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TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 7 2004 3:00 PM

British Cleric Approves of Targeting Children

While plenty of people in the Middle East and North Africa are horrified at the terrorist massacre in Russia, a British cleric thinks its perfectly peachy for Muslim terrorists to target British children if they feel oppressed.

An extremist Islamic cleric based in Britain said yesterday that he would support hostage-taking at British schools if carried out by terrorists with a just cause.

Omar Bakri Mohammed, the spiritual leader of the extremist sect al-Muhajiroun, said that holding women and children hostage would be a reasonable course of action for a Muslim who has suffered under British rule.

Oh, boo fuckity hoo. The human rights of Muslims who live in Britain are overwhelmingly more respected than even in relatively liberal Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa such as Jordan, Tunisia, and Morocco. Im sure its no fun being an ethnic and religious minority, but surely it beats the bootheel of the Baathist jackboot in his home country of Syria. Whatever grievances against the majority Muslims may have in Britain (and Im sure they have some) it will never be able to touch what the Chechens have against Russia. And even those grievances, horrific as they are, can never excuse the murder of children.

He tries to backpedal slightly by saying it would be okay if an Iraqi took British children hostage, and that it would only be okay if British children were killed in a crossfire.

This is disingenuous on multiple levels. For one thing, no Muslim in the world lives under British rule the way a British Muslim does. So his little quick-change maneuver over to Iraq isnt very compelling.

Even if he didnt mean to include British Muslims among those who live under British rule (dubious as that would be) he completely undermines his own attempt at moderation by saying the following:

"The Mujahideen [Chechen rebels] would not have wanted to kill those people, because it is strictly forbidden as a Muslim to deliberately kill women and children. It is the fault of the Russians," he said.

Terrorists shot fleeing children in the back. One child was impaled with a bayonet for asking for a drink of water.

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Comments

Akrasia

Ireland

August 2004

SEP 09, 2004 10:57 AM

God (or gods) has been a universal amongst all human societies we know about. This is because of human thought and reasoning is based very much on extraction and anology. All humans knew they had power over small things, they saw effects of big power, so they extracted that there must be something godlike who controls them.
This God acquires powers as new experiences need to be explained, Eventually there are so many properties, that it requires a dedicated expert to interpret them.The Shamen or the Druid or the priest, wields great power because his authority must be yielded to. In early civilisation, the shamen or religious leaders often led rebellions against the tribal leaders and were followed by the tribespeople. The people of the tribe, superstitious, were more afraid of the gods wrath, than that of the tribal chief.
Societies evolved so that the leaders had to have control over the religion of the people, this often meant enforcing a chosen religion onto the people, other times it simply involved declaring themselves to be the high priest or even the gods themselves (As with the ancient egyptians).

Just as the powerlessness of the parliamentary monarch permits the legitimate rule of the party leader, so the powerlessness of the "insulated" monarch, who is an incarnation, results either in priestly domination or, at least frequently, in the seizure of power by a family that is not encumbered with the monarch's charismatic obligations and hence can provide the real ruler (major domus, Shogun). Here too, the formal ruler must be retained because only her/his specific charisma can guarantee the proper relation to the deities, which is indispensable for the legitimacy of the whole political structure, including the position of the actual ruler. If the official ruler has genuine charisma--if it is personal not derived--s/he cannot be removed in the same manner as the Merovingians, in whose case the papacy provided a charismatically qualified power for the legitimation of the new ruling house. If an incarnated deity or a descendant of deity (for example, the Mikado) exercises genuinely charismatic authority, any attempt at deposing not just the incumbent--which, of course, is always possible in some violent or peaceful manner--but the whole charismatic house will endanger the legitimacy of all powers and weaken all traditional buttresses of the subjects' compliance. Even under the worst conditions, therefore, such a removal is anxiously avoided by all groups which benefit from the existing order; it remains to be seen whether such a dethronement is permanently feasible even when the ruling dynasty is considered representative of an alien regime, as now in China [1911-13].

Max Weber

Religion has always been a part of the justification for power by rulers. 'blue blood' Chosen people, descendants from a great prophet etc.. religion is tailor made to the power structure. when a land is invaded, one of the first things the invaders do, is try to change the religion of the population so that they acknowledge the legitimacy of the new ruler.

(sorry, battery is going, will continue this later.)

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