Thank you for your posts, Josh. I couldn’t have asked for better evidence or fodder for the impeachment of your bankrupt ideas.
You retail the absurd idea that Jihad begins with al Banna? Then what about the billion slaves of Islam suffering under the jackboot today — the same numbers that were born under Islam’s horrible star before al Banna ever darkened the earth? They were once Jews, Christians, animists, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, Sikhs, Taoists, et al. Islam slaughtered its way into their domains within the first centuries of it terrible birth through Jihad — which was then, remained, and will always remain Islam’s form of warfare to spread and preserve Islam. You are a leftist tool asserting that violent Jihad is an invention of Al Banna.
Further, you reveal your gaping ignorance of Islam by asserting that I am the one “insisting on conflating the religion with politico-religious ideologies and superstition.” Perhaps Erdogan of Turkey might know more about the topic that you? In 2007 the famously “secular” Islamic leader (oxymoron rich, isn’t it?) quipped: “The term “moderate Islam” is ugly and offensive — Islam is Islam”.
Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi has also famously weighed in asserting that there is no separation whatsoever between the exertion of the religious Islamic impulse, and the legalistic, and governmental impulse. No separation. None. Doubt what I say? Remember, this is one of the foremost experts on Islam in the West — speaking at a Muslim forum — and this account is on an Islamic website. Read it and weep:
“No Separation Between Religion and Politics
The prominent Sheikh Al-Qaradawi told the lecture that religion and politics are compatible and cannot be separated.
He said that those who advocate separation between religion and politics use religion to best serve their interests, but when it runs counter to their personal gains, they just ignore it.
On Islam’s position of establishing religious parties, he said, “There is nothing wrong in establishing religious-oriented parties-and this applies to Christians too-provided that all parties respect the law and the constitution.”
http://www.iumsonline.net/english/articles/2004/09/article02.shtml
So you appear to be the one conflating and confusing issues. The successful separation of Church and State is something came about in the Christian West. It’s something that has never existed successfully in the Islamic world. And to compound your foolishness, you’ve utterly confused the capacity of the American nation — the same nation you denigrate above, which has perfected the separation of Church and State, from the Islamic nation which has never done so, and may never do so. There have been halting dalliances into this realm with the forays of Attaturk in the early 20th Century, but we see how well that’s working out in Turkey.
It’s quite funny to observe how it’s always the flim-flam Muslims and their leftist abettors in the West always asserting that the “religion” of Islam is somehow (magically) separate from the “political” Islam. Tell that to the 8 dead seminary students killed in Israel yesterday. Which branch of Hamas claimed the evil deed? The “religious”, or the “political”?
And then there’s this:
“Good ideas, both from the Euro Enlightnement and the Islamic one, get buried and lost and it isn’t for all of Europe, America, or the Enlightenment to bear the blame for what the idiotic religious elements have wrought in our own time” — Josh Strawn
Again, talk about conflation! When the Christians begin rampaging at the drop of a hat, when their priests begin calling from their pulpits for the beheadings of the Jews and rival Christian sects, when their priests begin running entire countries, when their parishioners conduct over 10,000 separate terrorist attacks in a 6 year time horizong, attacks all targeting innocent unbelievers in their libraries, innocents in their nursery schools, innocents sleeping in their beds — and when they constantly cite passages from their Christian or Jewish bibles for all the murder they’re conducting, when the “idiotic religious elements” of the West begin acting as the Muslims have been doing all along — come back and we’ll talk.
