Soren Espersen Quotes
Where Islam is a majority, there is a dictatorship, because Islam is also a political system. We fight Islam in the same way as we fight communism. We don’t want it.
Soren Espersen, Press Secretary, Danish People’s Party, Quoted in The American Prospect, August 26, 2002
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Munir was a strong advocate for civilian control over the military and as exposed many military atrocities and disappearances. He was poisoned on a Garuda Airlines flight to Holland where he was exposing more of the human rights violations of the Indonesian Military.
The "we" referred to the Tunisian Ennahda Party of which he was the founder.
The journalist and author, one of the most influential Italian journalists and intellectuals, was then dying of cancer and came out of retirement to warn about the great threat that she believed that Islam was for the West. See {587753} for her earlier warning. While at the surface, she appears to be a very bigoted individual, her main concern about Islam in general and for European immigration in particular had an intellectual and sophisticated base. Specificly, was 1) Islam is the ONLY religion that teaches and demands the transcendence of nationalism in a world that is organized around nations. It demands a concept of Muslim land as opposed to Egyptian land or Pakistani land. 2) It is overtly sexist and requires sexism of its adherents as opposed to other religions where sexism is traditional and cultural and not as theological. 3) It is anti democratic and requires adherents to conflate religion and government. However, what Fallaci was unaware of was the reform and modernist movement within Islam who argued for a modern, democrative evolution of the religion much as what has occurred with Christianity and Judiasm and other religions.
In September of 2005 a Danish Newspaper published some political cartoons showing the hypocrisy of some Muslims who use Islam to justify murder of innocents and terrorism. Many in the Middle East protested vehemently because the Prophet Muhammad's visage was depicted against Islamic tradition. Many Muslim leaders claimed that insulting religion was an “abuse” of freedom of speech including those from nations which regularly publish material that is virulent against Christians and Jews. Momani reprinted the cartoons and wrote this editorial arguing that the cartoons insulted Islam far less than the terrorism and murder—especially a recent murder of Muslims in Amman attending an Islamic wedding ceremony, He was fired by the newspaper owners and then actually arrested by the Jordanian authorities for “Insulting Religion.”
Ironically, without the word “wicked” most people would regard the first sentence as a good description of elements of a modern democracy. It illustrates that for the Islamic fundamentalist democracy substitutes the rule of man for the rule of God, freedom of speech allows heresy and blasphemy to to uttered and communicated, and religion which is supposed to inform and direct politics. So what is good for the lover of democracy is the very thing that is bad for Islam. This is not a uniquely Islamic viewpoint. It has been and is held by fundamentalist Christians and Jews as well who would return to Biblical law punishing blasphemy and heresy with death and have religion drive all politics.
At the time Turkey and Indonesia were the only Muslim nations that was not dictatorships or a theocracies.
This quotation illustrated the extreme polarization between the current fundamentalist Muslims, and the Muslim modernists and the West. Kamal Ataturk, the great leader and stateman who is the father of modern Turkey, is castigated by the author for leading the new Turkish parliament to depose the Caliph – the civil and religious autocrat, one of whom reigned from after the death of Muhammad till his abolishment in 1924. Most of the rest of the world credits Ataturk with being one of the great leaders of all time—one who led a democratic revolution which transformed Turkey into the only Muslim secular democracy, requiring pubic secular European type education for all children, giving women the right to vote (before the U. S. even), adopting a European alphabet and dress, and outlook on life—creating most remarkably a total cultural revolution with virtually no loss of life. No revolutionary leader, before or since has led so extensive a political and cultural revolution, and it was a bloodless revolution. Turkey, into the 21st century, was by far the most powerful, industrialized, scientific and modern nation of Muslims in the world and others were far behind. Yet many Islamic theologian still castigate Atatork for his great achievements as being against the will of God.
Tunisia, although it has a large majority Muslim population, became a secular republic after its Arab Spring revolution.
Søren Espersen is a Danish politician, journalist, and author, who has been a member of the Folketing for the Danish People's Party since 2005. He is also the party's foreign affairs spokesperson. and former chairman of Udenrigspolitisk Nævn.
