Constitutional Law, Criminal law, Free Speech, International, Media, Politics, Society

Germany Cracks Down On Anti-Immigration Speech

Freedom_of_Speech220px-Angela_Merkel_(2008)The recent sexual assault in Cologne of women on New Year’s Eve has shocked the nation.  As many as 1000 men, allegedly set upon women and made them run a gauntlet as they were grabbed, their clothes ripped, and their bodies groped.  Police sources and witnesses have said that many were refugees — triggering renewed objections over a spate of rapes and assaults of women in the country attributed to recent immigrants.  To make matters worse for the government, newspapers are reporting that one man told police “I am Syrian. You have to treat me kindly. Mrs Merkel invited me.”  The result has been a rising tide of criticism of Merkel for her open-door policy. Yet, that criticism may now be muted by a move by the government to crackdown on anti-immigration comments as a form of “hate speech.”  As we discussed today with the effort to ban Donald Trump, free speech is being rolled back in Europe under hate crime and anti-discrimination laws as an alarming rate. It is particularly worrisome when the government is under attack on an issue like immigration and responds by prosecuting people for such criticism. News reports indicate that 18 of the 31 known suspects from Cologne were asylum seekers, including “nine Algerians, eight Moroccans, five Iranians, four Syrians, an Iraqi, a Serbian, an American and two German nationals.

We have previously discussed the alarming rollback on free speech rights in the West, particularly in France (here and here and here and here and here and here) and England ( here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here). Much of this trend is tied to the expansion of hate speech and non-discrimination laws. We have seen comedians targeted with such court orders under this expanding and worrisome trend. (here and here).

Prosecutors are charging people who are “inciting hatred” in Germany by speaking out against immigrants and their impact on German society. Prosecutors and judges are determining what criticism will be allowed and what will be treated as criminal. In the meantime, the government has reached a deal with Facebook, Google and Twitter to crackdown on Internet speech. It is an effort to create the artificial appearance of agreement and tolerance by denying free speech to critics.

While it is still not clear how many of the Cologne attackers were immigrants (as many as 22 have been identified as refugees), the incident has been a flashpoint as numerous stories of women and girls being harassed about their clothing or assaulted by immigrants. For example, a 26-year-old Berlin man’s home was raided by police, who confiscated his computer and phones after he had posted the image of a dead 3-year-old Syrian boy on a Turkish beach and wrote “We are not mourning, we are celebrating!” A disgusting comment and one that is worthy public condemnation. However, it is also an act of free speech.

Nevertheless, many citizens are celebrating the denial of their own free speech rights. So long as they disagree with the speakers, there appears little concern over the rising tide of censorship and criminalization of speech. People are now unsure what they can say about immigration, which is precisely the chilling effect that governments seek in such measure. The result is a forced silence . . . which is golden for governments like Merkel’s that do not like what they are hearing.

416 thoughts on “Germany Cracks Down On Anti-Immigration Speech”

  1. @Ken Rogers: Sorry! I made a mistake. It wasn´t 838 complaints, it was 883 victims filing charges for 766 offences (some victims filed offences together). So far only 21 suspects. You can see the numbers in the headline cited above.

    1. To quote you, Tom, HAHAHAHAHAHAH!
      If I knew you would take such offense to being spanked intellectually and rhetorically over and over and over and over again, I would have let you win one.
      It’s a shame you had to come back just to make even more of a fool of yourself (if even possible?)
      I’ll miss you.

      Would you do me a favor and take Nick with you? Please? I’ll pay you.

  4. Mr. Po…in reference to your remark that I am “hiding under an alias”.
    I know that your Mr. Po name is real, and that as an Oriental/ Mexican/Somali apologist for Islam, and consumate voluminous game player on this site, that you would never hide under a pseudoname or just play games for the sake if playing games.
    The massive amount of crap you have posted motivated me to drop the JT account, but I made the mistake of reading more of your BS in a comments section.
    So the WordPress account I have posted on in the last few days has a slightly different name.
    Sorry if this confused you, Mr. Po. I understand that given your Oriental/Mexican/Somali background, that English is probably foreign to you.
    Best of luck on your continued paid by the piecework/pieceword garbage you clutter this site with. -Tom Nash

    1. Tom Nash – I have always held that no one would write that much crap unless they were paid by the word.

  5. @po
    1, January 18, 2016 at 7:45 pm

    “True, Ken, factoids would have be (sic) the righter (sic) word, but using factoids would have undermined my aim to suggest the prominently established contemporary tendency to allow for a great range of truths, and therefore for a great range of facts.”

    “At this point, whether we want to or not, everyone is entitled to their facts and to their truth, and every truth is just as valuable as the other. one has to only listen to the republican (and less so in democrat) debate to see that. In fact, all our domestic and international policies are guided by words and concepts that mean the opposite of what they once meant, driven by facts that are no more than artificially upgraded factoids.”
    —————————————
    It seems that you’ve completely capitulated to the self-interested and/or self-deluded purveyors of obfuscation, po.

    There’s no question that “truthiness” is widely embraced, as are other forms of intellectual sloth and dishonesty, and Luntz is the very embodiment of the intellectual turpitude that Orwell excoriates in his classic essay “Politics and the English Language.” The fact that Luntz called attention to Orwell’s essay inadvertently threatens Luntz’s whole enterprise:

    “Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes.

    “Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes. Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer.

    “But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. (Emphasis added)

    “Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. (My emphasis) I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer.”

    Luntz has built a career on advising Republicans regarding ways to make their political designs more palatable to the public by means of systematic euphemism, about which practice Orwell has this to say:

    “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties.

    “Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.

    “People are imprisoned for years without trial [Guantanamo Bay], or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements [or neutralizing terrorist threats]. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

    “Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this: ‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’
    https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

    As to Stephen Colbert’s brilliant satirizing of “truthiness,” the quality characterizing a “truth” that a person making an argument or assertion claims to know intuitively “from the gut” or because it “feels right” without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts, those who take refuge in truthiness without ceasing will never know the quiet joy of discovery alluded to by Simone de Beauvoir when she wrote, “I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth – and truth rewarded me.”

    I suggest that you not contribute to a self-fulfilling prophesy regarding the triumph of politically degenerate language, but rather, for example, call a fact a fact and a factoid a factoid. Confucius nailed it a long time ago when he asserted that “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.” Likewise, the beginning of self-stupefaction is calling things by names that disguise their realities.

    1. Ken says:
      It seems that you’ve completely capitulated to the self-interested and/or self-deluded purveyors of obfuscation, po.
      ————————————-
      Not at all, Ken. in fact (no pun intended) I relentlessly rehash the fact that to fight the propaganda of the oligarch requires the taking back of words, kidnapped from their meaning and caretaker and corrupted, sold off as sex slaves for dimes and cheap booze.
      Whether it is terrorism, democracy, freedom…all of such words are just more keys that unlock our pocketbooks while locking us into the false reality devised by those who mastered our emotions and thereby our beings…and I keep fighting to retake those words and their meaning, and distribute them equally and democratize their application and their ownership.
      I can also see the fact that the game has been sped up. it is no longer the game of old, where the senses could keep up with movement, the eyes with the speed, the ears with the whoosh… the brain to detect words out of the warping of dimensions…it is supersonic speed, it is warp speed, we are told what the blur means, what the whoosh says, and most of us no longer can distinguish current words from their original meaning.
      Stating it as fact does not signify abdication, rather it is to state, in an ironic form, the ampleur of the problem. And the problem is not poetic license…it is not Irish English…or ebonics…of hispanic-english, it is not forms, it is meaning. Their forms is familiar, their meaning is else, their soul, the essence of words is gone.
      Yes, this cause is that effect, for to fight the corruption of words has to be alongside fighting the corruption of society, a two pronged fight unavoidably.

      Those are the facts. And nowadays everyone has access to his own stash of it, homebrewed, distilled with local ingredients to suit the local palate, and its suits the tongue and lift the spirits… We can still rescue the hostages, for without such rescue we are certainly doomed…and we must certainly do it in order to give ourselves a fighting chance…that’s an uphill battle, and …”that’s the facts, jack!”

      But…but…Perhaps I am contributing to that decadence…very likely! Perhaps my ironic twang on those words is missed in translation and are, therefore, affirming the corruption rather than exposing it…worth paying attention to, certainly.

  6. @bam bam
    1, January 16, 2016 at 5:42 pm

    “French mayor denounces Muslim offer to protect church at Christmas.”

    “As expected, besides Muslims, France’s liberals and leftists were highly indignant, to say the least, that Menard had compared Muslims to arsonists. One group, SOS Racisme, said it will launch a complaint, calling Menard’s choice of words ‘insulting,’ and accused him of wanting ‘to whip up hatred against Muslims.’ ”

    And bam bam wants to know just what the hell, pray tell, is wrong with whipping up hatred against Muslims? It’s so, so sado-masochistically bracing.

    What Jews Can Learn from Martin Luther King, Jr

    “Our Jewish tradition’s most famous prophet (one shared also by Christianity and Islam) is the subject of an exhibition at the Musee d’art et du Judaisme in Paris. The show Moses: Paintings of a Prophet (Moïse: figures d’un prophète) opened on October 14 and runs until February 21. Featured in it are two men revered by liberal Jews in America: The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose united efforts are represented by a 15-minute excerpt from a documentary film by Steve Brand titled Abraham Joshua Heschel & Moses.

    “The full documentary, “Praying With My Legs: the Spiritual Witness of Abraham Joshua Heschel” (not yet released and seeking funding to complete), traces the life and philosophy of one of the 20th century’s great Jewish theologians. It details well the close relationship he shared with King and their involvement together in the civil rights and Vietnam War protest movements, which is the portion of the film on view at the museum in Paris.

    “King and Heschel initially bonded over the prophets. King was drawn to Heschel’s intimate knowledge of the topic (Heschel’s masterwork, in a body of masterworks, was his book The Prophets), and Heschel in turn admired King’s devotion to the Exodus story of Moses and the Israelites, adapted to the narrative of the civil rights struggle in the 1950s and ’60s.

    “King, like his model Moses, famously did not reach the promised land of equal rights for Black Americans, dying without seeing the vision he’d been journeying toward. (This fight has recently experienced a resurgence of energy, with the Black Lives Matter movement, among others, helmed by a set of laser-sharp but more circumspect 21st-century prophets, including men like activist DeRay McKesson and author Ta-Nehisi Coates).

    “Heschel’s scholarship, as well as his close friendship with King, makes him an apposite choice for inclusion in the show, but he can also be considered a kind of prophet himself. The main job of the prophets of the Bible, after all, is to hold their people’s feet to the fire. Moses railed at the weak and foolish Israelites who strayed from the path the minute their leader ascended to the mountaintop to commune with God.

    “King fulminated against the war in Southeast Asia as well as against the injustices rampant in white American culture toward those whom it had enslaved for hundreds of years. Heschel supported both these causes, incurring the disapproval of some Jewish leaders when he did not hesitate to vigorously excoriate U.S. involvement in Vietnam, preaching widely on the subject, writing letters to presidents, and being a spokesman for other religious leaders in meetings with high-level military strategists like Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

    “As one can see from the film, Heschel, like King, had the charisma a prophet needs. He was impossible to dismiss, even when his message stung. The consummate gadfly, he shined a bright light on the ills of American society and also on those of American Judaism in the mid-20th century, which he saw as stultifying, airless, soulless, moribund. He was an outlier on one crisis we face today: how to make Judaism not only appealing but actually indispensable for Jews of future generations. His words were bracing and his exhortations powerful, but, rendered in such breathtakingly poetic language (as well as expressed verbally in his disarming Polish accent), they seem like a loving gift from a benevolent elder, not a rebuke: He even warned warmly.

    “He was a Jew who had suffered and seen too much suffering, and who, unlike [many of] the rest of us, was capable of vision on a greater scale, the prophetic scale. He knew what he was talking about, and, like King, he believed people could rise up, be their best selves, and behave with righteousness and even with holiness.”
    http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/196332/king-and-heschel-and-moses?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=b713308914-Monday_January_18_20161_15_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-b713308914-207311397

  7. @Riesling
    1, January 18, 2016 at 4:33 pm
    “Back to the topic: 838 people have filed criminal complaints.”

    Is that another dangling factoid, Reisling? If it’s a fact, surely you can document it.

  9. @po
    1, January 18, 2016 at 1:46 pm

    “But agree with need to check the fact checkers. Facts are now biased against truth.”

    Because of the indispensability of facts in apprehending reality through scientific inquiry, reasoned discourse, or any other epistemological means, surely you meant to say that factoids* are biased against truth, and not just now, but always have been.

    * n. A piece of unverified or inaccurate information that is presented in the press as factual, often as part of a publicity effort, and that is then accepted as true because of frequent repetition. For other meanings of “factoid,” see https://www.wordnik.com/words/factoid

    1. True, Ken, factoids would have be the righter word, but using factoids would have undermined my aim to suggest the prominently established contemporary tendency to allow for a great range of truths, and therefore for a great range of facts.
      I think it is a worsening problem, for previously, there were safeguards to fight back against the corruption of words, and therefore of facts, for all mistrust starts with the corruption of words and their meaning.

      The moment I saw Frank Luntz , he of [“ In a January 9, 2007, interview on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Luntz redefined the term “Orwellian” in a “positive” sense, saying that if one reads Orwell’s “Essay On Language” (presumably referring to “Politics and the English Language”), “To be ‘Orwellian’ is to speak with absolute clarity, to be succinct, to explain what the event is, to talk about what triggers something happening… and to do so without any pejorative whatsoever.”[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz%5D, feted on tv for his ability to assign different meanings to established words, doing party trick like “okay, how would you rephrase this…”, I knew the deceptors had won.

      At this point, whether we want to or not, everyone is entitled to their facts and to their truth, and every truth is just as valuable as the other. one has to only listen to the republican (and less so in democrat) debate to see that. In fact, all our domestic and international policies are guided by words and concepts that mean the opposite of what they once meant, driven by facts that are no more than artificially upgraded factoids.

      Reminds me of Stephen Colbert’s Truthiness, lies with a veneer of truth used to displace well established truths.

  10. tnash, why not give us a taste of its content?
    Fact checking is indeed important from certain sources…
    Wonder which friend is hiding under yet another alias…

    1. po – the challenge is that we now have to fact-check the fact-checkers. Politifact, for one, is biased for Hillary.

    2. I cited a source and summarized the contents of that source.
      I can’t help it if you’re too thick or too lazy to go to that source.
      You wrote a comment about how transvestites are tolerated in Senegal.
      Given your propensity for lying, I checked to see if what you wrote was accurate.
      It wasn’t. But if you or others are delusional enough to believe your tall tales, that’s not my problem.
      Now tell us more about how clever smart, logical, tolerate, etc. that you are…….since your multiple comments are generally longer that the columns, I know you have lots and lots of time to play your word games, display evasiveness, and demonstrate your obsessive self-aggrandizing behavior.

      1. Tom, how often do you have to say goodbye?
        i now suspect you have a crush on me…don’t worry, I have that effect on people., just ask bambam.

        This is what I said above:
        “<In Senegal, 95% Muslim, we had transvestites among our midst, they were known to be great cooks and had thriving restaurants. They were involved in festivities, and no one of note would have a party without a transvestite as the master of ceremony.

        You responded with this:
        “tnash80hotmailcom
        1, January 18, 2016 at 2:28 am
        I recommend FEAR FOR LIFE, HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH which deals with violence and de jure sanctions against gays, and those perceived as gay, in Senegal.
        Fact checking is becoming more and more important in comments from certain sources.
        ————————
        Now, unless your source (which is merely a bunch of words put together) was in Senegal with me and can certify that we did not “…have transvestites among our midst , and that…”, I have a hard time imagining how your source (which is merely a bunch of words put together) would/could show that I am lying?

        What am I lying about? That I was in Senegal?
        That we had transvestites among us?
        That they were accepted?
        That they were good cooks?
        That they were masters of ceremonies…?

        Are you alright, Tom? You almost managed to pass as a sensible, rational and smart person…then you go and do things like this…????!!!!

        It is hurting me to watch a good man, I am sure, demean himself so trying to score unscorable points!
        Just ask nicely, Tom, and I swear I’ll let you win one.

        1. OK, Po……so the tranvestites that “were accepted,” in a country that’s “95% Muslim” did not have to worry about Senegal’s criminal penalties against gays, or those perceived to be gay.
          At least as long as you were there to protect them, as you so heroically did in New York.
          I might stay tuned for when you tell us how you found the cure for cancer, won the gold medal in the Olympics, or worked among the poor in the slums of Calcutta.

          1. Tom, no need to apologize, we expected nothing less than dishonesty and obfuscation from you.
            I won’t tell you how I cured cancer, at least until you apologize first.

            You got it wrong again, it was the silver medal, and it was in the slums of Mombasa…Mother Theresa would not let me near calcutta., she did not care about being overshadowed.

            Meanwhile, other than getting stomped on by strange (yet dashing and highly intelligent) men on blogs, what have you accomplished?

            By the way, some bunch of words turn out to become fine sentences and paragraphs, others always remain bunch of words… randomly put together, defective in both form and content…am sure it not all your fault 😕

              1. Tom, it would be nice!
                I am certainly not holding my breath about it, however.
                If you could apologize, you would not be you 🙂

    3. The comment above was written as a response to Mr.Po’s “request” to “give a taste of the contents” of the source that I cited.
      Since I did summarize the contents, I don’t intend to copy every word from the source I cited, or read it aloud for Mr. Po.

  11. I recommend FEAR FOR LIFE, HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH which deals with violence and de jure sanctions against gays, and those perceived as gay, in Senegal.
    Fact checking is becoming more and more important in comments from certain sources.

  12. Bam, did they stone them or did they throw stones at them? I think there is a huge difference there.

    Obviously, I don’t condone what they did, if indeed it happened as you claim, if it did, then they deserve serving time in prison then to be sent back wherever they are from.
    I also denounce homophobia in the name of Islam and any other name. Stoning is bestial and an offense against humanity and God. That is why a great many of us Muslims and our non-Muslim allies are fighting against that.
    There is a hadith that states that the Prophet allowed stoning a couple once, and it was that they were Jews, and the Jews came to him to ask him to arbitrate about how to punish a cheating couple. He told them that he was not allowed, as muslim, to judge Jews according to the Quran, and asked them what their own laws required. They said stoning, and then they, the Jews, stoned the couple, according to their own laws.

    In fact, stoning is against the quran, because nowhere in the quran does it state to stone people as punishment. The few times it is mentioned, it is mentioned as something the evil people did or threatened to do against the righteous and the Prophets.

    In Senegal, 95% Muslim, we had transvestites among our midst, they were known to be great cooks and had thriving restaurants. They were involved in festivities, and no one of note would have a party without a transvestite as the master of ceremony.
    i remember helping a couple of transgender kids on West 4th street in NYC. The were being hassled by some kids and I gave them refuge in the store where I used to work. The manager threatened to fire me if I did it again but I felt it is my duty to help anyone in need.

    17 transvestites were murdered last year right here.
    An American soldier was just convicted of murder for killing a transvestite in the Philippines.
    Right now, transvestites are being attacked from every side, and it is horrific.

  13. The Jerusalem Post – Israel News

    01.18.2016 | 8 Shevat, 5776

    North African men suspected of stoning transgender women in German city

    International

    By BENJAMIN WEINTHAL \

    01/16/2016 14:13
    North African men suspected of stoning transgender women in German city

    “That was barbaric what they did. They are barbarians,” one of the victims said.
    View of Dortmund, Germany

    View of Dortmund, Germany. (photo credit:WIKIPEDIA)

    BERLIN — Three young men from North Africa were arrested on Saturday in the western German city of Dortmund for stoning two transgender women.

    According to a report on Friday on television station SAT1.NRW, the men attacked Yasmine und Elisa, two transgender women, near the city’s main train station.

    “Within seconds we were tossed around…and they took stones from a gravel bed on the corner and threw them at us,” said Elisa.

    A police car appeared at the train station as the stoning attack unfolded and arrested the men.

    The German media as a general rule do not disclose the last names of victims to protect their privacy. The three men are between 16 and 18 years-old and are known to the authorities from theft and assault arrests.

    Dortmund police official Kim-Ben Freigang said the suspects told the police that “such persons must be stoned.”

    Yasmine installed a security camera at the residence where she lives with Elisa after the attacks. “That was barbaric what they did. They are barbarians,” Yasmine said.

    She added that she could not believe that such an act of shamelessness occurred. “In 2016, in Germany, with stoning!” According to the SATI.NRW report, Yasmine said it was the first time in 30 years she felt unsafe as a transgender woman.

    According to Yasmine and Elisa, the three young men propositioned them, but after they realized that Yasmine and Elisa are transgender women, they attacked them with stones.

    Stoning people to death is a penalty used in nine Muslim-majority countries. In November, a criminal court in Iran’s northern province of Gilan sentenced a woman to be executed by stoning for alleged complicity in the murder of her husband, Arash Babaieepour Tabrizinejad.

    The stoning penalty of the woman, who was only identified by the initials “A.Kh,” was first reported on the Persian-language Iranian website LAHIG.

    According to the LAHIG report, the court imposed the penalty on the woman after an initial sentence of lashings and a 25-year prison sentence. The criminal court in the city of Rasht in Gilan issued the sentence.

    Lethal homophobia is widespread in the Arab world and Iran. A 2008 British Wikileaks dispatch noted that the Islamic Republic of Iran has executed “between 4,000 and 6,000 gays and lesbians” since the Islamic revolution in 1979.

    Islamic State has murdered dozens of gays by tossing the men off buildings. Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen and Qatar, to name just some of the most anti-gay countries, persecute LGBTs with the death penalty and imprisonment.

  14. Paul, I envy you, as an agnostic, that you don’t stay up at night worrying whether we pray to the same God.

    1. po – I am the type of agnostic who believes in God, just not that God is going to guide my life. So, it does me no good to pray. However, I do believe that in the end we all believe in the same God.

            1. There is nothing wrong with the logic in that sentence, only in your thought process.

              1. In response to my question Paul, yes, it is illogical. I asked the cause to the effect, you cite the effect to explain the cause.
                But agree with need to check the fact checkers. Facts are now biased against truth.

  15. Btw I don’t agree with some of the premises of the previous video but it’s well presented. In other words, find what’s useful to you and discard the rest. I find that people will often toss the whole thing if there’s ANY aspect they don’t agree with.

  17. I wonder if I could get away with posting a dirty limerick if it had no really bad words in it.

  18. po, Thank you for showing us how divorced you are from reality. Arabic is one of the most guttural languages on Earth in which many of the sounds are produced way in the back of the throat and sounds like the speaker is spitting. So how any sane person can say it is lyrical is beyond reason. At least the Dutch have a sense of humor about their language which is similar in sounds to Arabic. Instead Arabs try and deny reality. Your so called proofs are simply your taste rather than any objective criterion.

    I lived in the Mideast for a couple of years, and I noticed that the men there love women who are fat and obese, while Americans found them to be gross and ugly. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, and rather admit this FACT, you insist that YOUR tastes are the ONLY ones that are valid. That shows a cultural chauvinism that is quite offensive to any fair minded person. Then we have this absurd passage from you.

    Wow,…frankly, I am shocked and disappointed. I mean, the examples abound of sacred language used in rituals, including ALL houses of worship… even some Christian churches speak in tongues for the sacred language enhances the ritual…
    Have you ever recited the quran? Do you know that it is the most complex yet efficient language on earth?

    To say that Arabic is the most complex yet efficient language on earth is stupid. If it were so superior, then it would be the language of science, literature, diplomacy, aviation, to name a few places such a superior language would be useful. Instead, all of these fields mentioned use ENGLISH since it IS a very efficient means of communication. Complexity does NOT lend itself to efficiency. i had to laugh at some of the embedded spot in which they tout the great virtue of having MANY meanings to the same word. That is hardly a virtue or efficient. Then we have you saying something about Christian churches speaking in tongues which shows you have NO understanding of what speaking in tongues means since those tongues are NOT a language at all or sacred. It is gibberish in which the speakers purport to be speaking a language to mimic the apostles during pentacost. I have no desire to speak the koran verses since it is pointless to speak things which make no sense to me, and in any case would have to be put into roman script for any non-Arabic speaker. As for the efficiency of the Arabic script, the Chinese went with the Roman script when they decided to get away from their ancient form of ideographs. They did NOT choose Arabic script, and in FACT the Turks kicked out the Arabic script from their language and there is no move to restore it. That says it all about the worthless nature of the Arabic script in that those who used to use it got rid of it, and other languages looking to modernize their language do NOT consider Arabic as a model at all. So much for the superiority of Arabic.

    1. Randy
      First off let’s frame the terms of the debate. Are we talking about spoken Arabic or are we talking about Quranic verses, the Arabic of the quran? Your original point was about arabic as used in the prayers and the rituals, and that Arabic is the quran’s arabic, which the article I quoted went to great length to show how different and superior it is in its form and meaning from regular arabic. You musta missed it.
      Note how the recitation videos and the videos about the miracle of the quran talk about both the auditory value and the structural value? Most people would agree that recitation of the verse is rather melodious, as shown in the videos.

      Now, I am assuming you are talking about arabic as the daily language, which, if you want to debate, I am fine with it, just state your case. As you did however, I answered your points previously, especially with that article that shows the importance of the original language in the rituals, quoting Buddhism, Judaism and Islam. The idea that speaking in tongues features gibberish does NOT negate my point that it is aiming to enhance the spirituality of the ritual…a point you ended up affirming while trying to undermine it.

      I lived in the Mideast for a couple of years, and I noticed that the men there love women who are fat and obese, while Americans found them to be gross and ugly. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, and rather admit this FACT, you insist that YOUR tastes are the ONLY ones that are valid. That shows a cultural chauvinism that is quite offensive to any fair minded person. Then we have this absurd passage from you.

      Now, what is this talk about obese women and arabic taste? What?
      My tastes? When you just stated that fat and obese women are gross and ugly?That’s crazy talk, Randy!
      Wow! I don’t know how to even address that!!! That’s insane!

      To say that Arabic is the most complex yet efficient language on earth is stupid. If it were so superior, then it would be the language of science, literature, diplomacy, aviation, to name a few places such a superior language would be useful. Instead, all of these fields mentioned use ENGLISH since it IS a very efficient means of communication.
      I never said arabic is the superior language, I said it is the most complex yet efficient. Complex because words can mean a great many things based on how they are used, and efficient because one can say twice as much using half as much. Prove me wrong.
      Also, arabic WAS the language of sciences, until the collapse of the islamic empire, as states In his 2002 book What Went Wrong?, historian Bernard Lewis::“for many centuries the world of Islam was in the forefront of human civilization and achievement.” “Nothing in Europe,” notes Jamil Ragep, a professor of the history of science at the University of Oklahoma, “could hold a candle to what was going on in the Islamic world until about 1600.” Algebra, algorithm, alchemy, alcohol, alkali, nadir, zenith, coffee, and lemon: these words all derive from Arabic, reflecting Islam’s contribution to the West.” And all of that used what, yes arabic.
      Then again, wasn’t latin once a prominent in the west?
      English did not become what it is today because it is more efficient, it is so because it is the language of the dominant. That simple. If S. Arabia lead the world in technology and was the dominant economic nation, or even France for that matter, Arabic or French would be the dominant language. Which is why more and more people are learning mandarin, for China is getting to be more of a powerhouse.
      Anything else?

    1. Hilde, Bam and karen want me to reconstitute my harem so they can join it…especially karen.
      I mean, who wouldn’t?
      But no, I am not that person anymore.
      i didn’t use to include men in it but if I ever put it back together, am willing to make an exception for bambam.

  20. Po; “I think Hilde contaminated me.” You wish! LOL I had a bad word in one of the links in my post, shame on me.. sh*t.

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