Me on Dean on Islamaphobiamanaia

Now that I am back into the swing of things with the blogging I am now going to start my first cross blog mojo Dean has been a big person on Islam -a- phobia

(Note...two posts are by Dean and one is a counter post by a counter voice on his own blog)

lets look at a definition of PHOBIA

1. A persistent, abnormal, and irrational fear of a specific thing or situation that compels one to avoid it, despite the awareness and reassurance that it is not dangerous.
2. A strong fear, dislike, or aversion.

Now, one would think the phobia in Islam-a-Phobia is valid with definition #2. I however don't agree as it applies to social constructs. One can dislike and have an aversion to things socially without having fear which is key to phobia (which is the classical definition) indeed disliking things is not fearful nor is (usually) aversion in and of itself it is the emotion which fuels the other two which is key. So we have to come down to the fact do people have to fear Muslims to dislike them and have an aversion to them.

Lets go with the wrong use of Phobia that was keyed in and created a sense of Validity that Islamaphobia crawled into.

ho·mo·pho·bi·a Pronunciation
1. Fear of or contempt for lesbians and gay men.
2. Behavior based on such a feeling.

Here we see again the root -Phobia being changed to mean something which isn't fear.

Dr. Drew of Loveline fame recounted his being involved in a study which got to the root of what Homophobia is all about. And the images of two men with errect penii responded to a anger center at a very primative sector of the ole brain.

Now we know in the animal world showing of genitals can be about dominance issues (and in the classical sexuality of Ancient Greece and rome it was as well.... and also we can argue is so in Prisons today. It could also be a threat to your mate

So is that the same as fear? Is protecting your place in society the same as fear? If it is then I weep for society.....

And let me also be clear, while the instinct is a good instinct... good instincts can be directed in very bad ways.

So lets go to those primal sectors of the ole human nogin and look back at whats going on in racial issues in the past.

Racial intolerance tends to happen against groups that show outward signs of their inability to become part of the larger national group. Is that in and of itself fear or is it an instinct which guides thoughts into horribly evil places? I can say some of the wonderful stuff in our nations history (Cocified Negros) lends to the fear hypothesis but I often times have to wonder if fear isn't used to gin up good and positive desires to protect your herd and your tribe. If fear isn't a more advanced form of thought used to manipulate our desire to protect. One only has to look to Rwanda, violence in Haiti, and of course our good buddy adolph to see that fear of other social groups tends to lead to violence when ginned up by people.

Now... if violence is part of a positive impulse to protect your tribe, how do we make sure that Muslim citizens in the US are percived as part of "us" and not part of the other?

-Taking part in protests against the violence of terrorists abroad.And standing up against said violence-

Now I say this as some one on a campus with a high muslim population (Immigrant and from abroad) and I have to say you don't see Muslims speaking out against that violence you see them excusing it. You see them speaking of historical wrongs and the like. The Historical wrongs may have a validity in the causation of the violence but in speaking up to excuse the people of their old home or their co-religionists they are percived as the other.

You can speak out against the violence and speak of what lead the mind to justify such violence. And that could be a very compeling argument (and is in the very small number of students I have heard it from) who lived in places like Syria. Places where you can go from one neighborhood and feel like your in western europe and go to another and feel like your barely in the 3rd world. Their is something to culture and personal experience leading into what creates our rational thought process but in so zealously defending others experience it sounds like (and to some case is) an excuse.

I also know religous authority is something which matters to some muslims, but being silent is something that is at the very least spiritually questionable

-Not making comments about how we are really feminists and not you-

I read an article the other day defending the Hijab as an empowered feminist article of clothing and how Feminists in todays culture are morally bankrupt. Both of those points are perfectly valid when done seperately, but when strung togther it tends to make one an outsider.

-Accept that just like your country their is good and bad hidden-

I remember an article about the men in Saudi Arabia waiting in long lines to buy booze for their good american friend "John Smith" or another about the Islamic theocrats finding theological justification for sex change operations. Or the way in Iran prostitution (or rather extremmmmmmmmmmely short term marriages) is done. The truth is that our outward signs of culture often hide these little nuggets. I don't believe every saudi man in that village had a friend named John Smith. And these rather harmeless nuggets also are nothing compaired to some of the vile things hidden in the cultures over there as well. Such as rumors of slave auctions in saudi arabia a good 20 years or more after its offical ban. Its natural for every culture to project its good and hide the bad and hypocritical but what does matter is how we deal with those things that are wrong in our internal culture. denial is the wrong way to deal with it.

Maybe violence-and discrimination- against Muslims comes from people who want to protect their tribe against all alien influence, not fear
Maybe violence-and discrimination- against muslims comes from misunderstanding
Maybe violence-and discrimination- against muslims comes from people who are black of heart and impure of soul.

Maybe we should ask those questions before making a new phobia which really doesn't have a lick to do with fear.

and more importantly

Maybe we should ask those questions to find a way to become better people

Sunday Bloody Sunday

Sing it George

(H/T Dean's world)

Da Popa talk continues

Dean is going off on the Pope again and I have to take the other side of the argument (sort of)

as hellbent on persecuting Jews or converting them by force. Now he says an assault on the Jews is a direct assault on his own church, effectively throwing Jews under their direct protection--and you're mad about that?

While I don't agree with Eric on the whole of his arguments let me then say to you the following.

A church that in much of occupied Europe aided and abetted the Nazi rise to power, in much of Europe it saw its own flocks and coffers grow fatter from the new state presented by the Nazi's. A Church whose upper level leadership viewed the preservation of the church as a greater good then the preservation of those who suffered under Nazi persecution, how can this pope speak to the Church's protection when instead of speaking to the unchristian charecter in the hearts of many catholics of his own generation, he speaks of a criminal cabal who forced its black vision on the nation.

A pope who says "god why did you allow this to happen" instead of a pope saying " I swear oh lord, I will seek and I will guide the souls of every catholic to the mercy and justice you preached to so this never happened again." how can you trust the words of that pope to protect the Jewish people.

A pope who ignores the fact the catholic church in poland and other states set the seeds into the fields to call for the death of the Jewish people. Many of those same writers were read by and inspired Adolph Hitler. His crying out to god does ring hollow. He was a pope who wore the broken cross, he was a pope who suffered under the broken cross and who lived in that germany. He had a unique position to say "we failed you lord" and he failed to take it.

Some are of the philosophical bent that an economic and social system based on lies will wind up making false promises it cannot possibly sustain--like the vision of the great, glorious, perfect third reich united in socialism and corporatism under the all-beneficent state that would cleanse all ugliness and badness (read: Jews and other undesirables) from our midsts.

your using an attack on utopianism of the Nazi's as a false doctrine in defense of a church that teaches in its own faith a utopian doctrine that speaks to a New Jerusalem born from the purging and the war of those who sin. Dean the same values and teachings of the church can be found in a new form in the teaching of the Nazi's.... this is why it worked, and why it was able to snake its way into the hearts of so many in the world.

And how could you ever expect the patron of a church not to take special notice of members of his own flock, a Roman Catholic who was made a saint because she sacrificed her life to save Jews? He's not to take special notice of her memorial thats there? You're going to get mad at him for this?

Dean you need to learn a lot about Poland and about the Fact the Catholic church has taken this black spot and made it into a holy place

Jewish protests against Christian symbols were increasing in 1998, and there was a new demand that the Catholic Church in the former SS administration building at Birkenau be removed because it is not appropriate at the place where over a million Jews perished in the gas chambers......
It was only after the fall of Communism in 1989 that the genocide of the Jews was even mentioned on the monument in the former Birkenau camp. Before 1989, few people from outside Poland had ever seen Auschwitz-Birkenau, but there were actually more visitors during the Communist regime than there were in 1998 because all Polish citizens were encouraged to go on group tours of the camp and most of these visitors were Catholic. In 1998, the largest group of visitors were the Polish Catholic high school students who were fulfilling an educational requirement to visit Auschwitz where so many of their Catholic grandfathers suffered and died bravely during the Polish resistance to the Nazi occupation.......
For the Polish people, who are 98% Catholic, Auschwitz-Birkenau is the place where not one, but two, of their Catholic saints died as martyrs. Both Father Maksymilian Kolbe, a Catholic priest, and a Carmelite nun named Edith Stein met their deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau and have been canonized as Catholic saints. The prison cell in Block 11 at the Auschwitz main camp, which was occupied by Father Kolbe who volunteered to die to save the life of a fellow prisoner, is a prominent Catholic shrine. In 1998, the controversial crosses were placed in front of the side wall of the Block 11 building, where Father Kolbe was imprisoned in a "starvation cell."
Edith Stein was born a Jew and was an atheist, but converted to the Catholic religion and became a Carmelite nun under the name of Sister Benedicta of the Cross. Because she was a Jewess, she was gassed in the gas chamber in the little cottage known as Bunker 2 at Birkenau on August 9, 1942; she was canonized a saint in the Catholic Church in October 1998.....
On June 7, 1979, Cardinal Wojtyla came back to Poland, as Pope John Paul II, and honored the country of his birth by saying Mass at the former Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz II or Birkenau. Birkenau was chosen because it is the closest place to the Pope's home town that was large enough to hold the crowd of 500,000 people who attended this unique event in the history of Catholic Poland.

So first the saint he mentioned did not die because she helped jews, she died because she was to the Nazi world view a Jew
Secondly Pope John Paul choose to make a mass at the camp where most of the Jews in Poland were killed.

The Church has been pushing its ideological footprint on the largest Jewish mass grave in the world Dean, so by the pope honoring by name one of his own it is continuing a long process which has been wrestled with by Catholic and Jewish leaders and has invoked fights of Polish Nationalism as well over the nature of the place that stands as a scar to human suffering. So -YES- their is a point to the offense.

I also think you ignore a very important critique Eric makes of Hitlers actions (and the actions of others like him in Germany)

The first part of this claim is deeply contestable; religious antisemitism had a long European history, but the form of antisemitism that culminated in the Final Solution was grounded at least as much in early-20th-century racial "science" as it was in religious hatred. Martin Luther's antisemitism may have been essentially theological, but Adolf Hitler hated Jews not so much because they were adherents of a hated religion as because they were members of an enemy and inferior race.

While Eugenic Anti-Semetic thought hitler created was rather virulant it was a scientific justification for a theological Jew hatred that Christians in much of europe practiced with enthusiasm. He did not say "They killed Jesus" he said "They bring sickness, disease, infermity, and moral weakness" the difference is striking and when taken by the pope as an assault on Christianity makes the pope simply look foolish.

Dean your defense of the pope I guess is admirable, but it shows a lack of knowledge of the land he picked to make his speech, and what the Catholic Church has been doing there.

Well my thoughts on the pope inspired....

Turned into a good turn of the word over at Dean's world and Dean missed my point... and some one in his comment section showed more of the speech which (to my mind) makes the point further.

I had to come. It is a duty before the truth and the just due of all who suffered here, a duty before God, for me to come here as the successor of Pope John Paul II and as a son of the German people -- a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation's honor, prominence and prosperity, but also through terror and intimidation, with the result that our people was used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power.

again the problem here is the continued implication of the power of the Nazi party. The party didn't hold some unchristian power, the party appealed to a black spot in the hearts of millions. And it was that black desire, not the terror which brought down the long knives and guns upon the victims of the shoah.

We cannot peer into God's mysterious plan -- we see only piecemeal, and we would be wrong to set ourselves up as judges of God and history. Then we would not be defending man, but only contributing to his downfall. No -- when all is said and done, we must continue to cry out humbly yet insistently to God: Rouse yourself! Do not forget mankind, your creature!

But again, did not god give you free will, did not god come down in the flesh to teach you by his example.

by turning those words to god you ignore where man fell off the godly path.

now at the tail end of the speech we sort of see that... but for the first 60% of the speech we don't.... and the tail is hardly a tail in a real sense

And our cry to God must also be a cry that pierces our very heart, a cry that awakens within us God's hidden presence -- so that his power, the power he has planted in our hearts, will not be buried or choked within us by the mire of selfishness, pusillanimity, indifference or opportunism.

Let us cry out to God, with all our hearts, at the present hour, when new misfortunes befall us, when all the forces of darkness seem to issue anew from human hearts: whether it is the abuse of God's name as a means of justifying senseless violence against innocent persons, or the cynicism which refuses to acknowledge God and ridicules faith in him.

Here is the problem with that. The Nazi's appealed to the divine spark, as do all great men of evil. So in the end the word of god should be clear, the life of christ should be clear. God has shown you the way and so even if you cannot find the light of god within, god has laid the path clear to you without... so then you make the choice to ignore god, not that god is hidden from you. And that are what great incidents of human horror should truely teach us. Is not the evil of men, but that men know what they do is evil, and choose the evil, so very often.

Deep down, those vicious criminals, by wiping out this people, wanted to kill the God who called Abraham, who spoke on Sinai and laid down principles to serve as a guide for mankind, principles that are eternally valid. If this people, by its very existence, was a witness to the God who spoke to humanity and took us to himself, then that God finally had to die and power had to belong to man alone -- to those men, who thought that by force they had made themselves masters of the world. By destroying Israel, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful.

Here let me lay out a counter case made my a scholar.

While Christians as Christians were not perpetrators of the Holocaust, the Holocaust occurred in the most Christian part of the world. It occurred in the very heart of Christendom. Furthermore, while the hundreds of thousands of Nazis and their collaborators carried out the Holocaust, every Nazi and every collaborator to a person (excepting only Muslim collaborators), had been baptized a Christian. Every Nazi had Christian parents, attended Christian Churches, heard Christian sermons, and went to Christian Sunday school. Nazis buried their relatives with Christian ceremonies. Furthermore, the Catholic Church never - to this very day - excommunicated a single Nazi. What this means, then, is that during the Nazi regime Christianity and Christians failed in their own deepest beliefs. Christians failed to love their neighbors. Christianity failed to help the weak, the lame, the halt, the blind, or the stranger in its midst. In a word, when tested, Christianity - which, with all too few exceptions, showed no love, no compassion, no forgiveness - failed.

The article goes into the Shoah as a Christian issue and I encourage you to read it. With talk of the Nazi's trying to form an occult empire the truth is much different. The truth is the Nazi's put people into churches. The Nazi's inspired people to preach the word of god... but the era did not put into the hearts and actions of people the role god lays out for them.

When we say that people were lead astray by the Nazi's as an issue of theology we open a dangerous door, a door which allows people to never attone for the evil they choose to do. If I can blame the Nazi's because I collaborated then I can avoid my sin.

That as a Christian teaching would be false, as it would also be to the jewish line of thinking as well. many in europe...men and women, old and young...many sent the jew, the sick and infirmed, the gypse, and others to their death because they viewed them as less then human. And they can say now because of people like the pope, and those who came before him " I didn't do it."

That is Unchristian, and it is untrue.

So Sorry Dean, the pope doesn't get off the hook

Some old School goodness

THanks to Dean