Just between 2003-5, US forces killed 15 journalists in Iraq, the majority either Westerners or working for Western news agencies. The figure is from the mainstream American Journalism Review. 94 aid workers died in the Iraq conflict, according to Reuters. I don’t have a figure for how many of those were killed by the US forces, but many. Journalists and aid workers have been among the 2,540 people killed in “collateral damage” of drone strikes since Obama became President. Now the US has just killed medical staff and aid workers in Kunduz.
I do not want to downplay the horror and cold-heartedness of the grisly ISIL executions. But the United States military has killed more journalists and NGO employees than ISIL ever will. An inconvenient fact you will never see reported in the mainstream media.
Some of those US killings of journalists were not deliberate targeting. That is of little comfort to the dead people and their loved ones. Some were not accidental.
“Is There Truth in Religions?
The question is: Is there not truth in religions, in theories, in ideals, in beliefs? Let us examine. What do we mean by religion? Surely, not organized religion, not Hinduism, Buddhism, or Christianity, which are all organized beliefs with their propaganda, conversion, proselytism, compulsion, and so on. Is there any truth in organized religion? It may engulf, enmesh truth, but the organized religion itself is not true. Therefore, organized religion is false, it separates man from man. You are a Muslim, I am a Hindu, another is a Christian or a Buddhist and we are wrangling, butchering each other. Is there any truth in that? We are not discussing religion as the pursuit of truth, but we are considering if there is any truth in organized religion. We are so conditioned by organized religion to think there is truth in it that we have come to believe that by calling oneself a Hindu, one is somebody, or one will find God. How absurd, sir; to find God, to find reality, there must be virtue. Virtue is freedom, and only through freedom can truth be discovered, not when you are caught in the hands of organized religion, with its beliefs. And is there any truth in theories, in ideals, in beliefs? Why do you have beliefs? Obviously, because beliefs give you security, comfort, safety, a guide. In yourself you are frightened, you want to be protected, you want to lean on somebody, and therefore, you create the ideal, which prevents you from understanding that which is. Therefore, an ideal becomes a hindrance to action.”
J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life
http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/krishnamurti-teachings/view-daily-quote/20111213.php
Laguerre: I do love a nice controversy.
Load of nonsense.
Good starting point. Well reasoned. Intelligent argument. Well done.
The Qur’an is no more derivative than the Bible.
Did I suggest otherwise? The Bible is derivative, too. Particularly from Babylonian and possibly from Egyptian sources.
All holy books develop from previous ones.
My point exactly. Thank you. The Qu’ran being no exception. See also: Qu’ran, sura 5 (Al-Ma’ida), ayat 44[1]
The only reason, to take an example, that Jesus’ birth is placed in Bethlehem, is that the Old Testament tradition demands that the Messiah be born there. He actually came from a Galilee family, and an improbable story had to be invented to put his birth far, far away from there.
True – perhaps – the historical Jesus is subject to considerable speculation, as the only records of his existence rely on the same polluted source. But I’ll allow you your not-too-relevant point. It does not address, still less dismiss, the suggestion that elements of the Qu’ran could have been recorded prior to the Prophet’s emergence: that he could in fact have been enlarging an already existing tradition.
In any case the Birmingham fragment is a perfectly standard early Qur’an style in hijazi script. If it really were earlier, it would look different.
Not if the tradition predated the Prophet.
Two possibilities: 1) the Carbon 14 range of dates does include up to 649, 20 years after the Prophet’s death. So there’s no real contradiction. 2) The scribe reused a piece of old parchment. No tests were made on the ink.
Happy to concede both points. But I don’t concede that those are the only possibilities; another being that the accepted account of the Qu’ran’s creation/revelation/whatever might be incorrect.
Over to you.
I’m not quite sure, Craig, why you use the word ‘you’. I don’t have any religious beliefs. Religion is a social phenomenon. Of course the social circumstances in which you are born are going to dominate.
@Ken2
“More Americans are killed by guns in America than terorism. Americans shooting each other. 26,000 a year.”
As they say in America “Nice piece.”
http://internationaltimes.it/gun-lore-in-the-united-states-of-amnesia/
[…] Make no mistake, this is shaping up to be the most spectacular US foreign policy debacle since Vietnam – and we don’t think that’s an exaggeration.
The US, in conjunction with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, attempted to train and support Sunni extremists to overthrow the Assad regime. Some of those Sunni extremists ended up going crazy and declaring a Medieval caliphate putting the Pentagon and Langley in the hilarious position of being forced to classify al-Qaeda as “moderate.” The situation spun out of control leading to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and when Washington finally decided to try and find real “moderates” to help contain the Frankenstein monster the CIA had created in ISIS (there were of course numerous other CIA efforts to arm and train anti-Assad fighters, see below for the fate of the most “successful” of those groups), the effort ended up being a complete embarrassment that culminated with the admission that only “four or five” remained and just days after that admission, those “four or five” were car jacked by al-Qaeda in what was perhaps the most under-reported piece of foreign policy comedy in history.
Meanwhile, Iran sensed an epic opportunity to capitalize on Washington’s incompetence. Tehran then sent its most powerful general to Russia where a pitch was made to upend the Mid-East balance of power. The Kremlin loved the idea because after all, Moscow is stinging from Western economic sanctions and Vladimir Putin is keen on showing the West that, in the wake of the controversy surrounding the annexation of Crimea and the conflict in eastern Ukraine, Russia isn’t set to back down. Thanks to the fact that the US chose extremists as its weapon of choice in Syria, Russia gets to frame its involvement as a “war on terror” and thanks to Russia’s involvement, Iran gets to safely broadcast its military support for Assad just weeks after the nuclear deal was struck. Now, Russian airstrikes have debilitated the only group of CIA-backed fighters that had actually proven to be somewhat effective and Iran and Hezbollah are preparing a massive ground invasion under cover of Russian air support. Worse still, the entire on-the-ground effort is being coordinated by the Iranian general who is public enemy number one in Western intelligence circles and he’s effectively operating at the behest of Putin, the man that Western media paints as the most dangerous person on the planet. […]
http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/airstrikes-are-just-appetizer-get-ready-massive-ground-invasion-iran/ri10186
Happy to oblige shortly, though I should be working.
So far there’s absolutely no evidence that this is the case, there’s no point in speculating without evidence.
In fact, what you are suggesting is the standard Sunni belief, which has been doctrine since the 9th century. There was a debate then as to whether the Qur’an had ever been created, which led to an inquisition run by the Caliphs. The fundamentalists, the ancestors of present-day Wahhabis, won the debate with their view that the Qur’an was eternal and had always existed with God. By that logic, I suppose that it could have “leaked out” before Muhammad received the text from the angel Gabriel. So you agree with the Wahhabis, really.
Looked at from a Western point of view, though, it is the ideas which would be more or less derivative, not the literal text. This is a standard 7th century Qur’an fragment, to look at. The only reason to think it might be different is the C14 dating, whose accuracy might be questionable.
Curiously enough, by chance I met a couple of Germans last week who work on an Early Qur’an database project. They thought the Birmingham work had been sloppily done. I don’t remember the argument exactly, but it was about insufficient number of tests and comparisons. That would be my reaction too. One C14 date is not enough for a controversial conclusion. Who knows where they took the sample from.
I’d better get back to work….
Laguerre
Thanks – I don’t mind either way. I am some kind of Deist myself.
Laguerre good piece of writing and agreed on the points forwarded.
However, the attacks on Islam can take many dimensions, included the sloppy carbon dating results passed as gospel too.
I tend to think of the major religions as saying largely the same thing, and that these days not many adherents of any are determined that only their religion is the route to salvation.
It would be a cruel belief system indeed that damned a child to Hell/Hades/BadFieryPlace for being brought up, say, in the Hindu tradition, on the basis that they would not know the “truth” about Jesus Christ. Or, for the sake of fairness, vice versa.
I am sorry to see Russia getting involved in the Syrian war. I realise there is a terrible crisis in the whole Middle East which the US-Israel banking fraternity, together with their puppet sheikdoms, is trying to bring under controlto create a United States of Israel and steal any mineral wealth to sell to its own citizens. Russia’s intervention could prevent the Israeli banksters from getting their way as others have pointed out. What it does show to my mind is that when Russia is involved in a war it says it is, and when it is not involved (Ukraine for example, apart from humanitarian aid) it denies western MSM lies.
That is unlikely to deter the resident dissenters who suck at the MSM tit and throw-up its ‘goodness’ all over the bib of this blog. Only 8 days to go before we learn what lies are going to be milked out of the Dutch Safety Board over MH17. Could they possibly tell the truth? Or is it going to be another Lockerbie?
Just before the dissenters bring out some more grainy images of combined harvesters we know that US satellite technology is much better than the images produced during the Ukraine crisis by comparing it with the much better imagery of Russian military planes in Syria. This article also includes the combined harvesters to make the comparison.
http://russia-insider.com/en/us-satellites-work-syria-not-ukraine/ri10106?utm_source=Russia+Insider+Daily+Headlines&utm_campaign=134b037e69-Russia_Insider_Daily_Headlines11_21_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c626db089c-134b037e69-227206045&ct=t%28Russia_Insider_Daily_Headlines11_21_2014%29&mc_cid=134b037e69&mc_eid=01f3995473
Unusually, ‘Letters’ elevated to Gogle News’ top page:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/letters/11910636/Letters-President-Assad-is-the-Wests-best-bet-against-Islamic-extremism.html
So far there’s absolutely no evidence that (the tradition predated the Prophet) this is the case, there’s no point in speculating without evidence.
Sure. I make no pretence to be doing anything more than speculating. In fact there is little to suggest that the parchments were written before the Prophet appeared, even within the 14C date given. However, the existence of leaves from a complete and unitary Qu’ran at that date would rather confirms the conventional account that it existed in the Prophet’s time.
As to the sloppiness of the work, neither of us has any testable evidence, so that too is speculation. The dating itself was done at Oxford. The ink has yet to be tested, but it looks as if it will be.
There’s no need for the salafist imputation. The discovery, if correct flatly contradicts the Sunni tradition that the Qu’ran was compiled by Uthman…
And I have no axe to grind re. the validity or otherwise of Islam. Socially, it works for its adherents, for the most part, rather better than Christianity does for its followers, but like any other theology, the core story is pants.
Yes Craig I inhabit the world of faith. I was born with this faith or it was inculcated in me as a child. It informed my going to church at school and my whole understanding of the world.
Then when they let me out of an all-male boarding school aged 18 green as grass I found myself married to a lady who totally contradicted the basic fundamentals of my strange world. Free love was to her the essence of a loving husband. how could anyone be so cruel, heartless and controlling as to limit the sexual desires of females. What is more the whole world was simultaneously travelling down this ridiculous road.
So I re-found my faith in the world of Islam in which I recognised my original faith world. I found myself with a Kurdish wife ( nice ) but with a species of Muslim who did not want to spend their life in creativity and service to the community but in lying, fighting and political macination, i.e. takfiri Islam. I don’t know if you noticed but there is a difference between re-wiring people’s houses and killing them and raping their females. I find myself again in a strange world where for millenia it has been assumed that a good person was one who benefited society and now all that has been reversed, you have to lie and cheat your way to power. What a strange world you inhabit Giyane in which you don’t put 14 million people into refugee camps and steal their land.
I realised that the driving force for all change is moral rules. if you change the rules, and you convince enough people to go by new rules, you can remove the established authority from power and sit on their chairs. Britain in the 18th century declared itself morally, intellectually and physically superior to the entire MUslim world. Ir then set about enslaving Muslim Africa, Muslim India and Muslim Europe i.e. the Ottoman Empire.
Now in my lifetime they are trying to change the rules. We have had 25 years of constant propaganda against Islam that Islam is mad, violent and wrong. You cannot deny that this has been the case and you cannot deny that it has been accompanied by 25 years of violence by Christian countries. Well. By stating that inhabit a strange world you are denying it, if the truth were told.
we are being moved by MSM, and by Zionist mischievousness into a world in which on the media the ghoul state of IS is being glorified as a contingent of brave warriors who dared to change the world. John McCain ( I exaggerate ) has said look there’s nothing wrong with free love with dogs, my mother was a dog, my father was a man and he threw off his inhibitions to marry his bitch and here I am half dog half human. Gordon Brown said my father was a dog, he wore a dog-collar and my mother was a human and here I am. we are going to consume the entire human concept of money. Get used to it. we are going to eat your food.
No Craig it is you who live in the weird world in which what is happening in the world is somehow normalised.I ihabit the real world where breaking the rules gets you put down.
I realised that the driving force for all change is moral rules. if you change the rules, and you convince enough people to go by new rules, you can remove the established authority from power and sit on their chairs. Britain in the 18th century declared itself morally, intellectually and physically superior to the entire MUslim world. Ir then set about enslaving Muslim Africa, Muslim India and Muslim Europe i.e. the Ottoman Empire.
Hmmm. Are you saying the British Empire was the only outfit to change the moral rules, convince enough people, and govern large areas of the planet in its own interests? I’d think about that a little more, with reference to the Moghuls, the Safafids, maybe the Ummayads and (whisper it) the Sassanids.
Ba’al
All imperialist monsters. That’s why they were smashed because they exceeded the limits of Allah. that’s why Saudi and Muslim Brotherhood takfirism are in the process of being smashed by Russia. because they totally exceed the limits set by Allah.
Pathetic little academics grovelling tom the Zionist state by suggesting that the Muslim tradition is incorrect and Craig trying to suggest that the Qur’an is derivative from previous scriptures will provoke a bigger outrage from Muslims worldwide than a few silly cartoons.
Go on make fools of yourselves if you dare.
This will be my last comment at this blog. I won’t be reading any more comments here so please no one leave me any messages to clutter these threads.
Best wishes to all, and goodbye.
It is saddening John that the Syrian crisis has been elevated by Russia’s intervention.
Understandably and self-evident in dialogu President Putin struggled with that intervention yet knowing the Syrian government would soon collapse despite Russia stepping up military supplies and Iranian allies increasing military support and encouraging their Hezbollah and other Shia militia allies to join the fighting on the ground, where they had played a key role in some areas in Syria.
A point in time had been reached where the U.S. at it’s root projected a kind of biblical “City upon a Hill” — a phrase evoked by British colonists to North America as early as 1630 — and was exempt from historical forces that had affected other countries, this culminating in a unilateral pursuit of American military interests using preemptive strikes against potential enemies and promoting democratic regime change by tortuous proxy aggression, paying no mind at all to international laws and the autonomous freedom of other weaker countries.
Without a superpower rival, the US/UK, largely ceased to care what happened in these countries and, when they did intervene, as in Libya and Iraq, it was to install feeble client door-mat regimes.
The enthusiasm which agent Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy showed in overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi contrasts with their indifference as Libya collapsed into criminalised anarchy; and Iraq? How much can our hearts bleed there?
Evolution, transformation and growth is certainly frightening in this world; traumatic and most times unyielding as the present collapses to make way for revision.
All imperialist monsters. That’s why they were smashed because they exceeded the limits of Allah. that’s why Saudi and Muslim Brotherhood takfirism are in the process of being smashed by Russia. because they totally exceed the limits set by Allah.
And yet they all knew they were doing Allah’s will… just as IS, the Taleban, the Alawis do. George Bush knew he was doing the will of God, Tony Blair ditto, and while Putin himself may not -in private – be wholly engaged with the Orthodox Church, you may be sure half his soldiers are.
Mu bitch is with religion, not Islam, Giyane.
I feel that rallying to religion is not helpful, when the attacks on its adherents as a bloc clearly are not motivated by any particular antipathy to Islamic faith (despite its obvious failings), really, it might seem that way but it’s incidental, actually serves to confuse and confound what is actually taking place. It’s bad old old-fashioned race hate, of Arabs, Africans, it’s the white angloziosphere killing off those it its entrenched elite considers inferior or inconvenient, for kicks and booty. The Saudi parasites play a dangerous game of doing the west’s bidding because at some point, without real friends, they’ll be pushed under the bus too.
Still see religious belief as indicative of some traumatic head injury.
Clark don’t be so rash, we need your expertise on nuclear and other scientific matters. But not your contention that a certain amount of extra mutation could be a good thing.
Even more tragic would have been inaction of Putin that would have resulted in aiding and abetting the realisation of the wet dreams of the neocons. Fact is the current bombings of the mercenaries and ex prison inmates of Saudi et al jails, have already paid dividends.
The sudden talks of Assad can stay for another three years and no longer is being mooted! Why on earth Putin waited so long to get involved is the question? The simple fact is world has tried the jaw jaw route with the neocons and see where has it got us to? The neocon parasites are gaming the systems and are using the very principles of humanity and liberalism against humanity and liberalism.
The worst misconstruction’s of all was by Daniel Pearl who upended the principles of “creative destruction” a perfectly good working theory, and used it to carry on destroying nascent countries and economies to bolster the tired, bloated and morally and financially bankrupt entities, in direct opposition to the very theory he was spouting off!
There should be no sadness, in fact if there was a poll of the residents (whatever is left of these) in the areas that the cut throat mercenaries come “good terrorists” were to be conducted, you will find that Assad government will be winning hands down!
PS Thanks for the links Mark shall read these carefully.
i gave up repairing old books in 1990 after conceding my house to my house by English divorce law. i recently sent 15 sheets of barcham Green handmade paper that I had bought for my work in 1986 to the book conservation department of a library of Qur’ans and Kurdish culture in Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan. The paper had been sitting in a folder for 30 years.
what completely boggles the mind is that scientists and academics at Oxford university can be so utterly biassed against Islam that when they discover the vellum on which the Qur’an fragments from Birmingham have been written pre-dates the period when history informs us the text was written down, they are bold enough to declare that they believe the Islamic central core of belief is incorrect without bothering to consider the more obvious conclusion, that the vellum pre-dated the writing by maybe 50years. Why should that not happen in a non-consumer society if it can happen in ours?
The Qur’an was only finally collated later, parts of it may have been written down much earlier. 25 years of MSM organised attacking Islam appears to have left intelligent people deeply biassed against Islam. Our forebears built an Empire on slavery of Muslims and then laundered their savagery by Darwin’s declaration that dark-skinned people were ecologically undeveloped compared to white-skinned Europeans. White-skinnedness occurs in all regions that have a deficit of sunshine.
Academics mostly talk out of their bottoms.
to my house = to my ex-wife. Atheist/ Kafir cockroaches really having a field day on this one.
Giyane a very good point there (1:38pm) about the age of paper. Factors such as that plus the very likely large margins of errors in the dating process are germane, but at the end of the day, like all holy books it’s a collection of fairy-tales, journalism, it’s wholly fiction. Disclaimer: Any similarity to real events, persons is wholly coincidental.
Did someone mention Jesus?
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/
“to my house = to my ex-wife. Atheist/ Kafir cockroaches really having a field day on this one.”
Giyane/Guano reveals his normally well concealed hatred of atheists with that one.
“Our forebears built an Empire on slavery of Muslims …”
And your contemporaries are now trying to build a Caliphate on the slavery of Yazidis, amongst others. How do you feel about that, Guano? Can you inform us here regarding the Quran’s position on slavery?
Goodbye, Clark.
Would it now be the right time to exorcise religious comments altogether?
Religion is proffered as a vehicle for psychopath actions and the so called believers who forget their own humanity whilst under the influence of those false charlatans, mullahs priests,etc.etc.
Why should religion be occupying the space in society it has carved out for itself from high above? why should we let these misguided fools use their tomfoolery to undermine society and lead believers astray?
ISIL are criminals who use religion, priests of all kinds of denominations have abused children for hundreds of years whilst preaching their morals from the pulpit, still they want to carry on and judge themselves for these crimes against humanity, be absolved from their guilt.
They should loose a church for every crime committed, it should open up inner city brown field sites for some serious housebuilding and it would focus their profit ridden, perverted minds somewhat.
banish religion, make this a humanist blog.