The Anti-Muslim predjudice on A2K is wrong.

George, my point is that there isn't much difference between the religions as to ways and means of getting out the word. In my theologic arm-chair perspective.

Do you stand, Lash, by your comment that the ME is in "the stone age"?

yitwail's quote, "hope you don't mind my editing your comments to remove some inflammatory parts. the gist of your comment i agree with wholeheartedly. if i can paraphrase an organization i'm not really fond of--the NRA--religions don't murder people, people do. how many people are murdered or oppressed in the name of religion has much less to do with religion itself than social conditions prevailing at the time, and cultural differences existing between groups of people, of which religion is but one aspect. with respect to terrorists, it's terrorists, be it al qaeda or anyone else, who perpertrate terrorism. bin Laden doesn't prove that Islam is murderous anymore than the IRA proved that Catholicism is murderous."


Makes the most sense to me. When a country goes to war, it doesn't matter what the religious makeup of their citizens with few exceptions. But the big wars are based on what the country's leader's decide - and each person's religion has no place. That's the reason why German Americans fought against Germany, and Japanese Americans fought against Japan during WWII. It had very little to do with religious belief.

Thank you for clarifying, Soz - I see I misunderstood you.

ittleK,
If your point is that individual human behavior is much the same in all cultures and religions, then I agree.

However there are meaningful differences in the social aspects of both religions and political doctrines, and they can sometimes lead to large differences in the behavior of governments and large masses of people subject to their influence. Soviet Marxists rejected any power or values greater than themselves and their state. That enabled them to behave with unparalleled ferocity toward those they regarded as enemies of the state, or of the proletariat which they imagiuned it represented. Islam and Christianity have in turn differentky influenced the behaviors of nations which they have heavily influenced. There's good and bad on boith sides and plenty of available hiostorical commentary on the differences. The results generally speak best for themselves.

So, te unparalleled Soviet Marxists acted with more or less ferocity than the terrorists of late?

Sorry for not being clear, I can see where the misunderstanding arose.

Because it might be the truth. Telling the truth has value in and of itself, and furthermore, Eric Brown said that it wasn't true. If he can assert that it is not Islam, I believe I have the right to argue the point.

What was the point when you found in your thread that it was Christians? I mean, you came right out and said that it was Christianity, if I remember correctly, whereas I asked Eric to do his own count and only suggested that I had a feeling it might be Islam. If you can say you think it's Christianity, then it's puzzling to me that I can't say I think it might be Islam and ask someone who disagrees to use different counting criteria.

I personally think a more constructive approach than the discussion we are having would be to criticize the criteria I suggested.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/07/10/MUSLIMS.TMP

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=1&ObjectID=10335220

Little K-- I often find myself trying to counterweight stuff, too.

But, all the weight is on one side here.
------------------------

Let me share a bit about Bernard Lewis-- on the jacket of his book--What Went Wrong? about Islam and the ME...

"Hailed in The New York Times Book Review as the "doyen of Middle Eastern Studies", Bernard Lewis is one of the West's most foremost authorities on Islamic history and culture. In this striking volume, he offers an incisive look at the historical relationship between the Middle East and Europe.

He is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Pinceton University. A highly eminent authority on Middle Eastern History, he is the author of over two dozen books, most notably "The Arabs in History", "The Emergence of Modern Turkey", "The Political Language of Islam", "The Muslim Discovery of Europe", and "The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years.""

He isn't a Johnny Come Lately after 911 with a political ax to grind. This book was being proofed on 9/11.

I would urge anyone who wants to see Islam and Arab history in context of what's going on today to read What Went Wrong. Its easily readable and only 160 pages.

Although I was angry and said what I said in a callous manner, the facts are true.

The beginning of the conclusion--

"In the course of the twentieth century, it has become abundantly clear in the Middle East and indeed all over the lands of Islam things had indeed gone badly wrong. Compared with it's millenial rival, Christendom, the world of Islam had become poor, weak and ignorant. In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the primacy and therefore dominance of the West was clear for all to see, invading the Muslim in every aspect of his public--and more painfully--even in his private
life."

As I have pointed out before, most Arabs highly resent that they only thing that keeps them going is their proximity to oil and they have to have our help with even that.

We don't have to have our boots in the Middle East; technology and progress has us in their stomachs, ears, on their backs and in their women's dreams of freedom from vaginal mutilation and murder.

If you want to understand Islam and the Arab civilization, I don't know how you can without at least reading Bernard Lewis.

It seems people here don't really want to know. They want to blindly defend.

At least know who you and what you're defending.

The way I save myself from bigotry is to meet each person as an individual. I don't think many of you know what Islam supports. You don't have to hate Muslims individually, but you also don't have to hide from reality.

I'm going to show you.

Yes. There has been build up due to the oil they live on top of--but they can only make use of it with our help. Their society has stagnated since medieval times. Their Human Development Indicator, their Gender Development Indicator, .... Do you know the indicators used to establish a country's level of development?

Most of the Arab countries score at the bottom. This doesn't reflect how much money the country can generate. Who would judge them on that? It is highly geared to the way the government treats it's citizens, based on their level of finances.

Women are treated like animals. Children's health is neglected. But more importantly to the charge of Stone Age, they have never experienced a Renaissance. They have regressed, rather than progressed. They are continuing the backward slide.

Do you disagree?

Lash, come on! The stone age? They use chipped flint to cut their steaks?

Will the people who imagine I meant they were living in a LITERAL time warp, please expose yourselves?

Jesus.

Wikipedia-- According to the 2005 Trafficking in Persons Report of the United States Department of State required by the Trafficking Victim Protection Act of 2000, Saudi Arabia is notable among modern nations for continued tolerance of trafficking in human beings. See human trafficking in Saudi Arabia, source "Trafficking in Persons Report 2005". Saudi Arabia has repeatedly denied these claims. In addition, Saudi Arabia has tried to prevent such abuses. Religious leaders have preached in mosques sermons about the evil of abusing employees.

Lash - it's the same kind of thing as 'towelheads'. I know you were speaking metaphorically, but it's a highly sensitive issue on a huge scale. The stone age statement is inflamitory - not just here where you're pushing buttons, but the mindset is really really bad for the well-being of the world as a whole.

Then again it might not--and i have specifically responded to this more than once in this thread by pointing out that the Serb paramilitaries were far more murderous in just a few years. At Srebernica alone, they killed more people than those killed by al Qaeda in New York, Washington, Madrid and London combined.



You haven't argued the point, you posed a disingenuous and tendentious question seeking to get others to make your point for your. Perhaps somewhere within your tortured fear of Muslims and terrorists there is a part of you which knows your argument is no argument at all but the product of an irrational fear. This is somewhat understandable--it's easy to be complacent when the targets are Tutsis murdered by Hutus (an estimated 800,000 in just a few months, according to the Beeb); or when the targets are Croation and Slovenian Catholics or Bosniac Muslims, for which i've already provided a link to evidence. But now, suddenly, the security of a lifetime is shattered for Americans, most of whom are ill-informed or even uninformed about the provenance of the hatred some cherish for us, and it is all bewildering and frightening. You certainly have a right to argue the point, but you have not demonstrated anything, simply asked a leading question.



In the first place, i stated more than once in that thread that the criterion was not whether or not the murder were religiously motivated. Secondly, yes i certainly did contend that adherents of Christianity are the most murderous, and have a wealth of historical evidence to back that up. I haven't said you can't say, i've said you haven't said it, you've attempted through a leading question to make others say it. You've provided not a scintilla of evidence for such a contention. In my thread, the rabid Muslim-hater Moishe talks of "islamic fascism" and "islamic imperialism." Islamic fascism is an absurd term, as fascism is a politico-economic system which bears no resemblance to the motivation of al Qaeda and their proxies. It would be necessary to demonstrate that Muslims wish to establish a fascist world order, and not only is such a contention ludicrous, Moishe just throws it out there, as do so many conservatives among whom "islamo-fascist" is now become a favorite term, without any substantiation. It is equivalent to branding someone a Nazi in a political debate without actually demonstrating that the person in question is a devotee of National Socialist doctrine. "Islamic Imperialism" if hilariously absurd. The Arabs toppled the doddering Sassanid empire, the equivalent of pushing over a feeble old man. Then Ali roared into Persian, doing essentially the same thing, although tribesmen in the Zagros Mountains put up a stiff fight. The Arabs were repulsed by the Roman Empire, and so turned west. In North Africa and southern Iberia, local people embraced Islam and rose up against their German master, the Visigoths and the Vandals, the latter being the origin of the Arabic name for Spain--al Andalus. When they crossed into what is now France, however, they did not meet corrupt Vandal Kingdoms, and they got no support from an oppressed populace, and they were sent reeling back across the mountains, never to try the conquest again. By that point, any Arabs in the armies were an anomaly, the conquerers of Iberia being North African Berbers who had embraced Islam to overthrow their hated German masters. The successful Muslim empires have been carved out by Central Asian "horse barbarians" (the Chinese term) for whom Islam was incidental to their intention to conquer--the Seljuks and their successors the Osmali Turks, and the Moguls in the subcontinent. An entire mythology of an Islamic Monster, an historical juggernaut bent on world domination has been created in the wake of the rise of terrorism, and it simply is not supported by the historical record. From the historical record, however, Christians have been wildly successful at imposing empire upon others.



I've done so, at which point you claimed i was maligning you and that further debate would be pointless.

Good background on Muslims, Islam and what went wrong. Bernard Lewis.

A very important long standing tradition in any war is to portray the enemy as less human than ourselves. We give ourselves justification as well as increase our moral self-rightousness, our "natural" supremacy. The addition of label/names that demean are consistent with this technique. "Krauts" "japs" "slopes" "gooks" "towel-heads". Remember folks, the only good indian is a dead indian. In our current situation this has been a sticky issue because we have not defined an enemy so we are left to skirt around looking to put a face on "terrorism" and all we can come up with is "towel heads."

I am having deja vue from your post dys.....

But recognizing patterns that actually do exist, e.g. a disproportionate number of violent acts by adherents of a particular philosophy, is a far cry from name calling. It is simply never correct to say, Don't tell the truth, it's immoral." The most you can reasonably argue is that it's not the truth.

Towelhead-- A person who wears a towel on his head.

I will easily dehumanize terrorists.

Don't have a problem with your average Arab or Muslim.