Permissible lying

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From Diana West. The media has obviously taken up the same rules for itself.

Dear Glenn Kessler,

First of all, how come your “Fact Checker” column of 9/22 awarding Dr. Ben Carson “Four Pinnochios” for his statement regarding “taqiyya” is running for a second time? It first appeared last week, but there it is again in today’s paper, 9/27, on p. A5.

Oh well, I missed it the first time. It’s definitely worth revisiting.

Dr. Carson said the following: “`Taqiyya’ is a component of sharia that allows, and even encourages you to lie to achieve your goals.”

You then write: “In other words, he appeared to be saying that this tenet of Islam offered some kind of loophole that would allow the Muslim to lie about his or her religious beliefs to pursue other objectives. Is this the case?” (Emphasis added.)

For the record, your paraphrase is not what Carson said. He invoked “taqiyya” to describe a concept in sharia, or Islamic law, that, as he put it, “allows and even encourages [a Muslim] to lie to achieve [his] goals.”

I note that you have chosen to frame Dr. Carson’s very broad claim about sharia-approved lying by focusing on a literal definition of “taqiyya,” as if Carson were discussing only whether Muslims were specifically permitted to lie about “religious beliefs.”

You then go on to “fact-check” this concept of lying about religion in Islam.

Note that I put “fact-check” in quotation marks. This is because you did not, in fact, check the facts. You just contacted sharia-apologists and “taqiyya”-artists for comment.

As a reporter, you really ought to check the authoritative Islamic sources yourself, even if just for “balance.”

Such sources include Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law. It is available on Amazon, which should please the boss. Even at $29.95, it is a bargain, and I cannot recommend it highly enough as a means of quick access to “sharia,” or Islamic law, as authorized by Sunni Islamic authorities, including certification by Al Azhar.

Turn to the detailed subject index of Reliance of the Traveller where you will find a section on “Lying.”

This “Lying” section includes, relevantly, a subsection called “reasons that permit.”

Before I tell you what it says under the heading “Permissable Lying” on p. r8.0, I will quote three men you selected to referee this crucial discussion about lying in Islam, which, thankfully, Dr. Carson has brought to mainstream-media-attention for the first time, incredibly, since 9/11.

I am calling them (A), (B) and (C).

(A) actually addresses Dr. Carson’s general statement about the permissibility of lying in Islam, declaring: “There is no concept that would encourage a Muslim to lie to pursue a goal. That is a complete invention.”

“Complete invention”? As we will see below, “Fact Checker” does not have enough PInnochios to reflect the mendacity of (A)’s statement.

Now, to the other “experts,” who discuss lying in Islam in terms of protecting a religious minority:

B) “It is a dispensation within some aspects of Shia law, which was developed out of the experience of a persecuted minority. … If a Shia is being persecuted, and someone holds a gun to your head asking, `Are you a Shia?’ you are allowed to say `no’ in order to save your life.”

C) “Taqiyya is dissimulation when one is being oppressed or tortured or having one’s views banned, a bit like Jesuit dispensation to lie under oath when your life is in danger.”

To recap, you, and, by extension, the Washington Post, are reporting that Islamically-legal lying to achieve goals is “a complete invention,” or narrowly approved in cases of religious persecution.

Now, to the authoritative Sunni Islamic law book, Reliance of the Traveller.

The sharia discourse on “Permissable Lying” opens by citing canonical “hadiths” (or traditions of Islam’s prophet, Mohammed) by Bukhari and Muslim that quote Mohammed as having said: “He who settles disagreements between people to bring about good or says something commendable is not a liar.”

The text continues, quoting Umm Kalthum, a daughter of Mohammed, who appears in Muslim, where she says:

“I did not hear him permit untruth in anything people say, except for three things: war, settling disagreements and a man talking with his wife or she with him….”

War, settling disagreements, and talk between man and wife: That’s a whole lot of “permissable lying” right there.

“This,” Reliance of the Traveller continues, “is an explicit statement that lying is sometimes permissable for a given interest, scholars having established criteria defining what types of it are lawful.

“The best analysis,” the text continues, “is by Imam Abu Hamid Ghazali,” a famed theologian (d. 1111).

And Ghazali said:

“If a praiseworthy aim is attainable through both telling the truth and lying, it is unlawful to accomplish through lying because there is no need for it. When it is possible to achieve such an aim by lying but not by telling the truth, it is permissable to lie if attaining the goal is permissable…and obligatory to lie if the goal is obligatory.”

Now, back to your Source A. He claimed “there is no concept that would encourage a Muslim to lie to pursue a goal.”

No concept?

Really?

I just found exactly such a concept in the Al-Azhar-approved sharia law book, as derived from the “hadiths” of Bukhari and Muslim and explicated by Ghazali. And, more important, you can, too. Have a look for yourself. It will help in your preparations for the Washington Post correction that Dr. Carson greatly deserves.

The section on “Permissable Lying” in Reliance of the Traveller continues, offering additional detail. It underscores the fact-checkable fact that there exist within Islamic law different circumstances in which lying is permissable if not “obligatory.” ”

Meanwhile, I haven’t even mentioned the Islamic conception of “slander,” (completely, divergently at odds with our own), which serves as the Islamically legal means of outlawing free speech about Islam that is true but not complimentary.

So, to one side of the West-Islam divide, we have Thou Shalt Not Lie. Neat. Simple.

On the other side we have a body of Islamic law stipulating when exactly Thou Shalt Lie.

Dr. Carson was right again. I trust that Fact Checker is already preparing the necessary correction.

A comprehensive list of Abbott’s achievements

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I suppose political virtue is in the eye of the beholder, but this list of Abbott’s accomplishments is provided as a list of the things he got wrong. The website deals with Tracking Abbott’s Wreckage. Here are the first seven and the last seven. The hundreds in between are just the same:

478. Breaks a promise to provide a stable and unified Government – 14 September 2015

477. Laughs at Pacific countries who’s existence is being threatened by climate change – 10 September 2015

476. Rejects recommendations to make banks pay for tax payer funded insurance – 4 September 2015

475. Wastes $55 million, including $15 million on relocating four refugees to Cambodia before the deal to resettle refugees from Nauru collapses – 30 August 2015

474. Oversees botched Border Force announcement that they would stopping people for visa checks in the Melbourne CBD – 28 August 2015

473. Splurges $10 million to rename Border Force – 26 August 2015

472. Cuts $10 million from a grant to support sufferers of an incurable disease – 26 August 2015 . . .

7. Breaks a promise to make no cuts to health on 17 December 2013 when they cut $150 million from hospitals and health services.

6. Breaks a promise to make no cuts to health. He made this promise at the National Press Club on 2 September 2013 and in writing on 5 September 2013 as part of their policy commitments. This promise was first broken on 27 November 2013 when they cut funding to the Alcohol and Other Drugs Council

5. Breaks his election promise of no cuts to education by cutting funding for trade training centres in schools on 17 December 2013. He made this promise at the National Press Club on 2 September 2013 and in writing on 5 September 2013 as part of their policy commitments.

4. Breaks its NBN election promise of giving all Australians access to 25 megabits per second download speeds by 2016 – 12 December 2013 This was the Coalition’s policy they took to the election first announced 9 April 2013.

3. Breaks his promise to support Gonski – 25 November 2013 and 13 May 2014. Fails to commit to future funding or to require States to match the Commonwealth funding commitment. See paragraph two from Christopher Pyne on 29 August 2013

2. Fails to “stop the boats” – 23 September 2013. This promise was repeated so many times I can’t count. Here’s Abbott’s 2013 campaign launch speech.

1. Does not spend his first week as Prime Minister with an Aboriginal community – 14 September 2013. This promise was made in front of indigenous elders and participants at the Garma Festival on 10 August 2013, this is a live recording.

Read it all. Fascinating.

[Found by notafan]

Senator David Leyonhjelm comments at Catallaxy

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The following is a comment by Senator David Leyonhjelm at Catallaxy as part of the thread on Time for Last Drinks at the Wake.

DavidLeyonhjelm
#1829310, posted on October 18, 2015 at 4:05 pm (Edit)

Good post Sinc. I share your view on this.

The contest is now Turnbull versus Shorten. Most commenters here prefer Shorten, but that’s not what I hear elsewhere.

This was the tradeoff that had to be gauged, would more votes be won than lost by switching from Tony as PM to Malcolm. So far there is hardly anything in it, a switch of maybe one or two percentage points with the ABC and The Australian running as hard a pro-Turnbull campaign as it is possible to imagine. Come the election, or even before that, come an actual Turnbull decision that offends the left and we shall see what happens then. In the meantime, Malcolm is running to the left of Tony. This, therefore, is the program Malcolm has to achieve to improve on Abbott’s record, given Sinclair’s list:

– Repeal 18C
– Reduce marginal income tax rates
– Repeal the Renewable Energy Target and unwind Direct Action
– Dismantle the “opposition within”, the professional activists of the Human Rights Commission.
– Call a vote in the Parliament on SSM
– Make sound and sensible decisions on national defence and especially on procurement.

None are on the agenda. I will consider it a win if we merely just continue to stop the boats, but even there my hopes are not all that high.

But here is my question for you. At the last Presidential election in 2012, who did you support, Obama or Romney? If it was Obama, then I don’t care about a single thing you think about, not a single thing.

The lost continent of Europe

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When it finally happens, they are not going to know what hit them. We are possibly the stupidest generation in history, with our affluence making the wealth generating machinery of our societies look effortless but also apparently dulling our minds. The Europeans are about to find out how different reality is from appearance when everything is running well. How it works is entirely invisible. The article, written by a Swede, comes with the explicit title, Sweden Close to Collapse. These are the dot-points of the introduction but read the whole article which will scare you, or at least it should. If we have the wit to understand what is going on we can learn from their mistakes and not make the same ones ourselves. And while this is about Sweden in particular, it applies to the whole of Western Europe. There is no reason this could not be us because there are plenty here just as “imprudent” as the Swedes.

. If the wave of migrants keeps coming, in 10-15 years, Swedes will be a minority in their own country. That there is, in fact, an exchange of populations going on, should be clear in any sober assessment.

. “The final consequence of… Sweden’s immigration policy is that the economy will collapse — because who is going to pay for it all?* And economic breakdowns, once they happen, always happen very fast.” — Lars Hedegaard.

. In the last two weeks, more than 1,000 “unaccompanied refugee children” have arrived from Germany via ferry; more than half of them have now vanished and are listed as missing.

. For the last few weeks, the central train station in Sweden’s third largest city, Malmö, has been overrun with migrants; the volunteers that for the first few days showed up with food, water and clothes now seem to have lost interest.

. It will not be long until the Swedes realize that the state will not look after them. The country that just 20 years ago was considered one of the safest and most affluent in the world, is now in danger of becoming a failed state.

* This notion of “who will pay for it all” is part of the failure of economic theory and our superficial way of understanding the underlying economic reality in terms of money. Of money, there is never a shortage. Of food, housing, services there is only enough if the saving of the past has allowed us to lay down the right amounts to meet the requirements of the present. It’s not paying for it that matters, but having the goods and services in existence that are there to be bought. The shortages that the rush of migrants have caused are already becoming manifest and now the fight will begin in earnest.

Millennial attitudes to work – a satire I think

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Who are these Millennials?

Millennials (also known as the Millennial Generation or Generation Y) are the demographic cohort following Generation X. There are no precise dates when the generation starts and ends; most researchers and commentators use birth years ranging from the early 1980s to the early 2000s.

As for the video, I know this is the reputation but one that I have no personal experience of.

Hunting conservatives down

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With Libertarians having defected to the Obama side of politics, there are only we few conservatives left to stand up for the traditional values of the West. It has been clear for a while that it is only in the development of technology that America is a world leader, and it anyway all gets stolen by its enemies as fast as it gets invented. As for social values, the United States has had nothing to offer the rest of us since the 1990s. What we see is the transformation of the specific Judeo-Christian values that made Western civilisation free, prosperous and ascendant into the enemy. They may only be comics, but their storylines no doubt mirror the values of the people who read them. They will yet make it illegal to deny global warming, and who knows what after that.

AND CONTINUING: This is Judge Nepolitano from Reason Mag in October 2012 – the centre of libertarian thought if such a thing can exist – who could not choose between Obama and Romney. The article is The Failures of Obama and Romney. This is how a libertarian looked at the last presidential election:

President Obama is a failure as a president, and Gov. Romney is a failure as a candidate.

When he took office, Obama told the press that if he couldn’t cure the economic mess he inherited from President George W. Bush in four years, he wouldn’t deserve a second term. I guess he didn’t anticipate making the mess worse.

When he took office, the federal government owed $11 trillion to its creditors; today it owes $16 trillion. When he took office, gasoline was running about $1.85 a gallon and today costs about $3.85 a gallon. This is price inflation that he directly caused by flooding the markets with cash, and that directly harms the middle class and the poor. Unemployment has remained north of 8 percent throughout his presidency for those still looking for a job, and about 16 percent if you count all able-bodied out-of-work adults, half of whom have stopped looking for work on his watch.

He supported radical fanatics in their takeovers of the governments of Libya and Egypt, even going so far as to help them kill Col. Gadhafi, the former Libyan strongman who was once our ally. In the process, they opened jails in Libya, and out came some of the same folks the U.S. government has been fighting against in the Middle East since 2001. Obama pushed from power Hosni Mubarak, the strongman in Cairo, and he was replaced by the head of a criminal organization that Obama’s own State Department has prohibited Americans from engaging with. (Query: If the government derives its powers from the consent of the governed, how can the government help a foreign group and at the same time prohibit Americans from doing the same?)

In his lust to build a new world order in the Middle East, a goal for which he roundly criticized President George W. Bush, Obama has unilaterally, unconstitutionally and unlawfully killed Americans there. He killed Osama bin Laden when he could have captured him, and he let a mob kill our ambassador to Libya when he could have protected him — all to justify a value-free foreign policy that has no lasting friends or enemies, just fleeting interests. And he has killed thousands in foreign lands in secret, using drones that will soon find their way here and come back to haunt him.

Perhaps the next month will prove me wrong on Romney, but so far he is putting the electorate to sleep. I believe him when he claims to favor free market approaches to the nation’s economic ills, but I don’t believe him when he rails against big government and central economic planning, because his record belies his words. He is, of course, the father of the individual mandate — a totalitarian giant leap forward for the welfare state. And he has stated that if elected and re-elected, he will borrow money every year he is in office until the last.

When he was interviewed with the president on “60 Minutes” last week, I purposely did not watch or listen to the show. The next morning, I read the transcript of the interview and thought many of Romney’s answers were articulate and rational. Then I watched the same interview on tape and was bored nearly to death. Romney cannot put a fire in people’s bellies. The only reason he gives for voting for him is that he is not Obama — a reason that appeals to just under half the country, but is not enough to seal the deal. He needs to recognize that his audience for victory is not his former neighbors in Boston, but Joe Sixpack in the heartland.

He supports all of Obama’s killings in the Middle East, but claims he wants to control events there with a more muscular foreign policy. He cannot justify that view, along with the fact that it has failed and put us close to bankruptcy, to an electorate weary of wars. He rips into Obama’s borrowing, but overlooks his running mate’s voting record in Congress, which authorized all of it. At first he vowed to repeal Obamacare saying it is unconstitutional, and then he said he wants to keep the parts he likes, even if they are unconstitutional.

Can anyone get excited about Romney? Aside from a capitalistic attitude about the economy — as opposed to the president’s love of central economic planning — does anyone know what views he will embrace on Inauguration Day? Do you know anyone just aching to vote for him, the way conservatives were for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and progressives were for Obama in 2008? I do not know of such a person.

What do we do? The president’s failures are legion and have made all of us the worse for them. Gov. Romney’s failures are obvious and will give us four more years of Obama. Who says the system is not fixed?

If it was not blindingly obvious that Romney was oceans better than Obama their political judgement is empty and warped. Four years later, it would be interesting if they might just perhaps you know maybe think they might just possibly have been wrong.

Spare me your ignorant lessons in political calculation

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Do we really need such sanctimonious lessons in political calculation from the very leaders of the anti-Abbott Australian? To start we have Chris Kenny with Tony Abbott loyalists need to accept Malcolm Turnbull. But really, how do you beat this for destroying your own argument:

In Abbott’s favour were strong policy settings (border protection, climate change and attempted budget repair), the escalating issue of union power and corruption being teased out in the royal commission he established, and how all this had rendered Bill Shorten nigh-on unelectable.

So what’s Turnbull got that beats all of that, specially since Turnbull would not have achieved a single one of these, not one. As for “time to move on”, I will move on when Turnbull shows me he’s not everything I now assume he is. Then there’s this from Paul Kelly across the front page of the Inquirer section: The dilemma of conservatism. Other than wanting stability, honesty, personal responsibility, a free market economy and the government out of our lives – you know, those conservative values – what exactly do others add to the mix that I am missing. Here’s Kelly:

Turnbull does not say this but his mission is to modernise the Liberal Party. He is a social progressive who champions same-sex marriage, serious action on climate change, a multicultural ­society, a repudiation of monarchical trappings and an economy, entrepreneurial and innovative, geared to aspiration.

What an empty set of junk-filled cliched nonsense. If this is what Kelly and Turnbull think of as the issues of our time, they are so out of their tree that it is hard to fathom exactly how their rose-tinted glasses may be removed. These are people living in a bubble while just over the hill the entire Western world is under siege.

And then The Oz goes after David Flint because they think of him as part of the elites of our society. From Cut & Paste:

If words have meaning, Professor David Flint AM would be regarded as the member of an “elite”. Educated in Sydney, London and Paris, he became a tenured professor in law. In 1997, the Howard government appointed Flint chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Authority, one of the most influential positions in Australian public life. According to Who’s Who in Australia 2003, he is a member of Sydney’s Union Club. Yet Flint reckons he is not part of any elite, and he has just written a book, The Twilight of the Elites (Freedom Publishing), to prove his point. Following the American commentator Christopher Lasch, Flint maintains that “elite opinion is the opinion typical of the upper-middle-class liberal — that is, liberal in the American sense”. In short, elite opinion “tends to be left-wing on social and cultural issues”. How convenient, especially for a commentator who claims to disapprove of labelling.

Not even close. The elites of any society are a swarm of types like Malcolm who are the insiders, the kinds of people I think of as the Progressive Internationalists. People like David Flint often rise but they are never accepted. Richard Nixon would be your prime example, always an outsider to your Malcolm Turnbull types, in just the same way that Tony Abbott was. It is people like Turnbull, Kenny and Kelly who find, eventually, that they have to bring in some outsider to do their work for them. But as tone deaf to modern reality it is hard to imagine these people being more so than they are. In the meantime, we shall see if Turnbull and Morrison can do any better than Abbott and Hockey. Maybe they can, but they haven’t yet. And to say that whatever else, Malcolm will be better than Bill Shorten is only to admit that there was no argument at all in favour of the switch, since this argument works even better on behalf of Tony.

Stone Age primitives

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fire at josephs tomb

Another day in the Middle East.

PALESTINIANS TORCH JEWISH SHRINE AMID ‘REVOLUTION’ CALLS…
Terrorist Disguised as Journalist Stabs IDF Soldier…
MEDIA FEARS: ‘Open season on reporters’…

Why shouldn’t they burn to the ground ancient historic sites in Israel when they do it in their own countries as well? They are stone age primitives with iPhones living in our midst. But you know what. This is strangely a sign of some kind of understanding between the two sides. It’s not much, but the Palestinian leader, Mahmud Abbas, said this:

“Illegal” arson “offends our culture and our religion and our morals.” He said a committee would investigate and the damage would be repaired.

On the other hand, he has not criticised randomly stabbing old ladies in the street so there other kinds of things that do not necessarily offend his culture, religion or morals.

Meanwhile in Western Europe. At a community Information Evening about Refugee Camp in a small District of City Kassel, population 4000. This is ONE Day before 800 immigrant will arrive. A German Politican, Walter Lübcke, is shown speaking to the gathered citizenry:

Here’s the translation:

@(:31) “it´s so great that this country (GERMANY) has values and these values make it really worth it to live in our country (for the refugees)” He continues, “We need to stand up for these basic values and anyone who decides not to STAND UP FOR THESE VALUES has the right to leave the country/state if they are not in agreement. It is the freedom of every German….(Audience boos….Audience member, “I can´t believe it – piss off/get outta here!)

Mr. Lübcke trys to continue, “We have freedom, we have a democratic system, the majority” – but is then drowned out in the general uproar. Audience member, “What democracy!?”

There is no making sense of this in terms of straightforward electoral politics. On whose behalf is this all happening and for what reason? Who in Europe wants this change and why do they want it? This is unprecedented in history, that a sovereign people have been sold down the river by its leaders.