Metal Reviews

The sort of freedom Egyptians want:

http://au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/-/world/8881790/Logan-beaten-with-flag-poles-during-Egypt-revolt




Arab men are pigs . I'd have no qualms about nuking these fuckers. They are a plague. Israelis are right to bomb them.

Shame the military didn't let me join when I volunteered in 2003 (bloody depth perception). I would've happily hoed into these bastards.

Killing them instantly would be too good for them.

Haha, you clearly have no idea about what Israeli men are like, then. Rape and sexual harassment occur everywhere, not just in 'backward' countries like this.

I have no idea how you manage to stay so polite all the time. I've been biting my tongue the moment he started talking.

I've vented a couple of times in the past few pages, but the guy's impenetrable, has a shield of inane bureaucracy-bashing ready the moment you challenge anything.

This is just one example of Islamic attitude towards women.

Women get stoned in countries like Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia for trivial things.

This includes driving a car or going outside without a man present.

In Pakistan, Afghanistan and Jordan women are mutilated with fire and acid or killed for loving people outside of their family or sometimes even for wearing make up in public (so called honour killings).

But we Westerners have to "respect" their culture and any talk against them is racism. Though it's ok for them to spew hate against us.

Really we're pathetic and deserve to be overrun by them. I will laugh heartily if I live long enough to see Islamic Britain and L'Islamique Republique de France which judging by demographic trends will be sooner rather than later.

You were whining about how it's ok for countries to make oppressive laws a few pages back, don't suddenly change your mind just because women are involved! Yes, authoritarian states are bastards, and authoritarian Islamic states even greater bastards. But you can respect a culture without respecting crime, and criticising crime is not racism, whatever right-wing commentators are saying that left-wing commentators are saying.

The things is that stoning a woman or throwing acid at her face are not crimes in many Islamic countries and if they are, they are very leniently enforced and no action is taken against the perpetrators.

I cannot respect cultures where half the population is treated worse than live stock based on sex alone.

And it scares me that they come to our countries and try to do the same. There's already been instances of attempted honour killings in Australia as well as Muslims being involved in gang raping of white women whom they view as whores, Cronula riots were influenced by Muslim attacks on women (and lifegaurds who were trying to protect them) as well as a couple of foiled terrorist plots.

One prominent Melbourne Muslim cleric was even caught on video preaching to his followers that women should be beaten in such a way it doesn't leave marks.

Barbarians!

The one thing that I find amazing and it's the one thing I am grateful to Islam for is that they helped re-start cultural and scientific progress in the middle ages.

Without Muslims, we would probably still be stuck in the dark ages.

They used to be a lot more respectful to other religions (at least one's based on Abrahamic traditions i.e. Judaism and Christianity).

But then came the Ottomans and a slow cultural decline. Whereas Christianity has grown into the Enlightenment and then Western societies embraced a more individualistic, secular concept, Islam has regressed back to some sort of bastardised interpretation of the original version.

In fact wealth has done nothing for bringing similar "Enlightenment" concepts to Islam. Instead it has strengthened the position of Wahhabist and Iranian Shia fundamentalists.

Oh, what a morass of half-truths. India introduced the death penalty for acid-throwing a while back, and in (I think) Pakistan and Iran the punishment is blindness - hardly a western tactic, true, but hardly 'no action' either. Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq has stopped stonings. Yes, certain hardline clerics do preach violence, but they are a huge minority who are condemned by the majority. And sorry, but the whites didn't come off well from Cronula either. I thought that that story about them being motivated by attacks on women was found to be bollocks? Rhys? In any case, forming lynch mobs that cowardly attack individuals is not the answer.

Gender, sexuality, race, ability, class...but SEX! Heathens!

Not a Muslim country, just a large Muslim minority that they spend a lot of time slugging it out with (ref: Kashmir and Gujarat and also at least 3 wars against Muslim Pakistan (1947, 1965 and 1971).



So what about the journo that was attacked on the street in Egypt? Or even forming mobs to topple governments?

Or what about defending your country from unwanted foreigners who are causing trouble and pushing their own ways on to you (in this case they were mainly legal migrants but they do not integrate)?

Wow, learn to fucking quote.



What evidence?



Them too. Sexual assault is never justified.



How is that attacking an individual? It's attacking the state, which in these cases have lost the moral right to power with its torture and murder of its own people.



Pushing their own ways onto you how, exactly?

Actually, I could believe it either way.

Being who he is, ditto Zads.

A great example is the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran.

People power ala Egypt!

Here's a Wiki page (can't be arsed trawling through all the sites on the net) outlining number of honour killings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_killing

One stat shows 4,000 honour killings in Pakistan in last 6 years. And they're the reported ones!

These are not state sanctioned killings. People do them off their own accord and they seem to be socially acceptable.

Or Afghanistan ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_ ... fghanistan ):






1. Assaulting white women because according to Islamic perceptions they're whores.

2. Increased political correctness - e.g. Australian flags were banned at Big Day Outs on Australia Day so to not offend Australian muslims. Australia Day is about being Australian.

3. Honour killings and associated demands that they are a traditional practice and should thus be acceptable.

4. Demands that meat sold at supermarkets should be slaughtered in approved Islamic way.

5. Foiled terrorist plots that if successful could've maimed and killed Australians and that have in turn created a climate of fear.

It's funny you mention the Iranian revolution. Do you know much about it? Do you know that the people turned to religion to create a mantra of solidarity against the U.S. installed dictator of the time and that religion was not in Iranian politics before the U.S. intervention? The plight which you loathe so much was created by the policies you are so in favor of. There are many reasons why Iran devolved into fundamentalism but it represents a concrete example of a much larger trend in the world now. Young Arab men turn to radical Islam because it provides them a form of public discourse which challenges the prevailing, oppressive, Western doctrines spread throughout the world. It is sad that the only way they can defend the last vestiges of their culture, no matter how awful it is which at heart it isn't, is to subscribe to a distortion, an awful, equally oppressive distortion of their culture which once was so great. The development of radical Islam is very much a development of the last 50 years which can be paralleled to the West's intervention in these nations which you so adamantly defend.

It started long before the West got involved in a major way. And the Soviets are probably more to blame than the West for the issues in the 1950s-1970s through sponsoring Nasser, Sadat, Sukarno, Hussein and other secular nationalist leaders.

Wahhabism which was one of the initial fundamentalist movements and whose influence is widespreading thanks to Arab generosity was created in Saudi Arabia in the eighteenth century as a sort of Protestant Reformation sought of movement which sought to make Islam "pure" again.

It was initially spread through out the Arab peninsula by the House of Saud initially through military conquest and since the discovery of oil in that part of the world, through charitable institutions ala hospitals, community projects and schools.

These schools (or madrassas) teach Islamic fundamentalism and have been a key recruiting ground for terrorists around the world including in Europe.

In addition, Islamic fundamentalism started to spread rapidly once the largely secular, nationalist and pseudo socialist regimes (Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Indonesia prior to 1965) failed to deliver in terms of economic and social reform or deliver on the promise of a free Palestine and the destruction of Israel.

The nationalist regimes as led by Egypt under Nasser and Indonesia under Sukarno were largely Soviet sponsored.

The other thing that happened is the war in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan saw highly fundamentalist Muslims do to the Soviet Union what the secular nationalists could not do against Israel.

Furthermore the rich Saudis began to splash their wealth around.

So the militarily successful and generous Islamists achieved what secular nationalism could not.

As such Muslims around the world shifted to Islamism over secular ideology.

US involvement in Iraq in 1991 gave them further ammunition - i.e. the basing of infidels in the Holy Land (one of the main reasons Saddam had to be toppled according to some international analysts and experts including former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix).


The growth of Islamism has been mainly of the Sunni variety as promoted by Saudi Arabia.

Iran is a pariah amongst Muslims as it's predominantly Shia. It's influence has been limited to southern Iraq and Lebanon's Hezbollah.




By the way Islamic movements have existed for centuries and generally have not needed Western influence to get started. For example the Islamic movement in Aceh, Indonesia has been chugging on its own since Indonesia became independent.

Islamism in India has been an issue since partition. And Western policies don't have much to do with the Christian-Muslim slugfests in Sudan or Nigeria.

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I feel like I'm back at Uni doing international politics again! Thanks guys for the interesting discussion.

But what you're directing your anger at, correct me if I'm wrong, is the surge of Muslim dissidence in the West over the last ten years. Are you pointing to problems prior to that or am I correct? The failure of secular ideology, the Left presumably, has been brought on by Western intervention and the success of Islamic fundamentalism, where socialism has failed due to Cold War politics, is something that can't be seen as having happened in a vacuum. The Mahdi army only recruits people by getting families water and electricity. People aren't necessarily signing up freely to blow themselves up. Islam is obviously a vast religion and I won't say all movements are due to this problem but we can make direct historical links between the groups of now with foreign intervention which you so advocate. The U.S.S.R. propped up who would support their agenda and the U.S. did the same. Which you approve of in contemporary politics, despite these issues which have arisen. Huge issues mind you.

No anger here amigo!



Definitely a surge of dissidence in the West over last 10 years. Though there's a long history between Islam and everyone else (and to be fair the West and everyone else).

The scary thing about Islamic dissatisfaction with the West is that they export it to the West in the form of immigration.

It's like the Pakistani taxi driver telling me and my Australian wife that he would never let his daughters wear Australian clothes or marry non-Muslim men.






Failure of socialism/secular nationalism in Islamic world was largely because the basis of it was purely the pursuit of war, be it the destruction of Israel or intervention against non-socialist countries in Asia as promoted by Sukarno.

These failed long before the Cold War did. Suharto replaced Sukarno in 1965 (in a massive bloodbath). Egypt started giving up on it after the failure of the 1973 war.

Islamism on the other hand is focused on social issues. Pursuit of war is an element, but as a religious doctrine it's main pursuit is control over people's lives.

Thus it has more to offer people.

The only major western intervention that destroyed pan Arab nationalism was support for Israel.

The Arab countries that were alligned to the west are also the one's that are relatively stable in the grand scheme of the Islamic world - Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar and Morrocco (and to a much lesser degree Jordan).

Strangely enough these countries also have highly fundamentalist societies.



Some of this "foreign intervention" was what most people would consider positive events.

Many Egyptians felt betrayed by the US sponsored peace treaty with Israel. Would it have been better for the US not to get involved and let Israel eventually turn Egypt and Syria into a glass car park?


And the Muslims themselves invite Western interventionism.

The Arabs invited the US to kick Iraq out of Kuwait. Saudi Arabia has recently been agitating the US for a strike on Iran. And they happily accepted US aid in their war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

If it wasn't the USA, it would be China or the USSR or whoever can do their dirty work for them.




And Saudi Arabia props up those that suit it's needs.

This was my original point.

The issues would have arisen anyhow. As stated Islam is an expansionist religion that views that the whole world should be Islamic (much like the now toothless Christian religion).

Look at the situation in Pakistan/Afghanistan:

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US completely stopped its involvement in Pakistan and Afghanistan as they were no longer strategically relevant.

What happened then was that thanks to Saudi dollars and influence, Pakistan became ever more Islamified, especially the InterServices Intelligence (ISI) service which in many ways runs the country. Without the US telling them what to do, they go ahead and develop nuclear weapons.

The ISI helped establish the Taliban with Saudi money. The Taliban then supported Al Qaeda run it's training camps.

Al Qaeda launches attacks against the US in order to get the US to move it's troops out of Saudi Arabia. The US troops are only there at Saudi Arabia's request in order to contain Iraq!

US troops are out of Saudi Arabia, are nearly out of Iraq and are beaten in Afghanistan. But the growing Islamism continues.

And the attacks aren't just against the USA. Look at France where every time a Muslim is arrested, Muslims protest and burn French cities. In the 1990's the French were targetted in subway bombings by Algerian Islamists for having relationship with Algeria.

Or the Islamic clerics in Britain who have been promoting a Muslim Britain and again providing recruits for Al Qaeda camps long before 9-11.

Or in Bosnia where Saudi muhajadeen went to fight Serbian and Croatian forces (where Western influence was limited to trying to make peace because the Europeans didn't a war or four in Europe).


So the Islamists are pushing forward regardless of whose involved.