Thursday, February 08, 2007

Religion, Politically Correct Lies, & the Environment

Reuters published yesterday a short gushing piece titled "World's Churches Go Green and Rally to Cause" by Paul Majedie. Majedie fantasizes an ecumenical movemnt by Christians, Muslims, and Jews to fight global warming and other environmental causes. The handicapping for the muslims is pretty obvious. After spending a sentence or two on the environmental ideas of the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, leader of the Anglican Church, and Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew, the spiritual leader of Orthodox Churches, Majedie goes on provide concrete examples of synagogues being environmental. We then get to the muslim bit. Majedie quotes Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra, "We believe that we are God's deputies on the planet and we have been given the responsibility to ensure we use God's gift in the correct manner and leave it in a fit state which can be passed on to future generations." Who is this Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra? A major muslim religious leader? No, he is chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain's inter-faith relations committee. In other words, he is the Muslim paid to the lie to the infidels about Islam, in accordance with the muslim practice of taqiya.

I started wondering how Majedie found Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra for this quote. Obviously, there are all sorts of possibilities, but the most likely is that environmental liberal Christians suggested Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra. The liberal Christians would have got to known him from the inter-faith relations committee, where he lies to them. Not that Mogra's lies are unwelcome. The liberal Christians need them so the basic tenet of their faith that all religions say the same thing can be validated. No matter that the idea of all religions saying the same thing is an idea more closely related to Hinduism than anything in the Bible. The liberal Christians will determine the Muslims aren't all that different than Quakers, and Mogra is there to help them. Mogra makes the liberal Christians happy and if the liberal Christians need someone to say muslims are concerned about the environment, I'm sure Mogra is happy to oblige. Everybody gets to feel good.

Then, there are those other times when the liberal Christian feels that fundamentalist Christian say something very different than they. The liberal Christian may even sneer at the fundamentalists for believing in nonsense like Creationism. Yet, isn't the fact that religions say different things a tab bit more obvious than biological evolution?

Here's the problem with lying to yourself as the liberal Christians and politically correct are doing. You actually start telling your lies to other people, which is a sin in Christianity, even in liberal Christianity. Lying is even a sin for the secular media's political correctness. So what about this sentence in Majedie's article, " And for Muslims, the issue[environmentalism] is just as pressing"?

To be fair here, Majedie also had to work hard to ignore obvious facts about Catholicism when he reported that "Catholics are also very much singing from the same hymn sheet with Pope Benedict making protection of the environment one of the keynotes of his papacy." Majedie did not mention birth control in the next sentence.

Monday, February 05, 2007

The End Racial Profiling Act

I have an amusing story relevant to the End Racial Profiling Act (EPRA), which would de facto make it illegal to question a muslim about terrorism. Before the amusing story, I thought I should review that logic of how ERPA would make it illegal to question muslims about terrorism, as obviously, the bill doesn't state that explicitly. Pretend you are a screener at a airport and an obvious muslim comes up and acts suspicious. If ERPA passed and you search the muslim without finding evidence of bad intent, you would be accused of racism and possibly fired and even fined! Islamic terrorists are smart enough to send out a few suspicious decoys until the airport screeners learn to just not question muslims.

Now, the promised amusing story: I talked to a homeless man already taking advantage of leftist sentiment about racial profiling. The University near where I live is using its police force to chase the homeless out of the area. I'm not wise to know whether I should condemn this or support this. So the homeless man's response is to wear one of those wretched Arab scarves. The University police now leave him alone. The actions of the University police are a weird, but altogether expected, leftist mixture of political correctness and disdain for the actual poor.

Saturday, February 03, 2007

Islam and the Green Left

When I accuse the left of being in a de facto political alliance with Islamic fascist, I often encounter doubt. I've been suggesting David Horowitz's book, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, but David Horowitz is hardly the guy to convince someone on the moderate left—even if Horowitz is right. Thus, I needed to come up with a better argument. I now have some talking points about the left/muslim alliance in Europe. I only learned these details yesterday, when I was inspired by Snouck's blog which I found at the Infidel Blogger's Alliance to read the Wikipedia about Dutch political parties. It was the GreenLeft Party—a left-wing environmental party that I found particular disturbing. While the GreenLeft's Party economic policy is considerably more sane than the Dutch Socialist Party, a Marxist Party, it surprisingly seems to exceed it in attracting Islamic radicals.

The GreenLeft party has had two radical Islamic terrorists as members of parliament. I suppose one could be overlooked given the randomness on Earth, but two is too much when the GreenLeft currently has seven members in the lower house and five in the upper house. This is after an election in which the GreenLeft did relatively well. One GreenLeft party member and so called “human rights activist”, Farah Karimi, disclosed in a book her participation in the Iranian Revolution. Her revelation was greeted with silence as she had already told the party board. In November 2005, the GreenLeft party board asked Sam Pormes to give up his seat in the Upper House of Dutch Parliament, because “continuing rumors about his involvement with guerrilla-training in Yemen in the 1970s and the 1977 train hijacking by Moluccan youth and allegations of welfare fraud were harmful for the party.” When Pormes refused to step down, the party board tried to expel him from the party. In March 2006, a general party meeting sided with Pormes, and party chair Herman Meijer resigned. In other words, the GreenLeft party activists weren't only just fine with having a member of the Iranian revolution as a member of the party, they approved of having a known terrorist and welfare cheat as their representative in government—over the objection of their party's leadership. I don't know what could say de facto alliance better than that.

As an avid environmentalist, this radical Islam/Green alliance puzzles me. Of course, as I have ranted for ages, Green parties are actually Red parties who have appropriated environmentalism much to the determent of environmentalism. Still, Green Parties have some residual concern about the environment--even if misdirected--as in this instance: how do people who worry about greenhouse gases oppose nuclear power? Admittedly, the Green energy solution relies on renewable sources, but it is peculiar that a group of people who sneer at Creationism propose an energy policy every bit as magical. To give the Greens the benefit of the doubt, my wanting to look at the details is such a weird anal-rententive fetish. Anyway, I suppose the more urgent question here is why do people who oppose nuclear power think it is just dandy for Iran to have atomic weapons?

The flip side of this question is why are muslims willing to join Green parties. Blowing stuff up hardly strikes me as an expression of concern for the Earth. I suppose there has been some environmental terrorism--which may make sense internally--but its motivation is far different than Islamic wars of conquest. There is something about imperialism (and especially of the Islamic variety) that just doesn't jibe with environmentalism. Why wouldn't jihadists join the Dutch Socialist Party, which received more than three times as many votes as the GreenLeft party. Marxist romanticism about revolution is similar to muslim sentiments about jihad. Also, I can't help but note that one of the important environmental issues is greenhouse gases, and muslim holy men tend to come from countries with a strong interest in doing nothing about reducing greenhouse gases.

My suspicion the reason for this Green Left/Muslim alliance is that the multiculturalism cult has done most damage among the type of environmentalists who considers themselves trendy and intellectual. Sadly, this bizarre alliance seems to be spreading to the United States. The Democratic National Committee at their winter meeting had a pro-Hezbollah iman speak. I bet this iman claims to think the environment is an important issue.