Maldives Muslims Smash Buddhist Statues

They're at it again

Islamized Buddhist Statue at Bamiyan

Buddhist heritage eradicated

From AFP

Trouble in paradise: Maldives and Islamic extremism

By Amal Jayasinghe (AFP) – 10 hours ago 

MALE — At the Maldives' National Museum, smashed Buddhist statues are testament to the rise of Islamic extremism and Taliban-style intolerance in a country famous as a laid-back holiday destination.
On Tuesday, as protesters backed by mutinous police toppled president Mohamed Nasheed, a handful of men stormed the Chinese-built museum and destroyed its display of priceless artefacts from the nation's pre-Islamic era.

"They have effectively erased all evidence of our Buddhist past," a senior museum official told AFP at the now shuttered building in the capital Male, asking not to be named out of fear for his own safety.
"We lost all our 12th century statues. They were made of coral stone and limestone. They are very brittle and there is no way we can restore them," he explained.

"I wept when I heard that the entire display had gone. We are good Muslims and we treated these statues only as part of our heritage. It is not against Islam to display these exhibits," he said.

Five people have since been arrested after they returned the following day to smash the CCTV cameras, he said. The authorities have banned photography of the damage, conscious that vandalism of this kind which echoes the 2001 destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan by the Taliban is damaging for the nation's image. The gates of the two-storeyed grey building, which opened in 2010, are padlocked and an unarmed guard keeps watch.

The Maldives, a collection of more than 1,100 coral-fringed islands surrounded by turquoise seas, is known as a "paradise" holiday destination that draws hundreds of thousands of travellers and honeymooners each year. Visitors' contact with the local population is deliberately kept at bay, however, with most foreigners simply transferring from the main international airport directly to their five-star resorts on outlying islands.
Few have any idea they are visiting a country of 330,000 Muslims with no religious freedom, where women can be flogged for extramarital sex and consuming alcohol is illegal for locals. Islam is the official religion of the Maldives and open practice of any other religion is forbidden and liable to prosecution.

The religious origins of the Maldivian people are not clearly established, but it is believed that a Buddhist king converted to Islam in the 12th century. Thereafter, the country practised a mostly liberal form of the religion, but more fundamentalist interpretations have spread with the arrival of money and ultra-conservative Salafist preachers from the Middle East. In 2007, following a bombing that wounded a dozen foreign tourists, the former president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom banned head-to-toe coverings for women as a sign of his intent to battle conservative Islamic thinking.

At the museum, another official said that fundamentalists had threatened to attack the museum on previous occasions unless it withdrew the Buddhist display.

The country's ultra-conservative Islamic group, the Adhaalath Party, condemned the attack, but said they remained opposed to Nasheed's decision to accept three monuments from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
"Our constitution does not allow idols and that is why we objected to the monuments," General Secretary Mohamed Muizzu said, referring to the gifts to mark a South Asian summit held in November in the Maldives.

The monuments, which included one of pillar featuring Buddhist motifs, and which had been on display in the southernmost island of Addu, have all since been vandalised...   More 

Islamic Symbols - Swords and Koran

Coercion, intimidation, thuggery and outright terrorism are intrinsic and essential features of Islam.

Islam is so intellectually moribund and ethically repulsive that it cannot compete for followers in a free marketplace of ideas, but must eliminate its critics and competitors by whatever means may be necessary.

Even 1000 year old Buddha statues are a threat to Islam.

With the massive growth of extremist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, we can only expect Jihadists attacks on Buddhism and Buddhists to increase, as this recent article from Point de Bascule makes clear

The Muslim Brotherhood and Buddhism

Écrit par Point de Bascule on 08 Septembre 2011. Posted in Articles par Point de Bascule

On September 7, 2011, the Dalai Lama, Tariq Ramadan and other personalities took part to the Second Global Conference on World's Religions after 9/11. It was organized in Montreal with the active cooperation of McGill University and the Université de Montréal.

During the conference a project of Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the World's Religions was discussed. The article 12.4 of the Declaration claims that “Everyone has the right not to have one’s religion denigrated in the media or the academia.”

This push for censorship is part of a wider campaign led by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation representing 56 Muslim-majority countries to silence those who criticize Islam.

While this is happening, several Muslim scholars including many endorsed by Tariq Ramadan and the Muslim Brotherhood describe non-Muslim doctrines in a very denigrating way. We do not suggest that these authors should be censored or banned. We bring up this contradiction to highlight the fact that radical Islamists want it both ways.

Syed Maududi and other renowned Muslim scholars have written that kafirs (derogatory word for non-Muslims) will go to hell. They have claimed that Christianity is a distorted religion. In an Islamic Studies course set up by two Muslim Brotherhood operatives for the Edmonton Public School Board, Yusuf Ali’s Qur’an is being used as a reference book. In this book, Jews are described as “apes and swine” (p. 1742). More examples of anti-Jewish stances found in the book are listed in a FrontPage article that was published after the Los Angeles school board decided to pull all its copies of Yusuf Ali’s Qur’an from the shelves of its libraries.

The depiction of Buddhism in Muslim Brotherhood-endorsed books destined to Muslim audiences is no more positive than that of Christianity and Judaism. In fact, it is worse. Harun Yahya’s book Islam and Buddhism is a good example to illustrate where the Muslim Brotherhood and Tariq Ramadan’s “understanding of Islam” leads.

Harun Yahya is a prolific author promoted by various organizations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Yahya is a Turkish national born in 1956 whose real name is Adnan Oktar.

Harun Yahya is a frequent contributor to OnIslam, a Muslim Brotherhood news portal closely associated with Youssef Qaradawi. In September 2010, Yahya was identified as a regular OnIslam staff. (GMBDR about OnIslam)

The semi-private library operated by the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at Concordia University in Montreal has 44 books (28 different titles) written by Harun Yahya. The MSA is one of the oldest Muslim Brotherhood organizations in North America. The MSA’s library at Concordia contains books that are endorsed by the Muslim Brotherhood. It has no formal link with the University’s own libraries (catalogue, etc.) but it is operated in Concordia University premises and funded by the Council of Student Life.

Another MSA chapter at Memorial University (St John’s, Newfoundland) promotes Harun Yahya’s books and movies at their regular booth on campus premises. (Video)

Muzammil Siddiqi, an important leader of the Muslim Brotherhood operating in the United States has specifically praised one of Harun Yahya’s books. (Letter)

Harun Yahya’s books are sold at conventions organized by Muslim Brotherhood organizations. (p. 8 – ISNA Booth 1002)

Point 4.18 of a 1991 Muslim Brotherhood internal memorandum stresses the importance of “role distribution” among the organization’s activists in order to achieve success. While Tariq Ramadan is trying to take advantage of the Dalai Lama’s reputation to legitimize censoring the critics of the Muslim Brotherhood, Harun Yahya is busy telling Brotherhood’s supporters what they should really think about Buddhism.

In 2004, Harun Yahya and his colleague Tariq Ramadan were the main speakers at a conference that Ramadan describes as the “largest Islamic event in Australia” on his website.

Harun Yahya claims that Buddhists are guilty of “association” and that their accomplishments are “destined for destruction”

In his book Islam and Buddhism, Harun Yahya concludes that Buddhists’ accomplishments are purposeless and that they are “destined for destruction” because their understanding of God and religion is incompatible with Islam. Harun Yahya accuses Buddhists of “associating” false gods with the real one:

To deny the supremacy of God and worship the idols of an ordinary person, as the Buddhists do, is described in the Qur'an as to "associate something with God." In hundreds of places in the Qur'an, God reminds us that this "association" is a very serious sin. For example: “(Qur'an, 4:48) God does not forgive anything being associated with Him, but He forgives whoever He wills for anything other than that. Anyone who associates something with God has committed a terrible crime.

(...) To bow before these invented gods is a terrible crime against God. As stated in the Qur'an (4: 48), God may forgive those who commit every other sin and error, but never one who associates His creatures with Him. (Islam and Buddhism – Chapter 1)

Historically, this so-called crime of “association” has been the pretext invoked by Muslim scholars to justify the destruction and the eradication of the Buddhist civilization from India, Afghanistan and many other parts of Asia.

Ibn Khaldun (1332 - 1406) is one of many scholars endorsed by Tariq Ramadan. In his classic Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun explains why resorting to coercion and violence against Buddhists and non-Muslims in general is justified:

In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the (Muslim) mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.  ...continued

 ---

See   No future for Buddhism in an Islamized World

Jihad against Buddhism

A chilling article from American Thinker. 

 Is The Fate of the Infidels Tied to the Buddhas?
By Janet Levy

One of the ancient Buddhas destroyed as 'idols'

"No fanfare and little notice marked the 10th anniversary earlier this year of the destruction of the 1,500-year-old Bamiyan Buddhas.  These 6th-century stately statues carved into sandstone cliffs in central Afghanistan included one of the tallest standing Buddhas in the world.  On March 12, 2001, the 180- and 121-foot Buddhas crumpled under dynamite set off by the Taliban -- the Islamist militia group ruling Afghanistan from 1996 through late 2001.  Mullah Omar, the leader of the Al Qaeda-supported movement, deemed the statutes idolatrous graven images insulting to Islam and ordered their destruction.  Other Buddhist images, including statues and relief carvings as well as ancient Sikh gurdwaras and Hindu temples, were also destroyed by the Islamic terrorists belonging to the Taliban Movement.

This kind of cultural destruction has been part and parcel of Islam since its inception.  According to Dr. Bill Warner, founder of the Center for the Study of Political Islam, "Political Islam has annihilated every culture it has invaded or immigrated to by destroying the host culture."

Dr. Warner cites the extinction of a once-Christian Middle East, Turkey, and North Africa, and a Zoroastrian Persia, as a result of Islamic jihad.  He also includes the decimation of Hindus and Buddhists as well.  All told, he totals more than 270 million "nonbelievers," including Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Africans, and Jews, who have died in Islamic massacres since the birth of Islam 1400 years ago.

Prior to the Islamic conquests, which began in the 7th century, Afghanistan was primarily Hindu with significant minorities of Buddhists and Jains...

...By the 11th century, the region that includes modern-day Afghanistan had been Islamized and the remaining Hindus and Buddhists were stripped of their legal and social rights and relegated to dhimmi status.  This meant they were required to exist under shariah or Islamic doctrine and forced to pay the jizya, a tax payable to Muslims to guarantee protection against forced conversion or death.

When the Taliban came to power in 1996, Hindu and Buddhist minorities were forced to identify themselves by wearing yellow badges and the women were required to wear burkas.  The destruction of the Buddhas was yet another attempt to demoralize and humiliate Hindus and Buddhists and destroy their culture...

Read it all here


Understanding Sharia and Jihadist attitudes towards Buddhists
To put this cultural destruction in context, we need to remember that Jihadism, by its very nature, is obsessed with hatred against non-believers and their culture.

Sharia law states that  non-believers must either be converted, or enslaved and humiliated as second-class citizens (dhimmis), or exterminated.


Christians and Jews are the only people eligible for dhimmi status, being allowed to live under Sharia laws provided they pay the extortionate jizya 'protection' money and suffer institutionalised humiliation uncomplainingly.  However they may not build new places of worship nor repair existing ones. 

Jews and Christians are classed as 'people of the book', and supremacist propagandists use this phrase to claim that Sharia treats them favorably by allowing them to live.

Buddhists are often given no such option.  They are 'mushrikūn' (singular: mushrik) - idolators whose religion should not be tolerated in any form.

According to the strictest interpretations of Sharia, Buddhists must either convert to Jihadism or be exterminated, and their places of worship must be obliterated. It is therefore very much in Western Buddhists' interests to resist the creeping Sharia that is slowly being imposed on the United States and Europe, even if this involves getting more involved in politics than many of us would like, and making some unusual alliances.

Why dhimmis and mushrikūn must ally against Sharia (from Jihad watch)

'Dhimmitude is the status that supremacist law, the Sharia, mandates for non-believers, primarily Jews and Christians. Dhimmis, "protected people," are free to practice their religion in a Sharia regime, but are made subject to a number of humiliating regulations designed to enforce the Qur'an's command that they "feel themselves subdued" (Sura 9:29). This denial of equality of rights and dignity remains part of the Sharia, and, as such, are part of the legal superstructure that global jihadists are laboring to restore everywhere in the third world, and wish ultimately to impose on the entire human race. 

If dhimmis complained about their inferior status, institutionalized humiliation, or poverty, their masters voided their contract and regarded them as enemies of Jihadism, fair game as objects of violence. Consequently, dhimmis were generally cowed into silence and worse. It was almost unheard-of to find dhimmis speaking out against their oppressors; to do so would have been suicide. For centuries dhimmi communities in the third world learned to live in peace with their supremacist overlords by acquiescing to their subservience. Some even actively identified with the dominant class, and became strenuous advocates for it. 

Spearheaded by dhimmi academics and self-serving advocacy groups, that same attitude of chastened subservience has entered into Western academic study of Jihadism, and from there into journalism, school textbooks, and the popular discourse. One must not point out the depredations of jihad and dhimmitude; to do so would offend the multiculturalist ethos that prevails everywhere today. To do so would endanger chances for peace and rapprochement between civilizations all too ready to clash. 

But in this era of global terrorism it must be said: this silence, this distortion, has become deadly. Before 9/11 it was easy to ignore and whitewash dhimmitude, but the atrocities changed the situation forever. In jihads throughout history, untold millions have died. Tens of millions have been uprooted from their homes. Tens of millions have been stripped of their cultural identity. To continue to gloss over the destruction wrought by jihad ideology and its attendant evil of dhimmitude is today to play into the hands of jihadists, who have repeatedly vowed to dhimmify the West and destroy any recalcitrant elements. 

While jihadist groups, even with their global diffusion, are not strong enough to realize this goal by themselves, they have a potent and destructive ally, a genuine fifth column, in the dhimmi academics and dhimmi journalists they have recruited in the West. They have succeeded in confusing millions in the West into mistaking honesty and truthfulness for bigotry, and self-defense for oppression"

++++

The Fate of the Infidels

Gouging and disembowelment

"There is no liquid loved by Allah more than the liquid of blood.  Whether you do it by the lamb, or you do it by a Serb, you do it by a Jew, you do it by any enemies of Allah, that drop of blood is very dear."-  Jihadist Sermon

---

Coercion, intimidation, thuggery
and outright terrorism are 
intrinsic and essential features 
of Jihadism.

Jihadism is so intellectually moribund
and ethically repulsive 

that it cannot compete for followers
in a free marketplace of ideas, 
but must eliminate its competitors 

by whatever means may be necessary. 

See   No future for Buddhism in a Dhimmified World