“Muslims Are Strange People” By Thomas Harrington

Shared by Dr. Ehtisham

After the bombing in Manchester and the bridge attack in London, it is more clear than ever: Muslims are very strange people, inherently violent and desiring of death in a way that few of us can even begin to imagine.

The proof is there for all to see.

For example, when the US-led “international community”, under enormous pressure from pro-Zionist power brokers decided, in 1948, to award the land occupied for centuries by Palestinians to a group of Jews from Europe, and then looked the other way while those same Jews engaged in ethnic cleansing and herded the surviving Palestinians into squalid camps far from their legally-titled homes and lands, some of those Palestinians got angry and, and as part of their attempts at redress, lashed out violently at some of those Jews.

Very strange. No non-Muslim that I know would ever think of doing such a thing under similar circumstances.

In the 1950s, a charismatic Egyptian army officer named Nasser got tired of having his country and its resources, including the strategically located Suez Canal, treated as British properties on which their native presence was tolerated only insofar as they showed proper deference to the foreign Sahibs. He thus began to educate his people, including the country’s women, in secular and modern ways, and made moves to nationalize important elements of the country’s means of production thus keeping Egyptian wealth in the country for Egyptians, while at the same time encouraging Arabs in neighboring countries to do the same.

His efforts were greeted with an unprecedented campaign of demonization and, in 1956, a French, British and Israeli invasion of his country. He continued undeterred in his efforts and 11 years later, was treated, despite what you might have read and been told elsewhere, to another unprovoked attack by the Israelis.

In the wake of his death, the Western powers succeeded in finally putting a “reliable” satrap by the name of Anwar Sadat in power in that country. For the last 40 years the satrapy he institutionalized, supported by billions of dollars of bribes from the US, has systematically betrayed the most basic aspirations of the great majority of the Egyptian people. As they starved and the country’s once encouraging leap into modernity stalled, a grotesque and bullying class of parasites weaned on the pork of American “aid” grew fat and happy. Egyptian dedication to the aspirations of freedom and non-colonial dignity among other Arab nations was replaced with slavish loyalty to US, Saudi, and Israeli strategic interests.

All this has made some Egyptians feel angry and hopeless and desirous of revenge against the people from abroad who engineered this turn of events. This, of course, is very odd and aberrant, indeed, pathological behavior, something that,  were it to happen to non-Muslims, would clearly result in much different and much more peaceful and accepting  behavior.

In 1952, Iran elected a leader who had the audacious idea of using the oil that lay under the ground of his proud country to finance the well-being of its people. This obviously ridiculous idea (how could he not know that the US always has first dibs on all natural resources in the world regardless of geographical location.) resulted in a coup planned and carried out by the CIA and MI6 which ended in his overthrow and imprisonment, and the installation of a pro-US puppet with the pompous title of Shah who tortured and terrorized his own people with impunity over the next quarter century, while simultaneously spending the part of his county’s wealth that US allowed him to keep,  on himself and on  the purchase of US weapons systems.

This angered a lot of people in the country and in 1979, having seen that the route of secular reform and modernization that they had initially chosen in the wake of World War II blocked (the aforementioned overthrow of Mossadedgh in 1953), and then turned into a grotesque and ghoulish parody of itself during the reign of the Shah (1953-1979), they turned to a religiously-grounded form of resistance.

This is clearly very strange behavior, indicative of a deep cultural sickness. No other non-Muslim nation that I know of would ever think of doing such a thing.

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“A thin line between cult and religion” By Tara Burton

(Or is belief system a circular spectrum ranging from atheism at one end and cult at the other end?  Interesting article on belief systems. F. Sheikh ). IF COMMENTING ON THIS ARTICLE, PLEASE COMMENT IN GENERAL AND DO NOT SPECIFICALLY TARGET ONE RELIGION.

Beginning paragraphs;

“Cults, generally speaking, are a lot like pornography: you know them when you see them. It would be hard to avoid the label on encountering (as I did, carrying out field work last year) 20 people toiling unpaid on a Christian farming compound in rural Wisconsin – people who venerated their leader as the closest thing to God’s representative on Earth. Of course, they argued vehemently that they were not a cult. Ditto for the 2,000-member church I visited outside Nashville, whose parishioners had been convinced by an ostensibly Christian diet programme to sell their houses and move to the ‘one square mile’ of the New Jerusalem promised by their charismatic church leader. Here they could eat – and live – in accordance with God and their leader’s commands. It’s easy enough, as an outsider, to say, instinctively: yes, this is a cult.

Less easy, though, is identifying why. Knee-jerk reactions make for poor sociology, and delineating what, exactly, makes a cult (as opposed to a ‘proper’ religious movement) often comes down to judgment calls based on perceived legitimacy. Prod that perception of legitimacy, however, and you find value judgments based on age, tradition or ‘respectability’ (that nice middle-class couple down the street, say, as opposed to Tom Cruise jumping up and down on a couch). At the same time, the markers of cultism as applied more theoretically – a single charismatic leader, an insular structure, seeming religious ecstasy, a financial burden on members – can also be applied to any number of new or burgeoning religious movements that we don’t call cults.

Often (just as with pornography), what we choose to see as a cult tells us as much about ourselves as about what we’re looking at.”

Concluding paragraphs;

“To talk about religion as a de facto abuse-vector of hierarchical power (in other words, a cult writ large) is a meaningless oversimplification. It’s less an arrow than a circle: a cycle of power, meaning, identity, and ritual. We define ourselves by participating in something, just as we define ourselves against those who don’t participate in something. Our understanding of ourselves – whether we’re cradle Catholics, newly joined-up members of the Hare Krishna, or members of a particularly rabid internet fandom – as people whose actions have cosmic if not metaphysical significance gives us a symbolic framework in which to live our lives, even as it proscribes our options. Every time we repeat a ritual, from the Catholic Mass to a prayer circle on a farm compound to a CrossFit workout, it defines us – and we define the people around us.

Today’s cults might be secular, or they might be theistic. But they arise from the same place of need, and from the failure of other, more ‘mainstream’ cultural institutions to fill it. If God did not exist, as Voltaire said, we would have to invent him. The same is true for cults.”

Cick for full article;