14 posts tagged “world civilizations ii”

A few nights ago, I got to watch Deepa Mehta's film EARTH, the first in her EARTH, WATER, FIRE trilogy that provoked such a firestorm of protest in India. EARTH is about the unraveling of India upon the acquisition of Independence from the British in 1948. It looks at this period of great anguish and suffering through the eyes of one young girl (Lenny Baby) and a circle of her young adult caregivers. The film opens with Lenny Baby intentionally breaking a China dish, as though she senses the divisions to come and needs to symbolize them in some tangible way so that she can talk about her fears. Needless to say, no one really takes notice of the message she was trying to send, just as no one REALLY took time to think about the emotional and psychological stresses that a free India would bring to bear on its diverse populations.

India had always been a multi-cultural and multi-religious society. But it had always had some caste or some foreign power to regulate their co-existence. Political Independence demanded that whole new ways of thinking about one another be developed. Unfortunately, it led to the surfacing of deep and buried suspicians and animosities. Muslims, the minority, did not believe that they could trust a democratic and mostly Hindu India to protect its cultural distinctives. Sikhs and Parsees were forced to align themselves with one group or the other. It became too difficult to take the time needed to distinguish between one "sort" of Muslim or one "sort" of Hindu and another and individuals became identified as simply cells of the group, either enemy or friend.

 “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggression.” Sigmund Freud

And EARTH looks at this one group of comrades, some Sikh, some Hindu, some Muslim, some Parsee and it looks at how the forces of the wider community eventually split them apart and set them to warring against each other. In the midst of them, Lenny Baby, a nine or ten year old girl who loves them all is also split apart. In one of the most poignant scenes, She takes a doll and rips it apart, as she herself is being torn apart.  She is hopelessly doomed and in her childlike way, she knows it. She loves a Hindu. She loves a Muslim. She loves a Sikh. She speaks English. Her parents are Parsee. In a world where all these are killing each other in horrible ways she too will be forced to chose.

It raises important questions. Will we always resort in our loyalties to the communities were were born into? Can we create communities from the various "pre-loaded communities" and make them just as solid, just as enduring, just as formidable? And why can't we all see that really, we are most healthy when we feel free to belong to a number of communities that can overlap. Of course that makes life more complicated but, can we not manage it?

Have you ever done something symbolic, hoping that someone would see what you did and hear your cry for help in it?

OK. I am almost hesitant to make this one public. I am in the process of putting together a course in Middle Eastern History and another in Contemporary World Religions and basically, I order and watch everything I can get that I think will give me new perspectives. The movie I watched tonight is, without question, a controversial one. Islam: What the west Needs to Know.

It creatively intersperses quotes of world leaders (Bush, Blair, Harry Ried, Clinton, etc.) with academics and advocates of a more thorough understanding of the roots of Islamic fundamentalism. I will cut to the chase, their argument is somewhat an ironic one. (And they do not make it in these words). Their argument is that just as the Crusades were something of an aberration of the CORE teachings of Christ - something that eventually HAD to be corrected by a better understanding of the Gospels - the modern notion that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance is simply a result of looking at an aberration as well. The argument of this documentary is that moderate tollrant, democratic, liberal Islam is an Islam that is "off its track" that is not functioning as its founder intended.

See what I mean when I say "controversial"? And I say that as one who engages in conversation with what I would call moderate (no, let me say "likable, decent, tolerant, fun, insightful, convivial, and pleasant") Muslims regularly. How does this dichotomy come to be? According to the contributors on this documentary (and I have some reason from my own study of Islam to agree) there are different phases in Muhammad's life that have embedded themselves into the Qur'an. If, for example, you were to take the things that I affirmed in my public expressions of faith from the time that I was four to the time when I was 35, you might get a differently flavored message than what you would get if you heard me "out" my ideas sometime in the last decade.

Essentially, Muhammad had a period of his life in Mecca where he was vulnerable, weak, and often conciliatory. Later, after removing himself to Medina and building a power base there, a slightly different message emerges. Allah Himself brings about abrogations to earlier expressions. Later expressions are to replace older. It is THIS chronology of differentiation that the contributors to Islam: What the West Needs to Know are insisting on looking into.

One might ask many interesting questions. Are the contributors right? And if they are, what if moderate Islam has decided it likes itself even if it is inconsistent with some of the things Muhammad said in is Medinan Surahs? What is Islam? Is it what its prophet said early in his life, later in his life? Or whichever of the two modern Muslims prefer? Other questions arise. Is a movie that clearly takes the approach that Muslims - all Muslims are potentially dangerous and likely to revert to original programming in time something that should be shown in American Religion classes. I mean, essentially, this movie accuses them all of being potential "Cylon sleeper agents".

If nothing else, the film reminds me of the importance of my work ... and of my desire to have more Muslim friends, not less. I do not wish to be a victim to my latest movie's agenda.

Question for Comment: What are your core belifs. Is your life presently consistent with them? Why or why not?

"What am I in the eyes of most people," Vincent Van Gogh wrote his brother not long after embarking on his career in painting in 1882, "a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low."

Then he added: "All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart."

This letter of Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo seems like such a classic expression of what artists are about, or should be about. According to Emerson and Thoreau, it is what we ALL should be about in whatever work we do, be it horticulture, flower arranging, history teaching, computer programming, cheese making, or selling used cars.

"What I want and have as my aim is infernally difficult to achieve, and yet I don't think I am raising my sights to high. I want to do drawings that touch some people. . . . I want to get to the point where people say of my work: that man feels deeply, that man feels keenly. . . . That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love malgré tout [in spite of everything]"

I am reminded of the Rumi poem where Rumi writes:

 "Even if you don't know what you want,
buy something, to be part of the exchanging flow.

 Start a huge, foolish project,
like Noah.

 It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you."

I find myself reading the letters of Vincent Van Gogh and appreciating the role that his brother Theo played in his life more and more. Who would know the name of Theo Van Gogh were it not for the fact that he supported his brother's work and allowed him to paint? Sometimes I just wonder about the way that we structure society. We want everyone to get the opportunity to actualize themselves. We want everyone to get the chance to pass on to the world the gifts that reside within them. I suppose that is why the NO-Child-Left-Behind Act is called the No-child-Left-Behind Act. But I wonder sometimes if the end result is that many children do not get ahead. I wish there were a way of X-Raying children to see how much of this passion to give to the world that Vincent Van Gogh had was in them. Ultimately, that is the essential thing: a passion to give something to the world. One wishes they could live in a system where support flowed towards that passion like water downhill. So often, support flows to those who have almost none of it in an attempt to get them up to some line near average.

In another letter that Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother, he conveyed his understanding of the feeling of loneliness one feels in the absence of a counterpart and child.

"I remember that only a short while ago I came back to a house that was not a real home - not full of warmth as it is now - where two great voids stared at me night and day. There was no woman, there was no child, and though I do not believe there was any the less grief, I do believe there was less love. And those two voids kept me company to left and right, in the street, at work, everywhere and always. There was no woman, there was no child. Look, I don't know if you've ever had that feeling which sometimes forces a sort of sigh or groan from one when one is alone: oh God, where is my wife, oh God, where is my child - is being alone really living? . . . I believe in a God, and that it is His will that man does not live alone but with a wife and child, if everything is to be normal."

Van Gogh seems to want to paint nature and himself. He desperately wanted to be paid for his effort because he also needed affirmation but he would not allow the money to interfere with the need to express himself. As he writes to Theo:

"Feeling and love for nature sooner or later find a response from people who are interested in art. It is the painter's duty to be entirely absorbed by nature and to use all his intelligence to express sentiment in his work, so that it becomes intelligible to other people. To work for the market is, in my opinion, not exactly the right way, but on the contrary involves deceiving the amateurs. And true painters have not done so. Rather, the sympathy they received sooner or later came because of their sincerity. This is all I know about it, and I do not think I need know more."

Lonely, un-noticed in the world of art, hanging on by the slender thread of his brother’s patronage, Vincent could only battle his mental afflictions and fight the entropy of despair with work. “One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul” he wrote his brother,

“And yet no one ever come to sit by it. Passersby see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on the way.”

The poet, Robert Frost’s gravestone states that he had “a lover’s quarrel with the world.” I think one could say the same of Van Gogh. He loves the world. He does not think that enough people love it like they ought and he wishes to paint it in such a way that they cannot ignore it forever. He wants them to see beauty in broken people, empty chairs, and old boots. Like all of us, he knows that there is a difference between how we see the world when we are loved and in love and how we see it when we think ourselves unloved and incapable of expressing love in a way that anyone will appreciate. “There is the same difference in a person before and after he is in love as between an unlighted lamp and one that is burning,” he writes Theo:

“The lamp was there and it was a good lamp, but now it sheds light, too, and that is its real function. And love makes one more calm about many things, and so one is more fit for one's work.”

As artist so often are, he is right.

Question for Comment: For many years, Theo Van Gogh supported his brother's existence while Vincent's paintings went unsold, unappreciated, and often unseen. I am not sure if Theo believed in Vincent's inherent talent or if he simply felt it a fraternal duty. I would have to read more. I am left wondering though. Who in your life supports YOUR passion to serve the world in some way? And what do you do when the answer is "no one"?

I woke up at 2:30 in the morning and couldn't get back to sleep so ... I decided to watch the NOVA special on Sir Isaac Newton (Newton's Dark Secrets). The connections to the work I have been doing on Michelangelo are well stated in the conclusions the documentary draws about this enigma of the human brain's potential to see the universe in new ways:

NARRATOR: A year after Robert Hooke died, Newton published his second great masterpiece, Opticks, which expanded on his work with light. At the end of this book, Newton finally wrote up some of his key ideas about calculus, 40 years after they were conceived. And although he had given up alchemy, he continued to devote himself to theology.

ROB ILIFFE: Right up to his death, he tried to keep his heresy as secret as possible, and he thinks, "There's no point trying to convince these people of, of what I'm doing, because the time is not right. These people aren't fit to receive the kind of word that I'm giving out."

NARRATOR: Newton died in 1727. He was 84 years old. He was buried among kings and queens in Westminster Abbey, beneath a monument to his scientific achievements, his alchemy and passionate, but heretical, religious beliefs virtually unknown.

Now, two and a half centuries later, a new picture of Sir Isaac Newton is emerging, along with a new understanding of the roles that science, religion and alchemy played in his life.

JAMES FORCE: He sees his world as one world, he sees his pursuit of truth as one pursuit, and whether it takes him to books of theology or to books of nature, whether it be books of astronomy or books of alchemy, it doesn't matter to him.

SIMON SCHAFFER: What Newton does is brilliantly use the tools appropriate to every field in which he worked. He's an ingenious and energetic builder who's astonishingly brilliant at composing gorgeous monuments of the most intensely clever design. Sometimes these appear as great books like the Principia itself. Sometimes they appear in experiments. But we would be wrong to look for a single key which unlocks the whole mystery of Isaac Newton.

WALTER LEWIN: The man was a complete genius. I mean people like Newton, if I shoot off the hip, maybe once in 500 years, at best.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3217_newton.html

Its interesting that the last sculpture that Michelangelo did was a self-portrait of himself as Nicodemus, a man who felt that he had to keep his most controversial beliefs a secret. I find it particularly fascinating that people like Newton and Michelangelo had to figure out how to live within social systems that could not possibly see with their clarity of vision what was "out there". they themselves were constantly learning, observing, trying to connect the dots. These guys could, in a matter of months, put more pieces of a puzzle together than whole cities.

I would never put myself in the same category. I mean, these guys had Cray super-computers for brains but I do know the feeling of working on a puzzle for days and weeks on end - of seeing those pieces come together and having it just blow your mind how simple the picture is when you are done. You sit there looking at your project saying "Of course. why didn't I see it at the beginning?"

And then you look around you and you realize that you can never really get others to see what you have seen without helping them to make the same journey you have made to it. Unless you learn to teach better, you will always and forever then on be alone in the world. The man who cataloged Newton's papers after he died put all Newton's alchemy work in a file labeled "Not Fit To Be Printed". Even in their graves, people like Newton sell their souls for membership in their communities. Sir Isaac Newton too was a Nicodemus.

Question for Comment: How does one teach the ability to make connections? Are some brains just more adept at it? Can the ability to find patterns in seemingly random data be taught? Are people who think on the level of Michelangelo and Newton and Bethoven pre-destined to be lonely, putting distance between themselves and the communities of people they need every time they spend time alone thinking?

“not what they want but what is good for them.”
Remark by Oliver Cromwell.

Tonight's movie was To Kill a King. It is the story of the Roundhead's victory over the armies of King Charles in one of England's more interesting revolutions. It's about an inspired movement to dethrone a tyrant without having a clear plan for what sort of regime will replace it. It is about how even leaders of revolutions come to find out that their brothers-in-arms have different visions. And it is about how easily wealth can purchase power out from under idealism as long as there is a table to make deals under. I found myself asking "Am I watching a movie about King Chalres, Oliver Cromwell, Thomas Fairfax, the Tower of London, and England? or am I watching a movie about Saddam Hussein, George Bush, Colin Powell, Guantanamo Bay, and Iraq?"

Soon after the Roundhead armies defeat the armies of the monarchists, King Charles goes about bribing parliament to vote to keep him in power. Oliver Cromwell wants to see him tried and beheaded. Lord Thomas Fairfax sees a more moderate approach to change in view, seeing only a need to get Charles to sign a new Constitution limiting his power. Unfortunately for him, he is caught in the middle. His family's privileges have their origins in the Monarchical system whereby families are rewarded with special treatment for serving and defending the crown. The inequalities that he enjoys are founded on a belief in the divine right of kings so ... how can he kill the king?

Eventually, he determines to kill his friend Cromwell instead. It is only King Charles who is not conflicted by second guesses in this portrayal of regime change and personal loyalty. Fairfax's loyalty to his wife, to his children, to his family, to tradition cannot take him on as long a leap as Oliver Cromwell takes. Cromwell seeks not a reformed old order but a completely reformatted new order.

... And yet, a few years into his new regime, Cromwell has to consider that the idea of a king might have its advantages. The following comes from an article by Patrick Little in History Today; Feb2007, Vol. 57 Issue 2, p24-31,

"If his highness can be moved to accept of it [the crown], the services he hath done the nations have abundantly deserved it; but if he who hath so much merited it do judge it fit to continue his refusal of it, the contempt of a crown -- which can not proceed but from an extraordinary virtue -- will render him, in the esteem of all whose opinion is to be valued, more honourable than any that wear it.

WHEN THE AMBASSADOR to France, Sir William Lockhart, wrote this in April 1657, it had been nearly two months since the first formal offer by Parliament to make Oliver Cromwell king, and in England people were waiting anxiously for the Lord Protector to make up his mind. Would he choose to become King Oliver or not?"

Ultimately, Cromwell went with his convictions and insisted that regardless of the pragmatics, it would be a sin to resurrect the idea of monarchy.

"Truly the providence of God has laid this title aside providentially … I would not seek to set up that that providence hath destroyed and laid in the dust, and I would not build Jericho again."

His reference to rebuilding Jericho is from a passage in Joshua where God instructs that the city of Jericho, once razed, should never be rebuilt.

Again, the parallels to Iraq are interesting. Should Iraq have been completly deBaathified? should the Iraqi army have been dismissed entirely? How much change was possible in Iraq in such a short period of time?  Should America have ever started using "Cromwellian methods" to achieve what may have been idealistic objectives?

“No one rises so high as he who knows not whither he is going.”
Cromwell on personal fortunes.

Question for Comment: How are you affected when you feel that a cause you have dedicated yourself to has been taken over by someone who is using it for their own purposes? 

Watched another Frontline documentary on the part that Dick Cheney played in the push to war.

I wish Dick Cheney would watch it and respond so that I could say that I had listened to both sides of the story.The argument is that Cheney, Rumsfeild, Wolfowitz, Pearl, etc. set up their own intelligence agency and suppressed the CIA intelligence by putting pressure on George Tennant. 

It is interesting that Dick Cheney is the one that gets the workover and not Bush in this 2006 version of the Iraq War. What is so interesting is that most of the material is ALSO in the Frontline documentary, BUSH'S WAR put out two years later. In short you can pick either video and watch either man, Bush or Cheney get blamed for the Iraq War. In 2004, Frontline put out the documentary Rumsfeld's War. In 2010, maybe it will be Condi Rices?

None are friendly to Condi Rice or Don Rumsfeld who will need to have a movie made to redeem them from eternal blame for Iraq if it winds up a total mess indefinitely. I just find it fascinating that Frontline has used the exact same movie to go after EITHER Cheney OR Bush or Rumsfeld. Its like medication that will work for either pain relief OR headaches or high blood pressure being packaged as medication for each.

Question for Comment: Who do YOU blame for the Iraq War (if anybody). 

The following quotes come from the 1995 introduction to Edward Said's book, written 15 years earlier, Covering Islam. I think they reflect the mission of Edward Said to defend Islam, Palestinians, and Arabs in general from ignorant stereotyping.

“Malicious generalizations about Islam have become the last acceptable form of denigration of foreign culture in the West; what is said about the Muslim mind, or character, or religion, or culture as a whole cannot now be said in mainstream discussion about Africans, Jews, other Orientals, or Asians.” P. xii

“A massive United Nations effort at humanitarian relief in Bosnia was a novelty, given that everywhere else Muslims were seen and treated as aggressors for whom the best treatment was abusive talk, threats, sanctions, quarantines, and, on occasion, airstrikes.” P. xiv

“Islam” defines a relatively small proportion of what actually takes place in the Islamic world, which numbers a billion people, and includes dozens of countries, societies, traditions, languages, and, of course, an infinite number of different experiences.  It is simply false to try to trace all of this back to something called Islam, no matter how vociferously polemical Orientalists, many active in the United States, Britain, and Israel -- insisted that Islam regulates Islamic societies from top to bottom, that dar al Islam is a single, coherent entity, that church and state are really one in Islam, and so forth.” P. xvi

“The deliberately created associations between Islam and fundamentalism ensure that the average reader comes to see Islam and fundamentalism as essentially the same thing.” P. xvi

“in short, fundamentalism equals Islam equals everything we must now fight against, as we did with communism during the Cold War.” P. xix

“I am not saying that Muslims have not attacked and injured Israelis and Westerners in the name of Islam.  But I am saying that much of what one reads and sees in the media about Islam represents the aggression as coming from Islam because that is what “Islam is”. Local and concrete circumstances are thus obliterated.  In other words, covering Islam is a one-sided activity that obscures what “we” do, and highlights instead what Muslims and Arabs by their very flawed nature are.” P. xxii

“At the very least, one should say that in the contest between the Islamists and the overwhelming majority of Muslims, the former have by and large lost the battle.” P. xxvii

The world, it seems is always interested in simplifying things ... and thus conflating things. The content of what one learns is being driven by the need for efficiency in learning. There is too much to learn and therefore we do not feel we can afford the luxury of accuracy or complexity. And thus expediency drives the curriculum. I think maybe the world needs to slow down and rebuild its knowledge base ... one member of one sub-community at a time.

Question for Comment: What is a group that you think you know? Who do you actually know from that group?

Today, the boys and I were talking about Oscar Wilde's book The Picture of Dorian Gray 
and the following passage in particular: 

"I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream -- I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal-- to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be."

 I thought I might share a few selections from a textbook I used to use when teaching Western Civilizations to illustrate Lord Henry's attitude toward religion and reason. The authors' opinions are fairly evident in their treatment of the text and I thought it might serve as an interesting example of how history and contemporary bias interact. As you read, ask yourself, "are these historians telling students what happened in the past or are they just using their interpretation of history to argue for a philosophical position they hold in the present?" Here are the selections:

From Western Civilization: Ideas, Politics & Society, 3rd ed., p.137.

“During the second century AD., Greco-Roman civilization lost its creative energies, and the values of classical humanism were challenged by mythic-religious movements. No longer regarding reason as a satisfying guide to life, the educated elite subordinated the intellect to feelings and an unregulated imagination. . . . The application of reason to nature and society, as we have seen, was the great achievement of the Greek mind. But despite its many triumphs, Greek rationalism never entirely subdued the mythic religious mentality, which draws its strength from human emotion. The masses of peasants and slaves remained attracted to religious forms. Ritual, mystery, magic, and ecstasy never lost their hold on the ancient world – nor indeed have they in our own technological and scientific society. During the Hellenistic age the tide of rationalism gradually receded, and the non-rational, an ever present undercurrent, showed renewed vigor.

. . . Seeing themselves as isolated souls wandering aimlessly in a social desert, people sought refuge in religion. Reason had been found wanting. The time for faith and salvation was at hand.  . . . A spiritual malaise had descended upon the Greco-Roman world. Among the upper classes, the philosophic and scientific spirit withered; rational and secular values were in retreat. . . . Stressing the intellect and self reliance, Greco Roman thought did not provide for the emotional needs of people. Christianity addressed itself to this defect in the Greco Roman outlook

. . . The triumph of Christianity was related to a corresponding decline in the vitality of Hellenism and a shift in cultural emphasis – a movement from reason to emotion and revelation. Offering comfortable solutions to the existential problems of life and death, religion demonstrated a greater capability to stir human hearts than reason did. Hellenism had invented the tools of rational thought, but the power of mythical thought was never entirely subdued. By the late Roman Empire, science and philosophy were unable to compete with mysticism and myth. . . . Christian truth ultimately rested on faith not reason.”

Clearly, Secular people reason and therefore are never wrong and will never believe something just because it comforts them or serves a psychological need. Religious people refuse to reason and therefore are never right and are susceptible to believing things because they make them feel good.

I have been reading Edward Said's book Covering Islam  recently, and it is his contention that this sort of patronizing bias is reserved for Muslims, but I tend to think it is directed toward all people who make use of faith somewhere in their epistemological systems.

Question for Comment: Is it ever reasonable to have faith? Is it ever irrational not to?

"Have you really a very bad influence, Lord Henry? As bad as Basil says?"

"There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral--immoral from the scientific point of view."

"Why?"

"Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly--that is what each of us is here for.

People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion--these are the two things that govern us.

"I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream -- I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal-- to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be."

"But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us."

Oscar Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray

OK ... Here is the problem. If I were to do EXACTLY what I feel like doing right now, I would go exact a pleasant revenge on someone I know who has it coming. Would this  provide me with a "fresh impulse of joy"? I don;t even know. I can't even say because I have never tried it. Never allowed myself to try it. I am effectively suppressed you might say.  Is that to my advantage or disadvantage I ask you?

Question for Comment: Is Lord Henry right? Are we poisoned by our refusals?

A controversial new anti-Koranic video was recently produced and banned in Holland. It demonstrates the problem that Islamic people are having everywhere.  It is called FITNA. I will let you go find it if you want. It essentially superimposes specific verses from the Koran advocating violence against unbelievers with images and sound files of Islamic extremists advocating the same in contemporary society.

Interestingly, the film was mentioned by a student in the Netherlands who is taking one of my online classes right now. This week, we are studying McCarthyism.You can, I think, see the connection:

"Take a walk down the street and see where this is going. You no longer feel like you are living in your own country. There is a battle going on and we have to defend ourselves. Before you know it there will be more mosques than churches!" Geert Wiliders.

This guy so reminds me of Dr. Pfander in my Masters Thesis:

"AMSTERDAM – Faction leader for the Freedom Party Geert Wilders is not considering making any apology to Saudi Arabia for his recent comments on the Koran. He said this on Sunday in response to a report in the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan, which wrote that the Islamic country has complained to the Dutch government about the comments.

A spokesperson for the ministry of foreign affairs in The Hague said on Sunday that the Saudi ambassador had in fact done so “informally.” There has not been any official complaint however, he said.

The newspaper claims that the Saudi embassy in The Hague demanded that Wilders recant his comments and apologize to Muslims. The MP said he would not even consider it.

“Are they completely mad? It is scandalous that a country that does not recognize freedom of speech is telling me what to do. They had better learn that as an MP here you are allowed to say what you want.”

Wilders said earlier this week in an interview with newspaper De Pers that Muslims should tear out and discard half the Koran if they want to live in the Netherlands."

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1787609/posts

Would the Dutch tolerate the forced censoring of large portions of the Christian Bible in the Netherlands? W hat is the difference? I suspect that Christians have, whether they admit it or not, come to the place where they no longer think that King  David's conception of God was entirely accurate. Muslims are still, apparently having that argument. I suspect that it is very unfair to produce a video that pretends that they are not and FITNA may be that video.

Questions for Comment: have you ever read the Qur'an for yourself? How does one balance its advocacy for jihad with its advocacy for peace? Is it in a different category altogether from the scriptures that Christians appeal to?