still, Salim, I'd be happy to talk

Salim Mansur, the brave warrior for freedom, is again forthrightly condemning disgusting Muslim behaviour: a father's murder of his own daughter and a Muslim body's frivolous attack on the effervescent Canadian writer Mark Steyn. As always with Mansur, it is a perverted form of Islam that is to blame, never Islam itself.

The murder was prompted by an ideology of bigotry and terror masked as a faith-tradition -- an ideology of radical Islamism at war with the modern world of freedom and democracy.

from Salim Mansur: Bigotry, terror masked as faith

The Islam and the Muslims represented by a body like CIC (Canadian Islamic Congress) is not the true Islam and not the true Muslims:

Moreover, they are fraudulent in their claims of representing Muslims in general as the CIC does. The fact is, on the contrary, most Muslims in Canada and elsewhere in the West left their native lands to escape from unmitigated cruelty, heartlessness and hypocrisy of Muslim rulers and religious leaders.

[...] as fraudsters they have developed the swindler's art of blackmailing free societies [...]

For Mansur, the true Muslims and the bulk of Muslims are those that repudiate but also fear the Islamists. Apart from an initial close circle of Mohammad's and the successors of that inner elite this would seem to characterize all Muslims from the very start to the hopefully inevitable end. It is what you'd expect from a political ideology masked as a divine prescription. It is what has been in place from the beginning.

And that "beginning" is not simply the beginning of Islam but the beginning of life on this planet: for females and young offspring have always been vulnerable and have always been the first to be exploited or destroyed by life's urge to establish dominant and dominating genetic material. It is most glaringly exemplified in the behaviour of lions, an animal that Muslim men are quick to identify with. When a new male defeats the ruling male of the pride he sets out to obliterate the previous male's genetic material by killing every lion cub he can lay a claw on in the intervals of his systematic rape of each of the pride's lionesses. OK, "rape" is not correct as it assumes that a female might - or might not - give consent. In the leonine world, the female is simply not consulted. They are not known to refuse. This is in fact quite a good description of the average Muslim wife: she could never be "raped" by her husband as she has never been "known to refuse".

That was "in the beginning" but then God arrived. Humanity conceived of a divine law giver that dictated that things would be otherwise. Not that women and children were given particular consideration. First and foremost, the Divinity Itself had to be honoured and with an utterly singular focus:

• I am the LORD thy God
  
  
• Thou shalt have no other gods before me
  
  
• Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image
  
  
• Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain

excerpts from Bible: Exodus 20, King James Version

From a woman's point of view, nothing has really changed here. The dominant male, the Lion King, has simply been transformed into a "LORD thy God".

For us women and children, it took the coming of Jesus to change all that. Or at least to begin to change it all. There is a controversial saying of Jesus on this topic, the last in the Gospel of Thomas:

Simon Peter said to them: Let Mariham go out from among us, for women are not worthy of the life. Jesus said: Look, I will lead her that I may make her male, in order that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself male will enter into the kingdom of heaven.

from Gospel of Thomas Saying 114, trans Blatz

I tend not to take offense at this passage, seeing it as an invitation to women to become Lion Kings themselves. This is how Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Margaret Thatcher, at some moments even Condoleeza Rice, have come about. However, I would prefer a better acknowledgment of the sanctity of women in any role, for any woman living true to her essential nature can enter into the kingdom of heaven. That would even include a prostitute if that is genuinely her chosen profession (and indeed some of the ancient goddess faith systems did cultivate a sacred form of prostitution).

From a modern woman's point of view, Mohammad turned back the clock and returned women to a place as chattels, as hardly better than a cow or ass or any other beast owned by a man. There are many cultures - most notably the Chinese - in which women are or have been until recently treated badly, where they have had little or no separate rights and responsibilities. However, Islam - as it expresses itself in the Koran - is not woman-friendly and it further has the arrogance to proclaim itself as being from God and therefore as having an absolute merit and an eternal validity. Chinese culture has been able to change for the better perhaps because it was not so burdened by a God message set in the stone of the written word.

Mansur has a strong voice when condemning the current behaviour of Muslims generally (but especially Arabs in the Middle East). He doesn't mince his words and he often says what the "supinely appeasing" non-Muslims are too timid to say. However, like Jasser, he is less convincing when trying to make a case for a "true" or spiritual Islam, a genuine faith tradition, that has been hijacked by these nasty Islamists. He has not succeeded in showing us the difference between this so-called "real thing" and what seems to us - when examining the Islamic historical and written record - to be the real thing.

Salim, like Zuhdi, is a fine man, courageous and energetic in his efforts to defeat this supremacist ideology coming out of Islam. However, I have become more and more convinced that what has come out of Islam is Islam itself. Devout but "nice" Muslims like these will, I'm sure, continue to discover and experience the numinous through their Islamic traditions but, aside from such inner satisfactions, they can have nothing further to offer to the current debate.

Still, as with Zuhdi, so with Salim: I'm happy to talk these things over anytime you want to.

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