Islam versus Europe

You can't walk down the street without bumping into an Islamic theologian these days. They're everywhere. Last week it was the Charlie Hebdo staff, standing in front of their burned offices, telling us there was no Koranic law against laughter, they had nothing against Islam and that they had been "inspired by solidarity with kindred souls, the Facebook-Twitter generation whose Arab Springtime struggle for democracy is now jeopardized by Islamists determined to replace the dictatorship of strongmen with the tyranny of shari’a law". Implicitly these Facebook-Twitter generations were the "true Muslims", the majority, betrayed by the aberrant, minority "Islamists" who somehow managed to get more than 40% of the vote in the Tunisian election.

We see similar thinking in the absurd threat to "destroy the Muslim Brotherhood" recently issued by the hacker group Anonymous.

This is not a threat towards the religion of Islam. The Muslim Brotherhood, as well as terrorist organisations affiliating with the religion, defile and destroy the very essence of what the religion preaches. Therefore the Muslim Brotherhood does not represent the true ideas of Islam.

How bizarre is it that every Tom, Dick or Harry now fancies himself an expert on Islamic theology? Are we really expected to believe that all of these people have pored deeply over the ancient Islamic texts and more than 1000 years of Islamic jurisprudence and commentary and concluded that true Islam is "good" and "peaceful"?

Think about how strange it would be if teenage hackers and comic artists saw fit to pronounce on the true nature of Shinto or the true nature of Buddhism, telling Shinto-worshippers or Buddhists that they weren't doing it right. That would strike us as gobsmackingly bizarre. But when people say similar things about Islam, no one seems to think it odd.

Rather than attempting to add Islamic theology to their list of specialties, these Anonymous jokers would be better off concentrating on their "core competencies". As Russia Today reports here, the last few hacks they've promised haven't actually materialised.

And lets not forget that a few days ago the Turkish hacker group Akincilar boasted about having attacked Anonymous. Has Anonymous been able to retaliate? They can't even handle another hacker group yet they're going to take down the Muslim Brotherhood?

A DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack (which they're threatening to unleash against the Brotherhood) is also the least impressive kind of website attack. It consists of simply bombarding a website with access requests (just as if someone was visiting it in a web browser) so quickly that it can't possibly handle them all. Akincilar's hacks, which involve breaking into websites and changing their content, are technically much more impressive.