Why hasn’t Rockwell converted to Islam if he speaks so fanatically about Sharia? His mindset is revolved around that Muslims (at least in the middle east) are somehow always victims, they are never wrong, et al.
While I appalaud his book The left, the right, and the state, I wish he would stop whining so much and instead try to educate people about why they should be converted to the austrian school instead of basically saying that everybody who just happens not to know anything about the austrian school because no one told them be damned kind of mentality.
What I mean is that since Lew Rockwell is an islamic apologist to the EXTREME DEGREE. His view as I have said before is that the muslim world is never wrong, superior to us, and islamic law is somehow superior to anglo saxon jurisprudence (ie stoning, harassing people because of their dress, waging war on people because they don’t agree with certain verses). Link is here;
Now let’s address your claims about Mr. Rockwell based on this one blog post.
He does not say anything of that sort in the blog post. Please support this assertion or concede that it’s baseless.
My previous response applies here as well.
Where in the blog post does Mr. Rockwell say that he approves of stoning, harrassing people because of their dress, and/or waging war on people because they don’t agree with certain verses? He referred to aspects of Sharia that he views positively. That’s hardly the same as approving of all of Sharia without question - nor is it the same as saying that Sharia is superior to Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence. At best, I think you’re reaching quite a bit in making that assertion.
It seems like he is just saying that sharia, which is the conduct or outer layer of islam, should be okay. If it is done voluntarily. And that there is more to it than government, which is the western understanding of that term. Since it is more than government, and to some not government at all, banning Sharia would extend into banning lifestyle choices. Many of which are benign.
Jews have ‘halakha’, which many associate with draconian rules in the Old Testament. But that isn’t a perfect understanding of that. And as far as I know, no one has tried to ban it. Or run campaigns against Judaism.
We could say that it is irrational to follow these rules. But that is much different argument.
The West has become engulfed in anti-Muslim hysteria. It’s as absurd as the anti-“Jap” hysteria of WWII. Us = good. Them = bad. It’s all part of the same narrative that 9/11 belongs to. Sick games being played by sick people hell-bent on maintaining their iron grip on power. Every culture has messed-up stuff you can point to. I’m white and I was raised Christian but I’d hardly like to be painted in the light of Fred Phelps or Terry Jones. I think that a lot of the Western media portrayal of Muslim culture is really that irresponsible and childish, painting an entire culture in the light of its most bizarre and fanatical elements. Watch this. The Taliban was not popular in Afghanistan, nobody liked them… hell, most of them weren’t even from Afghanistan. Taliban had (have?) strong ties to Pakistani ISI (equivalent of CIA) which suggests to me that they were acting as a proxy for someone else’s ambitions.
Stop drinking the CNN/MSNBC/FOX Kool-Aid. Wake up and think for yourself.
There are people who have done independent research into al qaeda that conclude that it is a band of convicts and drug addicts/dealers that have been thrown out of the muslim countries. The US and UK and Israel organize the opposition to control it. England co opted the IRA, the moussad creadted Hezbolah to take power away from the PLO, the CIA organized al qaeda to proxy war with the soviets, just like they did with the Sandanistas and the contras.
Taliban is akin to if the US had a super orthodox religion running things. Most people know that the pope isn’t the antichrist, but that is not what Bachmann says…
Reading Lew Rockwell’s blog often, I always got the sense that he’s just trying to go against the tide of the anti-muslim crowd that dominates the mainstream media in the US while at the same time sort of calling out the totalitarian neo-cons that hate Islamic law because of how oppressive it is yet they want to force their style of totalitarianism on the rest of us too. At least that’s what I took from reading his blog.
To put it politely, I don’t, even in the slightest, buy the claim that most mainstream media, even US media (make that especially US media, given they were the ones blocking and blurring the Muhammad cartoons. Just look at what Comedy Central did to the South Park episode with Muhammad), is biased against Islam. Most modern day fiction goes out of it’s way to avoid portrayals of Islamic terrorism, replacing it with some bizarre variety of Eastern European ethnonationalism. Even 24 kowtowed to complaints regarding having a Muslim terrorist villain with a PSA from Kiefer Sutherland. Criticism of Islam and Muslim immigration is, regardless of any other political, social or economic stances (look at Jean Marie Le Penn’s economic nationalism and unionism or Pim Fortuyn’s hedonism) inevitably labeled “far-right” and “extremist” by the establishment-leftist European press.
This same tendency manifests itself often in the reporting of antisemitic attacks. Media outlets will often be deliberately vague about the identities or general description of the perpetrators, since a good deal of the time, it is not “rightwing” extremists (who aren’t right wing in any case, but that’s another subject) but second-generation radicalized Muslim immigrants behind them. And I have no doubt that the recent tragedy in Oslo will be used by the EU and it’s Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia to push for new Internet censorship regimens against independent bloggers as part of a new “battle against the right” in Scandinavia.
If pressed to acknowledge Islamic terror at all, the Western MSM will often qualify it by insisting that other religions (most often Christianity, though Hinduism occasionally gets the short end of the stick) are just as violent and anyone who believes otherwise is guilty of some imaginary mental disorder. I don’t believe in crazy neoconservative “global democracy” nonsense, but I don’t buy the multiculti line that it’s all those poor innocent Muslims terrorised by those evil “right wing extremists” or whatever Brown Menace is being paraded around as the boogeyman of the time, though I don’t blame the Muslims (given that most first-generation, Turkish and Indonesian Muslims seem perfectly fine by me) so much for this as much as I blame the overwhelmingly leftist Western media and political correctness.. Criticising Islam too loudly can even get you in a courtroom in some countries. Just look at Ezra Levant or Geert Wilders.
I don’t think that religious freedom falls under the framework of natural rights. I do not mean the freedom to believe what you want. I mean that religious people should still be held responsible to the same natural rights as everyone else. If someone is brought up to believe that forcing their children in to marriage is correct then they should be held accountable for that under the law. Being brainwashed with religious culture does not give you additional rights over other people. Natural law does not allow for forcing of your own children in to marriage, one example. That would be against the rights of the child, of course if the child is so brainwashed that they go a long with it then there is nothing anyone can do in that instance. But if the child protests the forced marriage then they should be supported under natural rights.
I certainly agree with that, though you have to be careful in not throwing the baby out with the bathwater by falsely equivocating the kind of bile that comes out of a lot of madrassas with Christian/Jewish/etc. schools. Then again, I wouldn’t want any of my hypothetical children within a thousand kilometres of the European Anglicans youth institutions, and it isn’t because of sex abuse scandals or sectarianism…
There is a growing and highly troubling movement from the likes of Hitchens and Dawkins (the “Elder Brothers” of modern totalitarian atheism) to abolish religious and educational liberty so that all children are properly indoctrinated into the wonders of secular humanist social democracy and welfare statism. There’s similar forms of it in the states against homeschoolers, but the decentralism and higher religiosity of the people has slowed it there somewhat.
But I have another question and that is referring to Walter Block’s quote “libertarians are neither right nor left”. If that is the case, then why is it that almost all the articles related to foreign affairs come from overwhelmingly leftist news sites? It should just be that you advocate a non interventionist foreign policy of peace, trade, commerce, no entangling alliances. But am I really to believe that these sites where Lew gets his news really advocate any of these ideals? NO! So even if I am exaggerating on the blogpost that I mentioned on lewrockwell.com, you can look at past articles where Lew’s views are incredibly leftist.
Is Lew advocating that Sharia is a good thing, or is he advocating that it be voluntary and people who want to be a subject to it can do so without imposing it on others? If he is advocating this fine. But I would like Lew to stop this crap where somehow everyone is a victim and it is always the west? That is a half truth.
While my foreign policy views (which could probably be most succinctly described as Realist in methodology, Objectivist in approach minus the anti-China/Russia nonsense) differ significantly from probably just about everybody’s, be they Raimondo, Clinton, Powell, Fukuyama or Peikoff, I don’t think Lew is a leftist by any stretch of the imagination. There is a very strong anti-foreign intervention tradition in the Old Right, and the concept of classical liberalism minus this component is a quite recent one. AntiWar.com has some writers from the left, but Raimondo himself is a paleolibertarian and has strong associations with Pat Buchanan, the poster boy of American paleoconservatism. The Mises Institute and LRC often carries the writings of William Randolph Bourne (Progressive, basically Old Old Left with an individualist streak), Thomas Sowell (conservative, though I’ve seen some who think he’s a neocon, of all things), Paul Gottfried (a paleoconservative nationalist who’s also a Zionist and a German monarchist) and George Reisman (Objectivist with disagreements with Rothbard over anarchy and the Soviet Union). Having someone on your “show”, so to speak, doesn’t imply endorsement of their views. For instance, revisionist sites regarding the Second World War may have some of David Irving’s older writings on the site, but that doesn’t mean these sites endorse his positions on the Holocaust. Equally, LRC has it’s Sheehans and Benders, as well as it’s Buchanans, Sowell’s and Gottfried’s.
Before I can answer this question, I’d like to see evidence (preferably systematic) that supports the assertion contained in your question - namely, that “almost all of the articles related to foreign affairs [on LewRockwell.com] come from overwhelmingly leftist news sites”.
How about you provide some past articles that you think support the notion that “Lew’s views are incredibly leftist”? We can go from there.
Otherwise, just because a site doesn’t advocate the same ideals doesn’t mean it has nothing useful or accurate to say whatsoever. Take Glenn Greenwald’s blog, for example. He’s an unabashed leftist (though of which kind I’m not so sure), so I certainly don’t agree with him on the proper role of government, but I nevertheless find his analyses of current events to be highly insightful and penetrating. Would you say, then, that I’m “incredibly leftist”?
I’d say it’s obvious, given Lew’s writings, that he’s advocating the latter.
Can you explain in more detail what you mean by “this crap where somehow everyone is a victim and it is always the west”?
“There is a growing and highly troubling movement from the likes of Hitchens and Dawkins (the “Elder Brothers” of modern totalitarian atheism) to abolish religious and educational liberty so that all children are properly indoctrinated into the wonders of secular humanist social democracy and welfare statism. There’s similar forms of it in the states against homeschoolers, but the decentralism and higher religiosity of the people has slowed it there somewhat.”
Neither of them are proponents of a governmental system. Much less totalitarian; though, one could argue that religion – lived with integrity – is totalitarian. I think they are concerned about religious schooling, because there is a low quality of education. They and the home schoolers only support private schools and homeschooling in order to shield their children from science and ideas that they think conflict with Christianity. So they can go on believing in the 6000 year old Earth and that dinosaurs were on the ark. And to make matters worse, they tend to want to either remake public education or introduce these absurd theories into science classes under the banner of ‘liberty’. (The discovery institute thinks that physics is against Jebus, because it doesn’t EVEN consider the power of miracles!).
This in fact discrediting private schools and homeschooling. Because people think that these are tickets to ignorance, or an excuse to carefully control knowledge. Instead of a chance for an alternative way to learn. This is the fault of a large percentage of people in these movements being religious fanatics. It is a false slowing. It is just reaction, for ideological sake. And not for educations sake. These people don’t want non-religious private institutions or parents who teach other religions or no religion. And we are no closer to private schools or homeschooling than in the past.
On the other hand, it seems like this is a certain branch of Christianity. And not Christianity itself. It is a Christianity which thinks it is speaking for the majority. That says that all Christians want to remain ignorant about science. There is also no proof that Christians are opposed to democracy or welfare statism. This seems to be a projection of one group’s desires onto the whole. And a projection of hated methods and goals onto religious opposition. Because Hitchens and Dawkins are against religion, that means they definitely hold opposite political views down the line. In a manichean universe, there can be no other way.
What I think many atheists (And Dan Dennet has a TED talk about this) advocate is that all of the religions be taught to children, through public or private means. Including all of the beliefs held by all of them. So people can be knowledgeable about what is believed in our world. Not to say it is true, but the fact that it is believed. In that way, ironically, we can see the religions outside of a mystical or propagandized light. For Christianity, Islam, or any of the others.
So I take it by your complete neglect of the questions and requests for evidence of anything you’ve suggested, and your total change of tone and direction, that you actually have no basis for all the claims you made? You should see my big surprised face.