Disgrace to my Faith

For some reason, my family gets a subscription to a ridiculous Christian magazine, The Trumpet. I think it’s because someone subscribed us to it, as a gift. The other day, I came across an article called Why London Doesn’t Need a Giant Mosque. Why would I read something with such an absurd title, you ask? I was curious. The author even mentions something in the first paragraph about how the title is politically incorrect. While what he mentions is true, the article went downhill from there. Downhill with a slope of 81°. By the end, I’m pretty sure I had an unhealthy blood pressure measure.

The article opens with a description of a “giant mosque” in the planning to be built in London, England. Claiming that the mosque will fit 70,000 people, the author began to discuss the problems with a mosque that large. I did some research and discovered that the house of worship is ‘only’ planning to fit 40,000 people. Why play with the numbers? For effect? 40,000 is still a fairly large number to me.

The article throws another cheap shot with the numbers: claiming that a quarter of British Muslims (roughly 400,000 people) justified the actions of the July 7/06 London downtown bombings. 25%? That number also didn’t sit well in my mind. Hitting the good old Internet once again, I found an article from the Daily Telegraph, stating that, from a poll they took among British Muslims, 88% of them found that the terrorist attacks were NOT justified. 6% found the attacks justified. Where did the 400,000 come from? Perhaps in some massive error on the author’s part of not being able to read properly or understand the difference between the words ’sympathize’ and ‘justify.’ The author in The Trumpet uses both words synonymously. It is clear that within this poll, both terms are used in two different contexts. And, from my understanding, the words do have different meanings. Incidentally, the poll found that 13% of British Muslims sympathized ‘a lot’ with the terrorists’ intentions, and 11% sympathized ‘a little.’ The details of the actual poll can be found here. Of course, having had countless stats and research methodology components in a lot of my courses, I know well enough that there should be a disclaimer with any sort of multiple choice poll. Anyone taking a survey can interpret the questions in a variety of ways, discrediting the validity and reliability of the poll.

The author then goes on to mention and imply that if a cathedral “the size of a snow-cone stand” were to be built in Saudi Arabia, there would be no sense of reciprocity on the part of the Saudis. In other words, the British are so accepting of the Muslim faith, while the Saudis wouldn’t be of the Christian faith. First of all, what kind of comparison is that? If that’s not a non-deductive, illogical analogy of an argument, I don’t know what is. Making a comparison between a country (England) with a liberal view on religion and tolerance, with another country (Saudi Arabia) that has a very strict, almost non-existent, view of religious freedom. Why not make the comparison with another Muslim country, Pakistan for example, that does tolerate Christian houses of worship? Oh wait, I suppose that this type of example would not strengthen the author’s weak argument. My mistake.

I must mention, however, that the article did bring up some point of concern for myself. There is mention that a fairly large terrorist group, Tablighi Jamaat, is in support of the building of the mosque. If this is true, then I would find some cause for concern in the building of the mosque. I certainly don’t have a problem with a ’super mosque’ being built in London, but I assume that most Muslims would prefer if the terrorist group wasn’t involved. Of course, everything is speculation, and not many people know for sure if the group is a terrorist group, but that would be my only hesitation to support the building.

I could go on with more examples of the absurdity of the article, but I won’t. What’s most disturbing for me is that The Trumpet is supposedly a Christian magazine. If you know me, I am a Protestant Christian. I am obviously disappointed by this type of literature. Not only because it is being written in the first place, but because there is a wide audience that reads and agrees (dare I say brainwashed?) with these messages.

I was discussing this article with my parents, and in my rant, I was expressing how this fuels intolerance. To any ignorant person, my family could appear to be a Muslim family. While I have no qualms with being mistaken for a different race/ethnicity/religion, what does this article do? It fuels the closed-minded and ignorant readers into having intolerant attitudes. It fuels that one uninformed person who reads this garbage into thinking that all people who appear ‘brown,’ such as my family, are terrorists. Of course this is nonsense, but I know that there are uneducated people who hold these beliefs!In our multicultural Canadian society, tolerance is an incredibly important virtue. It seems as though it is far easier to read such biased and mis-representative articles, such as the one I’ve written about, than to read material about different religions, or cultures. It’s a shame, it really is.

I’ve just unsubscribed from the magazine. A lot of the other articles were very narrow-minded, and biased views from the far ‘Christian right.’ It’s trash, and neither myself or my family need to read it’s intolerant garbage.

As a nice alternative, CBC Ideas has a nice set of podcasts on Tolerance. I’ve only listened to the first part, and it was quite interesting.

Push the Button

I was watching the Beeb (the BBC News) today, and they had a story about Israel’s song choice for this year’s Eurovision song contest. Here is the article on the BBC website about the song choice.

Israeli citizens who voted were to pick one out of 4 songs that Teapacks, an Israeli group, would sing/perform at the contest in Helsinki. An overwhelmingly large percentage of the votes were in favour of the song “Push the Button.” I read somewhere that 100% of the votes went to that song choice, but that seems odd… Why is this song such a big deal? Watch and see for yourself. (You can always count on almost anything being on Youtube).

While the song is obviously satirical in its nature, I think the shock value is disturbing. I can’t believe that (1) there’s a song about this sort of thing and (2) it’s immensely popular (or the extent of its popularity).

On the topic of allusions to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, why on Earth does it seem as though very few American politicians can pronounce the man’s name? I’ve often seen John Stewart poking fun at certain people who have difficulty pronouncing Ahmadinejad’s name – but for the first time today, I saw it for myself! What a joke.

Iraq for Sale

Last week, I watched George W. Bush’s State of the Union Address. As he was talking about the situation in Iraq, I was reminded of a documentary that I saw at Ecclesiax (Ecclesiax is a church that enjoy, and occaisionally attend). The documentary was called Iraq for Sale, and was made by the same individuals who made the “anti-Wal Mart” documentary, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices. Iraq for Sale is an excellent film, and I highly recommend it.

As with most current events, I was trying to keep up with the entire situation in Iraq. But (and I blame school), I wasn’t able to follow it as closely as I would have liked. I found the documentary incredibly interesting because it portrayed a side of the American government handling of the war that I had never thought existed. Mind you, as I mentioned before, I could have also been unaware because of my pseudo-following abilities. Anyway, the documentary examined a couple of the companies that the American government had contracted to work in Iraq. Haliburton was one of the companies, and I can’t remember the names of the others. Essentially, the government was spending an extraordinary amount of unnecessary money on contracts with these companies. Why unnecessary? Because a good portion (from what was shown in the film) of the jobs that were being contracted for could have been given to members of the US Army. Interviews were done with current and former employees from these companies, and most of these people recognized that their job could have been done by a member of the Army. None of the employees were aware of the complete details of their missions, and genuinely wanted to help their country.

I won’t write out everything that was said/shown in the documentary; I’ll leave it up to you to go see it. However, I will mention what enraged me the most in the film. Most people know what occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison/detainee center in Baghdad. The documentary revealed that not only were military personnel involved with the torture and humiliation of the detainees, but contracted employees were as well. (I had no idea this was the case…) This staff acted as interrogators, and according to former prisoners, played as large of a role in the scandal as the military personnel. In the end, who was punished? The military officers alone. The contracted employees managed to avoid any sort of convictions or penalties. I find this absurd. Why should the Army have received all of the bad press, and the well paid contractors suffer none of the blame? The film portrayed the contractors as not having a chain of command, in essence, their superiors turning a blind eye to the situation. What kind of weak justice is demonstrated when half of the criminals are ignored and not investigated? I can’t remember if the film delved into the details of why the contracted employees escaped punishment, but it would be interesting to find out.

I really wonder how these sort of events occur in the first place. I also can’t wrap my mind around the amount of money squandered on these contractors. The money could be spent in such better ways. Alas, such are the ways of certain (dare I say most?) governments…