Whatever your opinion of a man, hos words should be weighed and considered. I found this quote to be interesting, to say the least.
Source: Larry Flint, “Common Sense 2009” writing at the Huffington Posty
“…Instead, Obama wants toincrease the oversight power of the Federal Reserve. Never mind that it already had significant oversight power before our most recent economic meltdown, yet failed to take action. Never mind that the Fed is not a government agency but a cartel of private bankers that cannot be held accountable by Washington. Whatever the Fed does with these supposed new oversight powers will be behind closed doors.
Obama’s failure to act sends one message loud and clear: He cannot stand up to the powerful Wall Street interests that supplied the bulk of his campaign money for the 2008 election. Nor, for that matter, can Congress, for much the same reason.
Consider what multibillionaire banker David Rockefeller wrote in his 2002 memoirs:
“Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure — one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
Read Rockefeller’s words again. He actually admits to working against the “best interests of the United States.”
Need more? Here’s what Rockefeller said in 1994 at a U.N. dinner: “We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis, and the nations will accept the New World Order.” They’re gaming us. Our country has been stolen from us.
Journalist Matt Taibbi, writing in Rolling Stone, notes that esteemed economist John Kenneth Galbraith laid the 1929 crash at the feet of banking giant Goldman Sachs. Taibbi goes on to say that Goldman Sachs has been behind every other economic downturn as well, including the most recent one. As if that wasn’t enough, Goldman Sachs even had a hand in pushing gas prices up to $4 a gallon.
The problem with bankers is longstanding. Here’s what one of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, had to say about them:
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation, and then by deflation, the banks and the corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their father’s conquered.”
We all know that the first American Revolution officially began in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence. Less well known is that the single strongest motivating factor for revolution was the colonists’ attempt to free themselves from the Bank of England. But how many of you know about the second revolution, referred to by historians as Shays’ Rebellion? It took place in 1786-87, and once again the banks were the cause. This time they were putting the screws to America’s farmers.
Daniel Shays was a farmer in western Massachusetts. Like many other farmers of the day, he was being driven into bankruptcy by the banks’ predatory lending practices. (Sound familiar?) Rallying other farmers to his side, Shays led his rebels in an attack on the courts and the local armory. The rebellion itself failed, but a message had been sent: The bankers (and the politicians who supported them) ultimately backed off. As Thomas Jefferson famously quipped in regard to the insurrection: “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
Perhaps it’s time to consider that option once again.
The real war is not between the left and the right. It is between the average American and the ruling class. It’s time we took back our government from those who would make us their slaves….”
FIN
Since you are a Muslim, what do you think about this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2VkIu8TL_I&feature=PlayList&p=8C9C46871EFE7461&playnext_from=PL&index=5
Indeed, Kamal. The “left” and the “right” is a purposefully fostered illusion to keep the masses divided and distracted so our bankster overlords can carry on their business while most of us argue about “healthcare” and “same sex marriage.”
Short quick reply to something that deserves a longer more detailed reply today.
I doubt these guys even understand the Sharia, most Muslims don’t – even many madressa “Alim course” graduates who go on to become Imams. They pick and choose what they want to defend, and ignore the rest. Typically they pick moralistic personal codes and ignore everything in the Sharia about economic justice.
They also typically ignore the things in the Sharia that give women rights, an astonishing and unprecedented array of rights that many Western women didn’t even have until the 1930s.
That’s why I often hate even touching this topic – no one knows jack about it, those few who do know typically misconstrue the knowledge of it in supporting various sacred cows of theirs the result of cultural and historical conditioning.
Most people running their mouths off about it are bloody hypocrites and pernicious liars. In the Victorian age English people were objecting to the Sharia on the grounds of women’s rights when English women legally HAD ALMOST NONE, Richard Francis Burton wrote some astonishingly witty and insightful things about how stupid this was and pointing out in painstaking detail the rights the Sharia actually gave to women, and that English women completely lacked.
So the whole discourse on both Muslim and non-Muslim sides has been skewed out of both ignorance and malicious pernicious mendacity for a long time.
2. These guys are in a non-Muslim society, according to the Sharia itself they are bound explicitly by the laws of the society they are in.
Betcha the opponents of the Sharia don’t talk about this much, neither do these guys.
In fact no one talks about this, I mean a few do – Hamza Yusuf Hansen (a California Imam who oddly enough is more popular in the UK than here) has dealt on this often however, but it’s typically left out of the discourse by both sides.
If the laws of a society in which a Muslim enters explicitly forbids a Muslim from setting up independent courts then the Muslim who does so is violating a mithaq (covenant). For they are under the Amana (trust/security) of the non-Muslim state in which they entered. Violating this mithaq is reason for their expulsion. Honor would dictate that they themselves leave if they violate a trust, however a society is free to expel those who violate its fundamental terms.
Mithaqs are sacred, wantonly violating them is something the Sharia explicitly forbids.
Breeching Amana is forbidden. The trust of Amana is sacred.
If your mortal enemy stumbles on me and I give them my Amana not knowing who they are and then you stumble in them, then according to the Sharia I am bound by the terms of the Amana – period. Even if we are best of friends and I must fight you to defend someone under whom I am bound by Amana. This is a matter of true honor, and is a sacred obligation. If my guest violates the terms of his trust with me then I can expel her to the wolves and to you.
Otherwise I must defend her – No matter where it led. So if the act of setting up independent courts of a religious law in a secular state is opposed by that state’s people to whom those setting up these courts are beholden in a covenant then these guys are actually violating the Sharia they claim to love in doing so. So the discussion is over, they are violating the Sharia by trying to set it up in the UK. The logical thing for them would be to leave and go somewhere where they can do what they wish in peace. The Sharia itself stipulates this actually.
If the society’s rules and people explicitly allow this on the other hand then for those Muslims who wish to do so, they should be free. If Muslims who object to these rules do not wish to be governed by them they should remove themselves from the communities of Muslims who implement such courts. Historically this has been the case.
The Jewish Khazar kingdom openly allowed Muslims their own courts, in the same ways that Muslims under the Caliphate typically allowed Jews Christians Zoroastrians and Hindus their own courts. In fact under the Khazars (whose descendents became the Ashkenazim) the Muslims were only occasionally repressed, for the most part Bulgarian Muslims (at the time the majority of the Bulgur tribe were Muslims) and a few other Iranian, Slavic and Baltic Muslims, were openly allowed their mosques, their own Sharia courts, and their own affairs – as long as they paid taxes.
The Muslims in the Caliphate saw this as a good thing and mostly kept good terms with the Khazars, so long as they did not oppress their co-religionists.
In Norman and German dominated Sicily up a bit past Frederick Barbarossa’s time (and much of his thought and progressive ideas were inspired by his Muslim tutors) Muslims were allowed their own courts and affairs to conduct. There are other examples in history.
No one complains in America (anymore) when orthodox Jews govern their selves – and frankly no one should. I’ve read through much Halacha literature, the Shulkhan Aruch and bits of the Talmud (all in translation. My Hebrew is patchy, I can read the letters and make out basic vocabulary, but that’s about it) – honestly many things in Jewish law offend my sensibilities.
But I would defend to the death their right in America to govern themselves by free choice and free association under these laws, up to the point where their laws violated the law of the land.
Frankly “freedom of religion” should allow just this, else it’s a lie and hypocrisy.
If Hindus want to implement strictly the laws of Manu in a community that people are free to leave by choice, in a non-Hindu secular society
But then again I’m an American and I take the constitution pretty seriously. All of those inconvenient “Rights” that people tend to ignore nowadays.. liberals and conservatives alike. It’s funny that a Muslim often takes the US constitution more serious than half of the hypocritical pseudo-conservatives AND pseudo-liberals around me… but I’m probably an outlier..
3. The Sharia is made into a sacred cow by both Secularists, and Islamists, Muslims, and non-Muslims. No one is precise about what exactly they mean by “Sharia” but the word itself is used as an idol to command fear. People who object to the Sharia as the Sharia, without being more nuanced also object to things like “innocent until proven guilty” which was one of the things Western law picked up from the Muslim Sharia.
The whole discourse about human rights, womans rights, and the Sharia is hopelessly confused because no one is ever precise about what exactly they mean and it becomes a football for polemicists to bat around. Islamists use it as the criteria of Islamicity, anti-Islamists secularists use it as an example of what’s wrong with Islam. Both forget that it’s the liberal provisions in the Sharia that molded a good deal of what some Islamists hate about the west, and what their opponents love about the Western legal tradition. There is a nice book by a Hindu barrister that gives a clear historical exposition of how the Sharia molded liberal Western legal thinkers in the Renaissance. I’ll try to dig the citation out of my notes..
Anyway Islamists, the Taliban, etc. typically put the cart before the horse, at the best of times the Sharia – Islamic jurisprudence – is a means to an end not the end to be sought. Islam is primarily about two statements, La illahau illa Allah, Muhammad Rasulullah. Not painstaking legal formula on the type of clothing people can wear.
So before any precise discourse on the matter can proceed people must first clearly define what it is they oppose, what it is they support and want, what it is by which the Sharia is defined, and so forth. No one ever does this..
Because they are not interested in facts or reality, they are interested in ideology.
In short, if a secular society forbids setting up such courts then those running around doing so should be arrested under the terms of their society.
If a secular society allows setting up such courts within limits, then those who exceed these limits should be arrested under the terms of their society.
Those who set up such courts should actually learn the Sharia, much of what people think of as the Sharia is simply older pre-Islamic social codes dressed up with fancy Persian and Arabic terms. Take Pukhtunkwa, a lot of what Pashtuns see as Islamic codes of conduct is stuff they were doing when Alexander the Great strolled through the Hindu Kush. If anything Pashtun tribal norms were only recently pseudo-Islamicized back in the 17th century.
Those who oppose such courts should clearly know what they are talking about as well when they object to the Sharia, if anything the actual Sharia backs a good deal of Western legal and social ideas and was the foundation for them. There is considerable historical evidence for the Muslim inspiration behind the Renaissance and Enlightenment and it need not be re-examined here, indeed I lack the time though I might return to this theme now and then.
What made the West successful were the things Muslims simply forgot on their end at a critical juncture of history, much of what Muslims think of as “Islamic” isn’t and is just backwards tribal codes dragged around from antiquity.
Anyone who violates the law of this land, or the UK, as a visitor should be expelled. If they are citizens they should be legally processed under the terms of the law of citizens. In a fair and just way, innocent until proven guilty, tried by their peers and sentenced if there is a preponderance of evidence.
There was a now forgotten tract (previously rather popular in Muslim communities here back in the 1980s) that explicitly argued that the US constitution was actually a pretty Islamic document. I concur, in the UK with its unwritten constitution whatever violates their legal tradition should not be tolerated by their citizens.
Period.
Dave, every day this increasingly hits me in the head. The whole discourse is just sentimental on both the left and right, people run around defending sacred cows and ignore the real issues.
I’m just about done with both “conservatives” and “liberals” – neither see the fire burning on their living room carpet and both are simply contributing to the same weird dialectic.
I should probably write more about this, but whenever I do i feel physically disgusted and agitated.
Btw. I’ve been reading your articles, they are seriously interesting and give me something to think (and worry) about.
“Whatever your opinion of a man, hos words should be weighed and considered.”
Really now?
LOL
“No one complains in America (anymore) when orthodox Jews govern their selves – and frankly no one should.”
If they break the law they will have to deal with the justice system of the United States. There is no “orthodox Jewish court” that the US government will allow them to be tried in, in place of a US court.