The Ghost of Paley
Posts: 1703
Joined: Oct. 2005
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Ahhhh, the Ninester realises that his earlier sources were undercutting Louis's position, so now he brings in the real guns. This is good, because economic and crime data are what I take seriously anyhoo. So I'll abandon my fisking of his crap evidence and move on to the real stuff.
Nine:
[quote]According to the Zogby polling organization, Muslims in the U.S. are in general more educated and affluent than the national average, with 59% of them holding at least an undergraduate college degree. Muslims tend to hold professional jobs, and one in three Muslims earn over $75,000 a year. They tend to be employed in professional fields, and most own stock, either personally or through 401(k) or pension plans.
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He cites this article.
First things first. The very same article says:
[quote]As it happens, Her Majesty's government was well clued on these questions before the bombers struck: A 2004 Home Office study showed, for example, that British Muslims are three times likelier to be unemployed than the wider population, that their rates of civic participation are low, and that as many as 26% do not feel loyal to Britain.[/quote]
So things are apparently not rosy all over. This counts. But let's talk about American Muslims for a second.
| Quote | Information on American Muslims is sketchier. Thanks to a 2004 Zogby International survey, we know that a plurality of Muslim Americans--about one-third--are of South Asian descent; 26% are Arab and another 20% are American blacks. But until 2001 we had no idea how many Muslims lived in America, and even now the figure remains a matter of intense controversy. All major Muslim advocacy groups put the number at above six million, which, as Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum observes, has the convenience of being higher than the American Jewish population. Yet all independent surveys put the real figure at no more than three million, while the most credible study to date, by Tom Smith of the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center, estimates total Muslim population at 1,886,000. "[It] is hard to accept that Muslims are greater than one percent of the population," he writes.
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A very small minority, in other words. The article continues:
| Quote | Whatever the real figure, what's reasonably clear is that Muslim Americans, like Arab-Americans, have fared well in the U.S. The Zogby survey found that 59% of American Muslims have at least an undergraduate education, making them the most highly educated group in America. Muslim Americans are also the richest Muslim community in the world, with four in five earning more than $25,000 a year and one in three more than $75,000. They tend to be employed in professional fields, and most own stock, either personally or through 401(k) or pension plans. In terms of civic participation, 82% are registered to vote, half of them as Democrats. Interestingly, however, the survey found that 65% of Muslim Americans favor lowering the income tax.
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A fine group of Americans. And a highly selective one:
| Quote | In these respects, Muslim Americans differ from Muslim communities in Britain and Continental Europe, which tend to be poor and socially marginalized. Four other features set American Muslims apart.
First, unlike in Europe the overwhelming majority of Muslims arrived here legally, and many of those who didn't were deported after Sept. 11, 2001. Currently, according to Ali Al-Ahmed of the Washington-based Saudi Institute, there are probably no more than a few thousand Muslim illegal immigrants in the U.S.
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If some of this sounds familiar, it should. It's the very same things that were said about the early African immigrants in the UK: solidly middle class, well-educated, very assimilated. Unfortunately, the cultural center did hold: after a generation or two, the immigrants's children regressed to the cultural mean of their parent's societies and sank to the bottom strata. Prediction: one major difference between America and Europe's Muslims is that Europe's Muslims have had time for cultural regression to occur. Let's see if this hypothesis pans out:
| Quote | | Hanging over all this is the question of the long-term trajectory of the American Muslim population. In Britain, as in Germany and France, a striking feature of the Islamist movement is that it has taken root among second-generation Muslims, whose disenchantment with their Western lives is matched by the romanticist appeals of ethnic authenticity and religious purity. America's mostly foreign-born Muslims are perhaps less susceptible to this. But that's no guarantee their children won't be seduced. Then, too, neither a first-rate Western education nor economic affluence offers any inoculation against extremism: Just look at the careers of 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta, educated at the Technical University of Hamburg, or Daniel Pearl killer Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who did undergraduate work at the London School of Economics. |
Prediction met. While we're at it, let's peek at some crime statistics: [quotes are from the linked articles]:
| Quote | PARIS, June 19, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – French prisons are teeming with Muslims, a phenomenon chaplains and sociologists blame on marginalization and towering poverty and unemployment rates among the Muslim minority.
“It really harms the image of Islam and Muslims in France that prisons are teeming with Muslims,” Mamdo Sango, a Muslim chaplain, told IslamOnline.net.
Iranian-French researcher Farhad Khosrokhavar said in his recently published book Islam in Prisons that Muslims make up some 70 percent of a total of 60,775 prisoners in France.
As ethnicity-based censuses are banned in France, he said complexion, names and religious traditions like prohibition of pork indicate that Muslims constitute an overwhelming majority in prisons.
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| Quote | According to a new study from the Crime Prevention Council, Brĺ, it is four times more likely that a known rapist is born abroad, compared to persons born in Sweden. Resident aliens from Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia dominate the group of rape suspects. According to these statistics, almost half of all perpetrators are immigrants. In Norway and Denmark, we know that non-Western immigrants, which frequently means Muslims, are grossly overrepresented on rape statistics. In Oslo, Norway, immigrants were involved in two out of three rape charges in 2001. The numbers in Denmark were the same, and even higher in the city of Copenhagen with three out of four rape charges. Sweden has a larger immigrant, including Muslim, population than any other country in northern Europe. The numbers there are likely to be at least as bad as with its Scandinavian neighbors. The actual number is thus probably even higher than what the authorities are reporting now, as it doesn't include second generation immigrants. Lawyer Ann Christine Hjelm, who has investigated violent crimes in Svea high court, found that 85 per cent of the convicted rapists were born on foreign soil or by foreign parents.
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And dare we forget the Dutch:
| Quote | But by 2002, Kok's Labor government, hard hit by rising crime rates associated with unintegrated Islamic immigrants and a weakening economy, was handed a stunning defeat. That election marked the dramatic rise of the gay activist and former Marxist Pim Fortuyn. It was the beginning of what promises to be an unsettling period in Holland's usually placid politics.
In the first political killing in the Netherlands since the 17th century, Fortuyn was assassinated by an animal rights activist. Then came the murder of anti-Muslim iconoclast Theo van Gogh by an Islamist who was offended by one of van Gogh's movies. These events clearly shook the normally calm and consensus-driven Dutch. Fortuyn's political heir, Geert Wilders, who rose to political prominence in the wake of the Van Gogh killing, was depicted by the American and British press as a one-issue politician. His sole aim, it seemed, was to expel radical Islamists from Holland. That was a misunderstanding of both Wilders and the Dutch situation.
Wilders, who lives under 24-hour guard and sleeps in a prison cell for his own protection, is indeed a strong critic of Islam, which he argues is "incompatible with democracy." But it quickly became clear that he was far more than a one-issue candidate. Moreover, his arguments about Islamic extremism and immigrant crime had already been laid out a decade earlier by the prominent Dutch politician Frits Bolkstein, who is now giving the French fits as a member of the European parliament by pushing for increased E.U. competition in business services.
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Some stats:
| Quote | What increasingly bothers the Dutch are freeloaders. Though the unemployment rate is just over 2 percent, 18 percent of the Dutch labor force is on the dole to some degree, with 11 percent receiving occupational-disability benefits under the widely abused system. Immigrants, who have a high unemployment rate, are another irritant. Eight percent of Holland's 16 million people are of foreign descent, with more than half of them Muslims, mostly from Turkey and Morocco. Holland's four largest cities — Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam, and Utrecht — are home to the majority of immigrants. Almost half the population of Rotterdam, where Fortuyn launched his political career, is of foreign descent.
This has had unfortunate consequences. Earlier this month, the trade association representing Holland's supermarkets announced that it would be shutting down stores in the immigrant-heavy inner cities unless the government got serious about policing the areas. That's because young immigrant men from these neighborhoods are disproportionately represented in Dutch crime statistics. According to criminologist Chris Rutenfrans, a study in 2000 found that 33 percent of all criminal suspects are foreign-born, as are 55 percent of prison inmates. An astonishing 63 percent of those convicted of homicide are immigrants — Moroccans, Antilleans, and sub-Saharan Africans are the chief culprits. "The reason always given to explain these statistics is that they live in deprived circumstances," says Rutenfrans. "But other minorities are similarly deprived, and they aren't criminals."
Some Muslims bring with them a culture of religious extremism, encouraged in part by religious schools — at least one-third of which are funded by the Saudis, according to a government report. The report also revealed that 20 percent of Holland's Islamic schools receive funding from the radical Islamic organization Al-Waqf al-Islami, or have radical Muslims on their boards. The government warned that the country's Islamic schools showed very little commitment to preparing their students for integration into Dutch society.
More troubling, the government intelligence service warned as long as a decade ago that the Netherlands was becoming a center of Islamic terrorist recruitment and operations. Since September 11, terrorism experts have warned that violent Islamic extremists are conducting operations in Holland, in part because the country's deeply ingrained taboo against intolerance gives them relative freedom from scrutiny.
Worries about terrorism and crime manifest themselves as anxiety over immigration, yet Dutch voters also see the rising crime rate as part of a broader decline of civil society. It's common these days to hear the Dutch complaining that beneath the egalitarian surface, theirs has become an individualist culture, in which everyone thinks only of his rights, but not his obligations to the larger community. "People are fed up with the abuse of the welfare state, but they have yet to realize the problem is the welfare state itself," says Bart Jan Spruyt, political editor for Reformatorisch Dagblad, a Protestant-affiliated daily.
"The Dutch worry about what's happening to civil society, but they don't understand that the state cannot make you moral," says Livestro. "They fail to see that civil society starts with personal morality, and with the family." The social problems are connected to the decline of religion and the consequent loss of faith in traditional Judeo- Christian morality. Some 30 years ago, 60 percent of the population were at church on Sunday morning; today, it's between 8 and 13 percent. The media have relentlessly mocked religion.
To be a believing Christian in today's Holland, therefore, requires a countercultural courage that's hard for most Americans to imagine. But these people exist. I stumbled across a small congregation of Iranian Pentecostals, all converts from Islam, in a distant suburb of Amsterdam. The pastor, who asked not to be identified because of past violent threats from area Muslims, told me that he was shocked by the naivete the Dutch have about radical Islam. He thought Fortuyn was "a bit extremist," and didn't count himself a supporter — but he agreed with much of what Fortuyn said, and was glad somebody finally said it.
In this, the Iranian pastor was like most Dutch voters with whom I spoke, telling me that Fortuyn wasn't their cup of tea, politically, but he was invaluable as a catalyst for a long-overdue discussion of Islam and the limits of multiculturalism. Kinneging says Fortuyn struck a chord with voters sick of being taken for granted: "In the wake of the transformation of our big cities [by immigration] has come a lot of guns, violence, drugs, trading in women, and dirty streets. The political, intellectual, and journalistic elite who are in favor of this immigration do not live in these urban neighborhoods."
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This one's for Cogzie.
Nine:
| Quote | The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is the United States largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group, originally established to promote a positive image of Islam and Muslims in America. CAIR portrays itself as the voice of mainstream, moderate Islam on Capitol Hill and in political arenas throughout the United States. It has aggressively condemned all acts of terrorism, and has been working in collaboration with the White House in "issues of safety and foreign policy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_the_United_States
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Don't be so sure:
| Quote | As Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes points out, the Washington-based CAIR, founded in 1994, "presents itself as just another civil-rights group" - cultivating an image of moderation that enables it to garner "sizable donations, invitations to the White House, respectful media citations, and a serious hearing by corporations." The organization's goal, CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper says benignly, is to promote "interest and understanding among the general public with regards to Islam and Muslims in North America."
But the reality is something not nearly so benevolent, and Americans ought to become aware of it. CAIR is a direct outgrowth of the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP). According to Oliver Revell, the FBI's former associate director of Counter-Intelligence Operations, the IAP "is an organization that has directly supported [the Palestinian terror group] Hamas' military goals. It is a front organization for Hamas that engages in propaganda for Islamic militants. It has produced videotapes that are very hate-filled, full of vehement propaganda." Such roots can hardly be considered "moderate," and as we examine CAIR more closely, what we see only gets uglier.
CAIR's founder and executive director, Nihad Awad, was the IAP's public relations director with a long history of extremism. Awad openly praised Iran's notorious Ayatollah Khomeini. He blasted the trial and conviction of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers - against whom the evidence of guilt was overwhelming - as "a travesty of justice." At a 1994 Barry University forum, he candidly stated, "I am in support of the Hamas movement."
The IAP's current president, Rafeeq Jaber, was a founding director of CAIR. Mohammed Nimer, who directs CAIR's Research Center, was on the board of the United Association for Studies and Research, which is the strategic arm of Hamas in the US and was founded by Hamas operative Mousa Abu Marzook. The aforementioned Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR's Director of Communications, lso worked for the IAP. To this day, he refuses to publicly denounce Osama bin Laden. He euphemistically ascribed the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in Africa to a "misunderstanding of both sides." He dismisses the Sudanese Islamic government's enslavement and torture of millions of black Christians and animists during the past two decades - to say nothing of its slaughter of some two million more - as mere "inter-tribal hostage-taking." He makes no secret of his desire to see America one day become a Muslim country. "I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future," he told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "But I'm not going to do anything violent to promote that. I'm going to do it through education."
Such sentiments echo those of CAIR chairman Omar M. Ahmad, who in July 1998 told a crowd of California Muslims, "Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran . . . should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth." In a similar vein, CAIR board member Imam Siraj Wahaj calls for replacing the American government with a caliphate, and warns that America will crumble unless it "accepts the Islamic agenda." Wahaj, it should be noted, served as a character witness for Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the Muslim cleric convicted for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; the same cleric who was busy devising plans to blow up American landmarks, buildings, and bridges; the same cleric whose conviction CAIR called a "hate crime" against Muslims. And even though Wahaj was listed as an un-indicted co-conspirator in Rahman's case, CAIR now permits him to sit on its advisory board, deeming him "one of the most respected Muslim leaders in America."
With regard to the war on terror, CAIR's anti-American loyalties are all too clear. In October 1998, for instance, the group demanded the removal of a Los Angeles billboard that dubbed Osama bin Laden "the sworn enemy," complaining that such a caption was "offensive to Muslims." In the wake of 9/11, CAIR actually denied bin Laden's culpability, a position from which it would not budge until three months after the attacks, by which time the evidence against al-Qaeda's linchpin was irrefutable. The Website for CAIR's New York chapter - with which Mayor Bloomberg's appointee Omar Mohammedi has been affiliated - openly doubted that Islamic hijackers were responsible for the attacks, speculating that either the Bush administration or Israel orchestrated the nightmare.
CAIR has been the mouthpiece of some of the vilest anti-Semitism imaginable. For example, the organization co-sponsored a 1998 Brooklyn College rally at which a militant Egyptian Islamist led the attendees in chanting, "No to the Jews, descendents of the apes." Hussam Ayloush, who heads CAIR's Los Angeles office, contemptuously refers to Israelis as "Zionazis."
Over the years, a good portion of CAIR's funding came from a group called the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF). Yet when President Bush closed the HLF in December 2001 upon learning that it was raising money to support Hamas terror attacks, CAIR reacted with its characteristic petulance and indifference to American interests. Calling Bush's move "unjust" and "disturbing," the group circulated a petition exhorting the government to unfreeze HLF assets - charging that "there has been a shift from a war on terrorism to an attack on Islam."
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Nine:
| Quote | | Then you can't "see" my bet. Pointing to critics of religion or Christianity through time doesn't match the criteria set down. |
Even very public critics, who published books and articles attacking all shades of Christianity, starting from the 1920's? Here's his Scopes coverage, which savages religious fundamentalists at every turn. Then read Treatise of the Gods. Here's a sample:
| Quote | | The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking. Not by accident does Genesis 3 make the father of knowledge a serpent -- slimy, sneaking and abominable. Since the earliest days the church, as an organization, has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was the apologist for the divine right of kings. |
Oooh, I mispoke. Here's an article from 1917:
| Quote | Starting from this double basis, Mark [Twain]undertakes an elaborate and extraordinarily penetrating examination of all the fine ideals and virtues that man boasts of, and reduces them, one after the other, to untenability and absurdity. There is no mere smartness in the thing. It is done, to be sure, with a sly and disarming humor, but at bottom it is done quite seriously and with the highest sort of argumentative skill. The parlor entertainer of Dr. Taft's eulogy completely disappears; in his place there arises a satirist with something of Rabelais's vast resourcefulness and dexterity in him, and all of Dean Swift's devastating ferocity. It is not only the most honest book that Mark ever did; it is, in some respects, the most artful and persuasive as a work of art. No wonder the pious critic of The New York Times, horrified by its doctrine, was forced to take refuge behind the theory that Mark intended it as a joke.
In The Mysterious Stranger there is a step further. What Is Man? analyzes the concept of man; The Mysterious Stranger boldly analyzes the concept of God. What, after all, is the actual character of this Being we are asked to reverence and obey? How is His mind revealed by His admitted acts? How does His observed conduct toward man square with those ideals of human conduct that He is said to prescribe, and whose violation He is said to punish with such appalling penalties?
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These are the questions that Mark sets for himself. His answers are, in brief, a complete rejection of the whole Christian theory -- a rejection based upon a wholesale reductio ad absurdum. The thing is not mere mocking; it is not even irreverent; but the force of it is stupendous. I know of no agnostic document that shows a keener sense of essentials or a more deft hand for making use of the indubitable. A gigantic irony is in it. It glows with a profound conviction, almost a kind of passion. And the grotesque form of it -- a child's story -- only adds to the sardonic implacability of it.
As I say, there are more to come. Mark in his idle moments was forever at work upon some such riddling of the conventional philosophy, as he was forever railing at the conventional ethic in his private conversation. One of these pieces, highly characteristic, is described in Albert Bigelow Paine's biography. It is an elaborate history of the microbes inhabiting a man's veins. They divine a religion with the man as God; they perfect a dogma setting forth his desires as to their conduct; they engaged in a worship based upon the notion that he is immediately aware of their every act and jealous of their regard and enormously concerned about their welfare. In brief, a staggering satire upon the anthropocentric religion of man -- a typical return to the favorite theme of man's egoism and imbecility.
All this sort of thing, to be sure, has its dangers for Mark's fame.[snip]
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Here's another guy:
| Quote | Religions are conclusions for which the facts of nature supply no major premises.
-- Ambrose Bierce, Collected Works (1912)
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| Quote | Altar, n. The place whereon the priest formerly raveled out the small intestine of the sacrificial victim for purposes of divination and cooked its flesh for the gods. The word is now seldom used, except with reference to the sacrifice of their liberty and peace by a male and a female fool.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
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| Quote | Christian, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
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| Quote | Decalogue, n. A series of commandments, ten in number -- just enough to permit an intelligent selection for observance, but not enough to embarrass the choice. Following is the revised edition of the Decalogue, calculated for this meridian.
Thou shalt no God but me adore:
'Twere too expensive to have more.
No images nor idols make
For *Robert Ingersoll to break.
Take not God's name in vain; select
A time when it will have effect.
Work not on Sabbath days at all,
But go to see the teams play ball.
Honor thy parents. That creates
For life insurance lower rates.
Kill not, abet not those who kill;
Thou shalt not pay thy butcher's bill.
Kiss not thy neighbor's wife, unless
Thine own thy neighbor doth caress.
Don't steal; thou'lt never thus compete
Successfully in business. Cheat.
Bear not false witness -- that is low --
But "'hear 'tis rumored so and so."
Covet thou naught that thou hast not
By hook or crook, or somehow, got.
G.J.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911), some versions have "Roger Ingersoll" for our "Robert Ingersoll"; see also our "Which Ten Commandments?" handbill ††
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| Quote | Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something he can see and feel.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
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| Quote | Irreligion, n. The principal one of the great faiths of the world.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
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| Quote | Reverence, n. The spiritual attitude of a man to a god and a dog to a man.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Saint, n. A dead sinner revised and edited.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
[...]
Trinity, n. In the multiplex theism of certain Christian churches, three entirely distinct deities consistent with only one. Subordinate deities of the polytheistic faith, such as devils and angels, are not dowered with the power of combination, and must urge individually their clames to adoration and propitiation. The Trinity is one of the most sublime mysteries of our holy religion. In rejecting it because it is incomprehensible, Unitarians betray their inadequate sense of theological fundamentals. In religion we believe only what we do not understand, except in the instance of an intelligible doctrine that contradicts an incomprehensible one. In that case we believe the former as a part of the latter.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
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More later.
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Dey can't 'andle my riddim.
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