Karnal wrote on Jun 11^th, 2014 at 9:55pm:


I encouraged you to start a new thread to discuss it Karnal. I have in this thread (previous page I think) criticised both Gandalf and Abu for misrepresenting Islam to make it appear consistent with western liberal morals. Yadda, sprint, etc are quite open about their views. You will not see either of them doing the peculiar tapdance that Gandalf has in this thread.

Be my guest. Prove me wrong. But don't expect me to do it for you out of some deluded sense of fairness.

Karnal wrote on Jun 12^th, 2014 at 1:41am:


So - What do you like about Islam, PB? What has it given you that made you a better PB; made your life and the the lives of others around you better?


Or would you defend anything and everything just because it is disliked by people you dislike?
What's your thinking (if that's the word)?

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When they spend thread after thread trying to avoid the topic, it is tapdancing. This is not my first attempt to figure out where Gandalf is coming from, and this particular thread has certainly been an eye-opener. When they try to argue that Muhammed calling for the execution of homosexuals fits in with western liberal morals, that is spinning BS. It has been clear for some time that there is something "special" in the way Gandalf interprets Islam, and it was his efforts to avoid shedding any light on that that brought out the allusions to tapdancing.

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When they quote tracts from the Koran that clearly support that position, I agree that it is a genuine reflection of Islam. That doesn't mean I support the position.

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He is. I have put a lot of effort into getting him to reveal them. Thinking they are stupid is not the same as thinking he is not entitled to his opinions.

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So they are just lucky that they are Muslims?

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I think you are projecting your own methodology onto them. I see more parallels with Falah here. He argued that the people he disagreed with were obviously deliberately lying, which justified his own deliberate lies. Obviously it is not a clear-cut case of people downloading their opinions from the Koran, but what you do is the opposite extreme. The reason these backwards views survive when the rest of the world moves on is because of the legitimacy given to them by Islam. Your efforts at reinterpretation are not going to change that.

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That is how I interpreted Muhammed's call to execute homosexuals. Saying nasty things about the immodesty of homosexuals is kind of moot compared to stoning them to death.

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What is your view on the Islamic dress code? Perhaps you can reinterpret a comment from Muhammed to derive support for nudism? Perhaps Muhammed actually intended to ban clothing? Stay tuned for another episode of "Gandslam, the real truth about Islam".

Soren wrote on Jun 12^th, 2014 at 12:00pm:


Dislike? But, dear boy, I like everyone!

We all have a contribution to make - this is how knowledge and ideas grow and spread. Knowledge is quite secular that way.

What I like about Islam is the idea of jihad, a spiritual struggle with your own faults. I also like the rule about giving alms to the poor. The idea of submission to the Almighty is also interesting to me, although it's not really my path. There are a few others, but essentially, these are the "core tenets" of Islam.

I have no real interest in Islam - unlike you and FD. My interest is in the particularly modern phenomenon of deliberate ignorance - what John Ralston-Saul calls the Unconscious Civilization; a process that, for Alain de Botton, renders us "truly shallow and irresponsible" citizens.

For de Botton, we've given up seeing the world around us and making our judgments of reality based on our observations. Instead, we trawl through our UK Daily Mail articles and our Jihadwatch sites, and this is meant to tell us what's happening in our very own neighbourhoods and lives.

For most here, Islam is so far from their own lives it is completely irrelevant to them. And yet, they blame it for all their problems.

What's worse is they pretend to know something about it - Islamic jurisprudence, ethics, textual interpretation, relationships and culture. They pretend to know what's going on in distant civil wars and complex social/political issues. These issues are dumbed-down, misinterpreted and deliberately misconstrued - each and every time.

But crucially, this process of willful ignorance is held up as a virtue. If anyone questions this process, they're a PB, an appeaser, a spineless apologist, a pretend Muslim.

This process, of course, is not just the work of Islam board posters. The recent debate on Muslim child marriage in Sydney quoted the Community Services Minister, Pru Goward. If you question the information Pru Goward provided, as any Community Services caseworker would be required to do in an investigation, you're seen as standing up for Islam and/or approving of paedophilia.

This is the dearth of the Enlightenment  - of every value that underpins Western civilization - of every value we believe separates us from the Muselman. It's groupthink, tribalism and supersticion on a grand scale, and when we seek out the source of many of the rumoured "truths", we find them to be deliberately fabricated lies.

What's worse is that exposing these lies is seen as foul play. We should have lies if they help in the smear campaign. Even when the lies are exposed - and Bolt has been found guilty of this many times - the lies are systematically repeated in the hope that they'll become truths.

This is not a Muslim issue, it's a question of ideology. It's not a defence of Islam, it's a defence of facts. People have given up observing what they see and regressed to an almost trance-like state, propagated and sustained by foreign media, the new opiate of the masses.

The Godfathers of the Enlightenment have been forgotten. Descartes, Locke, Voltaire - all cast aside in a modern tribal attack on a non-existant enemy.

If that's the word, that's my thinking.

Soren wrote on Jun 12^th, 2014 at 1:25pm:


What's that, dear boy?

polite_gandalf wrote on Jun 12^th, 2014 at 1:41pm:


The post-2007 FD has been calling for Muslims to challenge the fanatics since he changed from the 2007 FD.

When you do, he disagrees with you.

The post-2007 FD has been arguing for Muslims to come into line with Western values for years.

When you do, he disagrees.

The post-2007 FD advocated Freeedom, self-determination and demokracy in Muslim countries.

When the Arab Spring happened - silence.

The more you agree with FD, the more he'll find fault with you. The more the world changes, the more FD will fortify his position.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Always, absolutely, never ever.

It is an FD world, no?

BlindFreddy wrote on Jun 12^th, 2014 at 2:00pm:




For some bizarre reason I'm thinking of a mattywisk sock...