A Short Critique Of Islamic Fundamentalism

A Short Critique of Islamic Fundamentalism Introduction Today we face a huge problem of Islamic extremism. Extremism is nothing new in religion but the simple scale of the problem we face from the above and its threat to our way of life is daunting. There is also good reason to believe that this particular threat is bigger than Communism or National Socialism. There are two reasons for this: 1) It is a direct descendant of National Socialism and if not of Marxism, shares a similar mindset and group ethic in order to impose itself upon the human race and collective psyche, through means of coercion and control. 2) Its very nature is abstract enough to make it seem difficult to recognise as a single entity but also a real enemy, in the sense that the older Hitlerite or Soviet enemies were to the West. The second reason is the one we shall deal with first. Religion through its very nature is personal, even if practised in the public sphere. The personal relationship enjoyed by most Moslems with their god Allah and the promise of eternal salvation, makes the religion one of the most quixotic to understand and defeat in any war being fought in its name. Unlike a political ideology like Communism and Nazism, no political tracts exist to guide the ideologue but a book called the Koran; a series of utterances supposed to come from Allah himself via the angel Gabriel and from the mouth of the faith’s founder, Mohammed, an illiterate living in the 7th Century after Christ. Such tracts are notoriously contradictory, as is the Christian Bible and most of either, must be taken on faith. Faith in its very nature, is therefore a matter of personal belief and interpretation, so if any ideology exists as such in any such religion, it has no fixed agenda or crystallised version unlike written political tracts like Mein Kampf1 and Das Kapital2. The very contradiction in these religions, has therefore led to a variety of interpretations and indeed fractures and fault lines ranging across the community of believers in Islam and Christianity. The enmity and violence that stems from these differences have caused great violence and schism between the believers in the above to such a degree, that even today in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, Moslem kills Moslem 1 2

Adolf Hitler, German leader 1933-1945. Karl Marx, 19th Century philosopher and thinker, Father of modern Socialism and state intervention. 1

in far greater numbers than those outside the faith. Christianity itself waged war in similar disagreements and European history is pitted with faith wars of great cruelty and only the Age of Reason, the Renaissance and the removal of power from the clerics and secular revolution like the French in 1789, allowed Europe to establish a series of modern nation states free of religious and monarchical control. The monarchies remain in places like Britain, Holland and Spain but these have hardly any authority in the Parliamentary democracies thus established and act instead, rather like the Tribunes of the People in the Roman Republic to protect the modern citizen against the forces of tyranny and despotism. England in particular enjoys a well-established system of constitutional titular monarchy, now under threat from the increasingly totalitarian European Union. Out of this secularity however, arose a new tyranny: one called Socialism. This creed saw the cure for the poverty and distress in an industrial age within Humanity itself. God ceased to be part of the plan for human salvation. This we call Atheism that is by the way, still a religion nevertheless, simply because through it Man became his own master through the control ‘of the means of production’ and hence societal or rather group ownership. The latter in the form of particular groups benefited mostly, usually by being a member of the ruling elite within a single Party controlled state system. Socialism whether international or national is still a form of state sponsored Communism, merely being a question of scale. The results of both in the former Soviet Union and Germany under Hitler were the same: inert wasteful economics, huge monolithic bureaucracies answerable only to themselves, mass poverty, lack of freedom and original thought and oppression of the human condition and worse. Today we have the European Union that is irreligious, Communistic in style and increasingly authoritarian, its heavy hand dampening initiative and economic success much to the concern of its respective populations within the ‘nation-states’ that make it up. These will not be ‘nationstates’ much longer it seems if the ‘EU’ succeeds and does not collapse under its own inert weight. In answer to the first reason stated above, the Arab followers of Mohammed saw the original Islam as a solely Arab religion. Indeed for many years after these tribes erupted from their desert fastnesses, conversion was resisted and those that did accept Islam kept apart from the pure blooded families of Arab descent. The Arab conqueror preferred instead to maintain a racial divide emphasised by his peculiar religion derived from the Prophet. The city-states they took 2

from the Byzantines remained largely in the former owners’ hands, while the Moslem elite lived off the benefits in profits, land and taxation. Likewise, within what was once the Persian Sassanian Empire, Arab elites ruled through compliant natives rather than take a direct interest in governing as the Executive concerned with the minutiae of daily goings on. However with time as Arabs themselves became assimilated in the ways of their subjects in the Near and Middle East, especially in Persia where the strong courtly tradition of poetry, music and song had evolved a rich culture that was one day to reach the West via the Crusades, the pressure to extend the benefits enjoyed by Moslems became unbearable, especially as many in the subjected population deeply resented paying the religious tax or jizya to their conquerors as a mark of their dhimminitude and subjection to superior Islam and therefore under its ‘protection’. By the standards of the time this was not unfair or unreasonable. The conquered were also required to wear different clothes to the Arab elite, not allowed to carry weapons and although permitted to follow their own faiths as ‘Peoples of the Book’, had to obtain permission to build new churches or temples and these, especially the former were not allowed to dominate the mosques standing nearby. However in practice things could go very differently, especially matters concerned with the nature and ways of existence within the Arab elite itself. Arab society was based around tribe and the extended family. The tribe would not only consist of family members such as brother and cousins but individuals or groups that sought protection from the former, in order to survive in a hostile world. These were clients of the tribe and were expected in exchange for tribal protection, to support the same in its struggles with its enemies. Sometimes as was inevitable, these client followings became very large and this in turn led to factionalism as members of the inner circle of family men occasionally fought for supremacy and sought support from the huge following of clientele, so leading to further factionalism and fracture and new power blocs. The clients gained in power at the expense of the ruling family, riven by strife. These in turn demanded a greater share of power and decision making as their power increased, until displacing the original familial power structure and Arabist agenda originally followed by the first Islamic conquerors. This is a process that goes on in all empires. However it was due to the particular structure and nature of Arab society that it made itself 3

felt with such gusto in the Caliphate, that arose in the 700s AD, from the Arab conquests: family rivalries were to be the death knell of any intentions by the elite to foster a pan-Arabist agenda. The powerful mawali clientele wanted to be a major influence within the umma or community of Islam and they achieved this so well, that they largely superseded Arab dominance in the faith to a point that Islam was no longer, simply an Arabist religion and therefore a mark of racial superiority with a racially superior faith. Many in the Islamic world saw an appeal in Marxism, a possible relief for the extremities within their religion. However, they soon discovered like many more sensible people, that Communism does not go well with human nature; being what it is. The Arab-Semitic intellect and psyche is naturally quick and volatile as are many that originate in the East. Considering that civilisation began within the Fertile Crescent and within the Indian sub-continent this is hardly surprising. Recent archaeological discoveries posit an urban origin of as much as 10,000 years ago. Even around the Black Sea, artefacts found of sophisticated structure may be as old and certainly predate the legendary ‘Flood’ in Judaic and Hellenic mythology. However, one has to say that Islam itself has not gone through its ‘Age of Reason’ and its modern ‘Renaissance’ upon the world stage is rather one of unreason. Around the late 1920s the Moslem Brotherhood was formed by Arabist thinkers such as Hassan al-Banna looking for a way to throw off the colonial yoke of European rule and return Islam, to a purer unadulterated form of religion. One of its members was violently anti-British Amin al-Husseini, a close friend and ally of Adolf Hitler who actively aided the Nazi recruitment of Moslem SS men to fight against the Russians and the allies. Although al-Husseini was allowed to return by the British after the defeat of Hitler and ‘forgiven’, the Nazi background remained within his psyche to the point that he still dreamed of an Arab-Islamic dominated world or a reborn Ottoman Empire. Even today Hitler’s Mein Kampf is distributed by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation to its young people. Osama bin Laden is another disciple of the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and AlQuaeda3 doctrine borrows almost chapter and verse from Nazi racial superiority ideology. Indeed the Nazi salute is often given by recruits to the jihad waged against Israel today! The plain truth is that we are 3

‘Al Quaeda’ is not some elite clandestine army though but means simply ‘the base’ or ‘network’

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fighting another form of racist Socialism directly descended and still influenced by Nazism and Hitler. This is the true nature of extremist Islam and if further proof be needed, its hate figures are Jews and indeed all peoples that are not Arabic or at least not Moslem that it regards as untermensch4, or a sub-species of humanity that it is perfectly in order to kill, subdue, abuse and enslave for its grandiose dream of an Islamic lebensraum5 or Greater Global Caliphate that would in effect be Islam’s Greater Reich. It has also been noted that members of extreme groups in Britain and Europe have been attracted to this form of Fascism due to the powerful attraction of its National Socialist style ideology and anti-Semitism. The plain truth is that Wahabism is a religious form of Nazism. Ironically Rightist parties like the BNP6 are fighting this with everything they have and it is not just to gain votes but a genuine concern for the future of their country. One can detest the BNP but they are the only ones that seem to have grasped the threat that we face to our European Civilisation. As one married to a coloured woman one views this with concern. In a recent poll carried out by a respected national pollster, 55-60% of the British subjects that took part in the survey and not being told the anti immigration policies they were being asked to comment on, were standard BNP ideology, supported them. When they were told it was BNP, the support declined rapidly. If matters do not improve one can easily see greatly increased support for the BNP by voters sick of wishy-washy amoral politics riddled with Political Correctness.

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Translated as ‘sub-men’. Ibid ‘Greater place to live’. 6 British Nationalist Party. 5

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Chapter 2 Hitler’s Legacy Nazi Doctrine was based upon the superiority of the Aryan ‘Race’. These ideas that are anathema to us today, saw the human race divided into superior blonde-haired, white supermen and a helotised race of sub-men or untermensch to be enslaved for the service of the superior. This was in a nutshell the very basis of Hitler’s crude ideology, that although it borrowed much from evolutionists like Darwin, corrupted it in such a way that it became something he and his fellow thinkers never intended. Like all such political doctrine, the state replaced God as the progenitor and provider of the masses and the cult of the Great Leader became in effect, the Godhead of the New Order. Marxism is also an Atheist doctrine and is similar in content to National Socialism, in that it seeks to control the people through a state party system led by a Great Leader and one can still see this in modern North Korea, where the latter title is still used. Garish hoardings are to be found everywhere extolling the virtues of the Korean Godfather Kim Jong-il. The difference between the two types of Socialism is one of scale and of course racial supremacy. One seeks to establish a world Marxist state, based upon the support of the ‘oppressed’ masses, seen as ‘victims of Capitalist society’ while the other wishes to establish a socialist national system, based upon the racial superiority of its people. The Left by the way, are actually bigger covert racists than the Nazis, since they like to have racial minorities within their ‘care’ in order to ‘save’ them from their wicked white ‘oppressors’. One knows of several instances where successful decent black men and women have been ignored and regarded as ‘Uncle Toms’, simply for supposedly having sold out to the white ‘racist overlord’. The recent 2007 scandal in the BBC, wherein it refused to transmit the story of brave black British soldier, Private Beharry VC, whose courage saved several manned Warrior armoured vehicles while seriously wounded himself, is a glaring example of this patronising covert racism.

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‘Racism’ actually means to protect one’s own race. Many academics now dispute the idea of ‘race’. There are certainly differences in blood groups, skin colour and types, facial features etc that are familiar characteristics of ‘races’ but even here one must be careful: especially in the light of the latest DNA discoveries in genetic science. The plain truth is that the modern human is a composite mongrel originating from several ‘races’. For example it was estimated that one in ten English people have black ancestors and this is not surprising considering our activities in the abolished slave trade. To be blunt, many a seafarer and soldier far from home, decided to ease his loneliness by taking up and mating with a buxom wench in some far-flung part of the Empire. Indeed if it were not for the fact that humans did not interbreed, the human race would indeed be in a very sorry condition: survival relies on diversity and the ability this gives for the human race to flourish in hostile climates. It is literally all in the genes. Modern conceptions of extremist, either Left or Right of ‘Racism’ are just plain stupid in fact. Hitler came to power in 1933 and immediately started his ‘Aryanisation’ programme to ‘return’ ownership of Germany to its German volk. The subsequent loss of much of the German elite Intelligentsia in medicine, science, academia, film and theatre was a disaster for the country and German universities now riddled with pseudo scientific ‘Aryan’ theory became a laughing stock. A similar process is happening today in British, American and European academic institutions but for opposite reasons, namely to drive out those of Rightist sympathies. Hitler though realised quite quickly, that to have ‘Aryanised’ the German military General Staff would have meant depriving his country of the best it had in military thinkers and strategists. Stalin in Moscow had decimated the Russian Red Army in similar fashion and the result was defeat and retreat. Many German Generals of Jewish antecedents were suddenly found to be good ‘Aryans’. However the idea of a ‘Master Race’ continues to this day. The Leftwing is as we have seen above, covertly racist and still strives to socially engineer the good Socialist Man or Woman. The ideologies of these extremes are in effect, two ends of the same pole. Both are based upon a false premiss of an ideological theory that is not borne out by fact. Both of them seek to ‘improve’ the quality of ‘Society’ through social engineering, either by genetic manipulation or by empowerment of the ‘masses’ through political programs, deliberately constructed so as to change the character of the ‘Society’ under attack. 7

Our own societies are still being attacked by the Left, in order to change the system from within through grand schemes of social engineering and political policies that seek to undermine and do away with the old. Its modern form is a ‘philosophy’ of post Marxist ‘Political Correctness’, a truly Orwellian attempt at imposing change through thought and speech. The trouble is that it does not work but merely stores up problems for the future, as it frustrates the democratic rights and privileges of the very ‘Society’ it seeks to replace. It is fully intended to of course, however human beings have certain innate traits and characteristics that it has taken millions of years to evolve, simply in order to survive. These are Evolutionary paradigms of course and any attempt to interfere is bound to fail, especially if human beings try to enforce their own highly subjective ideological forms of ‘evolutionary’ theory. One simply cannot change human nature through banning thought, word and deed. The proof comes from the history of the individual fighting for survival in a hostile environment: it is therefore, the fully equipped, self-reliant human being that survives best through mating with other humans with ‘good genes’, and so diversifying the DNA pool that will protect his descendants from disease and spread his ‘type’ in competition with other ‘types’, with similar strong genetic characteristics, to produce a stronger and better adapted human being. As we have seen, social engineering schemes reliant upon clap-trap political theories of ‘race’ and ‘empowerment of the masses’, are just so much patent rubbish. It is also why democracy has been so utterly successful, since it encourages the individual to co-operate with others of like-minded enlightened self interest to the benefit of all in Society: strong men and women of high moral intent and free thinkers striving towards a better world. This is no dew-eyed theory either as the unbounded success of the United States and even little Switzerland, has shown abundantly. This does not mean to say that we should all open up our nationstates to mass illegal uncontrolled migration either. The deliberate attempt to deconstruct the nation-state through such means, as the European and American elites have been craftily doing, is nothing short of the politics of insanity: this process is rightfully resented by the populations of those countries affected by this evil. A nation-state is far more than just the plaything of a corrupt wealthy elite and its rather flaky theories. The nation State has successfully contained

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within its borders whole peoples with a common culture and ‘racial’ identity. Most of those in the West at least, have strongly democratic ideals and traditions until spitefully attacked by somewhat demonic bodies such as the European Union, intent on abolishing the former for some grandiose abstraction of a United States of Europe, increasingly unanswerable to its populations within the former states and in the end bound to fail simply by being too large and unwieldy to control and utterly inhuman in scale. Far from preventing war, the civil conflagrations that now threaten to erupt should it continue on its crazed path will be bloody indeed and far more so than the two world wars of the previous century. No Hitler’s legacy, like that of Napoleon before him has much to answer for. Mass migration and ridiculous false guilt by our modern elites over the atrocities of the Holocaust, have led to our current impasse. Into this maelstrom a radical violently racist religion enters and the full consequences of the Fuhrer’s legacy come to fruition: a religious and ideological racism and superiority complex, that as we have seen above is a direct descendent of Nazi theory and practices. Instead of a uniformed jack-booted Great Leader we have a god that demands like the Fuhrer, that all must submit to the will of his people and their demands for lebensraum and also covert to his creed or die. The new untermensch are those that do not believe and resist, the new sub-men to be enslaved by this superior racialist-religion are women, Jews, blacks, homosexuals and of course the white populations of Europe and America one has to understand clearly that Al Quaeda, has a strongly racist pan-Arab agenda that regards even non-Arab Moslems as somehow inferior to Arabians. This is not always declared openly of course but it has always been so in practice over the thousand or so years of Islam’s existence. If modern proof be needed, then look no further than the dreadful ethnic cleansing of Negro inhabitants and tribes in Sudan’s province of Dafur by the Janjaweed composed of black and afro-Arabians. The Janjaweed regard themselves as racially apart from the black Christian elements in their society. In short the Arab has always regarded himself as distinct from his fellow humans. The Arab as we have seen is desperately proud of his lineage, as is evidenced by his attempts to keep Islam a purely Arab religion at the beginning of the Caliphate after Mohammed’s death. 9

Modern Arab speaking tribes in Dafur may not be racially pure in the sense that Hitlerian theories posited but they certainly see themselves as a distinct ‘race’ with a distinct ‘Arab’ religion and language, supported by ideas similar in practice to the Nazis. There is also the question of Atheism within extremist Islam. The denial of God after all in such an ideology or religion is a form of Atheism as we shall see in the next chapter. Their ‘God’ maybe called Allah but the latter has more in keeping with the Fuhrer concept or worship of a man and his idea rather than a faith. Adolf Hitler was seen as a ‘God’ by many and indeed Himmler sought to substitute Mein Kampf for the Christian Bible. One cites as further evidence the practical deification of the Prophet himself, a practice that he would have been horrified by if we read the Koran correctly. However we shall finish this chapter with the Nazi architect and War Minister, Albert Speer’s description of Hitler’s attitude to the Moslems speak for themselves, ‘Hitler had been much impressed by a scrap of history he had learned from a delegation of distinguished Arabs. When the Mohammedans attempted to penetrate beyond France into Central Europe during the eighth century, his visitors had told him, they had been driven back at the Battle of Tours. Had the Arabs won this battle, the world would be Mohammedan today. For theirs was a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to that faith. The Germanic peoples would have become heirs to the religion. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament. Hitler said that the conquering Arabs, because of their racial inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with the harsher climate and conditions of the country. They could not have kept down the more vigorous natives, so that ultimately not Arabs but Islamized Germans could have stood at the head of this Mohammedan Empire.7’

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Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, Chap 7, p96, Obersalzberg. Trans: Richard and Clara Winston, Macmillan Company, New York, 1970. 10

Chapter 3 Koranism To be an Atheist according to The Pocket Oxford Dictionary is to deny the existence of God or any divine power. Kant, perhaps the most difficult and complex thinker to exist, even understand, thought that God was simply beyond the capacity of man’s mind. All he could suggest was that God was a Necessity that we could only infer from our limited experience of Reality as a manifold unified whole. We simply cannot prove God’s existence either way but simply identify the absolute need of God from which to posit our own existence within our own limited perceptions of Reality, that was actually a Unity without limit. It was in this latter, that the absolute Necessity of God existed. The standard philosophical proof of God’s existence is. ‘For God to exist, He must be greater than anything of which we can conceive. Since He is greater than anything of which we can conceive, He therefore exists! If He were not greater than anything of which we can conceive, He would not therefore be God and would not exist! However, since He is the greater than anything of which we can conceive, He is God and He exists!’ In other words Kant is right, God exists as a Necessity even if Kant himself, would perhaps have regarded the above statement as a tautology. Put simply, those people in Christianity and Islam that state, that they are doing God’s Will are actually denying His omnipotence. This surely is a form of Atheism, since we are reducing the Unity of Unlimited Reality called God to a limited human condition, rather than the unconditioned state of Being understood by Kant? By reducing God the Eternal Unity of Unlimited, Unconditional Reality to a human level, it is placing a limited experience and interpretation on a limitless Being and is therefore a subjective experience of God, a Being that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of? What one is trying to convey, is that such claims to be doing the ‘Will of God’ are false, in that they place limitations upon the Supreme Omnipotence of a Being that may or may not exist and whose Beingedness is predicated upon a Necessity that can only be inferred, not proven! By so reducing God to our limited terms of reality and existence, we are denying Him omnipotence and Unconditional Reality. The God 11

we create from such limited human subjectivity, is a god of our own limited concepts of creation and therefore unreal due to the philosophical theorems explained above. They are also blasphemous. Now one has thought long and hard and perhaps neologisms should be brought into play here. We shall call these ‘Biblism’ for Christians and ‘Koranism’ for Moslems. These two words will be utilised to described the activities of those above that believe they are doing the ‘Will of God’. This argument is similar in meaning to the one about Churchiality and Christianity: that merely going to Church every Sunday does not make one a good Christian. However it is ‘Koranism’ that interests us here in the philosophical arguments we are about to express below. We shall now define ‘Koranism’: A state of mind that takes the Koran literally as the ‘Word of God’ in spite of contradictions and corrupted transmissions down the ages. The Koran began life as an oral tradition and these historically are notoriously difficult to maintain in their exactitude, with personal interpretations and anecdotes handed down by the teller from generation to generation. The Moslems always say the Koran is uncorrupted: this is utter nonsense! As one Academic wrote so well in respect of oral tradition, in this case that of classical Athens, ‘At what stage does ‘‘oral history’’ become ‘‘oral tradition’’? How many generations does it take and how do we deal with intervening stages of transmission between personal reminiscences (which comprise oral history) and the oral tradition of Henige’s8 definition? His definition also neglects the type of ‘‘oral tradition’’ which is known and carefully transmitted by a narrow esoteric group but not known by the rest of society. What about family tradition itself? The simple transmission of personal reminiscences to the next generation (and then the next) causes havoc to these categories……..The very process of recall involves a certain degree of re-forming or re-structuring of the ‘‘original’’ memory. Psychologists of the mnemonic code by which our memories store information. Every memory is ‘‘encoded’’, as it were: we retrieve it via certain cues, by means of scanning….. When we recall something, the process of recall may involve further elaboration or structuring…. Personal reminiscences are not all passed on, but edited more or less severely according to the speakers intentions in telling them. For

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D.P. Henige (1974), The Chronology of Oral Tradition, Quest for a Chimera, Oxford. Esoteric group like the Moslems? Author’s note. 12

instance, a person may want to present his life in a manner other people will admire.9 Mohammed was illiterate and his first converts were his own family. His transmission of what was to become the Koran, was therefore oral until later written down by his followers and not finally in its ‘finalised’, permanent form until some years after his death. A board of scholars appears to have been assembled to produce a definitive version by the Caliph Uthman 644-56AD. Apart from the problems we have discussed above, historical context is vitally important here. When Mohammed founded the religion, the Arabian Peninsula was a chaotic scene and disunited with blood feud and intertribal strife. The appearance of a ‘Prophet’ with a new monotheistic faith was bound to be a powerful weapon in any attempted unification of these warring peoples. The Roman Emperor Constantine saw the value of Christianity, the other monotheistic faith that unified a struggling empire and assured its survival for a few centuries more. The Koran borrows heavily from the Jewish and Christian teachings around at the time. The Jews actually rejected Mohammed and so did the Christians that he admired as well. The problem for both is that Mohammed misunderstood them in some matters, especially that he thought the Holy Trinity10 as worship of a triple godhead and he also is said to have misconstrued the high honour given to Mary, Mother of Jesus by Christians as worship of a goddess. These misinterpretations remain with us today among the more ignorant of Islam’s followers. Moslem’s also display great arrogance in the belief that Islam ‘predated’ Judaism and Christianity, and that Jesus and Abraham were ‘good Moslems without knowing it’. This is like somebody plagiarising a doctoral thesis and then attacking the original, genuine author for the crime of copying his own work. Many Christians and Jews deeply resent this attitude among Moslems. The faith itself feeds upon the individual’s inferiority and group collective ‘superiority’ enforced by numbers. The Marxist Left utilises the same methodology to coerce compliance, hence the empathy between Islam and libertarian elites in Europe and America. Both also use the weapon of 9

Dr. Rosalind Thomas, Introduction, pp 11-13, Oral Tradition and Written record in Classical Athens, Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture, Cambridge University Press, 1989. 10 Koran IV, Women, 165. 13

denial, violence and abuse to ensure cohesion among their ‘flock’ as well. It also aids the cause that both Left and Moslems seem incapable of admitting the truth to themselves or others. Both share and exploit the ‘victim hood of society’ scenario: or to put it another way, ‘It is everybody else’s fault but mine!’ The gunman who wiped out 32 lives in Virginia recently blamed everybody else but his own acute feelings of inadequacy. The Moslems that attacked the Twin Towers in New York blamed American Society, rather than the real cause of their grievances; their religion and Moslem totalitarianism in their own lands and refusal to do anything about it, except bite the hand that feeds most Moslem regimes in the Middle East, namely American dollars, without which these spoilt brats and offspring of oil wealthy plutocrats would have still been pushing goats and camels in the Arabian deserts. American influence has made these lands what they are today and far from encouraging Moslem ‘dishonour’, kept in check much of the extreme forms of Islamic rule. The task of a scholar is to be a searcher for truth. A good scholar must not be fearful of it either or of speaking it. A scholar must also be impartial. The recent fiasco over the Danish cartoons has intimidated many in the West for fear of ‘offending’ Islam. Once we go there, scholarship is lost and dogma and ideology take over. That is simply not acceptable in any time or place. Context is also very important and the writing and statements ostensibly from ‘God’ must be placed within their historical and political context. Both the Bible and the Koran are political and history books and must be examined in that frame of thought. Once a reader applies sections of these outside these contexts they become corrupted and dogmatic, even if they do appear to be saying something about the present. For example, the Book of Daniel was written some 300 years after the events it was supposed to describe, as a political example to the Jews of the day in which it was written. Again to apply the Koran to interpret modern events is wrong as these too applied to a time, long since passed. The Prophet Mohammed appears to have been a decent man and with honour. Heavens knows what he would have made of the current extremist attacks that have killed thousands around the globe today. He would have been horrified! Jesus too, seeing the atrocities carried out in His name would have been appalled as well! These activities are based upon dogma and false ideology, taken out of historical political context in which they have been originally placed in the Bible or Koran. It is therefore a dangerous practice to apply literal interpretations of ancient texts to modern events. The butchery of the 14

Crusades appals many Christians today that see the Bible in a very different light to those that stormed the Holy Land in the 1200s AD. Likewise, many decent Moslems today are horrified at what is being done in the name of their religion. This author has observed the indoctrination of young minds in Islamic schools first hand and the repeated mantras of those unprepared minds, corrupted without the scholarly discipline necessary to counteract misinterpretation and falsehood. Even, Biblical indoctrination is dangerous without the guiding hand of a scholar to point the way to correct understanding. One is reliably informed by a Christian theologian at King’s College London, that in his first year as a student, he and his class were made to translate pagan Plato from Greek before being let loose on Christian texts, simply in order to allow them a measure of detachment and to develop a good scholarly ability to remain so. This was not the case in respect of the Islamic scholars I witnessed learning the Koran by heart, without the much-needed censure of scholarly guidance by an elder. This is what one refers to as ‘Koranism’ or the blind acceptance without question and sceptical, scholarly detachment and discipline of the contents of the above. This way is ‘brainwashing’ and indoctrination and I believe that this has led us to the terrible situation we face today with militant Islam. The Nazis too allowed themselves to be indoctrinated in similar fashion and an absolutely illogical hatred of Jews as well, just like that found in extremist Islam. One can also see similar problems with ‘Born Again’ Christians and their literal interpretation of the Bible without questions asked and good erudite dispassionate scholarship. This one can call ‘Biblism’. The latter ‘doctrine’ too has killed millions over the centuries. As a Christian one is none too proud. However ‘Born Again’ Christians do not murder millions in the name of their god anymore, nor does ‘Biblism’, unlike ‘Koranism’ that does, as is evidenced in the atrocities in New York, London and Madrid.

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Chapter 4 God is not ideology Koranists and Biblists create their own human version of ‘God’. They extract literalism from the texts, irrespective of political, historical or archaeological context. Years ago an academic colleague of mine was driven to suicide, simply for questioning a priest’s obsession with the Dead Sea Scrolls. This Abbot ran the excavation at Qumran and insisted that a proto-Christian Sect had lived at the site writing these scrolls. The colleague had realised this was not the case and that what they were dealing with, was actually one of many sites the Jewish authorities used to store the Temple records when they had a row with their Roman occupiers. This had happened, a number of times in the past and the documents were recollected when they made up with the Romans again. These scrolls were finally left in situe after the final Bar Kokhba Revolt of 132AD, when the Jews were finally kicked out of Palestine. The Roman garrison placed on the site, had ‘kindly’ stored the documents it seems, so preserving them for Archaeology and the 20th Century scholars that were to translate them. The ideologue priest sacked my colleague, pilloried him in the press and on TV and drove him into a nervous breakdown, out of work and eventual suicide, just so this ‘Christian’ obsessive could have it his way. This is the price of ideology at any price: is a man’s life worth that? And were the 3,000 in New York or the 6,000,000 Jews in Nazi Europe worth an ideology and its sick obsessions? The human mind as we have seen has limitations. Reality though, has no limitations if we are to believe Kant. Limited human Reality is therefore perhaps no reality at all, simply because our construction of Reality is limited to our own version of it via our own experiences, thoughts and prejudices. How else can it be? We are only Human after all. Human Reality may indeed be Relative to another Human Being but the Ultimacy of Truth most certainly is not. Relativism has its uses but it is severely limited as an expression of Truth. Those scoundrels that hide behind it are merely betraying the limitations of their own humanity and prejudiced unwillingness to face cold hard fact. They are like children and naughty children can be very spiteful and cruel.

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We have advanced much in technological and scientific discovery since the days of Kant. I believe that it is possible to look at God in a different way based upon those discoveries. For example we appear to live in a Multiverse rather than a Universe: thousands of them! How does one get one’s mind round that one? The further we advance in knowledge, the more life seems to become a mystery of Unlimited Reality that threatens our own perceptions, within our own limited realities. We need God more than ever to reassure our ignorant timid minds: the Reality of Omniscience and Omnipotence of Love that is the Limitless One True God: a Being so incredible that we simply cannot possibly conceive of Him or his wishes, although from time to time he may give a hint of what He expects of us. Is that not better than any of the above self-made little gods described above? It will also preserve peace and give faith back its respectability! It is simply unacceptable for extremely limited perceptions of ‘God’ to be utilised for narrow political causes and murder of innocents through warped selfish, ignorant and woefully inadequate ideology that have more to do with complexes of power and megalomania, than the Ultimate Truth. The divide between these evil corruptions of God’s love and meaning, is a vast chasm but if Islam is to regain its respectability and indeed its honour as a world religion, rather than representative of mayhem and savagery of a totalitarian racist ideology determined to dominate the globe, it and its followers must do away with those among them that pervert the message of the Prophet and founder. They must cross that Divide and enter into an Islamic Age of Reason and Enlightenment like that of Europe in the 18th century. Islamic thinkers nearly got there in the period of 800 to 1200AD but were often subjected to persecution, even death. Like I said, I am shamed by the activities of some of my Christian ancestors that acted similarly to Moslem extremists today. These Christians likewise perverted the loving sacrifice and message of Christ to suit their own egos. Many innocents died to suit their Church megalomania and coercion to conform to Church doctrine. It was the major reason for the foundation of the Church of England for example in my own land and the foundation of the United States of America and the Age of Reason itself. Without an Islamic Age of Reason, that faith will remain in the Dark Ages and bring suffering to the human beings of its own faith and those, its lunatic fringe seek to dominate. We simply cannot and will not allow this…. God Bless! 17

Guy Leven-Torres 21st April 2007

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