Plutocracy in disguise
Democracy is under siege.
America needs democracy.
Catch people interest, attention. Get them to talk about it.
These Not in my name people were caught red handed by social media.
The purpose is more important than strategy (material)
They build our trust
Any attraction is a distraction
Arrogance
Hateful God
39:20 many purposes
Unrepresentative and illigeitemate and trickery, Chicanery, deception, fraud.
There Torah teaches them double standards. They are not allowed to charge interest to a Jew.
Chosen one syndrome – Belief that heaven is reserved for the Muslims. It is for the Mu’mins. The true believers.
This world is an alurement.
Human rights
English Bill of Rights in 1689, which included the inalienable rights of representative government, free elections, freedom of speech, religious toleration, trial by jury, and prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
In this way, a radical universalist framework of human rights rejects the agency of communities—national, religious, and cultural—to determine and follow their own conceptions of morality, of what it means to be human, and how humans should be treated. Of course, this is deeply problematic because these existential questions constitute the backbone and purpose of many communities and traditions, including Islam. What is more, this affects the process of human rights promotion and interventions, because both of these are necessarily based on a power dynamic whereby one group of people decides for another the best way to live their lives.
Violence and oppression in the name of human rights
The effects of the newly emboldened security paradigm put in place in the early 2000s are still apparent, both domestically and internationally, and are closely related to the issues of Islamophobia that fuel the “clash of civilizations”[23] rhetoric related to Islam and human rights. Above all, the debates on security raise the questions of whose human rights are included in, or worth, international indignation and protection, and for what purposes is the sacrifice of these rights deemed justifiable.
The justification of torture
Rhetoric aside, in reality we need to look no further than the incidents at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay to know that torture is a tactic alive and well. Nonetheless, the debate on torture is illustrative of the dynamic between human rights and security, and the tendency of the latter to trump—for lack of a better word—the former.
Alan Dershowitz, a legal scholar at Harvard University until his retirement, argued for a prioritizing of security in his article, “Tortured Reasoning,” published in 2004. Claiming that he was against torture “as a normative matter,” Dershowitz argued that it is sometimes necessary in the case of a “ticking bomb terrorist case.”[26] The ticking time bomb symbol has become prevalent in discussions on torture and terrorism, even disseminated in popular culture on television and in movies—the pressure of time, the threat of a terrorist attack, and the certain guilt of the suspect combined create circumstances in which torture is seen as a necessary and justifiable tool.
The erosion of civil liberties
Though formal colonial rule has ended, Western domination and control continues to impact upon the human rights of the vast majority of the people of the non-Western world in ways which are more subtle and sophisticated but no less destructive and devastating.
In his book Islam in Liberalism, Joseph Massad extends this point to make the argument that Islam became the necessary “other” Western colonial powers needed to define themselves and justify their imperial expansion.
In reality, the question of whether Islam and modern human rights are compatible is important because, in order to address it, we must look at the roles of not just religion, but of history, of power, and of morality itself. This intersection sheds light on the problems with our current understanding of human rights and how they are protected. As this paper has shown, modern human rights are rife with contradictions, contradictions that are very acutely connected with the manipulation of Islam for political ends. On the one hand, Islamic texts and history show a deep concern for the sanctity and enjoyment of life, and for individual freedoms in every sense: from respect for the individual on an interpersonal level to the protection of the individual from corrupted authority, religious or otherwise. On the other, Islam is at the center of many agendas concerning resources, military expansion, security, and culture, and this fact has been instrumental in creating a problem of Islam and human rights that has little to do with the religion itself.
