Falsifying Islamic history as a debating tool

Post lifted from Jihad Watch

Both Hugh Fitzgerald and I have written about Islamic apologist and media darling Reza Aslan, noting some of his innumerable distortions -- for one, he calls Muhammad's community in Medina "a communal, egalitarian society dedicated to pluralism and tolerance." Sure it was -- with the women veiled and the three Jewish tribes ultimately exiled or massacred by the prophet of Islam. Other than that, it was very pluralistic and egalitarian.

But Aslan gets away with this sort of thing because few people are aware of the facts of Muhammad's life as they are recounted in Islamic tradition, and so they have no knowledge of anything they can use to challenge him. And of course he is by no means the only Islamic apologist to capitalize upon this ignorance. All of this underscores the need today for people to be informed about Islam and Muhammad not from material intended for non-Muslims, but from material written by Muslims and intended for other Muslims (which is what I used to write my biography of Muhammad). Only then can non-Muslims get a clear picture of how Muslims really regard the elements of Islam and Muhammad's words and example that jihadists use to justify their actions and make recruits among peaceful Muslims, and thereby get a clear picture of the magnitude of the problem we face today.

Without such a clear picture, public policy will go wrong, remedies will be applied to the problem that are not remedies, and the jihad will continue to advance. Make no mistake: false, whitewashed history is a weapon of the jihad. Don't let yourself become a victim.

Here is another example: in `Reza Aslan's Pogrom Amnesia,' the ever-insightful Ilana Mercer has posted a link to a post by Myles Kantor about a debate between atheist crusader Sam Harris and Aslan. In that debate, Aslan again uses whitewashed history as a debating tool:

About Reza Aslan, the darling of the media on all things Muslim, Myles Kantor observes the following:

"Last night I watched Sam Harris and Reza Aslan's January 25 debate on religion at the Los Angeles Public Library. Toward the end, Harris noted the anti-Semitic character of the Middle East before the establishment of Israel in 1948.

Aslan responded in reference to pre-state Israel, `Before 1948, of course, there were tens of thousands of Jews living alongside their Arab neighbors without any problem at all.'

Without any problem at all? How about the Jerusalem pogrom in 1920 and the Jaffa pogrom in 1921? Or Arab massacres of Jews in Hebron and Safad in 1929? Or the Tiberias pogrom in 1938? (There was a reason the Sephardic Jewish sage Maimonides wrote in 1172 regarding Arabs, `Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they.')

If Aslan is ignorant of this recurrent savagery, then the Harvard graduate's study of pre-state Israel has been amazingly selective. If not, his misrepresentation of Arab-Jewish life before 1948 is revisionism in the same gutter as Holocaust denial."

Or down at curb level with the New Historians' output.

Aslan's howler here is on par with similar claims that Muslim Spain was a proto-multiculturalist paradise. And innumerable others. Inform yourselves. Don't let the whitewashers of jihad get away with any falsehoods.

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ELSEWHERE

Bank of America rolls out credit card requiring no SSN: "Bank of America Corp. has begun offering credit cards to customers without Social Security numbers, typically illegal immigrants, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday. In recent years, banks across the country have been offering checking accounts and even mortgages to the nation's fast-growing ranks of undocumented immigrants, most of whom are Hispanic, the paper said, adding these immigrants generally have not been able to get major credit cards. The new Bank of America card is open to people who lack both a Social Security number and a credit history, as long as they have held a checking account with the bank for three months without an overdraft, the Journal said."

State Farm stops new policies in Mississippi: "State Farm Insurance Cos. is suspending sales of any new commercial or homeowner policies in Mississippi starting Friday, citing in part a wave of litigation it has faced since Hurricane Katrina, a company official said Wednesday. Mike Fernandez, vice president of public affairs for State Farm, said Mississippi's 'current legal and political environment is simply untenable. We're just not in a position to accept any additional risk in this homeowners' market.' Fernandez said the decision does not affect existing policies but the company is still assessing how many of the current policies in Mississippi will be renewed this year. Fernandez said the action was not a direct response to any specific development in the litigation. That litigation has included a recent federal jury's $2.5 million punitive damage award to a couple who sued State Farm for refusing to cover the 2005 hurricane's storm surge damage to their Biloxi home."

Indian truckdrivers coming: "Truckers on American highways will hear a new accent on their two-way radios when India exports its first batch of lorry drivers to the US to meet a severe manpower shortage. For the past four months more than 200 "transportation specialists" have been put through their paces at a training school in the state of Andhra Pradesh where US conditions have been replicated - from the size of the trailers to Yankee truckers' slang.... They are just the latest in a line of exportable skills from India, home to one-sixth of the world's population, as profit-driven enterprises and cash-strapped governments prove only too willing to tap into an English-speaking workforce eager to do the jobs rejected by others, often for a fraction of the salary.... Drivers in the US on average take home $5,000 a month plus good benefits but fewer Americans are interested in long-haul because of the amount of time they spend away from home. Gagan Global, the US company recruiting the drivers, says that there are an estimated 20,000 vacancies that urgently need filling.... Mr Gagan defended his programme, saying that both the US and India would benefit. "They're not taking away jobs [in the US]. There is a shortage. There are companies that have 5,000 trucks and 1,000 of them are sitting idle in their yards without anyone to work them," he said."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason -- Details here and here

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