Saudi Writer Is Deported Over Posts on Prophet
By LIZ GOOCH
Published: February 12, 2012
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — A Saudi journalist was deported Sunday to his home country, where he was expected to face arrest and possibly death for writing about the Prophet Muhammad.
The journalist, Hamza Kashgari, had been detained by the Malaysian police since Thursday, when he was stopped at Kuala Lumpur International Airport at the request of the Saudi government. Mr. Kashgari, a newspaper columnist based in Jidda, had fled Saudi Arabia amid public outrage after he wrote about an imaginary meeting with the Prophet Muhammad in a series of posts on Twitter, according to news reports.
Human Rights Watch warned that Mr. Kashgari faced “almost certain conviction and a death sentence on charges of apostasy” if he was sent back to Saudi Arabia. ...
Trouble in paradise: Maldives and Islamic extremism
By Amal Jayasinghe (AFP) – 1 day ago
MALE — At the Maldives’ National Museum, smashed Buddhist statues are testament to the rise of Islamic extremism and Taliban-style intolerance in a country famous as a laid-back holiday destination.
On Tuesday, as protesters backed by mutinous police toppled president Mohamed Nasheed, a handful of men stormed the Chinese-built museum and destroyed its display of priceless artefacts from the nation’s pre-Islamic era.
“They have effectively erased all evidence of our Buddhist past,” a senior museum official told AFP at the now shuttered building in the capital Male, asking not to be named out of fear for his own safety.
“We lost all our 12th century statues. They were made of coral stone and limestone. They are very brittle and there is no way we can restore them,” he explained. ...
Ah the joys of rational people. I keep wondering how our species got this far, and how quickly we’ll sink back to caves when the extremists realize the evils of educatiom amd technology and start storming all the universities and high tech companies, start killing anyone with a college education, and taking over governments.
Saudi Writer Is Deported Over Posts on Prophet
By LIZ GOOCH
Published: February 12, 2012
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — A Saudi journalist was deported Sunday to his home country, where he was expected to face arrest and possibly death for writing about the Prophet Muhammad.
The journalist, Hamza Kashgari, had been detained by the Malaysian police since Thursday, when he was stopped at Kuala Lumpur International Airport at the request of the Saudi government. Mr. Kashgari, a newspaper columnist based in Jidda, had fled Saudi Arabia amid public outrage after he wrote about an imaginary meeting with the Prophet Muhammad in a series of posts on Twitter, according to news reports.
Human Rights Watch warned that Mr. Kashgari faced “almost certain conviction and a death sentence on charges of apostasy” if he was sent back to Saudi Arabia. ...
Trouble in paradise: Maldives and Islamic extremism
By Amal Jayasinghe (AFP) – 1 day ago
MALE — At the Maldives’ National Museum, smashed Buddhist statues are testament to the rise of Islamic extremism and Taliban-style intolerance in a country famous as a laid-back holiday destination.
On Tuesday, as protesters backed by mutinous police toppled president Mohamed Nasheed, a handful of men stormed the Chinese-built museum and destroyed its display of priceless artefacts from the nation’s pre-Islamic era.
“They have effectively erased all evidence of our Buddhist past,” a senior museum official told AFP at the now shuttered building in the capital Male, asking not to be named out of fear for his own safety.
“We lost all our 12th century statues. They were made of coral stone and limestone. They are very brittle and there is no way we can restore them,” he explained. ...
These tragedies done in the name of religion are despicable, but what can you do when entire cultures (or subcultures) are psychopathic?
Horrible. Let’s hope that what Occam posted doesn’t come to pass. Just heard on NPR that the world is becoming more"American” that is to say, more democratic in their governmental forms. Obviously where democracy flourishes so does individual freedom. Maybe the “Arab Spring” will continue and those Taliban babies will grow up fully educated and say “daddy what’s with the pissed off attitude our folks had about the world and who is Mohammad”?
Yeah, I imagine Taliban babies are told not to share their toys, and only allowed to play in sandboxes facing Mecca.
If you are making snide statements to bait me into reaffirming my beilef about the importance of healthy caregiver-child bonding in very early childhood development, then here you go:
As Taliban babies are prone to live in war torn areas, their caregivers, I would think, may be prone to stressors or other problems that could limit their most effective relatedness to an infant/toddler. To the extent this is true, they would, generally speaking, have a disadvantage to infants/toddlers raised by caregivers who were more consistently available for maintaining healthy responding.
Little kids in third world countries spend a lot more time with their mothers than they do in West. (In fact, so do kids in the U.S., for example, who’s mothers are on welfare.) No daycare caregiver will ever give a child the quantity and quality of attention as his mother. But I believe your initial claim was that they are all psychopaths, in which case the nurturing effects wouldn’t play a role here anyway.
Every now and then a story like this makes me wish there was some uninhabited continent or nearby habitable planet where the rest of us could go and leave all the religious zealots behind to destroy themselves. Then we could come back and repopulate the planet with sanity and reason.
Little kids in third world countries spend a lot more time with their mothers than they do in West. (In fact, so do kids in the U.S., for example, who’s mothers are on welfare.) No daycare caregiver will ever give a child the quantity and quality of attention as his mother. But I believe your initial claim was that they are all psychopaths, in which case the nurturing effects wouldn’t play a role here anyway.
You are the one who brought up babies, in this thread.
I was referring to a culture or subculture being psychopathic, as in a subculture of Islamic believers that believes devoutly that an individual should be put to death if that individual decides he doesn’t believe in Islam and the subculture of Islamic believers that destroyed irreplaceable art and antiquities, or the subculture of Islamic believers who believe that mutilating a girl’s genitalia is a proper practice, or the subculture of Islamic believers who would gladly kill someone for simply portraying a supposed pictoral representation of Muhammed.
Most Muslims apparently don’t hold to these radically fundamental beliefs in practice, but some clearly do. How is it that some Muslims hold fast with the more rabid fundamentalist interpretations of the Quran and the Hadith (and act on them) while most do not? For example, how was Bin Laden so different in this regard from his brothers? Clearly, I cannot claim that Bin Laden experienced issues of disorganized attachment with his his primary caregiver in his very early childhood, and was thus more prone to accept and act on beliefs that promote violence, but it is one thought.
How is it that some Muslims hold fast with the more rabid fundamentalist interpretations of the Quran and the Hadith (and act on them) while most do not?
How is it that some Muslims hold fast with the more rabid fundamentalist interpretations of the Quran and the Hadith (and act on them) while most do not?
If you ask me, I think it’s genetics.
I think it is genetics and their experiences in their individual lifetimes.
