The Iranian theocracy killed at least 50 children during a few weeks of Fall 2022. Nearly three centuries ago, one could play “Le Fanaticisme Ou Mahomet Le Prophete, Tragedie par Voltaire”. Both facts, killing children for religious reasons, and censoring critique of religion, are related; I didn’t invent the argument, it is found explicitly in Voltaire complaining, for example, about children burned alive by Catholic authorities just because those children were born Jewish.
NYT refuses to print possible deepest explanations of why children are been killed in Iran, and censors even milder observations which Voltaire made, three centuries ago:
The New York Times, famous for (mostly) NOT talking about the Holocaust of the Jews during WWII (and now claiming to be “haunted” by how badly, that is, pro-Nazi, the NYT behaved then), censored all my comments on why the theocratic regimes in Iran kills children. The NYT’s basic position is that believing that the interpretation of Islam in power in Iran is to blame should be censored. Instead it nebulously criticizes the “regime” in power. It does not dawn on the NYT, that this “regime” is called Shia Islam. The regime is Islam. The regime is not secular law, the roots of which are at least 27 centuries old (Rome) or even a thousand years older than that (Babylon).
This way, the NYT can present as an outrage the fact children are being killed, while making sure children keep getting killed.
Please find below a collage of various comments I sent to the NYT. All my comments which could be seen as crticial of Islam were censored. Remarkably, of hundreds of comments critical of the killing of children in Iran, not one was critical of Islam. So no mentally debilitating system of thought affecting the Middle East was injured by the NYT.
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NOT to criticize Islam is racist, and malevolent:
The concept of “secular” comes from “seculum”, a period of 120 years. Secularism is the religion of living in one’s own time, with relevant technology and problems. Being tied up again (re-ligare) by what makes sense today.
The attitude of making the critique of Islam into a death sentence is in the Quran, all over the Quran. The penalty is death and eternal torture.
Allah says: “They who disbelieve and deny Our revelations, such are rightful owners of Hell. –(Quran, S 5; v.11; then Allah repeats that same message again and again and again, throughout His Quran, varying a word here or there; for example: “But those who disbelieve and deny Our revelations, they are owners of hell-fire.” (S.5; v.86)).
Accordingly, the QURANIC “REVELATION” KEPT REASON IN BONDAGE. At that point weaklings who hate civilization always whine that I should talk about Christianism and its horrors. Right:
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Europe Was Built With And Against Catholicism:
Much of what came to be know as Christianism, was from a humanitarian movement lauched centuries before Christianism. There were social services in Rome, and alms to the poor on massive government level. Christianism adopted those as if it had invented them, but it didn’t.
What was uniquely Christian was the terror launched by Theodosius I, Roman emperor and theocratic tyrant, around 380 CE, calling “heretics” all those he wanted to attack and destroy. Thus, of course, Christianism, known at the time as “Universal Common Opinion” (“Orthodox Catholicism” in Greek) was accused. As deserved. Eugenius, a school principal, supported by the Senate of the city of Rome, allied to the Frank Arbogast, Commander in Chief of the (Western) Roman army tried to stop Theodosius (and his Goths!) Eugenius and Arbogast died from it. And the Western empire collapsed.
However, a century later, Clovis, elected King of the Franks and Roman Imperator (in the technical sense) and Consul, adopted a more subtle approach. Clovis forced Catholicism into a more civilized form by… adopting it (and educating it, to the impotent rage of some Popes).
That more civilized form of Catholiscism, open to Judaism and even Islam, lasted five centuries, until 1026 CE exactly, when heretic burning was relaunched… Then Christianism was resisted tooth and nail, by a whole panoply of European thinkers such as Abelard (12C). That resistance took many forms, including creating religiously independent universities… The Fourteenth Century’s most important thinker, Buridan, who discovered most of Newton’s laws, refused to get a religious degree, and still rose to the top of the top university, and advised four kings (also slept with a queen, at least, so it was said at the time…) This is indicative of how little respect the church was getting. In the fifteenth century, not content with putting senior churchmen in cages, king Louis XI of France would send the army to protect Protestants against Catholics (yes, that was before Luther was born). A testimony to tolerance: imagine an Islamist chieftain sending armies to protect unbelievers…
The anti-Christian movement was immensely powerful in Europe. As Nietsche pointed out, Christianism, a perfect slave religion, was used mostly as a way to keep the peasants in place, and many among the peasants knew it, so they revolted, and were exterminated (10C). A steady state of repression was thereafter imposed with steady state reverence for Christianism, an exact parallel, for the present day oil and gas plutocracy all over the world. To get into the real mood of the oppressed in the Middle Ages, one just has to read the 150 remaining Fabliaux, where lecherous priests, the basest individuals imaginable, preaching religion while doing the opposite, are ridiculized while being tortured to death, as justly deserved. The earliest fabliaux are from 1150 CE. In an early one, the priest who slept with the wife pretends to be Jesus, striking the sanctimonious pose of the martyr on the cross, so the husband nails him, before slicing off his endowment…
Europe became Europe, because superstitious religion was kept under foot, and under secular law, once the Franks had got rid of the Roman Catholic state (which they were supposed to defend, and ended up defending against…).
Tellingly, the word “Europe ” in the modern sense, was introduced by the Franks, during the invasion of Europe by the Muslims in the early Eighth Century. The armies resisting the Muslim invaders were called “European” by Eighth century Franks (Franks were squabbling among themselves… to put it midly… but recognized they shared common values that Muslim invaders were deprived of. Later, under Charlemagne, though, accomodations were found with Muslim rulers of Spain, as those had veered towards civilization too…)
Calling Europe “Christian” in the early Middle Ages was a joke and a (serious) coverup of what was really going on (for the real lion mentality ruled de facto, as Friedrich Nietzsche insisted correctly). European civilization, even around 700 CE, was highly diverse, and there was no attempt to impose a monolithic way of thinking (except in parts the Franks were actively conquering). Islam was the exact opposite:
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Islam wants to be superstition, religion, revelation, civilization, system of government, law and justice:
All the Muslim philosophers who suggested to put reason first fell under Islamic terror. The Islamic dictators kept a wide berth from any overly critical Greek philosophy. Even Plato and Socrates were too much for them. Aristotle was better, since he was a collaborator of tyrants, thus Aristotlian writings survived well under Islam.
The most famous Muslim philosopher, “Averroes”was stoned to death in 1198 CE, by a mob of Muslims in Morocco because Muslim scripture says to kill people who may think differently on esoteric subjects. This leads straight to killing children in the streets of Tehran in 2022.
The third successor of Mahomet was killed in a coup against the Qur’an he had dictated, because of this Quran he had dictated, boiling all the alternative Qurans, and that Uthman Quran is the Quran we have now, and we are supposed to respect as if it were god itself. But in 650s, the closest companions and relatives of mahomet fought against it. To death. In huge battles, such as the Battle of the Camel, led against the Quran we have now, by Muhammad’s most loved and devoted third wife, the young Aisha. In truth, this Quran is much too much Uthman’s elucubrations. Muhammad was more broad minded. After all, in the Quran, Allah admits: religions are “mere fables of old men“.
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Fighting for Iranian Freedom is fighting against Islam:
Good luck to Iranian youth, it will need it, because tyrannies are often successful when they cling to power, not hesitating to kill children.
The region under the spell of Islam was, for millennia, the world’s wealthiest, and much civilization originated there. Time and time again, tyrannical regimes have used Islam as a cover for oppression. This didn’t happen in the West because of the separation of church and state which, although often wobbly, mostly perdured.
Muslim tyrannies have ruined the Middle East. Only secularism will save them. The rise of the West was in part caused by more distance between religion and critical thinking, in particular, humanism and science.
Iran has a very old civilization. Iranian calendar is seven millennia old… By contrast, the imposition of Islam by invaders is only 13 centuries old. It is high time that Iran frees itself from what the Quran itself called “mere fables for old men”.
This is the beauty and wealth of the Quran: just as reality itself, it contradicts itself. The reason is simple: Uthman, the third successor of Mahomet, had a commission to write the Quran he liked, but he couldn’t erase outright preliminary versions of the Quran: so some of the spirit of these earlier versions survive, here and there. Certainly Mahommet comes out as a more sympathetic, more feminist and more progressive human than any of his successors…
The Shah’s regime was criminal, kleptocratic and ridiculous. (My own dad, a geologist, met with the Shah, with the aime of finding oil for Iran, which was done; thus I lived in Iran a bit, climbing Damavand, among other things.) However the Shah was overthrown by Khomeiny and Al. after Khomeiny flew from France. Khomeini had been weaponized by the CIA in 1953 to throw out the democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh. All this to bolster my thesis that:
Muslim Fundamentalism is fundamentally an aspect of the manipulation of Western plutocracy.
Actually, by destroying oil production in Iraq and Iran, Western machinations made sure that fracking for oil and gas would be highly productive… Similarly, pseudo-ecologists were encouraged to attack nuclear energy and hydrogen, and promote unwieldy batteries so that fossil fuels would stay the prime energy providers.
Right now the game has become more dangerous: similarly to what happened in the 1930s, the fascist regimes once encouraged by the West have started to coalesce. Because yes, it is encouraging fascism to pretend that Islam as found in the Quran of Uthman is something to be respected.
More than 15 centuries ago, Clovis famously quipped that, had he been there with his Franks, Jesus would not have been crucified. But the whole point of Christianism is that God had been crucified by humanity. And Clovis knew this. So the point Clovis was making, at the point of his sword, is that Christianism should be missing its main point: the terror of a God so sadistic, he self-crucify.
In the Quran, God (“Allah”) is asked why it is that he needs demons, satan and genies, if he is that powerful? Allah haughtily replies that the answer is too complicated for humans to understand. Humans as He likes to have them. Indeed, the answer is that God needs to keep on killing children, pour encourager les autres…
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Why would the NYT be an accomplice of child murderers by censoring comments explaining why the children are being murdered?(In some articles I sent comments absolutely avoiding Islam: they were published, while, about the same article, those pointing, even very technically, at Islam were systematically censored; that degree of subtlety in censorship, in 2022 is from humans, not yet machines… And the NYT has indeed an entire human censorship bureau… It reminds me of rooms full of hordes of Facebook censors, who tried to ban me several times for facts of Nazism, not flattering to Nazism, which I had related…)
Obviously because the powers that be beyond the NYT considers that it is better to leave malevolent aspects of Islam unexplained… So that this malevolence can perdure.
Thus, while the NYT has to admit children are killed by the Iranian theocracy, the NYT pretends that this has nothing to do with the versions of Islam which are dominant today… and are explicitly revered by those who identify just DESCRIBING these versions of Islam with… “Islamophobia” also known as “racism”.
Whereas the racism is of course from those who advocate the sanctity of Islam, as the NYT does, and, therefore, the sanctity of Mullahs, and other criminals exploiting theocracy.
This is, in part, a case of the NYT being affected with Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. MSP is a mental illness and a form of child abuse. The caretaker of a child, most often a mother, either makes up fake symptoms or causes real symptoms to make it look like the child is sick.
Western plutocracy, especially its fossil fuel branch, has found Fundamentalist Islam highly useful. So it is keen not to criticize Islam. That in turn creates various diseases, and then the main stream media, including the New York Times, pretends to be concerned with what they secretly set-up, namely reverence for Middle Ages’ theocracy… The very sort of oppression against which European civilization fought for 15 centuries!
Patrice Ayme
Some of the Children killed by Muslim theocrats in Iran (picture from the Islamophile New York Times):
