Fair enough. Apologies for that.
Prepare yourself for a bunch of dismissive comments from those who can’t brag about a triple digit IQ because they had dumb but horny ancestors.
Much like Obama’s “but the Crusades” rationale to equate Cristianity with Islam you fail to take into account the temporal distances between superstitious zealots who act on those barbaric words.
But not Irishness…
Well no, there’s not a comparable philosophical underpinning or doctrine to being Irish.
Um, maybe they should have said that?
Sydney Herald, Dec. 1 1974
Already there has been a spate of petrol bomb attacks on the homes of Irish citizens in England and pubs run by Irish landlords. In Birmingham, there has been talk of English workers dropping bricks on the heads of Irish Catholic workmates on building sites and in factories.
And the aftermath of that horrific created a backlash against the city’s Irish community which took decades to heal.
The Irish who had flocked to Birmingham in the 1940s, 50s and 60s in their thousands and built a thriving community suddenly found themselves ostracised by friends and workmates.
Irish-owned buildings were vandalised and prominent members of the Irish community bombarded with death threats.
That year the St Patrick’s Day annual parade was halted and it seemed the backlash would go on forever.
Or, we’ve already seen the effects of collective punishment and bigotry, and found them distasteful.
What is the motivation or justification for the Islamic acts of terror derived from? Generally, those committing the acts invoke their own religion as a justification for waging jihad. Shouldn’t we trust Islamic terrorists on the subject of Islamic terror?
Because it’s been simply ages since anyone claimed that the bible condoned their barbarism, right?
“That’s why we created this name, Lord’s Resistance Army. And people always ask us, are we fighting for the Ten Commandments of God. That is true – because the Ten Commandments of God is the constitution that God has given to the people of the world. All people. If you go to the constitution, nobody will accept people who steal, nobody could accept to go and take somebody’s wife, nobody could accept to kill the innocent, or whatever. The Ten Commandments carries all this.”
The LRA were happy to engage in full spectrum barbarism - slavery, child rape, abduction, rape as weapon, child soldiers - all the while claiming they were establishing a theocratic state based on the Ten Commandments. Kony only surrendered in 2013 because of ill health. Yet no-one went around saying that Christians as a whole carried responsibility for his psycho-loon cult.
That’s the first I’ve heard of that nut. But if he managed to conquer territory and there were also several primitive Christian theocracies that had the money to support his movement I’d be outspoken about the source material of his superstition needing reform or eradication as well.
Then again, as detailed above, the terrorists are recruited from those who know the least about the religion, and especially new converts and those not active at mosques. There are also plenty of accounts like this one:
ISIS captors cared little about religion, says former hostage
A French journalist’s ISIS captors cared little about religion, Didier Francois - who spent over 10 months as the group’s prisoner in Syria - told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an exclusive interview on Tuesday.
“There was never really discussion about texts or – it was not a religious discussion. It was a political discussion.”
“It was more hammering what they were believing than teaching us about the Quran. Because it has nothing to do with the Quran.”
“We didn’t even have the Quran; they didn’t want even to give us a Quran.”
There’s also Osama bin Laden’s various statements:
As Michael Scheuer, a former CIA agent and Bin Laden expert, has said: “Western media have made no consistent effort to publish Bin Laden’s statements, thereby failing to give their audience the words that put his thoughts and actions in cultural and historical context … Bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us. None of the reasons has anything to do with our freedom, liberty and democracy but everything to do with US policies and actions in the Muslim world.”
(My bolding)
“Is it bad? It is not against human rights. And that commandment was not given by Joseph. It was not given by LRA. No, those commandments were given by God.”
Shall we apply the same arguments. He’s clearly a true christian (because he claims to be) and is happy to quote bible verse supporting his brutality. As such we should condemn all Christians (etc, ad nauseam).
And meanwhile in the Central African Republic, Christian militias target the minority Muslim population, telling them to convert or die. ( CAR: Muslims forced to convert to Christianity )
"Having been forced to flee the Central African Republic (CAR) amid sectarian violence, Muslims returning to the country are now being forced to convert to Christianity under threat of being killed, Amnesty International said today.
In a report titled 'Erased Identity: Muslims in ethnically-cleansed areas of the Central African Republic, the NGO claims that the majority of Muslims have left the western region of the country following a wave of ethnic cleansing in early 2014."
Ethnic cleansing, death for the non-believer…just how’s that temporal distance of yours?
Ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation are not the same as adherence to a particular belief system. Those who fail to make this distinction give support to those, often racist, essentializers who respond to criticism of their ideologies with accusations of racism and bigotry. For example, a big part of David Duke’s shtick is to portray opposition to racist, neo-Confederate, movements as an attack against white people generally, as if some innate quality of white people makes them require tolerance of this intolerant belief system for survival. Similarly, when Islamist groups like CAIR respond to criticism of Islam or Islamism, they rely on the narrative that (their version of) Islam is an essential characteristic of all Muslims. This reinforces the viewpoint that those who criticize or leave (the Islamists version of) Islam are undergoing some kind of unnatural, beastly, transformation.
Do you see the same level of organized support for Christian terrorism as exists for Islamic? I’m sure we could find a Buddhist or Hindu terrorist as well. But the religious text that is motivating the most violence isn’t Jewish, Christian, ancient Norse, classical Roman, or oral traditions of Crow.
Scale matters.
So does perspective. Islamic terrorism was essentially unknown prior to about 1970. It’s not as though the religious text changed.
Criticism of the Christian religious tenants used to justify this violence was normalized long ago. I have never once heard someone accuse those discussing the ideology underpinning the LRA as Christianophobes. If someone in the West says, as a reason for enforcing oppressive legal or social codes of conduct, “the bible says so”, a socially acceptable and popular response is to dismiss that reason entirely as stupid and outdated. Among Muslim majority nations and Muslim communities in the West, a similar response regarding the Koran is not only often socially unacceptable, but can be life threatening.
Splendid. So you’ve abandoned that whole temporal distance line, and are now arguing that actually it’s the scale that counts?
“Non-Muslims Carried Out More than 90% of All Terrorist Attacks in America”
“According to this data, there were more Jewish acts of terrorism within the United States than Islamic (7% vs 6%). These radical Jews committed acts of terrorism in the name of their religion. These were not terrorists who happened to be Jews; rather, they were extremist Jews who committed acts of terrorism based on their religious passions, just like Al-Qaeda and company.”
And that would be because no-one ever blamed Christianity as a whole for the actions of Kony and his merry band of psychopaths.
I’m not really inclined to respond point by point to that regurgitation of all the things you’ve said before and keep saying repeatedly. One can’t help but get the impression that you just don’t like Muslims. You’re entitled to not like them, I suppose, and I’m sure that no amount of data or published articles are going to change that, so far be it from me to try. But on a few matters of factual detail …
I don’t know how you could write this and think that it somehow only applies to Muslims. It very often applies – and often to a much greater degree – to most ethnic minorities who tend to congregate in the same communities and associate largely with each other – Asians, East Asians, Jews, immigrants from virtually any non-English country in the world. It’s surprising but true that Muslims are culturally well integrated in many countries in Europe and especially in the US and Canada.
Good, well at least they’re a few notches better than Kim Davis and all her fundamentalist Christian bigots.
You’re running around all over the map here. Karachi is not in what I would call an advanced or enlightened first-world nation – hint: it’s in the country that sheltered Osama bin Laden.
As for native-born terrorists, in western societies we tend to get disaffected crackpots in all flavors – how many of the American mass shooters of the last few years have been Muslim? What percentage of the western Muslim population does these things? The head honcho of the Paris attacks was a petty thief known to the police, the Belgians recently captured were convicted robbers with criminal records for other offenses – not exactly devout Muslims. These and most others have been various kinds of misfits, often young and impressionable, outcasts from society, sometimes with mental health problems – all prime candidates for victimization in the name of some great cause that they can use to exact vengeance on society. If it wasn’t Islam, it would be voices in their heads, signs from heaven, or talking pets that tell them what to do. Religion happens to be a convenient rallying point for misfits and crazies. Always has been.
The poster who coined that phrase seems to have acknowledged agreement with me – and just about everybody else here – that western Muslims are overwhelmingly law-abiding, peaceful, and well integrated into society and have no interest in “murderous displays of religious fanaticism”. Let it go already.
Read the OP again and tell me if “criticism of ideas” was what was going on there. Here, let me quote the relevant part for you:
The husband was dressed fairly normal but the wife had the full length black outfit and had her head covered and her face partially covered. They got more than a few stares and [there] was many an angry look. Americans have been told to be tolerant but I think our tolerance is coming to an end.
That doesn’t sound to me like these staring angry yokels were having an intellectual debate about ideas.
Let me know when these Jewish terrorists manage to bring down skyscrapers.
So now it’s not the timeframe, nor the scale, just that some Muslim terrorists are really really good at terrorism?
It’s almost as if some of these organisations have extensive military experience and tactical training.
It only “seems” that way to you because you have been conditioned to erroneously equate criticism of Islam with bigotry against Muslims. You are the one displaying symptoms of racism and bigotry, since you obviously have completely different standards regarding criticizing the intolerance of usually brown Muslims than you do for Kim Davis’s intolerance. That’s the very essence of racism.
This is merely another attempt to polish your own halo, and simultaneously dismiss the arguments of others. If anyone has a negative opinion of Muslims, it is those who insist that the current state of Islam is acceptable and who deny religion’s role in the widespread suppression of human rights that Muslims suffer at the hands of other Muslims.
A difference that you are not acknowledging is the much debated Islamic doctrinal decree against befriending (or taking as protector depending on translation) non-Muslims. Another is the strong anti-kuffar attitudes prevalent in Muslim communities. This attitude is not simply a result of ethnic cohesion, but is also a symptom of communities indoctrinated into an assimilation resistant ideology.
Remember that your original cite about integration had the caveat that excluded gender relations. That’s a pretty giant “except for…”.
This does not follow, unless you can show that Kim Davis is opposed to tolerance of homosexuality developing in Saudi Arabia or Egypt. My guess is that her attitude would mirror that of many Muslims in the West, that she would consider those societies immoral, and the people followers of a false religion, and so would not care at all whether homosexuality was tolerated there, unless she favored it’s acceptance there to bolster a narrative that non-Christian societies tended towards moral bankruptcy.
We are talking about the upper-class section of society, fully literate, filled with people who have Western educations, and lots of money and opportunity.
According to stats compiled by Mother Jones, using the traditional FBI definition, in 2015 there were four mass shootings, which involved five attackers, in which thirty seven people were killed. Three of the five attackers were Muslim, and nineteen of the thirty seven murder victims were killed by Muslims, in a nation which is roughly 1% Muslim.
What percentage of White Supremacists/white racists attack synagogues or black churches? Does this mean that their ideology is just an excuse and not a contributing factor?
This is just an assertion, with nothing to back it up. If you actually pay attention to the proclamations of those committing the attacks it is clear that Islam is more than just a convenient excuse. There are plenty of reasons to conclude that without exposure to Islamic ideology, many or most jihadist attackers would not have become mass killers.
Yet the majority of both the perpetrators and the victims of mass shootings in 2015 have involved Islam in particular, in a nation with roughly 100x as many non-Muslims as Muslims.
This particular train began with your misreading, I was trying to point that out to you, but you still seem confused about it.
I was responding to your point in particular.
The niqab is a potent symbol of an oppressive, intolerant ideology. It is a declaration of adherence to a belief system that professes incredibly hateful things about gays, Jews, and non-Muslims generally, and challenges legitimacy of even the continued existence of these groups of people on the planet. Those who wear it among non-Muslims or progressive Muslims should not expect any more tolerance than one should expect if they were to wear a Klan hood into a predominantly black neighborhood, with the caveat that the woman wearing the garment might very well have little choice, which would be more akin to a child dressed up in Klan attire and brought to a black neighborhood. A sneer might not be the most helpful way to deal with either encounter, but it should be expected. And the fact that sneers or insults are the greatest threats that these kinds of displays usually elicit shows how far we, as a society, bend over backwards to respect free speech and expression of even the most hateful varieties.