*Subject:* A MASTERPIECE by Robert Sibley (Ottawa Citizen)**** ** **
**** [image: Description: Description: cid:2238F085-1D70-4CBF-A9E5-FA4A09F2E9F7]<https://www.facebook.com/plugins/comments.php?channel_url=http%3A%2F%2Fstatic.ak.facebook.com%2Fconnect%2Fxd_arbiter.php%3Fversion%3D11%23cb%3Df11be54246a52e4%26origin%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.ottawacitizen.com%252Ffd3c5a1342710a%26domain%3Dwww.ottawacitizen.com%26relation%3Dparent.parent&href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ottawacitizen.com%2Fstory.html%3Fid%3D7357141&locale=en_US&numposts=5&sdk=joey&width=620> **** Robert K Monckton<https://www.facebook.com/plugins/comments.php?channel_url=http%3A%2F%2Fstatic.ak.facebook.com%2Fconnect%2Fxd_arbiter.php%3Fversion%3D11%23cb%3Df11be54246a52e4%26origin%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.ottawacitizen.com%252Ffd3c5a1342710a%26domain%3Dwww.ottawacitizen.com%26relation%3Dparent.parent&href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ottawacitizen.com%2Fstory.html%3Fid%3D7357141&locale=en_US&numposts=5&sdk=joey&width=620> · Moncton, New Brunswick<http://www.facebook.com/pages/Moncton-New-Brunswick/102170323157613> **** Europe is proof that Multiculturalism has been a horrible and deadly mistake. While it's countries opened their doors to all immigrants, some have come in to exploit them to no end. Islam does not believe that all cultures are equal.It's followers are now spreading across the globe and refusing to be assimilated to their new homes. If Multiculturalism is not stopped now by native Europeans, it will be stopped in the near future when Muslims have achieved numerical dominance. Canada must learn from Europe's failed experiment and make changes now. **** **** **** http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/Column+Muslim+world+awaits+Great+Separation/7357141/story.html **** **** **** **** Column: The Muslim world awaits its Great Separation**** **** **** By Robert Sibley, Ottawa Citizen October 7, 2012**** **** **** When the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes published his masterwork, Leviathan, in 1651, Europeans were barely beginning to recover from the Wars of Religion that had devastated the continent since the early 16th century. Responding to this violence, Hobbes provided an argument for the establishment of political orders free of unwarranted religious influence, an argument that has deeply influenced the formation of western liberal democracy.**** Leviathan was a book born of necessity. For more than a century and a half — from the German Peasants’ War in 1524 to the English Civil War in the mid-17th century — Catholics and Protestants had slaughtered each other in the name of the one true God. The Thirty Years War alone, between 1618 and 1648, devastated Europe to a degree not seen again until the wars of the 20th century.**** Only in 1648, with the signing of the series of treaties known as the Peace of Westphalia, were Europeans able to bring their religious wars an end. The treaties not only established the principle of non-interference in the domestic affairs of sovereign states, but they also laid the groundwork for the separation of religion and politics, a concept that over time became a fundamental principle for liberal democratic order.**** *Thus, Christian Europe achieved the Great Separation, the result of which was the gradual withdrawal of religion from the public sphere and its relegation, more or less, to private life. By some accounts this separation of religion and politics is one of the hallmarks of western civilization, a philosophical achievement that, along with advances in science and economic power, enabled the rise of the West.***** *No such separation has occurred in the Muslim world*. And that lack — some call it a failure — is, arguably, the deep source of the recent violence in the Muslim world, not some risible video mocking the Prophet Muhammad. It should be evident to everyone, except perhaps the Obama administration, that hardcore Islamists have used the video, The Innocence of Muslims, to push a political agenda that has as its ultimate aim a religious purpose.*** * *The Islamists can get away with promoting violence by means of faux religious outrage because of the totalitarian nature of Islam.***** I do not use the word “totalitarian” to be unnecessarily provocative. I mean that* Islam is a totalitarian religion in the sense that *it attempts to encompass the totality of human life, whether cultural, political, social or religious. In the words of one prominent Islamic scholar, Jaafar Sheikh Idris: “Islam cannot be separated from the state because it guides us through every detail of running the state and our lives. … For Muslims, the word ‘religion’ does not only refer to a collection of beliefs and rituals, it refers to a way of life which includes all values, behaviours, and details of living.”**** Given this definition, it is understandable why those who question or mock Islam are deemed enemies of Islam. Someone who insists all of life’s activities must be religiously grounded cannot help but incline toward extremism when something “offends” his or her faith. Questions create doubt, which undermines the coherence of that person’s existence. The only way to eliminate that doubt is to eliminate its source, all in the name of God, of course. And therein resides the great potential for violence. As political theorist Michael Allen Gillespie remarks: “*When men come to think of themselves as enacting God’s will, or indeed be gods themselves, the political consequences are inevitably horrifying.”***** To be modern, as commentator Fouad Ajami points out, is to tolerate things that offend you. The fact that so many Muslims take offence at the slightest perceived insult betrays a deep sense of insecurity within the Islamic mind. Not that the* leaders of the Muslim world* are any more secure than the mobs that they use. They, too, betray their unease with modernity in wanting “Islamophobia” declared “a crime against humanity.” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called for “international legal regulations against attacks on what people deem sacred.” *Can you imagine an American president demanding international laws against Christianophobia?***** Behind the events that spark “Muslim rage” — from the 1989 fatwa against novelist Salman Rushdie and the 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who made a film about Islamic culture’s abusive view of women, to the 2005 Danish cartoons and, now, the blasphemy of a 14-minute video — is the refusal of Islam’s elites to accept that their religion requires its own Great Separation if it wants to be part of the modern world.**** Lacking such a reformation we now have Muslim theocrats and political leaders demanding that the West adopt Islamic cultural standards, including bans on “blasphemy.” This is nothing more than the logical extension of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s death sentence on Rushdie over his supposedly blasphemous novel, The Satanic Verses.**** *What is most troublesome is the willingness of western leaders, including the president of the United States, to placate Muslim religious “sensitivities” while undercutting fundamental principles of western political order.***** “T*he future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” Barack Obama said in his recent speech to the United Nations*. The statement is problematic because it *effectively entails a rejection of the right to free speech of those critical of Islam.***** “When one finishes parsing the sentence, one is left thinking the president of the United States agrees with Muslim mobs, and denouncing those who cause offence by ridiculing what others hold sacred can only mean admitting free speech should be abridged,” says Salim Mansur, a political scientist at the University of Western Ontario.**** There are dangers to placating Islamists. “The greatest danger of the growing menace was that good men would commit intellectual suicide and call it peace,” writes Salman Rushdie in Joseph Anton, his recently published memoir of his years under the fatwa.* “Good men would give in to fear and call it respect.”***** No doubt, most Muslims in the West want to assimilate peacefully, to enjoy the benefits of the West while continuing to practise their faith in private. But too many are happy to live in Brussels or London or Toronto while listening to fundamentalist mullahs who promote the Islamist agenda at the local mosque. The fact that Muslims living in the West are only too willing to riot at some “insult” to their faith reinforces the notion that there will be increasing demands for the institution of Sharia laws and, hence, Islamic governance,* as the Muslim population within western societies grows.***** But then what we are seeing in the cities of the West is what commentator Daniel Pipes calls the “separation of civilizations” — Muslim-only enclaves where Sharia laws pertaining to matrimony, education, economics and even calendar time hold sway.**** This augurs ill for the future. *The West has imported the conditions that allow for the emergence of the kind of religious conflict* that Hobbes warned against in Leviathan. The question, of course, is whether westerners will shed the illusions of multiculturalism and reject the Islamist effort to impose medieval religious laws antithetical to a modern liberal society. Unless they do, the result may well be what Hobbes most feared: a war of all against all.**** Robert Sibley is a senior writer for the Ottawa Citizen. His new book, The Way of the Stars, was published in September by the University of Virginia Press.**** © Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen**** Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Column+Muslim+world+awaits+Great+Separation/7357141/story.html#ixzz28lBROLWX **** -- Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum * Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/ * It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls. * Read the latest breaking news, and more.
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