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The communion in your local church every Sunday is a metaphor that represents a common bond with every Christian (and the J man). Since it happens once a week rather than once a year and every church goer does it rather than 0,001%, man, Christianity is tight as a Victorian corset compared to Islam. Thicker than thieves !
If we are to count symbols and metaphors as concrete facts, that is.
And we have Christians protesting and trying to ban everything under the sun; from same sex marriage to abortion to evolution to Halloween. The idea that Christians aren’t trying to ram their beleifs down everyone else’s throats is a fantasy.
We do have examples of incidents like airplanes being grounded, and Muslims arrested because somebody got the vapors after seeing them pray or eat from McDonald’s bags, but the majority of the “backlash” is from every day, garden variety prejudice and discrimination that isn’t going to be reported on the news.
There is also a cottage industry in bashing Muslims on talk radio and Fox News.
The difference is when Christians protest, you make fun of them. When Muslims protest, people die.
Do you see a Christian sharia law in the United states executing gay people? I realize there aren’t any gay people in Iran but theoretically they would be unhappy with their lifestyle choices.
All of this has nothing to do with the fact that there isn’t an anti-Muslim backlash in the United States. Which is the point of this thread.
No there isn’t. They go to great pains to differentiate the religion of Islam and the terrorists using it.
Your statement,
is utterly without a factual basis. The U.S. Christian citizenry has engaged in religious discrimination against Catholics, Jews, Mormons, indigenous peoples and others and has no tradition of opposing religious intolerance anywhere else in the world except that it might have coincidentally occurred as a byproduct of some other political action. (Even your claim, here, was that the U.S. had no gain by crushing Serbia, while completely ignoring the religious intolerance of Catholics vs Orthodox in the same overall struggles in Croatia and all the various persecutions of all three groups by all three groups.) Muslims and Hindus in India? No U.S. response. Catholic suppression of Buddhists under the Diem brothers? No U.S. response. Catholic vs Protestant in Northern Ireland? After decades of conflict, a U.S. effort at peace that was prompted by personal intentions with no mandate from U.S. Christians. The war between Catholics and Communists in Spain, with the subsequent persecution of the Communists? No U.S. response. Christian persecution of Muslims in Lebanon? No U.S. response. Jewish and Muslim harrassment of Christians in Israel or Palestine? No U.S. response.
Your “demonstrated political will” simply does not exist.
I have taken no strong position regarding anti-Muslim backlash–there has been some, without ever reaching any level of persecution–but your comments, particularly the one to which I responded, have been pretty much entirely erroneous.
We absolutely have an political will against religious discrimination in this country. Religious freedom has driven people to these shores for over a hundred years and goes back to before we were a nation. It hasn’t always been pretty but compared to any other nation in the same time period we have been at the forefront. My example of Serbia was in response to the notion that Christians stood against Muslims when in fact it was a group of predominately Christian nations that stepped in to end it. That we are not the World’s police force in every conflict does not negate that we did, in fact intervene. We also intervened in Lebanon which is a nation full of paramilitary civilian armies that thrive on conflict.
As if Christians don’t kill people over religion. Fanatics are fanatics. And people make fun of Muslims all the time.
We have Christian laws that discriminate against them, and always have. And constant harassment and violence. I’m sure that some gay guy beaten to death for God takes comfort that it’s tolerant Christian fists that kill him.
But there is one, like it or not.
Hell, there was immediately after 9/11. I remember news stories about Muslims and even just people who LOOK like Muslims (Arab Christians, Sikhs) to the attackers being attacked.
That’s a perfect example to use. 9/11 was the greatest foreign attack on American soil ever. It killed thousands of people, cost hundreds of billions of dollars in damage, and involved attacks against the political and military seats of power. compare the worldwide backlash over Pat Robertson’s remarks about Islam. at least 8 people died in the riots. The level of religious tolerance in the United States is extremely high.
Again, to the point of the thread, there are no signs of an anti-Muslim backlash in wake of the recent terrorist attack.
You really need to spend some quality time in a Middle Eastern country to appreciate how misplaced your patriotic self-loathing sounds. I have friends from Lebanon who were persecuted (real persecution) for their religion. While they are Christian they look and speak Arabic. They are damn happy to be here even though they miss their homeland.
Maybe in certain colonies, like Rhode Island and Pennsylvania I think were examples with religious freedom, but otherwise early on there it wasn’t really “religious freedom”. Now you might argue that people came to North America so they could practice their religion but that didn’t mean they respected the rights of others to do so.
Also… “compared to any other nation in the same time period we have been at the forefront” might be kinda dubious. Maybe at some particular given time the US was at the forefront, but I doubt that was true even most of the time.
As opposed to 100,000 in Iraq.
First, just because I loath America doesn’t make me “self loathing”. Nor am I even slightly patriotic, self loathing or otherwise. And if your friends are alive, then at least some Americans have been persecuted worse than them; don’t try to pretend that religious hatred is unique to the ME. And the intolerance of other countries doesn’t make America one iota less intolerant.
You are also ignoring the fact that America has a hell of a lot more legal protections against religious persecution. The Christian fanatics aren’t more tolerant than the Muslim fanatics; they are just under more restraint. Remove those restraints and they’d be openly killing gays and uppity women and unbelievers in the streets. Because that’s the sort of thing that Christians HAVE done historically, when they could get away with it. Fanatics are fanatics.
I didn’t say you were self loathing, I said patriotic self loathing which you sadly admit freely. I can’t say that I’m surprised.
Yes, anti-Islamic hate crimes went up, but looking at the link the surprising thing is how small a proportion of the total these crimes were. Even in 2001 there were less than half as many anti-Islamic incidents as anti-Jewish ones; by 2008 the number had fallen so far that there were only one-tenth as many anti-Islamic incidents (105 - not sure where you got 155 from) as anti-Jewish ones (1,013), and actually more anti-Christian incidents (131). Both of those years, the number of anti-Islamic incidents was dwarfed by the number of anti-black (and, for that matter, anti-white) and anti-gay incidents - though of course there may be overlaps in those numbers.
FWIW, Wikipedia estimates there are about 6.4 million American Jews, and anywhere from 2.5 - 7 million American Muslims.
So if the question is whether there was a backlash, the answer is “yes”. Was the backlash as large as feared? Guess that depends on what your read of the expected backlash was, but to my mind, “no” - I thought the fears were way overblown, but still expected the statistics to show a much worse picture than this - even accounting for the likelihood that some anti-Muslim crimes go unreported.
Where? You have not provided a single counter example to the phenomena I noted. (I also note that you now change your claim from a “will to intervene to support tolerance” to a wimpier, we don’t discriminate as much as other guys.)
That is silly. Claiming that people who have come to the U.S. to avoid persecution is a demonstration of a political will to intervene in favor of tolerance is stretching the point to ludicrous levels. We have a pluralistic society in which a limited amount of religious tolerance has been forced on the populace in order to avoid constant internecine warfare, but there has never been a political will to actually embrace or promote such tolerance, (outside whitewashed high school history books), and there has never been a will to intervene to promote it.
How am I suppose to prove something doesn’t exist? Where is all this religious discrimination you seem to think exists in this country? That’s the point of this thread. You show me the anti-Muslim backlash. The idea of backlash means there is something to roil against and THAT is something that can be quantified. Beyond 9/11 and the 2 recent attacks there have been a number of terrorist plots foiled. In a society that supposedly discriminates against Muslims (absent any terrorist attacks) where is the backlash given the attacks that have occurred?
You of all people should be able to stay on topic long enough to answer the question posed by the thread.
Magiver, are you a white guy, and if so, are you really surprised that you personally haven’t experienced any backlash?
I agree that what you claimed does not exist. Your claim to which I have objected was:
Where has there been any “will to intervene against religious intolerance” in U.S. history? Even if you find an isolated instance, it will not be a “demonstrated political will,” it will be an accidental result of a different effort. For example, the interventions in Bosnia and Herzogovina were an effort to prevent cultural genocide in which religion was a significant marker, but the “intolerance” was not particularly religious. It also occurred prior to the WTC/Pentagon attacks when there was no particular association among most Americans of religion with the conflict. (It was also primarily opposed by factions that loudly proclaim themselves to be “Christian” in the U.S.)
I have made no claim that there is a lot of religious discrimination occurring, today. In refutation of your silly claim, I pointed out that the “Christians” of the U.S. have historically both discriminated against other beliefs and permitted such discrimination by others. Most of such discrimination has died down, (although it still surfaces from time to time), but I have not claimed that it is a serious problem, today.
As to the point of this thread, I already pointed out my positions: first, that there has only been minor anti-Muslim backlash and second that the claim that there are lots of people “fearing” such a backlash is greatly exaggerated. There are not a lot of people wringing their hands about anti-Muslim backlash and there is only a small amount of low grade discrimination going on, today in the U.S.
Having openly declared my position on the topic earlier in the thread, I feel free to point out the historically inaccurate absurdity of a claim that “Christians in the United States have a demonstrated political will to intervene against religious intolerance in spite of what has transpired” when it is posted.
We went to war with Serbia with no internal interests at stake. We bend over backwards to separate church and state. There’s no backlash against Muslims or any other religion. We went out of our way to take Russian Jews and Muslims from every dust bowl country in Africa and the Middle East. I don’t know what rock you live under but I see Muslims and Jews and Buddhists and Sieks everywhere in the United States living in peace. What I don’t see are the riots of France, the persecution of Christians in Lebanon and the general desire to randomly kill people of other religions.
Where is all this discrimination?