No Murtads in Malaysia

Malaysia Today via Pedestrian Infidel:

MALAYSIAN police said yesterday they have arrested a woman who had allegedly used SMS messages to spread false information about the baptism of Muslim Malays as Christians.

Uh-oh.

Some 1,000 Muslim Malays protested outside a Catholic church where the conversions were expected to take place.

However, the crowd dispersed after learning that the ceremony was actually for about 100 ethnic Indian Catholics who were receiving their first Communion.

Nobody died this time.

Religious conversion is a thorny subject in majority-Muslim Malaysia, where Muslims are not allowed to convert.

Proselytising of Muslims by other faiths is also prohibited.

Islam is oh-so-fragile.

Comments

[Josh Scholar]

I thought you'd be amused by this

Notice the sentence: "Earlier this year, a group of well-known progressive Muslims such as the novelist Salman Rusdhdie, Toronto's Irshad Manji and the Netherlands' Hirsi Ali authored a widely-distributed summation that described Islamism as "a new totalitarian global threat...a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man's domination of woman, the Islamists' domination of all the others."

The amusing thing being that murtads, Salman Rusdhdie and Hirsi Ali were called "moderate Muslims". Proof that the rest of the world is so ignorant of how Muslims attack those who would leave, change or critisize Islam. It's just a foreign concept to the rest of us.

You can be an atheist and still be a Jew, you know.

[Isaac Schrödinger]

That is interesting. I have been baffled by the "progressive" or "moderate" label when it comes to describing Hirsi Ali--she's an explicit apostate or a non-Muslim.

I think more fundamentally most Westerners can't really comprehend the nature of a religion like Islam. A frustrating experience is that I always see many people talk about the financial status of Muslims. "If only these folks had a good living, then terrorism would cease!"

No, it wouldn't! Look at Osama. The guy could have been a playboy and lived a life of luxury. Instead, he wages war against us.

They offer mayhem because Allah and the Prophet of Doom command them to.

Why is it so hard to see that?

[Josh Scholar]

Why is it so hard to see that?

Many reasons. One, people tend to learn overly simplified rules from history unless they've been explicitly taught something more intelligent.

So what we've learned from the civil rights movement is not to always oppose intolerence, but rather that we should never critisize anyone different than ourselves.

Two. Rather than having a sophisticated approach to other cultures based on the assumption of common humanity - which would imply that every social ill we've ever faced in the past could exist in spades in any other culture, such as religious intolerence, sectarian hatred, class based oppression, xenophobia etc. rather we simply made the simple minded assumption that all cultures are essencially exactly like our own, right now.

Both of these come from the simple assumption, anyone who critisizes anyone different from himself must be an insane bigot, who ought to be ignored if not shut up!

Three, even when people DO see that such assumptions are failing, they can't admit it, because our brand new taboos against bigotry scare them. If they speak up and are critical they will be called bigots, and thus tainted and their social and career standings harmed.

Four is what should be called "moral inertia." People resist seeing a major social wrong because admitting it's existence would challenge them to address it. People don't want to address this one because it would be very HARD to address, and they don't want to admit the moral failing of ignoring a major wrong, so it's easier to deny its existence.

Related to that is the fact that we in the west have our hierachy of fears, and having been through such horrors as the civil war, WWI, WWII, (and to a lesser extent) Korea and vietnam, we are still much more afraid of what we are like when we're angry than we are of what unimportant, barely unarmed, poor, ignorant nobodies across an ocean can do. So the majority of our media people are still trying awfully hard to hide everything Muslims do that might make the public angry. Remember the Holocaust when you wonder what sort of behavior a full scale jihad will inspire in the Europeans. Peter Lorry said "you wouldn't like me when I'm angry."

The American public is more right wing and excitable than the college educated media class. America has the ability to end all life in group of countries in less than a day without sending a single soldier. So it's easy to be more freightened of the American public (and what they might demand) than of any terrorist or enemy.

Now I think the American public, religious and excitable as it may be is much better than liberals think it is. It got over prejudice just as much (no more no less) than the educated, liberal elite did, after all.

Also, there's another factor. Americans these days, are unbelievably overworked. Our economy is a horror, and no one has TIME to learn anything new, such as what's going on in the middle east.

Similarly, the news media itself has become, over the last 20 years, so badly underfunded that it's little better quality than tabloid now. So reporters and editors don't have the time or the will to learn anything new, such as what's really going on in the middle east.

[Josh Scholar]

One more point, it takes a long time and a lot of effort to get your head around another culture. But our opinions are based on a media that has to come to an instant, easy to understand and shallow conclusion that they can all agree on (and thus protect their reputations).

So we starting off wobbly on this.

It's going to take a generation to get our heads around this... Unless the internet speeds up the dissemination of real information enough. Hell, I would have said two generations otherwise.

After all it took a generation for the public to notice environmental problems, and that first partial generation overreacted badly. So that took two generations to digest.

Another problem is that Muslim cultures are so hostile that it's awfully depressing to sane people.

So most of the people who are attracted to learning about Muslim cultures are a bit unbalanced. They may be crazy people who are attracted to the hostility (say Juan Cole), they Islamists pretending to be on our side, some are xenophobes and racists. Not to say that every one of those people do a bad job. You can do a good job for bad reasons, but once again, this means we're off to a rocky start.

[Josh Scholar]

One correction to my original post. I spoke of the civil rights movement which was an American thing. Obviously there are similar trends in the rest of the west, for different reasons.

[Isaac Schrödinger]

Mere words won't wake up most of the American public. Only another horrible event (or possibly events) will rudely teach America that another culture wishes for her to end.

[Josh Scholar]

Give it 10 to 15 years. The next gen of kids will get it.

[Josh Scholar]

It might be a good idea, if mostly a waste of your time, to go back to that site and set them straight about Hirshi Ali and Rushdie being murtads. You could do it better than I could. Point them to your article.