor’s refusal to file charges against the newspaper.

Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen was right not to intervene, insisting the government has no say over media – the argument used by Arab leaders when they are asked about anti-Semitism in their media, by the way. But in a New Year’s speech, Rasmussen condemned “any expression, action or indication that attempts to demonize groups of people on the basis of their religion or ethnic background.”

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Muslim WakeUp! Why I am (not) a progressive Muslim

Posted on January 29th, 2006 by .
Categories: Internal Debates.

Is it important to be progressive Muslim. On Muslim WakeUp! a discussion.

Why I’m A Progressive Muslim Some arguments:

7. My penis. As the owner of a penis I can assure those without one that my penis confers no significant religious insight upon me its owner. Nil. Nada. I will go out on a limb and assume that my penis is somewhat similar in thinking ability to others’. I extrapolate from that similarity that a woman leading a prayer is perfectly fine since a penis cannot think.

10. Big words like patriarchy, misogyny, hegemonic power. Because thankfully progressive Muslims don’t need any of them to get their point across. Sure they could bore you with talk of the need to create a counter discourse to the received orthodoxy inherent within the socio-, political economy of the faith as constructed and understood both subjectively and implicitly; that this has been and continues to be based on certain constraints that are arguably social and not religious in the strictest sense; that their enterprise is merely an attempt to marry Islam as praxis to external experience so as to negate the disconnect between the temporal and spiritual, and that such an endeavor presupposes a certain dynamism that runs counter to the current orthodoxy. But who in the world would want to listen to that?

Or Why I am not a progressive Muslim, some arguments:

16. Labels suck. They don’t do us complex humans justice. (And you’ll note that I use them anyway, just like you do, so shuttup.)

And the Number One reason I am not a progressive Muslim: I don’t want my teenaged kids hanging out with them if that leads to their thinking that all the openness-postmodern-fluidity yadda-yadda means I will budge on our family’s no-dating rule. And no premarital sex, ibni, binti! No judgment implied on any readers—you folks do what you deem right in your life path, your decisions are between you and God, I will defend your right to privacy. I know this issue is not as black-and-white as the conservatives make it, that abstaining from or engaging in sex outside sanctioned relationships is not the isolated standard by which purity of heart is discernible (by God, in any case, not by us), and that honor is an internal quality known to God, not a quality indicated by, say, an intact hymen. So I won’t shake my holier-than-thou finger at you, and I won’t tell you how to raise your kids. Me, I’d rather hang with Mormons and Baptists on this issue. Until my kids—male and female—are, like, at least thirty. Yeah, you heard me. Same person from the Sex and the Ummah column. This will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who knows me, or has read me carefully, as opposed to alarmists and cheerleaders. Just because a person writes openly about sex and respects discourse from differing opinions about it, doesn’t imply she advocates in her personal life all the practices described in the writing (the imbeciles who believe that it does know who they are). And just because the damn conservatives believe in this principle (no premarital sex) for all the wrong, anti-feminist reasons, guess what progressives, doesn’t make it automatically wrong. It’s right in my book, on entirely other, spiritual-ethical grounds.

And you can discuss it further on their forum.

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