Back in June we posted about a new mosque that was being constructed inside a church in Berlin. This was to be a special, tolerant, progressive mosque: women would not be separated from men, and Sunnis, Shi’ites, and Alewites could all pray together side by side.
Well…
Since then, the real meaning of “interfaith” has become apparent. As the Muslim Brotherhood describes it, interfaith is the bridge by which infidels cross over to Islam, but no traffic will ever be allowed in the opposite direction.
The tolerant mosque in Moabit was a bridge too far by the standards of most Muslims in Germany. Seyran Ateş, the visionary Turkish-German woman who conceived the idea for an inclusive mosque, has received numerous death threats and is now under special police protection.
It’s obvious that as far as Islam is concerned, “tolerance” and “inclusion” are for rubes — that is, for the infidels. And Seyran Ateş is either one of those rubes, or a supremely skilled practitioner of taqiyya. You decide.
Many thanks to Ava Lon for translating this brief video clip, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:
See also this article from Deutsche Welle.
Video transcript:
| 00:00 | The founder of the moderate mosque in Berlin Seyran Ateş | |
| 00:04 | will be more strongly protected by the police after more than 100 death threats. | |
| 00:08 | The lawyer and women’s rights activist | |
| 00:12 | is committed to a secular and liberal/moderate Islam. | |
| 00:16 | She has already been the victim of an attack, and | |
| 00:20 | sustained life-threatening wounds. In the Berlin district of Moabit | |
| 00:24 | she founded, with other people, a mosque where men and women, | |
| 00:28 | Sunnis, Shia, and Alevis pray together. |
Hilarious.
Next the whole ‘former’ church becomes a mosque and game over for infidels – go play somewhere else.
And so it goes – 1 day, 1 building, 1 street, 1 neighborhood at a time.
The dye is cast – Powell was correct.
Notwithstanding the truth of what you write about Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech of 1968, it is actually die not dye.
One die, two dice.
You cast or roll dice, plural of die, in a dice game.
Okay, if we’re going to get technical:
The ‘die’ referred to here is not a gambling die, it’s a die as in ‘tool and die,’ meaning you are casting molten metal to form a particular shape for a particular purpose; once the metal takes that shape, the purpose is determined.
When the Divine Julius took his army across the River Rubicon, he uttered the famous line, “Alea iacta est,” rendered in English as “The die is cast.” He didn’t mean he was taking a gamble, he meant he had taken a step that could not be taken back.
Hence he modern phrase “crossing the Rubicon” used to mean choosing a course of action that is now irrevocable.
*sigh*
Instead of ‘used to,’ I should have written ’employed to’ because colloquially ‘used to’ carries the implication of ‘once but no longer.’
J.C.’s phrase still packs a punch. I believe there’s even a motor vehicle named Rubicon.
The reporter of this phrase is Suetonius. I do not see any evidence of “die” being a metal stamp after looking at Wikipedia, which while never being authoritative per se, often gets to the crowd-sourced truth on its Talk pages. But someone on them comments that if the die were a metal one as you say, the sentence would be “moneta fusa est”. Apparently “alea” referred to an early form of backgammon in Caesar’s time.
So could you provide the source for your opinion that metal and not gambling dice are meant?
Wikipedia: ” Lewis and Short,[6] citing Casaubon and Ruhnk, suggest that the text of Suetonius should read Iacta alea esto (reading the imperative ESTO instead of EST), which they translate as “Let the die be cast!”, or “Let the game be ventured!”. This matches Plutarch’s use of third-person singular middle/passive perfect imperative of ἀναρρίπτω,[7] i.e. ἀνερρίφθω κύβος (anerrhiphtho kybos, pronounced [anerːípʰtʰɔː kýbos]).”
By the first century AD alea refers to the early form of backgammon that was played in Caesar’s time. Augustus (Octavian) mentions winning this game in a letter. Dice were common in Roman times, and generally known in Latin as cubus[8] and in Greek as κύβος kybos “die” and κυβεία kybeia “dice-playing”
My source was my dad with his PhD in Classics (from UNC – Chapel Hill ca. 1970). He said a different usage would have been deployed if the reference was to the knuckle bones they used as dice.
You have clearly done some more thorough research so I can’t gainsay what you have said. My dad’s been out of the academic scene for quite a while, and since I am unable to read Suetonius in the original, I will defer to your interpretation.
Mark Steyn said (paraphrasing) that there are no moderate Muslims — either you are an extremist Muslim or you’re an ex-Muslim. At the time I read that, I thought it a bit overstated. Not any more.
I think the analogy of Germans who voted for Hitler vs. Germans who worked in the death camps is appropriate for muslims. Moderate muslims are the ones who voted for Hitler, radical muslims work in the death camps. They all work toward the same goal.
Their logic (if you apply that term to Islam) is: you are with us or again us. Death or submission.
Getting back to Enoch Powell, in my opinion one of the five greatest Englishmen who lived during the 20th century, many people consider he was wrong by quoting twenty years in his speech.
Wrong. He knew that it would take longer for catastrophe to arrive, but who would have listened to him or believed him if he had said 60 or even 70 years, knowing that they would be dead by then ?.
Only 50 years have passed (less than a generation) and every year that passes proves how right he was and how wrong his fellow politicians, and, it must be said, the majority of the english public were.
The sad thing is, most still have the heads firmly buried in the sand.
This woman is no Muslima! This is a deception, as usual. Do not believe anything a Muslim tells you, unless he says he will try to kill you.
Real Islam is self-policing. Sharia actually contains commands to individuals to assassinate anyone renouncing any part of Islam.
You often have narcissistic Muslims attempting to redefine Islam according to their individual preferences, including the Amadiyya Muslims, Zudi Jassar, and Irshad Manji. These people don’t last too long in an Islamic setting; they may survive in a country of few Muslims or strong law enforcement.
At least Irshad Manji admits that canonical Islam has problems. The Amadiyyas claim that true Islam is peaceful and tolerant, and therefore claim that any representation of Islam as violent is false and Islamophobic.
While the effect of such breakaway sects is actually beneficial to the phony bucolic representation of Islam in the West, the Islamists reject even the fig leaf of any change. As it turns out, they’re right. They are spreading in the West just fine without having to compromise in the least on doctrine, thank you.
Ms. Ates is no doubt sincere in her efforts to marry Islam to modernity. But I also think that, like Hamad Abdel Samad, she is misguided.
Muhammad was a product of his time and his society, and he created a religion that perpetuated his time and his society. He had neither the vision nor the moral fibre to forsee anything better than the status quo.
Islam will either die or continue to enslave millions in poverty and misery.