We regret to inform you that KPFA has canceled our event with Richard Dawkins. We had booked this event based entirely on his excellent new book on science, when we didn’t know he had offended and hurt – in his tweets and other comments on Islam, so many people.
Creeping sharia/soft jihad
Someone, I forget who, once likened Canada to a hotel where one can come and go as one pleases. Who, however, will fight for Motel 6?
“We had booked this event based entirely on his excellent new book on science, when we didn’t know he had offended and hurt – in his tweets and other comments on Islam, so many people.”
“We booked this event based entirely on his excellent new book on science – before we knew he had offended and hurt so many people in his tweets and other comments on Islam”
You’re welcome.
islam is evil and should be wiped from the face of the earth. any religion that says unbelievers have to be killed must be shut down forever.
What now passes as modern liberalism in all its many manifestations can be distilled down to one word – ANTI-CHRISTIAN. The more anti-Christian the belief is the more it is protected and vaunted by the liberals.
I still haven’t found any rational, convincing arguments about how progressives got owned by Islam,the most repressive religion on the planet. How can you call yourself an atheist or a progressive and not target a religion that controls and brutalized women, murders gays, persecutes atheists and prohibits pretty much all forms of entertainment and personal choice. Islam is the poster boy for everything that’s wrong with religion. Crazy amount a mental contortions needed by progressive atheists to cover over the hypocrisy, double standards and intellectual inconsistencies by supporting Islam but despising all things associated with Christians/Christianity. Being atheist and not critisizing Islam is like claiming to be anti-racist but insisting that any crtique of the Klan is offensive and strictly off-limits.
As recently as 2012 atheists in Australia were still able to heckle Islamists. Now they’d likely be charged with a hate crime for even mildly mocking them.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5RlhqUFuGpg
I still haven’t found any rational, convincing arguments about how progressives got owned by Islam,the most repressive religion on the planet.
The reason can be summed up with two dates: November 9, 1989 and December 25, 1991. The former was when die Mauer was opened and Berlin ceased to be a divided city, thereby ending communism. That was encouraged, in part, by the events of June 4, 1989 which showed yet again the true face of that ideology.
The second date I mentioned was the day Mikhail Gorbachev formally dissolved the Soviet Union and the source of that communism ceased to exist. The attempted coup earlier that year showed that the country’s days were numbered.
Communists have been smarting about the collapse of that morally bankrupt system ever since and have worked tirelessly to restore it. Islam is merely a means by which they hope to accomplish that.
Leftard atheist twat gets what other leftard twats mandate for him. Seems fair.
For me, the key question paragraph that Steyn asks is, “Many of us, including presumably Richard Dawkins, are puzzled why all over the developed world there are so few takers to “fight for freedom”: Certainly the list of those prepared to champion the cause of free speech and protest assaults on it – from Berkeley to Berlin to Brisbane – is short, and those prepared to subordinate free speech to the needs of identity politics grows ever longer.”
I would suggest that the Friedrich Nietzsche philosophy has so penetrated our society and its institutions that our will to survive has been sapped.
“Crazy amount a mental contortions needed by progressive atheists to cover over the hypocrisy, double standards and intellectual inconsistencies by supporting Islam but despising all things associated with Christians/Christianity.”
There is another factor at play here. Simply put, it is good old-fashioned fear. Christianity is a soft, safe target. But a good number of the adherents of Islam tend to be – shall we say? – somewhat more muscular in its defence.
Poke fun at the tenets of the Catholic Church or the beliefs of those Evangelicals and what’s likely to happen to you? Potential outcome: not much. But now ridicule Islam. Potential outcome: violence against your person, up to and including death.
There is one upside to this: the sneering artists who put crucifixes in urine or stick elephant dung on pictures of the Virgin Mary can be completely ignored. They’re all insufferable poseurs. And those foul-mouthed “out there” comedians who send up the Bible Belt and Mormons*? Forget ’em; so-called “cutting edge” comedy is quite dead, and has been for a while.
In fact – love him or hate him – Bill Maher is just about the only TV personality prepared to openly criticize Islam these days.
* Speaking of which, don’t expect to see a Broadway musical about the Quran along the lines of “The Book of Mormon” anytime soon.
The leftard calculus (like leftards themselves) is simple. Leftards hate the US, therefore they also hate Israel, which is America’s friend, and, by the same “logic”, since Islam hates Israel and the US, that means that Islam is the left’s friend. That’s pretty much all there is to it. Of course, the left’s long antipathy to Joos is just icing on the cake for all this.
Ok but that still doesn’t make any sense since the religion that progressives have deemed sacred would target progressives as much, if not more, than capitalists. In the extreme cases, Islamic terrorist attacks, the violence is random but victims are usually residents of politically progressive cities or targeted at other progressive groups like the gay nightclub in Orlando. Even the anti-muslim backlash (hoaxes and real) are mainly in progressive enclaves like universities and big cities. If indeed progressives have a game plan it’s not working well unless bringing back blasphemy laws is considered a success…until it is inevitably used against progressive politics and ideology. This will turn out to be a pyrrhic victory, at best.
*
And a California Imam… prayed to Allah to “liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque
from the filth of the Jews” and to “annihilate them down to the very
last one.”
*
I agree that fear prevents progressives from criticizing Islam but it doesn’t explain the defense and support of such an extreme religion. If, as argued, it’s simply to hurt non progressives at the expenses of betraying every other ideal progressives say the care deeply then I find that to be an insufficient explanation. Surely, there has to be something more rational. I tend to be cynical about politics and religion but even the worst dystopian fiction writer would reject this as a plausible scenario.
“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”
Attributed to, among others, Winston Churchill.
I agree that fear prevents progressives from criticizing Islam but it doesn’t explain the defense and support of such an extreme religion. If, as argued, it’s simply to hurt non progressives at the expenses of betraying every other ideal progressives say the care deeply then I find that to be an insufficient explanation. Surely, there has to be something more rational. I tend to be cynical about politics and religion but even the worst dystopian fiction writer would reject this as a plausible scenario.
You seem to assume leftists are thinking rationally…
In fact, leftists are driven more by irrational hate than anything else.
Yes, Jews will most certainly be negatively affected too. The list of people, religions, ideologies that Islam can peacefully coexist with is short. Generally I avoid the issue because anytime the subject of Jews or Israel is mentioned, all kinds of crazy people crawl out from under their rocks and focus solely on that topic.
Islam has many of the characteristics that communists cherish.
Both enslave the masses.
Both actively and brutally eliminate opposition of any kind.
Both set themselves up as the sole authority in their respective realms (after all, under communism, there was “the Party”).
Both are ideologies of conquest and indoctrination.
Both are dedicated to the destruction of western civilization.
What is this cognizant dissonance between dedicated partisans and religious belief? NEWS FLASH… not all libtards are atheists, in fact a great many are Christian, and not all Conservatives are Christian either, many like myself are atheist, agnostic, etc.. For example, I haven’t seen any local atheist groups sponsor Syrian refugees in our community, but it is indeed two local Christian groups that helped import even more of these peace-loving Muslims into our midst.
I have never ever heard Dawkins say that he hates Christians, but he does have much contempt for religious institutions. His specific criticisms of the Catholic Church itself are damned well deserved and justified.
Also, never forget, the likes of Hawkins, Maher or Harris, no matter how much you hate their beliefs, have done more to warn westerners of the evils of Islam than ANY chickenshit Republican before Trump. To my mind, their otherwise apparent collective buy-in to the rest of the left’s narrative is a primo example of the intense power of group-think.
Bill Maher finds the homosexual alliance with the Islamist the most puzzling development of all.
What else but self-loathing would produce such a response to something so antithetical to your very survival? Are gays as comfortable and proud in their own skin as they claim to be?
Don’t pick sides. Watch the train wreck. This is the left eating its own.
I can assure you that Communist-radio KPFA of Berkeley (along with the Communist Administration of UC Berkeley) would NEVER, EVER, consider Dawkins HATE statements about the Catholic Church … to be “hurtful” … because his “important book about science” is as important as Galileo’s work against the “superstitious” Catholic Church. Hey! Did we forget to remind you that Islam “invented” ZERO !?
“Both are dedicated to the destruction of western civilization.”
That’s it in a nutshell.
Dawkins mistake was to not realize that he lives in a politically correct society, and in that society there is a hierarchy of political correctness.
Our successful, abundant western capitalist society that the left loathes grew out of our former Christianity-based society and thus as they seek to destroy what we have accomplished, they also seek to punish its originators and ensure that Christianity can never produce such a society again.
So Christianity is on the very bottom of the politically correct hierarchy, and the biggest enemy of western civilization and of Christianity (Islam) is at the absolute top and protected from any and all criticism.
For decades Dawkins has bean lauded for his denigration of Christianity, and it seems that he didn’t really understand that it wasn’t (as he thought) because his comments were factual, but rather that they were so (unwittingly) politically correct.
Does he realize that now, or is he puzzled by what appears (to him) to be a complete about-face?
Yes … and what he FAILed to understand is that the hierarchy of liberalism places Izlam ABOVE even Gay rights. Why ? Because the leftists see Izlam as an effective partner in the WAR against Christianity. So, they reason, Gay rights will be best served by CRUSHING Christianity. They also believe that Izlam actually tolerates and participates in Gay sex quite openly by buggering small Muslim boys … the whole throwing a random Gay off some Minaret … is just for “show”. The only Gays they toss … are the ones who refused the WRONG Imam a blowjob.
Oh, are my comments “hurtful” ? Not nearly as hurtful as my dropping a Quran into a jar of my own urine. I have several that I have offered to local “Art Gallery’s” … but none of them seem to recognize it as legitimate “Art” … and my NEA grant $ requests have also been turned down … hmmmm ???? I wonder WHY ??
It is an easy answer, halfwit; I refuse to risk anything to enable people who are stupid, to continue in stupidity indefinitely. I will not enable people who want this society destroyed, by doing anything to protect them. The virtue signalling “sheep dogs, sheep, wolves” people are part of the problem. Spilling your own blood so all the SJWs get to keep working against you? SOO SMART. SO NOBLE. Don’t ever stop enabling self destructive behavior.
You keep using the word rational in relation to socialists. I do not think that word means what you think it means.
I will not even reply to name caller. He should know better as to where I am coming from.
What Joe said. And, I will repeat, this movement to destroy Christianity started in the late 1800s with the adoption of Nietzsche’s teachings combined with Marx’s.
I think you have your history mixed up, The Enlightenment and French Revolution predate Nietzsche. He merely drew a line between there and here.
Hmmm? ??? I don’t recall mentioning the Enlightenment or the French Revolution in my comment, and I certainly know they both predated Nietzsche. All I was suggesting was that the efforts to discredit liberal democratic thinking and Christianity were both given more impetus by the acceptance by intellectuals of Nietzsche’s teachings. Somehow that called for being called a halfwit. Interesting?