Qohel

Make a Difference

Day: February 12, 2009

What the West Needs to Know

February 12, 2009 / / 0 Comments

I have Muslim friends, but am convinced that while there are reasonable and moderate Muslims, there is not and cannot be a reasonable and moderate Islam.

For Muslims, Mohammed is the perfect example of a life well lived. You canot criticise the prophet publicly without risking death. Yet Mohammed, as I have noted before, had sex with a nine year old girl, tortured his enemies, and was a mass murderer who in between killing Arabs who disagreed with him, decapitated several hundred Jews.

Unless Muslims are willing to repudiate Mohammed’s example, and that would mean disowning the prophet – impossible! –  an Islam which claims both to follow his example and to be moderate will simply be an impossibility.

Some interesting comments here about the film Islam: What the West Needs to Know.

NZ Too Much for Darwin

February 12, 2009 / / 0 Comments

By the time the twenty-three year old Charles Darwin reached New Zealand he had definitely had enough.

Despite its natural beauty and fascinating birds and insects, Darwin wrote of the Maori people:

“Their persons and houses are filthily dirty and offensive. I should think that a more war-like race of people could not be found in any part of the world than the New Zealanders. We were all glad to leave New Zealand. It is not a pleasant place”.

In fact the Maori are a brave and noble people who had complex agriculture and buildings, and were frequently far more generous with European settlers than the settlers deserved.

Debate Must Be Stopped. ‘Honour’ Killings? Sorry, No Time.

February 12, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Via Kathy Shaidle, this story from the Toronto Sun.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission has time to investigate and comment on stories published in national magazines over which it has no jurisdiction. It has time to condemn writers like Mark Steyn because their criticisms of radical Islam makes them Islamophobic (whatever that means – being critical of something doesn’t mean you are irrationally afraid of it).

But investigate and comment on honour killings in a state where they do have jurisdiction and could make a difference?

Sorry, too busy. From the Sun article:

It was her response to Steyn’s criticism of OHRC’s silence on honour killings that shocked me.

“There are thousands of things that happen in the province of Ontario on a daily basis and we don’t comment on all of them,” she said.

But, I spluttered, women are being murdered.

“As I said, we are a small commission.

“There are many problematic things that happen in our community and we have to make choices because we can’t respond to everything,” Hall said.

So honour killings are merely “problematic”?

Oz Bush Fires – Greenies Responsible

February 12, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Hmm…

The people who lit the fires are immediately responsible. But a measure of responsibility also lies with environmental activists who pressured local councils and other governement agencies to reduce or disallow prescribed (that is controlled protective) burning and other clearing of highly flammable scrub from residential areas. 

‘The green movement is directly responsible for the severity of these fires through their opposition to prescribed burning,’ said David Packham, former supervising meteorologist for fire weather nationwide at the Bureau of Meteorology.

At a community meeting in Victoria yesterday, Warwick Spooner, whose mother and brother were killed in the fires, told council members ‘We’ve lost two people in my family because you dickheads won’t cut trees down.’

Meanwhile, another family who disobeyed government regulations, cleared bush from around their home, and were fined $50,000 for doing so, said that their home and lives were saved because of the action they had taken – action which is simply reponsible in high fire risk areas.

The argument is that clearing of bush around residential areas reduces bio-diversity and increases the risk of extinctions of native animals through loss of habitat. This is nonsense. The areas cleared in prescribed burning are very small – just enough to prevent fires jumping to buildings. The real risk to native wildlife is massive uncontrolled fires like those which have just occurred.

© 2024 Qohel