That's "cants", with an a.
They are suddenly pretending to be all concerned about the trade union movement in Iran, which they have previously treated with the same total disregard or active hostility with which they treat the trade union movement in Britain, or the United States, or anywhere else.
Still, the entertaining side continues apace. Dear old Auntie sees the low vote for the "most liberal" candidate as proof beyond any reasonable doubt that the election must have been rigged. It was held in Iran, dear. Have you got that? Iran.
And now that the North Tehran Trendies' British counterparts are terribly attentive (ha, ha) to the working class in Iran, is there any chance that they might begin to acknowledge the existence of working-class, or poor, or rural opinion in, say, Britain?
Meanwhile, I have the dubious pleasure of finding myself in agreement with Nicolas Sarkozy. Face-covering (not head-covering, but face-covering) is incompatible with the conduct of British, as of French, social and cultural life.
Onwards in sympathy for opposition to usury, but also in total opposition to any according of legal status to Sharia law, to Muslim schools here (where my own Catholic schools have existed since a good thousand years before any other kind did), to polygamy, to male no less than female genital mutilation, and to the building of mosques with domes and minarets, which are triumphalistic manifestations of an Islamised society, culture and polity, and which were in that spirit added to former churches during Islam's forcible overrunning of the Eastern Roman Empire. But halal meat is a serviceable weapon in the armoury against the hunting ban.
Will Sarkozy, among so very many others, now also see the light over Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Xinjiang, Turkey...?
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Huh? As long as general building codes are followed, how is it anyone's business how a religious group decorates their place of worship? If Christians can put vaults and steeples on their churches, what legitimate public purpose does it serve to prevent Muslims from putting minarets and domes on their mosques? None.
ReplyDeleteWhat is your issue with Muslim schools? That you want to forbid them entirely from establishing, or that you just don't want them to receive public funding?
I'd probably settle for no public funding, but I wish I didn't have to.
ReplyDeleteDomes and minarets are triumphalistic expressions of Islamisation. They have no place on our skylines.
Everyone knows that David hates muslims and views them in the same sort of way that Hitler viewed Jews.
ReplyDeleteMale genital mutilation - so do Jews. So do Eritrian Christians.
Female genital mutilation - forbidden in the Koran and actually only practiced in northern and north-east Africa - by muslims, christians and ahmists. Female genital mutiliation does not happen in Asia with the exception of maybe the Yemen.
Polygamy - Of course that did not happen in the bible!
Halal meat - Basically the same method as kosher meat. And what about the practice of animal sacrafice carried out by Armenian Christians. And their church was founded by two of the Apostles!
What is wrong about minarets etc. Other faiths can reflect their traditions. You talk about religion being forced on people. Er like Catholicism on Protestants and vice-versa. Or Catholicism on Orthodox. Or Christianity in general being forced on South American indians with death by burning if they did not play ball.
You are a testament to bigotry!
"Male genital mutilation - so do Jews. So do Eritrian Christians"
ReplyDeleteYes, although the practice cannot by definition have anything to do with Christianity as such. It is also very widespread in America and Australia. So what?
"Female genital mutilation - forbidden in the Koran and actually only practiced in northern and north-east Africa - by muslims, christians and ahmists. Female genital mutiliation does not happen in Asia with the exception of maybe the Yemen"
Yes.
"Polygamy - Of course that did not happen in the bible!"
It is forbidden explictly in the New Testament, and never presented very favourably, to say the very least, in the Old.
"Halal meat - Basically the same method as kosher meat"
Yes.
"And what about the practice of animal sacrafice carried out by Armenian Christians"
There may be animal sacrifices in Armenia, but by definition they have nothing to do with Christianity. I know a very great deal about Eastern Christianity, but I have honestly never heard of this one. You are not thinking of Azeris, are you...?
"What is wrong about minarets etc"
See above.
As for South America, good to see that you are defending even HUMAN sacrifice. You put me in mind of when Cortes cast down the blood-soaked Aztec idol and erected a tiny Madonna and Child instead. By all accounts, there was the most blood-curdling noise from the demons thus exorcised.
The skyline is something that everyone creates. Muslims are part of that everyone.
ReplyDeleteDomed and minaretted mosques are pretty. It's not as though they would wreck the looks of a place.
You really expect society to edit the skyline to preserve your sensibilities from the architectural aspirations of Muslims? That's awfully controlling, I'd say.
Domes and minarets developed to express the Islamisation of an area (originally, of Christian areas), and they still do - I have actually seen them slapped onto a nineteenth-century Nonconformist chapel in South Wales, for example.
ReplyDeleteThere was nothing pretty about that, even purely architecturally. I can only assume that the council was too PC to refuse planning permission.
"I have actually seen them slapped onto a nineteenth-century Nonconformist chapel in South Wales, for example."
ReplyDeleteAlrighty, so that one may have looked like homemade sin.
But regardless of the aesthetics, and regardless of whether domes and minarets really are intended to send a message about the advancement of Islam, the fact is that Muslims have the same right to peaceful self-expression as the devotees of any other faith.
There is no Qu'ranic or other requirement for these things. Like face-covering, in fact.
ReplyDeleteThere's no Biblical requirement for grand-looking churches with stained-glass windows, either. Therefore, we may legislate against them, right?
ReplyDeleteCome on.
In Islamic countries, they do. I freely admit that such buildings are expressions of Christendom. That's why I'm all in favour of them. And that's why our dear friends the Gulf monarchs, for example, are markedly less keen.
ReplyDeleteFace-covering, meanwhile, is not of Islamic origin at all: it was a status symbol among upper-class women in the (of course, Christian) Byzantine Empire, enabling them to walk the streets without being mistaken for street-walkers.
As Islam conquered that Empire's Levantine and North African provinces, this, among much else, was taken on. But it has absolutely nothing to do with Islam as such.
By all means let both men and women dress modestly. I do not want to see practically naked girls falling down drunk in the gutter, and I see no reason to regard them as having been liberated, but the very reverse.
However, I object in the strongest possible terms to the idea that, simply because one finds women sexually attractive, one might jump on any woman if one can see anything more of her than her eyes.
This is just as objectionable as the genital mutilation of male infants, and the sale of adolescent boys to the highest bidder through the dowry system.
What is this Christendom of which you speak?
ReplyDeleteIf it means what I think it means, then that's the problem right there. If you take away state sponsorship of religion, then you take away the very space into which some Muslims want to fit an officialized version of Islam -- with its Sharia courts and publicly-supported religious schools, and whatnot.
(Parenthetically, dowry's not a great practice, but that's not how it works. Also, can't say for sure that male circumcision really compares to the burkha.)
You can't "take away" that space. It can't be done. It exists anyway, and will always be filled by something - Islam, the cult of Lenin, the cult of Kim Il Sung, there's always something because the human need never goes away.
ReplyDeleteAnd you can take off the burkha. Genital mutilation is worse.
See you did not publish my links concerning Armenian animal sacrifice. It hurt didn't it!
ReplyDeleteYour bigotry rings through your silence on the matter.
"You can't "take away" that space. It can't be done."
ReplyDeleteSure, you can do it. The US has pretty much succeeded in this regard, and we don't have anything like a Stalin cult to make up for our lack of a state religion.
As far as circumcision is concerned, I can only go by what men say. And most of the ones here seem to think it's no big deal. The burkha, on the other hand, effectively isolates women from even the most basic normal social contact. Even their bones break from rickets, because they don't get any sun.
Except, of course, that you haven't done any such thing in America. Not really. And then there is the cult of the Founding Fathers.
ReplyDeleteIf genital mutilation is carried out in early infancy, then the victims cannot know that it is "no big deal".
Nobody worships the Founding Fathers! Yeah, there's Presidents' Day and some monuments. That hardly adds up to a cult.
ReplyDeleteChurch and state really are separate here. It works. I wouldn't have it any other way.