Thursday, June 21, 2007

Stuff I would love to research if I had enough time pt627

Today sees the launch of the Council of Ex Muslims over at Portculis House. The organization is going to headed up by Marxist women's right campaigner and Iranian exile Maryam Namazie and is intended to provide a voice for Muslim apostates.

Now the thing is about outfits like this is that people end up supporting them because they appear to stand for free speech, the separation and church and state, women's rights and good stuff like that.

Well, they do

Sort of

They are also very good at perpetuating myths, fuelling conflict and exacerbating or even creating divisions between people.

I'm mindful of the stellar career of that other radical ex-Muslim atheist women's rights campaigner Ayaan Hirsi Ali who got caught telling lies and now works for the super-fluffy, totally unfascist American Enterprise Institute.

I'm also mindful of the fact that much potential Left Wing opposition to the invasion of Afghanistan was neutered by portraying the occupation as somehow being about women's rights and nothing to do with oil pipelines, opium production and Central Asian military bases. Yes, of course it was.

And I couldn't help noticing that the Council of Ex Muslims appears to feature a fair number of Iranian exiles who left the country as part of the exodus of ex SAVAK operatives and other potential prisoners of conscience who fled Iran back in 1980. Though I'm sure they would not have the bad taste to follow in the footsteps of all those Iraqi exiles who earned a tidy living making up all sorts of bollocks intelligence as part of the preamble to the 2003 invasion of their homeland.

However, something tells me that spokespeople for the Council of Ex Muslims will be getting plenty of opportunity to put their views about Iran across in the weeks and months ahead. The kind of radical atheist Marxist views that will be music to US Christian and Israeli Neocons' ears

None of which amounts to anything conclusive other than grounds for some wariness about the Council of Ex Muslims but it would be lovely to know who's going to be paying their bills

.

5 comments:

Shahid said...

Then there's that famous "apostate" Dr Wafa Sultan, poster-girl of the not-so--independent-MEMRI, who infamously "tore apart" an al-Azhar professor "live" on al-Jazeera...

She claimed to have had doubts about Islam after seenig her professor gunned down in her class.

She was the Zionaxis former-Muslim/reformer-Muslim-anti-Muslim pin-up bitch for a while and got lots of air time because of her ranting.

Turned out:

1) She had never been a Muslim in the first place, ever...
2) She had gained entrance to America illegally
3) She had not only lied a lot about her past, but had lied about her professor being shot in class, in fact, no such incident ever occurred.
4) MEMRI is run by some Israeli ex-secutiry fucker
5) In that interview, the format for which was quickfire (suiting the short attention span of most of us Westerners, but being totally unlike the norms of debating which require considered responses) the bit where she was put in her place was not put into the famous youtube excerpt.

Recently, Wafa the Hutt has been torn several new arseholes and for this reason, refuses to do any more interviews.

As for Rushdie.....

DE said...

Ex-Muslim? Is this like an Ex- Parrot?

This reminds me of Jews for Jesus. But most of all it goes to prove that Monty Python still has the best understanding of modern religious organisations.

Anonymous said...

Not directly related but in line with past themes of the blog ... a story from the FT.

"What is at risk is not the climate but freedom

By Vaclav Klaus

Published: June 14 2007 03:00 | Last updated: June 14 2007 03:00

We are living in strange times. One exceptionally warm winter is enough - irrespective of the fact that in the course of the 20th century the global temperature increased only by 0.6 per cent - for the environmentalists and their followers to suggestradical measures to do something about the weather, and to do it right now.

In the past year, Al Gore's so-called "documentary" film was shown in cinemas worldwide, Britain's - more or less Tony Blair's - Stern report was published, the fourth report of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was put together and the Group of Eight summit announced ambitions to do something about the weather. Rational and freedom-loving people have to respond. The dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us. Everything else is denounced.

The author Michael Crichton stated it clearly: "the greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda". I feel the same way, because global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem. It requires courage to oppose the "established" truth, although a lot of people - including top-class scientists - see the issue of climate change entirely differently. They protest against the arrogance of those who advocate the global warming hypothesis and relate it to human activities.
"

Stef said...

@anon - a decent summary of this whole nonsensical business...

Global Warming: Truth or Dare?, Denis Rancourt...

http://tinyurl.com/2l98x2

Stef said...

"...I argue that by far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might..."