Oh, garbage. They’ll get cheered on by their fellow extremists; no different than with Islam. Eric Rudolph, the anti-abortion & anti-homosexual bomber was cheered on for years, hidden by sympathizers, and so on. And I’ve heard plenty of people speak of approval about the Christian assassins who have killed doctors who perform abortions.
Again; fanatics are fanatics, Christian or Islamic.
Actually, that’s easy enough to answer. They’d do it because the mosque in question happens to belong to a different batch of Muslims; religious fanatics are at least as enthusiastic about attacking heretics as they are about attacking infidels.
Well, yes, that’s kind of tautological. There is indeed such a thing as specifically radical-Islamist terrorism, and yes, a crucial shared element in all its manifestations is the religion of Islam.
Here’s where it’s not clear whether you’re continuing to make self-evident observations about radical-Islamist terrorism in particular, or disintegrating into mindless and ill-informed bigotry about Islam in general.
It would be absurd to claim that all of Islam, as a major world religion, is “stuck on stupid” and “cannot seem to advance beyond the Dark Ages”—that’s nothing but broad-brush Der-Trihs-style religion-bashing, and doesn’t deserve any serious response.
On the other hand, if what you’re trying to say is that the violent reactionary zealotry of militant radical Islamism in particular is stupid and backward, well, yeah, can’t really argue with that even if I wanted to.
The religion suffers from 6 degrees of separation. The religion itself is based on a warrior prophet and the messages put forth are resolute in their intensity depending how you want to interpret his words.
Christianity survived in spite of itself through a combination of schisms and a general migration toward the New Testament (what Christ taught) versus the Old Testament (everything including the kitchen sink that could be used to beat plowshares into swords). The people who thump the bible are striking hardest on the Old Testament side of the book.
The hierarchy of Christianity was broken with Marin Luther and it broke the power structure that bound the religion. With Islam, the power structure is just the opposite and this leadership vacuum is filled by anybody who wants to claim to be an Imam. It opens the doors to the Arabic version of Fred Phelps and the words of Mohammad have a more direct consequence. A rational person embraces the peaceful aspect of the religion. A Fred Phelps embraces the sword. The religion itself isn’t trying to rule the world but there are factions within who use the religion to organize and execute their version of it.
True…Scotsman senses… tingling.
Besides that, I’m not sure what you’re talking about. The Bible says everything and its contrary. The Koran says everything and its contrary in cryptic verse. What’s the difference ?
Besides, you must know that, for being the word of a warrior prophet, back in the day the Koran was a vastly progressive text, as were the Muslim Caliphates compared to the Christian Kingdoms - socially, scientifically, artistically, religiously.
The reasons why they eventually stagnated under Ottoman rule while Christendom at the same time crumbled and flourished are multiple and complex, but they have far more to do with politics than what’s in each bloc’s respective holy book. IIRC Cecil did a short article on the subject.
Again, not sure what sense this makes. On the one hand, christianity has hundreds of Phreds and they’re powerless because the religion’s base is broken, but Islam has hundreds of Phreds and they have more power because the religion never had a base ?
I’m open to hearing any explanation that describes the phenomenon.
What “phenomenon”?
At least they’re being disavowed. It took 3 years after 9/11 before anyone thought put out a fatwa against Osama Bin Laden.
There were, last time I checked, about three hundred million Muslims in the world who supported suicidal terrorist attacks against civilian populations “In defence of Islam”. In Pakistan, Osama Bin Laden is about five times more popular than President Obama. It’s disingenuous to deny that Islam has far greater problems with terrorism than any other religion, and Magiver is correct to note that nothing explains the behaviour of Islamic fundamentalists better than the fundamentals of Islam.
Forgot the cite (pdf). Go to page 39.
And 174 million Americans that think it would be a great idea to torture a Muslim, based on the 58% positive response to the question, “should we waterboard Abdulmutallabn for his attempted attack on the flight to Detroit?”
People “support” all sorts of things in hypothetical scenarios or when they perceive that they are threatened.
So, about the same ratio as Limbaugh’s audience.
Actually, Islamic extremism in conjunction with 200+ years of Western colonialism with the attendant feelings of frustration, oppression, or hopelessness explains the behavior of Islamic fundamentalists better than the fundamentals of Islam. (Note, for example, that there is a pretty close correspondence between disruptive colonialism or recent civil war with support for terrorism and a corresponding rejection where colonialism was a bit more benign or there has not been recent civil war. If Islam qua Islam was the great breeder of those attitudes, then Turkey should be right near the top of support for Islamist terrorism while Lebanon, 49% Christian, and Nigeria, 40% Christian and 10% animist, should have much less support…)
Thanks for sparing me the trouble of an easy debunk, tomndebb.
Well, yeah. That’s exactly what militant religious (or, more generally, ideological) extremism is: the efforts of factions to use their religion (or ideology) to organize and execute their violent attempts to gain power.
It’s true that for the past few decades, the radical-Islamist brand of violent extremism has been more prominent worldwide than the versions associated with other religions. However, it’s in no way unique to Islam. For instance, Hindu extremist groups in India use their own religion in precisely the same way as a rallying cry to justify violent attacks on Indian Muslims and Christians.
The test for that is simple, are there random terrorist attacks against Muslims in America? No. Are there random terrorist attacks of Americans BY Muslims? Yes. And to the point of this thread, are there backlashes against these attacks. No. Why is that tomndebb? What causes Muslims who have no direct hierarchy to span continents and cultures in a united phenomenon of terrorism?
Oh, garbage. You don’t see American Christian terrorism against Muslims because they have a military to do that sort of thing. Instead Christian fanatics cheering on a lone bomber and calling for jihad, they cheer the US laying waste to Iraq and call for nuclear attacks on the ME. They join the military to get their own hands bloody, and applaud our torture of “terrorists”.
I’ve discussed Christianity specifically but if you want to look at Hindu extremism then lets look at the broader picture. There is no worldwide front of attacks by Hindus so the threat of the local religious/cultural war does not extend as a sympathetic cause in other locations. This seems to be a unique phenomenon in modern history to Islam.
Not amongst the EU politicians apparently - in fact they are eager to increase their numbers in Europe.
Huh? The answer to all three of your questions is “Yes”. Examples of terrorization of American Muslims include the following:
You keep trying to handwave American anti-Muslim hatred away, while claiming that foreign Muslim anti-American hatred is a unique “phenomenon” in the category of hatred, a phenomenon specific to the fundamental religious makeup of Islam.
But this is the very same fallacy that frightened people have fallen into in many different historical situations when facing a terror threat. They want to believe, or feel impelled to believe, that the danger is somehow inherent in the fundamental nature of the larger group to which their enemies belong.
Nineteenth-century urbanites worrying about anarchist bombs, in a time when anarchist groups were disproportionately Jewish, made up theories about how Jewishness itself conduced to callous violence. Cold War hawks hypothesized that the essential cruelty of the Russian nature made Soviet communists uniquely dangerous. Your ideas about the uniquely violence-inducing properties of Islam are just the same old tune in a different key.
Heck, it’s the same tune that’s being sung now even by members of other militant extremist groups. Consider what this leader of a right-wing Hindu organization accused of terror attacks in India has to say about the alleged violence inherent in both Islam and Christianity:
Imagining that we need to look for the roots of violence or danger in the core doctrines of a particular religion is a pointless and counterproductive distraction. What we need to do, rather, is focus on the specific militant-extremist movements themselves and figure out ways to suppress and counteract their violence.
Speculative woo-woo theories about how the intrinsic nature of the religion itself is somehow channeling its adherents into hatred and destructiveness may seem profound to their ill-informed inventors, but they don’t really provide any useful insights.
Um, no. In fact, the “local religious/cultural war” fanned by some radical “Hindutva” or Hindu-nationalist militant extremists in India does indeed “extend as a sympathetic cause in other locations”. Hindus outside India provide a lot of financial and organizational support to Indian Hindu extremist groups.
I didn’t necessarily expect you to know that, but I am a bit surprised you didn’t notice the parallel with the more familiar situation of American Catholics of Irish descent funneling weapons and money to IRA terrorists during the Troubles.
You are aware that your cite is complete rubbish, right ? Of course, when the group of whistleblowers proudly bears the motto “Racism is the lowest form of stupidity, but Islamophobia is the height of common sense”, and the newspaper that publishes their article is an arm of the Moonites, it’s not really a surprise.
Facts :
The Euro-Mediterranean partnership didn’t go into effect on January 1, 2010. In fact, it’s been going on since 1995.
The EuroMed plan’s goal was not, of course, to drive Christianity out of Europe or initiate a massive exodus of Muslims into Europe. Why on *Earth *would you believe Europeans would sign up for that ? It was, like all European initiatives, a rather meaningless commercial and diplomatic partnership.
It was, for the most part, a failure, though apparently Sarkozy is eager to turn it into a kind of second-class EU of sorts.
50 million immigrants across the EU would be a water droplet in the sea. 50 million immigrants over 50 years even more so.
It might come as a surprise to you, but Nigeria isn’t a Mediterranean country. No, really. Check your map. So even *if *these asswipings were 100% factual, they would have had absolutely zero influence on the Detroit shindig. None, zilch, zip, nada.
If the military is being used to attack Islam, why was it sent to overthrow the secular, socialist regime in Iraq instead of the Islamic theocracy in Saudi Arabia?