“Islam Is Not The Problem” – Handwringing Liberal Humanists Everywhere

Amnesty International Syrian Refugee Facts & Figures (footnote 1)

“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.” — Winston Churchill (The River War, 1899)

“Believers are like a structure supporting each other”² — Sahih Muslim 2585

Depending on your disposition, searching google for “islam is not the problem” will give you either a bias confirming orgasm – or fill you with nausea and despair for our species. The oozing apologia makes everything barfed out by the Vatican about xtianity seem measured, well reasoned and restrained.

I fall very firmly in the latter camp. In fact, I’m more of the opinion that the former are like folks that smile at the alligator in the hope they will get eaten last. To claim that islam has no case to answer for in regard to the butchery, human rights abuse and general misery in the Middle East and much of Africa, and the endless attempts to export the same to the rest of the planet, is naive at best, spineless appeasement at worst. A fearful fatalistic apathy.

The screencap at the start of this post first fell into my twitter feed yesterday and I am just as susceptible to bias confirming tingles as our contemporary neo-humanist hand-wringers. It seemed to validate many of the observations I have made in the past. But unlike them, I did not allow the “feel good” fuzziness to steamroll my duty to fact check and verify prior to recirculating it. Investigation confirmed it was indeed a valid Amnesty International document –

Facts & Figures: Syria refugee crisis & international resettlement – 5 December 2014

It is a fascinating fact sheet overall and does confirm that the richest of the rich islamic states have not lifted a finger to offer shelter to their muslim “brothers” fleeing from a vicious conflict zone. True, the document is dated December last year. Have things changed since? Lets hear it straight from the mouth of the Kuwaiti chairman of the Gulf Forum for Peace and Security³ just a few months ago [WARNING: you may want to put your fist through your monitor] –

“Do not hate each other, do not envy each other, do not turn away from each other, but rather be servants of Allah as brothers. It is not lawful for a Muslim to abandon his brother for more than three days.” – Sahih Muslim 2559

I don’t think I’ve seen everything that is fucked up with the islamic world expressed so clearly and concisely as in this video –

Kuwait and the Gulf countries are expensive and not suitable for refugees… the cost of living in Kuwait is high, whereas the cost of living in Lebanon or Turkey is perhaps cheaper. Therefore it is much easier to pay the refugees to stay there…

The Syrian refugees are dismissed with the same distaste as Wall Street hedge fund billionaires encountering a homeless veteran for the first time outside their country club – “You’re not my problem. Here have some loose change. Now fuck off”. And it gets worse –

… you cannot accept other people, who come from a different atmosphere, from a different place… and place them in Gulf societies just like that…

Essentially, what this (no doubt devout) muslim is saying about his “brothers” in disguised language is that “they’re dirty, they’re poor, they smell and they’re the wrong colour”.

And all of this is delivered by Fahd Al-Shelaimi with a dead straight face, with the sincerity of a man with an unshakeable belief that he is a man of reason, to an audience who it would be inconceivable to him could express any dissention or doubt. This is the rationalisation of a mind with permanent cognitive deformation as a result of living in a rigid theocracy and knowing nothing else.

Here, in plain sight, and yet invisible to our liberal neo-humanists, is the toxic xenophobia and overt racism between different shades of brown that is endemic in the Middle East and Africa – an open attitude of “if you are not one of us, you are less than human, let alone equal or worthy of our concern” – rigid, race and religious based sectarianism that at its least prevents these regions from functioning constructively and cohesively, and at its worst escalates into full-blown genocides. “None so deaf as those that will not hear. None so blind as those that will not see.”

Contrast that with the situation in the greater west, where even the merest whiff of criticism of islam immediately elicits wrinkled noses, hissing accusations of islamophobia and racism and accusatory editorial sermons conflating both in The Guardian.

“But islam is not the problem…”

Isn’t it? Let’s return to the Amnesty piece. Here is a graphic pulled from it by the ilmfeed islamic culture site –

Original ilmfeed.com image slightly amended to include Iran. Given that Iran has always been a staunch supporter of the Assad regime in Syria and its civil war, it is highly unlikely any refugees would seek asylum there.

We can clearly see where the refugees are and are not. What is the difference between these states? Most glaringly, the ones with a big ZERO for refugee intake are all hard-line islamic theocracies – stonings, floggings, beheadings and all. And the ones that are shouldering all the burden?

Turkey – a secular democracy since Atatürk kicked the caliphate’s ass to the curb, has remained so despite the best efforts of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and will continue to remain so.
Lebanon – the middle east’s melting pot, a state of chaos with the whole spectrum of cultures and nothing remotely like a theocracy.
Jordan – a constitutional monarchy with a functional parliamentary system. Has expressly forbidden the formation of religiously based political parties.
Egypt – full of religious maniacs, true. Also has a judicial system FAR too much under the control of clerics. BUT all these maniacs have been kept on a leash by a secular military dictatorship (because it’s probably the only way to do it).

So why is it that these states – states that, according to Al-Shelaimi, are the poor, unwashed distant cousins of the GCC – can, albeit grudgingly in some cases, find the means and the space to accommodate the relentless refugee stream out of Syria, yet their much richer and much, much closer-to-god neighbours cannot?

If you throw Al-Shelaimi’s shallow self-excusing political codswallop out the window, there is only one real reason I can see. And that is that concern for the welfare of one’s muslim “brothers” and degree of civic and transnational social responsibility is inversely proportional to the degree of religiosity and theocratic corruption of your society. QED.

“No. Islam is not the problem”.

Let’s briefly return to our liberal neohumanists then. I’ve not quite finished kicking them in the guts. I’ll let the images speak for themselves –

3 year old Aylan Kurdi washes ashore

Barrel bombs and nameless children no one gives a fuck about

First image is one child – a child given a name and a narrative – but, it is only one child. The second are two nameless children with no story any other than their loved ones know. The dead one is one of ~10000, an estimate from February 2014 – and that figure does not mention the number maimed. The number has probably doubled since. The other 9999 don’t have names or stories either.

The first occurred on the border to Europe, so was easily captured by mainstream media and quickly ~~exploited by ghouls that get pay-per-click~~ presented to the world as a tangible human face of the Syrian conflict. The second has no location, nor even a date.

What does it say about the neo-humanists now braying about everyone who is not them not doing enough to solve the refugee crises because saturation media has suddenly rendered the problem “urgent” and, god forbid, may even force the concerned ones to get up from their keyboards? Oh yeah –

“How dreadful are the privilege checks which neo-humanism lays on its social justice hordes! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.”

Addendum (post +6 hours) –

Social Justice Warrior performance art –

¹ – They only list five. I think, if they are referring to member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council, the omitted state is Oman.

² – These are extracts from the islamic hadiths, said to be direct verbatim quotations of the prophet muhammad and second in authority only to the qur’an itself.

³ – This is a joke right? What the fuck do they actually do? The entire Middle East is a shithole of endless bloody squabbling and citizen exploitation, abuse and torture/murder by “religious police” squads. When is the last time, ever, that any of the assholes actually dealt with their own problems rather than expecting the west to step in and set everything aright? Google is absolutely devoid of any mention of “Gulf Forum for Peace and Security” other than links pointing back to the above video. My bet is it’s just another party zone where the rich princelings can gather and drink illicit booze, which they publicly flog their own people for doing, away from the prying eyes of their mullahs and imams, and feast on imported white pussy. Bunch of corrupt, spoilt and depraved assholes. No, islam is not the problem.

grey lining