Thursday, January 14, 2010

Pat Robertson: Haiti's Pact With Devil /Edward Said Criticizes "Orientalism" As a Cover For Racism For Faux Scholars & Neocons To Justify Their Wars

UPDATED: 2:28 & 4:25 PM Jan. 14, 2010

Photo of a whole Gaggle of racist Islamophobes spewing ignorance and hatred of all things Islamic or Arab. America & Israel under God's protection -other nations not so much.



The organization "Muslims Against Sharia "is rather misleading since it is made up primarily of Non-Muslims such as Robert Spencer, Pam Geller etc. to promulgate their racist views about Islam and all Muslims.
Islamophobes Incite hatred of Islam and Muslims creating a conspiracy theory in which Muslims are slowly but surely taking over Europe and the "West"- They appear to borrow much of their rhetoric and bizarre theories about Islam from Anti-Semitic tracts such as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. So it is according to Islamophobes that Muslims not the Jews are working in the open and covertly to conquer the world.
Faux Islamic Experts -
Pam Geller, Robert Spencer , Gert Wilders, Andrew Bostom
"Islam is of the Devil" has become a common slogan used by Islamophobes such as Pam Geller, Robert Spencer, David Horrowitz, Andrew Bostom, Walid Shoebat, Brigitte Gabriel, Gert Wilders, Glenn beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Daniel Pipes,Mark Steyn, Steve Emerson, Michelle Malkin, Michelle Bachman, Pat Robertson, Debbie Schlussel ,Wafa Sultan, Bat Ye'or, Newt Gingrich, Eric Cantor, John Bolton etc. see my related posts On Islamophobia
Hate mongering : A Mosque dripping blood - Many of the so-called popular experts on Islam and Arabs are just spewing their own hatred & bigotry against Islam & all one billion three hundred million Muslims. These Faux Scholars refuse to even accept Islam as a competing religion or faith because in their view Islam is of the Devil -and comes from Ishmael's progeny & not by way of Adam or Noah or Abraham. The other criticism they have of Islam is that it is not a religion but a political ideology which supports a totalitarian form of government based on the Quran and Sharia law.

Update later have a nice day


Via Maud Newton
Rachel Maddow Haitian (and U.S.) history: A 60-second tutorial
January 14, 2010

On Rachel Maddow’s show, the Haitian Ambassador responds (above) to Pat Robertson’s revolting and infuriating, but not especially surprising, claim that the earthquake is a result of slaves’ “pact with the devil.” As Alex Balk says, this rebuttal is “direct, intelligent,” and “filled with more history in one minute than pretty much anything you see on most news programs all evening

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy



Quote below by Edward Said P.XIX-XX preface to Orientalism 2003
(in reference to the Iraq war)

Without a well-organized sense that these people over there were not like "us" and didn't appreciate "our" values-the very core of traditional Orientalist dogma "us"-the very core of traditional Orientalist dogma...there would have been no war."


And on the faux experts on Islam who are really just fear mongering racists who claim to be impartial scholars and academics. They just help put fuel on the fire and spew their made up facts and are taken serious by millions of Americans including those in the Pentagon .

What I do argue is that there is a difference between knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of understanding ,compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes, and on the other hand knowledge-if that is what it is-this is part of an overall campaign of self-affirmation, belligerency, and outright war. There is,after all, a profound difference between the will to understand for purposes of coexistence and humanistic enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control and external dominion . It is surely one of the intellectual catastrophes of history that an imperialist war confected by a small group of unelected U.S. officials... was waged against a devastated Third World dictatorship on thoroughly ideological grounds having to do with world dominance , security control, and scarce resources, but disguised for its true intent, hastened for by Orientalists who betrayed their calling as scholars. The major influences on George W. Bush's Pentagon and National Security Council were men such as Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, experts on the Arab and Islamic world who helped the American hawks think about such preposterous phenomenon as the Arab mind and centuries old Islamic decline that only American power could reverse. Today, bookstores in the Unite States are filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, Islam exposed, the Arab threat, and the Muslim menace, all of them written by political polemicists pretending to knowledge imparted to them and others by experts who have supposedly penetrated to the heart of these strange Oriental peoples over there who have been such a terrible thorn in"our" flesh. Accompanying such warmongering expertise have been the omnipresent CNNs and Fox News Channels of this world, plus myriad numbers of evangelical and right-wing radio hosts, plus innumerable tabloids and even middlebrow journals, all of them recycling the same unverifiable fictions and vast generalizations so as to stir up "America" against the foreign devil.


Here's an example of an Islamophobe spreading his hatred of Islam . Wallid Shoebat an Arab scholar who proof-texts the Bible to prove that Islam is really the religion of Satan and the Anti-Christ. It is not the number 666 which the book of Revelation refers to as the beast or anti-Christ but rather three Arabic symbols referring to Allah as the name of the Anti-Christ or Satan.

Proof islam and allah are the antichrist!!
Walid Shoebat proves that islam and allah are the antichrist!!




In past posts I have discussed the various individuals such as Robert Spencer, David Horowitz, Pam Geller, Brigitte Gabriel Bostom etc. who describe themselves as Islamic and Arab experts but are in actual fact just anti-Islamic propagandists who spew the same sort of superficial negative stereotypes as did previous generations of pseudo-scholars and pseudo-intellectuals who wish to promote hatred of all Muslims and are dismissive if not antagonistic against Islam and the majority of the peoples of the middle East. They act as propagandists and apologist for Western racist or racialists views of the world. There are in their views superior and inferior cultures ,religions, traditions etc. They contend that The western cultures and judeo-Christian values are superior to these other cultures.



"Unlike the Americans, the French and British--less so the Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, and Swiss--have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western Experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. . . .

It will be clear to the reader...that by Orientalism I mean several things, all of them, in my opinion, interdependent. The most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient--and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist--either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she says or does is Orientalism. . . .

Related to this academic tradition, whose fortunes, transmigrations, specializations, and transmissions are in part the subject of this study, is a more general meaning for Orientalism. Orientalism is a style of thought based upon ontological and epistemological distinction made between "the Orient" and (most of the time) "the Occident." Thus a very large mass of writers, among who are poet, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, "mind," destiny, and so on. . . . the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient . . despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a "real" Orient. "

FromOrientalism: a Brief Definition Edward Said from ORIENTALISM 1979

also see: Home
The Edward Said Archive:: إدوارد سعيد


What is apparent these days especially since 9/11 is that these pseudo-scholars on Islam and on Arabs is that their views and prejudices are tailor made for promulgating negative stereotypes about Muslims , Arabs and Islam. These unfortunately popular and influential writers such as Robert Spencer, Pam Geller, Bostom David Horowitz, Bat Y'eor , Brigitte Gabriel,etc. are promoting such exaggerated stereotype that they are better labeled Islamophobes that is racist and Judeo-Christian Western chauvinist. They argue that Islam is a political ideology which is totalitarian and anti-democratic when it is instituted as the religion and the law Sharia of a nation. This may apply to the Taliban in Afghanistan to a certain degree but it could be argued that this form of extremism is more to do with certain cultural traditions of the peoples of these regions as opposed to being truly representative of Islam.

Negative stereotypes of Islam, Muslims and Arabs have been embedded in Western society going back to at least the First Crusade. Islam was depicted or characterized not just as a false religion competing with Christianity and Judaism but as really a political ideology based upon the interests and prejudices of the Arab peoples in the Middle East or Near East or Near Orient. Along with this stereotype came the view which was promulgated that the Prophet muhammad was a charlatan , a brutal warrior, a sex addict, a pediophile and anti-Jewish & anti-Christian and so on.

The Orientalists who claimed to be impartial scholars were in fact prejudiced in favor of Christianity and Western Civilization and had a very negative denigrating view of what they referred to as the Orient which seems to have meant any geographical area outside Europe. America , Australia and Canada etc.

Some Orientalists though were prejudiced in such a way that they romanticized and idealized the "Orient' which they saw as having a great deal of knowlege , wisdom and cultural artistic values to offer to the west.

But what the scholar needs to deal with is not false myths and prejudices but with the reality of the actual people of for instance the Middle East.

On Orientalism-Edward Said
Edward Said discusses the themes of his classic work "Orientalism", its implications and its place in the modern world.



Edward Said, "The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations" 1

This is part one of Edward Said's lecture on Samuel Huntington's essay and book on the "Clash of Civilizations," at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1996).





Op-ed: Debunking civilisational clash —Ishtiaq Ahmed, Daily Times.com.pk, Dec. 21, 2003 (via Excellent resource The American Muslim

A Dialogue of the Cultures Instead of the Clash of Civilisations by Naika Foroutan , July 31, 2006 at The American Muslim

For years, academics have been trying to draw attention to the fact that a dialogue of the cultures – in other words a dialogue between civilizations instead of a clash of civilizations – is not some short-term emergency measure, but a long-term, long-lasting process that must take place not only at cultural level, but also at political and economic level.

There is a clash between those forces which want to keep the material and intellectual wealth of the world confined only to the West and at most share it with corrupt elites in the Muslim world and those who struggle to universalise it for the benefit of all humankind

No other book on international politics has received so much attention or generated as much controversy as Samuel P Huntington’s, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (he first published a long article on the issue in 1993 and followed it up with a book in 1998).

Its starkly shocking and pessimistic message that politics is nothing but the pursuit of tribal instincts to ensure group survival negates the long and arduous struggle of human beings to transcend the bounds of race, religion, caste, sect and language, instead identifying humankind as one family entitled to the same rights and freedoms. Ideologically it negates the notion of universal human rights and the spirit of internationalism and global solidarity that the United Nations symbolised when it was founded in 1945.

Huntington takes his cue from the Realism School of International Relations, which applies Thomas Hobbes’ notion of a ‘war of all against all’ in the state of nature to the international arena. Realism looks upon the international political arena as anarchic; because of lack of trust in each other, nation-states do all that is within their power to maximize their protection and self-preservation.

However, he radically alters the framework by shifting focus from international competition and hostility between nation-states to civilizations. He asserts that after the collapse of the Soviet bloc the war of ideologies is over. But this does not mean that the world has reached the end of history with the triumph of Western liberal democracy as Francis Fukuyama had predicted. Rather a more deep-going and irresolvable conflict of civilizations has begun.


also see website homepage The American Muslim

and so it goes,
GORD.

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