From the ridiculous to the more sublime
In the end, it’s what you’ll find.
EXPO tells the ongoing story of all kinds of racism here in Sweden.
The latest report is that a member of SverigeDemokrater (the so called “Sweden Democrats”) has allied herself with a facebook group that would like to forbid the religion of Islam in Sweden! It’s outrageous!
Here the Sverigedemokrater have been invited to a manifestation against racism
Expo’s mission is similar to that of Searchlight Magazine
It’s a question of Civil Courage and a sense of social, even national, global responsibility. It doesn’t matter where we were born, or who we are, it’s our planet. Heaven is somewhere else.
There’s a saying “Silence is golden” – that there is a time, when silence is most effective.
There is also a saying that “Silence means consent”.This suggests that being quiet about Islamophobia means that by maintaining a silence about it, one is guilty of acquiescing to it. If this is not true then the burning question is what are the diverse Swedish religious leaders of Church and Mosque, of Buddhist and Hindu Temple saying about Islamophobia? Will the Dalai Lama talk about it when he comes to Sweden? What do the Marxists say?
For now I include Marxism because it has certain features in common with religion although, as Ninian Smart once observed, “the practical aspect of worship, and so forth, which is important in a number of religions, is much less developed in Marxism. One can see ways in which it’s developing of course.”
Civil Courage
What would Jesus have said, if he were alive today or if he had come back to this world and was living among us here in Sweden? (Of course there’s always the oddball racist nut-cracker Swede who would probably tell him to go back to wherever it is that he came from : his favourite country in the Middle East – perhaps they would prefer that he went back to Egypt where our ancestors sojourned for a while, the place where they claim he would feel more at home, than in the most civilised and advanced Sweden, so says one of them to me, wagging his puppy dog tail:
“But you think to give the Swedes advice on some nonsense about going out to reassure muslims. Since you are not Swedish, you have no place counselling them to do this or that, or any other course of action. You are a foreigner living amongst them who has prospered (not because of any African society presumably), and thought yourself fit to do so. You are not. You are a son of Africa living amongst a foreign people, who are not your people; however you may wish to deceive yourself.
Also, if you love Sweden so much, why are you planning on spending your final years in your favorite Middle Eastern country (not that I care). Go there now and save all of us the wait.”
So what’s all the talk of integration supposed to be about? Can Nyamko Sabuni be a member of the Government’s cabinet?
Of course, I have many Swedish relatives (and German, Dutch, American, British, French). I also sing this – and with feeling too:
”Du gamla, du fria, du fjällhöga Nord,
du tysta, du glädjerika sköna!
Jag hälsar dig, vänaste land uppå jord,
din sol, din himmel, dina ängder gröna,
din sol, din himmel, dina ängder gröna.
Du tronar på minnen från fornstora dar,
då ärat ditt namn flög över jorden.
Jag vet, att du är och du blir vad du var.
Ja, jag vill leva, jag vill dö i Norden!
Ja, jag vill leva, jag vill dö i Norden!”
Another song (you may or may not sing along. Feel free)
As the saying goes, “In your heart you know we’re right.And in your guts you know they’re nuts.”
Check THIS out !
I actually heard one of the greatest living Talmudists Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz say (at the Great Synagogue of Stockholm:”We all came from Africa!”
I’ll come to the similarities and the differences between ideology and religion (with particular reference to Islam) later – in my posting in which I propose to bury the guy who said that the word Islamophobia ought to be abolished - and thus silence all criticism of them – so that he and others like him can be free to continue to rail at Islam and express all their hatred towards Muslims as perfectly honourable, even innocent Islamophobes who belong to the misunderstood religion of Islamophobia which they insist should not be named but exist as a secret religion, clean, nameless, so you cannot label them or properly identify them, no matter what they say, since they’ve abolished the name of the crime.
Don’t get me wrong, there are hate preachers in some of the judgemental (heaven & Hell) religions, for example there is Sheikh Abdullah Hakim Quick for whom certain fundamentals are non-negotiable and not open to reform. This is him talking: “They said ‘what is the Islamic position on homosexuality?’ And I told them. Put my name in the paper. The punishment is death. And I’m not going to change this religion.”
The fallout from news about what Baroness Warsi was going to say and what she actually said, has been considerable.
Here’s what she actually said:
University of Leicester Sir sigmund Sternberg Lecture
Once upon a time I thought that Karl Marx was the prophet of Communism – his book ( which I have not read in its entirety) “Das Kapital” and in this way we can name many other prophets of this and that, Freud, Darwin etc. At the same time ( once upon a time) I thought that Muhammad Ibn Abdullah – salallahu alaihi wa salaam with all due propriety could be referred to as the Prophet of ISLAM , his book : The Qur’an. But that was before zapping through “Moses Maimonides – the man and his works” by Herbert A. Davidson with special emphasis on the last chapter of the book , his miscellaneous writings.
Will explain that in my next posting about Islamo-phobia