“Creativity, Progress, Political Correctness, Different Ways of Thinking About Progress, and the Goals of Conservative Muslims Reflected in the Paris Massacres on November 13, 2015” – by Gary S. Smolker

What Are the Truths About the Paris Massacre Last Week?

According to one of my friends, conservative Muslims are called strict Islamists by people who are either too afraid to call them what they are or too ignorant to know what conservative Muslims believe.

According to him, Conservative Muslims believe men and women should be separated, women should not perform in public, nor should women wear the kind of clothes the “Good Lovelies” wore during their performances at the concert I attended on November 14, 2015.

They believe women are inferior to men.

They strongly believe that women should not be independent.

Conservative Muslims do not believe in “affirmative action”, women’s rights, women liberation, etc. etc.

Conservative Muslims believe they are superior to all people who are not conservative Muslims.

They believe they are superior to all people who wholeheartedly follow their interpretation of Sharia Law.

Conservative Muslims also believe that the harsh penalties and punishments set forth in the Koran are reasonable and should be followed

According to that friend, the reason the so-called Muslim/ISIS terrorists randomly shot people in the audience at the concert hall in Paris, tried to bomb the soccer stadium and randomly shot couples in Paris who were out for the night is that they consider it is their duty to rid the earth of people like the people who were in those places at those times.

They have NO tolerance for people who don’t behave in a POLITICALLY CORRECT WAY; they have no tolerance for people who don’t strictly follow their interpretation of rules set follow in the Koran; they have no tolerance for people who have a different interpretation of what the Koran commands people to do then they do.

Look at recent movies which portray politically correct behavior under Sharia Law in rural communities in Muslim countries.

Recent Movies Which Portray Politically Correct Muslim Behavior

“Rock the Kasbah”

The recently released Bill Murray movie “Rock the Kasbah” is about a young unmarried young Muslim woman living with her family in a small village in Afghanistan.

In “Rock the Kasbah” Bill Murray is an entertainment talent manager.

While in Afghanistan promoting one of his clients, who is a singer, Bill Murray accidentally discovers this young woman.

She has a beautiful voice.

Thereafter, Bill Murray talks this young Muslim woman into entering and into singing on a nationally broadcast singing contest.

When her father and other people who live in her village learn that she has sung in a singing contest they “disown” her.

I saw this movie recently (in November, 2015) at a local theater in Sherman Oaks, California.

“He Named Me Malala”

“He Named Me Malala” is a documentary.

It is the true story of a young woman who at age 15 (Malala Yousafzai) was shot in the head by a Taliban assassin while riding home in a school bus in Pakistan’s Swat Valley.

The Taliban attempted to assassinate Malala because Malala was an outspoken champion of the idea that girls should be given an education.

The Taliban targeted Malala for assassination because Malala wanted to learn how to read and publicly said she wanted other girls to learn how to read.

The movie makes it clear that the Taliban, following strict conservative Muslim/Islamic law, is vehemently against women being taught to read.

Malala was targeted by Taliban militants for her outspokenness in support of girls’ education.

Malala has an astounding eloquence and boldness.

Even when Malala was eleven years old she was attracting the attention of international reporters because of her outspoken advocacy.

During the course of the movie, the film shows various village schools in the Swat Valley where girls are taught to read had been bombed, had been completely destroyed by the Taliban.

Malala and her father Ziauddin Yousafzai spoke after the showing of “He Named Me Malala” which I attended.

Malala told the people in attendance: When you tell your story it is a healing, it is a rehabilitation.

Malala and her father then thanked Academy Award winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim for making the documentary we had just watched. 

I saw the international premiere of this documentary in September at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.

“Parched”

This is an Indian film about the plight of women in rural villages in India.

Lena Yadav, the filmmaker, stated at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival that the story told in this movie is based on true events.

According to Yadav: 80% of the women in India don’t know what an orgasm is; they are sexual slaves.

The village elders and all the local men in the village where the story told in this movie takes place repeatedly tell each other: Don’t get an educated wife, they have books riding their minds.

The story in this movie revolves around the life of a young girl who is forced to marry a young boy she doesn’t want to marry.

Her young husband brutalizes her, steals from his mother, drinks excessively and is a lazy oaf.

Watching her son brutalize his child bride disgusts her.

She then begins to thirst for more than what life has given women in her village.

The men laze around and talk to each other while the women do all the work in the village..

As the story in the movie progresses, she questions the status quo in her village, the rules of conduct in her village which favors men, sends child brides to abusive husbands and ostracizes women for being educated and opinionated – and begins to have a series of lengthy conversations with female friends – outside the hearing of men in the village – about “how women should value themselves” and what stops them from doing so.

According to the film maker the life of women portrayed in this movie is the typical life of all women in rural Muslim and Hindu villages in the countryside and in strict religious communities in big cities in India.

I saw the world premier of this movie in September at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.

 

“Maintenant ils peuvent venir” (“Let Them Come”)

This French/Algerian movie is about the dark decade in Algeria in which strict Islamists tried to take over Algeria, and 200,000 died in the ensuing conflict.

It is set in Algeria in the late 1980s.

In one scene a Muslim man is told by his strict Islamist father-in-law that the marriage between he and his wife (his marriage to the daughter of the father-in-law) is not valid because he is not a strict Islamist.  He is an infidel because he is hot a strict Islamist.

The father-in-law has taken his daughter away; he has married her to a strict Islamist; and now lives with the second man.

That man already had a wife.

That man now has two wives.

His daughter is now that man’s second wife.

This film is a family chronicle which begins shortly before the man characters get married to each other in an arranged marriage, and follows that marriage and the man and woman who got married from that time forward.

I saw the world premier of this film in September at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.

Progress, Creativity, Political Correctness and Different Ways of Thinking

If we are going to solve the problems that are rampant on our planet, we need to have creative people with creative ideas.

Yet we continue to close down creative people, with invalidations that ever more imperiously impose from without, an institutional mentality that squashes [young] people in a way that forces them to give up the expression of their souls and, instead to worry about winning the approval of  authority figures, the approval of grown-ups, college administrators, the federal government, all sorts of protesters who don’t feel welcome in society and all sorts of other bosses and audiences.

This violation of self is insulting and injures who we are deep in our hearts.

In hopelessness and despair some people become tormented, depressed or suicidal.

In such a society everyone is forced to worry about what everyone else thinks about them, which is the route to vapid mediocrity.

Truly creative people think differently.

Seeing the Big Picture

“Free speech” is under attack in the United States: Forty percent of Millennials in the United States are okay with limiting free speech if it is racist.

“Freedom of Religious Choice” is under attack in the United States: The Mormon Church (the Church of the Later Day Saints) recently adopted a same-sex marriage policy barring children of married same-sex couples from being baptized [hence forth they will not be allowed to become members of the Church] until they are adults, until they are 18 years old.

In order to become members of the Church children of same sex couples are now required to leave their parents’ home and to disavow same-sex marriage and co-habitation.

At the street level, on my recent travels in different parts of the United States, I have read bumper stickers which state:

1. CHOICE.  What a beautiful right.
2. Democracy is not a spectator sport.
3. Freedom of religion means any religion.
4. Compassion is the radicalization of our time.
5. Don’t believe anything until it has been officially denied.
6. I will believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.
7. You don’t have to burn books to destroy culture.  Just get people to stop reading them.

Those bumper stickers are a sign of the way some (I don’t know how many) people are thinking in the United States.

Responding to Our Ever-Evolving World

The history of the human race is violent.

Only by striving to understand the behavior of people throughout history and in remote places can we hope to understand from where we have come and how much of the past lives unrecognized with us.

What is happening in the world today is culturally contextual, historically contextual, in our faces every day and very dramatic.

In a recent article by Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor, in Foreign Policy she states:

“The Paris attacks were not surprising.  Occasional terrorist attacks in the West are virtually inevitable; … we’ll see more attacks in coming decades, not fewer.  We need to stop viewing terrorism as shocking and aberrational, and instead recognize it as an ongoing problem that needs to be managed, rather than defeated.”

In a recent article by Charles Gave, written for a French paper in September, 2015,  Mr. Gave explains that nobody can understand the disaster that is unfolding if he knows nothing of history, past events that shaped the world today.

Mr. Gave explains:

For the past 50 years, money has flowed in a torrent from Saudi Arabia to the rest of the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and Europe to build Wahhabi mosques: “schools” where the only things taught – and only to boys – are the Koran and religious extremism.

The goal of this project is to “purify” the Middle East and eventually the rest of the world to an “original” form of Islam.

According to Mr. Gave:

• First: The West must clearly identify the enemy which is not the Muslim religion,but the Wahhabi sect.  And it must immediately break off relationships with the states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which are exporting this virulent form of extremism.
• Second: We will have to stop accepting political donations from these countries to finance our electoral campaigns.
• Third: We will have to stop selling those countries warplanes, helicopters, missiles, radars, tanks and other weaponry.  One does not prosper by selling weapons to one’s enemies.  As Lenin said:“The capitalists will sell us rope with which we will hang them.”

There Is No Such Thing As Zero Risk

How are you going to change what you are doing now?

How are you going to change what you will be doing in the future?

Consider the impact of the confluence of highly impactful forces in the news every day (geopolitical, sociopolitical, economic, cultural, historical, local political, local social, global financial forces, local financial forces).

Many political “experts” will tell you that U.S. foreign policy is responsible for the rise of ISIS, and for the rise of terrorist attacks:

• There were no terrorists threats against U.S. citizens from the Middle East when Saddam Hussain was running Iraq  and when Omar Qaddafi was running Libya.
• The consequence of the United States destabilizing countries in the Middle East has been the reign of terrorist terror we are now experiencing.

Other political “experts” will tell you that the current surge of terrorist attacks is the result of Saudi Arabia and Qatar funding fundamental extremist Muslim clergy and funding their schools which teach boys the Koran and extremism.

Consider the impact of all of the above forces on you personally, including the impact of such forces (a) on your current investment strategies, (b) on your current investments, (c) on your current travel plans,(d) on your current career plans, (e) on your current retirement plans, and (e) on all your other current strategies and goals.

For further input on all of the above topics see the post titled “We Need to Rethink What Security Means” posted on the Gary S. Smolker Idea Exchange Blog on November 30, 2015 at http://www.garysmolker.wordpress.com.

Good luck.

 

Copyright © Gary S. Smolker, All Rights Reserved