Why not? Same with the Bible. If god objects then he can stop any changes from happening. Somehow I’m pretty sure he won’t.
Which is it? First you assigned poverty to explain the yearlong riots then you said it spilled over into other countries. Is France now responsible for poverty in other countries? Did the LA riots spill over into other countries. Did they last a year? Poverty is a poor excuse.
I’m not sure what a Hindu Muslim is but they don’t appear to be actively engaged in fatwas or riots over cartoons, books, movies, statements and other perceived injustices from a distant land.
The riots among the disaffected youth spilled over to other countries for a week or so. They, like the French violence, occurred among the poor immigrant communities. The proximity of France to other countries meant that kids in similar conditions thought it would be fun to emulate the French kids. That really is not that hard to understand. The summer riots of the 1960s in the U.S. followed a similar trend, as did the various campus “rebellions” at the end of the 1960s.
“Hindu Muslim” was a typo for “Hindu, not Muslim.” Other than that, you are simply repeating your effort to link all things done by anyone Muslim as “Islamic,” regardless of the actual causes.
The riots over the cartoons were, indeed, an action directly tied to Islam and the perception that the West is disrespectful of all things Muslim. The Fundamentalist Islam promoted by the Wahhabists has been very successful in exploiting perceived insults against their beliefs. I have never denied that the Wahhabists and other Islamic Fundamentalists are a growing power and a growing problem. My objection is to the silly notion that it is “Islam,” (including Sufi community organizers in Manhattan), that is at the core of the problems, failing to distinguish between those who are filled with hatred and those who are just trying to get along with their lives and even throwing in people who are not following Islam, like the French rioters, simply because it is easier to pretend that “Islam” is causing a problem than to take the time to find out the facts on the ground.
Would you object to saying that Christianity is Catholicism?
You may find this hard to believe but I don’t jump into these threads because I want to defend Islam. I’m not a Muslims (heck, I’m an agnostic) and I freely admit that, as tomndebb rightly points out, there is an obvious and growing problem of radical Islamic groups plotting and carrying out violent attacks.
Instead, I jump into these threads because I want to oppose blind hatred. When I see people - and Americans in particular - suggesting that we need to put anyone who is a Muslim, was a Muslim or might be a Muslim on a watchlist because a tiny number of Muslims Did A Very Bad Thing, it makes me mighty tetchy because what they’re doing is exactly what the terrorists want - destroying our freedoms. That’s stupid, harmful to the ideals America purports to stand for and inflicts a lot of misery on a lot of innocent people.
It’s a lot harder to take the effort - and admittedly the risk, however infinitessimal - to distinguish between those who pose a genuine threat to us and the vast majority of others who don’t and could actually be helpful in our goals if only we’d stop trying to tar them with the same enormous brush as the terrorists. We talk a lot about the price of freedom, usually in the context of sending soldiers out into the world to kill other people, but a bigger part of that price is making sure that we don’t give away so easily the freedoms that generations of those soldiers fought and died for.
What relevance does that have?
The problem with those on this board who are trying to stir up hatred of Muslims is that they are ascribing everything bad that happens to be done by a group of Muslims to the fact that they are Muslims in a way that they do not ascribe everything bad done by a group of people who happen to be Christians (Or Jews, or Jains, or Buddhists) to the fact that they follow a particular religion.
Well, given that it is clearly a false statement, sure.
Catholicism is one facet of Christianity. Friends/Quakers are a different facet of Christianity. Aryan Nations is a yet different facet of Christianity.
If you find any Quakers violently robbing armored cars and engaging in similar acts while claiming that their beliefs require those actions, then I will consider equating Wahhabists to all Islam.
If you do not, you are simply engaged in lazy thinking to associate all Muslims with Wahhabist beliefs and actions.
Addressing tomndebb’s point about what is Islam. If he isn’t willing to say that the 50% of Christians that are Catholic define what Christianity is, then there is no point in ever saying what amount of fundamentalists define Islam. The real question is if the book is correctly interpreted by these ‘fundamentalists’. If it is then that is the norm and there will always be someone willing to follow by taking it at its word. Which is the word of god, btw.
My problem is with people who ignore the obvious connection between what some Muslims do and the fact that they most likely wouldn’t be doing it if they weren’t Muslims. Would there be a conflict in Palestine if all the people there were Jews? Or Muslims? No, the problem as it exists between Jews and Muslims in Israel is that they are Jews and Muslims. It is also telling that the countries who for the most part don’t recognize Israel as a state are Muslim in some cases with no common denominator other than the religion itself.
For people to continually deny a connection between religion and how people act who follow them is completely naive. It’s like saying that my car manual tells me to torque the wheel nut to 100ft/lbs and instead of using a torque wrench, I’ll just use a hammer and bash away until it becomes tight. The book is there for me to read and follow. That some people just use a wrench and tighten it until they feel it is tight, doesn’t mean they are doing it much better or worse than the guy with a hammer, but it does ignore that the book says 100 and not 50 or 200. But it shouldn’t be surprising that some people will actually get a torque wrench and tighten the bolt to the specs that the book, and the ‘engineer’ who wrote it, requires it to be set to.
So, essentially, only if 101% of Muslims act like fundamentalists will you admit that there is any relation to fundamentalist thought and the religion. 50% doesn’t cut it. Why bring it up at all? To continue with your analogy, Quakers are no more representative of Christianity than the Aryan Nations. If 50% isn’t representative, then what is? In other words, nothing is and you make it up as you see fit.
The only solution is to go back to what the book actually says (because that is the guide and words have meaning and can be parsed for content) and who is following it the closest.
That doesn’t even begin to explain the time span of the riots.
So if we highlight some fundamentalist Jews who’ve done something evil for which they can claim authority from their holy book we can paint all Jews as Evil?
And, as a lot of Christians also hold the OT in some esteem, can we apply the same rule there?
Or is it one rule for Muslims and one rule for everyone else?
Where ever you get extremists you’ll find they have some sort of axe to grind and claim some special authority for acting the way they do. In the case of Muslim extremists it’s often the Qur’an - even though a far greater number of Muslims explicitly tell them that they are wrong.
There are some pretty ugly people doing some pretty ugly things claiming the bible at their authority and yet you don’t obsess about that in the same way.
Catholics might make up about a third of Christians, possibly a bit more, but not half. The fact that Catholic belief and practice ranges from the Pius X groups who nearly deny the declarations of the Second Vatican Council to people embracing Liberation Theology and people engaged in the near-Pentacostal rites of the Charismatics means that Catholicism is so far from monolithic that it cannot be used to “define” Christianity even if it did make up half of the Christian population.
Trying to hang labels on people by what you want to tell them what to believe is silly, in any event. Following your logic, we need to take steps to protect ourselves from the Quakers and the Amish, because just looking at the Aryan Natiuons we can tell what Christians “might” do.
On the other hand, if you are going to ignore the fact that the people who follow a book have generally not behaved in the way that you want to impose on them through your own limited interpretation for the last 1300+ years, then you can simply make up anything you want to believce about them. You’ll be wrong, but you can make up whatever you want.
You are the one making up stuff about how those people have to believe one thing or another. I am quite willing to accept that the Wahhabists and some other Fundamentalist Islamic groups believe in carrying out the fiercest passages of the Qur’an. The fact that the vast majority of Muslims have never engaged in that behavior for more than 1300 years should be a good clue to any thinking person that that is not how they interpret their scriptures.
Neither does trying to blame it on “Islam” when the vast majority of the rioters never attended mosques and many of them were nominally Christian.
You are trying to blame a religious belief for the actions of people who do not even hold that belief.
Pointing out a common denominator in a situation is not the same as blaming every Muslim on the planet. It is an acknowledgment of a connection to the religion and it’s cultural/political/social hold on people. You acknowledge such things exist in the abstract but argue against any examples brought forward.
The problem is with the way certain people obsess about it.
Can you imagine if someone pointed out that every US president who took their country into war was a Christian and on that basis Christianity was in some way evil?
Picking some identifying attribute and making lists of undesirable actions by people who happen to share that attribute is the action of a rabble rouser, not a serious debater.
But your “common denominator” does not even exist in the example of the French rioters. They were not all Muslim. Those who were Muslims were not observant. The religion of Islam did not play a role in sparking or perpetuating the riots. You are taking a coincidence and trying to draw a conclusion from it.
I do not argue against it in the particulars. The riots against the cartoons of Mohammed were directly connected to the religion, (with some other cultural associations). The French youth riots had no such connection, but you want to assign it a connection because some of the kids had Muslim parents.
I have a feeling it’s all in the family.
I have never said that all Muslims, the majority of Muslims, or anything but a small minority of Muslims do evil things. I am claiming that their book is evil and full of hatred towards others who do not follow it. I am making the claim that because of that it allows certain people to use that as the reason for the acts they commit. I am also making the claim that because the majority of believers in this book don’t do evil things, it doesn’t make the book any less evil because of it. They do the things they do because most people just want to live their lives in peace and ignore those writings that require them to do something else.
And I am also saying that as long as the book exists in its present form, people will continue to use it for the evil they do. The same goes for Christians who use the bible to justify their hatred of gays, etc. Remove or change the passages that justify their hatred and they don’t have legs to stand upon.
I see. So, you would like to enter into a dialog, to point out the error of their ways and to bring them to a more benign understanding. And your first gesture to open this dialog is to pee in their face?
I have it on good authority…my Mom, my Sunday School teachers, that sort…that such an approach is very likely to be counterproductive.
And this just in…
**Petraeus Condemns U.S. Church’s Plan to Burn Qurans **
Why do you guys hate our heroes?
Ah, which is different than their book telling them to kill or convert me the first chance they get?
“Please, kind Sirs. Could you please remove the material from your book that says I must be killed, converted, or made to pay ‘special’ taxes as it upsets me. Just so you know that I don’t like being threatened, but rather than taking it as a direct threat and doing unto others before they do unto me, I’ll just let you know my displeasure with these statements by destroying copies of the book that I own.”
That what you’re looking for?