21 May 2016 - Islam is a "criminal" ideology which deserves to be ranked with "Nazism, fascism and communism", is "incompatible with the principles of European law" and, like its totalitarian predecessors, must inevitably be defeated.
So argues Czech lawyer, activist and politician Kl'ara Samkov'a in a hard hitting lecture she delivered earlier this week in the Czech Parliament to an audience including (some rather bemused) ambassadors from Muslim countries - including the Turkish ambassador who, with several others, walked out half way through.
Her speech - translated here by Lubos Motl - is well worth reading because it addresses issues almost never aired in polite circles in Western democracies, which find it convenient to dismiss them as extremist or Islamophobic or needlessly inflammatory.
Is Islam compatible with Western democracy? Is it capable of reform? Can this end happily?
Samkov'a's prognosis, on all three counts, is bleak.
The problem with Islam, she argues, is that it's not so much a religion as a "totalitarian system of governance". Unlike Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism or Shintoism, the religious aspect is secondary to the legal one.
The law is an intrinsic and inseparable part of the Islamic ideology. It constitutes the core of the content of Islam while the rules claimed to be religious or ethical are just secondary and marginal components of the ideology. From the viewpoint of Islam, the concept of religion as a private, intimate matter of an individual is absolutely unacceptable. However, that's exactly the principle on which today's Christianity and the civilizations derived from it rely. It's the private relationship of an individual towards God which is more or less mediated by one of the churches. Even those members of our civilization realm who consider themselves atheists, i.e. those who claim not to believe in God, automatically extract their attitudes to life from the Christian traditions while these traditions take the form of either folklore or cultural automatisms which makes them share the generally accepted spirit of Europe and both Americas. Again, it's necessary to remind ourselves that this view is not only unacceptable for Islam but it is also denounced and explicitly named as a crime. Islam rejects the individual conception of faith in God and in a totalitarian way, it forbids all doubts about itself.
It is, she goes on, a belief system based on an extremely regressive, joyless view of the world.
Islam doesn't share the Enlightenment's idea of the social progress associated with the future. According to Islam, the good times have already taken place - in the era of Prophet Mohammed. The best things that could have been done have already been done, the best thing that could have been written has already been written, namely the Quran.
Rather than working with the world - as Judaism and Christianity, or at least the civilizations that have arisen from them do - Islam is filled with hatred for it.
Judaism, Christianity, and the civilization that arose from them have surpassed this unjustifiable skepticism, this contempt of people for themselves. At the same moment, Islam remained a stillborn infant of gnosis, deformed into a monstrously mutated desire to blend with the Universe again, into a retarded obsessively psychopathic paranoiac vision about the exceptional nature of one's own path towards the reunification of the essence of one's devotee with God.
Cruelly, this means that Muslims are not brought closer to but further away from God.
This faulty conception also gives rise to the idea penetrating all of Islam about the identification of matter with evil and the contempt for our civilization which is considered materialistic, and therefore intrinsically evil and clashing with God. It's a genuine tragedy of the Muslims themselves that they have eternally closed their journey to God by pursuing this dead end.
Its vision of humanity is grim and riddled with self hatred.
Depression, perishing, the absence of faith in the human and his irreplaceable value, skepticism towards the dignity of every human being regardless of his characteristics such as religion, social status, sex, and nationality, that's what characterizes Islam. Islam has rejected philosophy as we know it, as a possibility of a critical and rational view into the nature of reality.
Which probably explains why Islam isn't big on either human rights - or scientific progress.
This attitude is also preventing Muslims from thinking about the questions on human freedom, dignity, the role of a person and the state, and - paradoxically - also the questions about God which became, within the Euro
21 May 2016 - Islam is a "criminal" ideology which deserves to be ranked with "Nazism, fascism and communism", is "incompatible with the principles of European law" and, like its totalitarian predecessors, must inevitably be defeated.
So argues Czech lawyer, activist and politician Kl'ara Samkov'a in a hard hitting lecture she delivered earlier this week in the Czech Parliament to an audience including (some rather bemused) ambassadors from Muslim countries - including the Turkish ambassador who, with several others, walked out half way through.
Her speech - translated here by Lubos Motl - is well worth reading because it addresses issues almost never aired in polite circles in Western democracies, which find it convenient to dismiss them as extremist or Islamophobic or needlessly inflammatory.
Is Islam compatible with Western democracy? Is it capable of reform? Can this end happily?
Samkov'a's prognosis, on all three counts, is bleak.
The problem with Islam, she argues, is that it's not so much a religion as a "totalitarian system of governance". Unlike Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism or Shintoism, the religious aspect is secondary to the legal one.
The law is an intrinsic and inseparable part of the Islamic ideology. It constitutes the core of the content of Islam while the rules claimed to be religious or ethical are just secondary and marginal components of the ideology. From the viewpoint of Islam, the concept of religion as a private, intimate matter of an individual is absolutely unacceptable. However, that's exactly the principle on which today's Christianity and the civilizations derived from it rely. It's the private relationship of an individual towards God which is more or less mediated by one of the churches. Even those members of our civilization realm who consider themselves atheists, i.e. those who claim not to believe in God, automatically extract their attitudes to life from the Christian traditions while these traditions take the form of either folklore or cultural automatisms which makes them share the generally accepted spirit of Europe and both Americas. Again, it's necessary to remind ourselves that this view is not only unacceptable for Islam but it is also denounced and explicitly named as a crime. Islam rejects the individual conception of faith in God and in a totalitarian way, it forbids all doubts about itself.
It is, she goes on, a belief system based on an extremely regressive, joyless view of the world.
Islam doesn't share the Enlightenment's idea of the social progress associated with the future. According to Islam, the good times have already taken place - in the era of Prophet Mohammed. The best things that could have been done have already been done, the best thing that could have been written has already been written, namely the Quran.
Rather than working with the world - as Judaism and Christianity, or at least the civilizations that have arisen from them do - Islam is filled with hatred for it.
Judaism, Christianity, and the civilization that arose from them have surpassed this unjustifiable skepticism, this contempt of people for themselves. At the same moment, Islam remained a stillborn infant of gnosis, deformed into a monstrously mutated desire to blend with the Universe again, into a retarded obsessively psychopathic paranoiac vision about the exceptional nature of one's own path towards the reunification of the essence of one's devotee with God.
Cruelly, this means that Muslims are not brought closer to but further away from God.
This faulty conception also gives rise to the idea penetrating all of Islam about the identification of matter with evil and the contempt for our civilization which is considered materialistic, and therefore intrinsically evil and clashing with God. It's a genuine tragedy of the Muslims themselves that they have eternally closed their journey to God by pursuing this dead end.
Its vision of humanity is grim and riddled with self hatred.
Depression, perishing, the absence of faith in the human and his irreplaceable value, skepticism towards the dignity of every human being regardless of his characteristics such as religion, social status, sex, and nationality, that's what characterizes Islam. Islam has rejected philosophy as we know it, as a possibility of a critical and rational view into the nature of reality.
Which probably explains why Islam isn't big on either human rights - or scientific progress.
This attitude is also preventing Muslims from thinking about the questions on human freedom, dignity, the role of a person and the state, and - paradoxically - also the questions about God which became, within the Euro