Cultural Terrorism as a tool of Islamic Fascism

The first time I came across this concept of "cultural terrorism" it was in a report by the European Muslim Research Centre at Exeter University.

Terrorism cannot be understood only in terms of violence. It has to be understood primarily in terms of propaganda. Violence and propaganda, however, have much in common. Violence aims at behaviour modification by coercion. Propaganda aims at the same by persuasion. Terrorism can be seen as a combination of the two. Terrorism, by using violence against one victim, seeks to coerce and persuade others. [Their emphasis within the report]

Islamophobia & Anti-Muslim Hate Crime, EMRC, (revised version!), 2010

Now, considering that the EMRC gets invited to speak at East London Mosque and for the left-islamic alliance of UAF, I take it that this concept is something that muslims accept, that academics accept, and that the left accepts.  

The truth, of course, is that it is muslims who are the perpetrators of cultural terrorism, rather than the victims.  The classic modern examples are the assassination attempts/threats against film-maker Theo Van Gogh, novelist Salman Rushdie, cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, etc.  However, this islamic cultural terrorism has a much longer and much more international history -- the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan (2001) and even the destruction of the most ancient university in the world, the buddhist university at Nalanda , destroyed by muslims in India in 1193.

Today I came across this report on the Maldives, where muslims are once again conducting cultural terrorism against the ancient buddhist (pre-islamic) culture of the Maldives.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gpQRnwpootZot3dA...

Trouble in paradise: Maldives and Islamic extremism

By Amal Jayasinghe (AFP) – 8 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 AFPat 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.

The Adhaalath party supports new president Mohamed Waheed, who Nasheed accuses of taking part in a coup, and is due to join the new government.

Waheed called the museum attack "totally unacceptable" and denied there was religious violence in his country.

Former foreign minister Ahmed Naseem disagreed.

He said extremists were thriving in the Maldives and that they were partly responsible for the toppling of Nasheed and the installation of Waheed. "What we had was a military coup backed by religious extremists," he said.

"There is a strong influence of Islamic fundamentalists in the country and they will get stronger," Naseem told AFP. "These groups are funded from abroad. "This threat is not only to us, but the rest of the world as well."

The moderate Nasheed, who was educated in Sri Lanka and Britain, was consistently accused of being under the control of Jews and Christians by religious opposition parties now linked to the government

There were also demonstrations over proposals from the transport ministry to allow direct flights from Israel.

"We strongly condemn the anti-Semitic words and the other commentary recently," US assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs Robert Blake said during a visit to Male on Saturday.

"Under President Nasheed, the Maldives tried to improve relations with Israel and showed what a progressive country they were and we really commend them for that."

And yet British muslims -- with their mosques, their bookshops, their exhibitions at the British Museum on the Hajj, their islamic TV channels -- claim they are the victims of cultural terrorism!