Worse than that he’s a moderate “former” terrorist,
Anybody else remember what the “right” had to say when folks said we should listen to what the terrorists had to say if we wanted to understand the roots of terrorism?
CMC fnord!
Well, this would make sense if I had been of the opinion that there weren’t moderate Muslims. But since I’ve not made that claim and it is not my opinion, not so much.
Yeah, yeah, more of the same. Care to opine on the article linked to? Or are you afraid to find fault with it because it was written by a Muslim? 
The funny part is he stated:
Since Valteron, magellan01, and others of their ilk seem to think most members here are defenders of various Muslim practices, I wonder why they don’t translate that same theory to their board presence. Something like “I said that at some point if your values cannot coexist with the values of the board you are posting on, you adapt to the board, or voluntarily leave it.”
While I don’t want anyone to leave the board (I also don’t want visitors to our country to have to adapt to “our values”, whatever the hell that means.), I’d certainly consider them at least consistent if they followed their own advice.
The report Teaching Emotive and Controversial History 3 – 19 (a pdf), published by the Historical Association, actually appears all rather sensible and unalarmist. It basically points out that there are all sorts of baggage - some obvious, some not - that different pupils bring to history topics like the Holocaust, slavery, the Middle East, the history of religions and the War on Terror and none of this makes it easy for teachers. But, entirely unsurprisingly, it hopes that history teaching can “play a key role in helping young people understand the complexity and background to the world in which they are growing up in” (p3).
The passage that all the UK papers cherrypicked for their minor Shock!Horror! story is (p15):
FWIW, The Guardian’s headline (but not the report) inflated the first example to “Schools drop Holocaust lessons” in much the same way the Daily Mail’s report did. Unlike the Mail, they point out that the Holocaust is soon likely to be made a compulsory topic anyway. (The Express presumably found a Diana angle.)
Some posters might even find the report’s reading lists on specific historical topics useful for broadening their understanding. If they wanted to.
It looks just like all the stuff we used to get from “reformed” communists (or the Moody Bible Institute or Jack Chick getting “spoiled priests” to tell everyone about the horrors of Romish papism and its desire for world domination) back in the day. He, coming from the most extreme branch of Wahabbism, sees all of Islam through the filters that you enjoy using. (I note, for example, that he speaks of Shari’ah as though it was a single monolithic system rather than the multiple schools of philosophy that we already know exist.) I am sure that much of what he said is valid for varying percentages of the Muslim population.
Using his narrow perspective to extrapolate to “Islam,” however, is just silly. Let’s combat actual Muslim assaults on human rights where they occur without trying to pretend that there is some worldwide Muslim/Marxist/Romish plot to conquer the world. There certainly were some Marxists (for a limited time) and some Dominicans (for a limited time) and some Muslims (for a limited time) who actually believed in that stuff. But most of it is simply a good bogeyman to scare the uninformed into following restrictive policies on our own societies to “protect” us from “those people.”
The next time you hear the old line that “Islam is a religion of peace”, think about this. As related by Samuel P. Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996, Paperback 2003):
"Wherever one looks along the perimiter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbours. The question naturally rises as to whether this pattern of late twentieth-century conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim groups is equally true of relations between groups from other civilzations. In fact, it is not. Muslims make up about one-fifth of the world’s population but in the 1990s they have been far more involved in intergroup violence that the peoploe of any other civilization.(emphasis mine) The evidence is overwhelming.
1.“Muslims were participants in twenty-six of fifty ethnopolitical conflicts in 1993-1994 analyzed in depth by Ted Robert Gurr (Table 10.1). Twenty of these conflicts were between groups from different civilizations, of which fifteen were between Muslims and non-Muslims. There were, in short, three times as many intercivilizational conflicts involving Muslims as there were between all non-Muslim civilizations.”. (op. cit. pg. 256)(emphasis mine)
The question is not whether Islam is a militant, warlike, and agressive force in the world. Given the contents of the Koran, it could hardly be otherwise.
But the sad fact is that many of the people on SDMB who have reacted to my posts have fallen back on the specious argument of moral relativism. Sure Muslims have lots of conflicts going on, they say, conveniently brushing the facts aside as soon as it is admitted, but look at the bloody-minded Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition in the Americas, the colonization of Muslim countries by Europe and even the present oc cupation of Iraq.
Let westerners by all means wallow in their own, guilot, which is mainly historical and in the case of Iraq based on a stupid military reaction by a nation that is nontheless reacting to and traumatized by terrorism on an unprecedented scale (9-11).
While there is no denying that the Christian Crusaders “rode up to their stirrups in blood” when they massacred the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for instance, I do not know of a single school in the west that teaches that this was a good thing, nor have I heard of any campaigns in Chrsitian countries to wrest the Holy Land from the unbelievers.
Of course the Bible says that we should stone women taken in adultery and kill homosexuals and even people who work on the Sabbath. But apart from a few extreme nut cases like the KKK who call for executions of gays, do you know of any politician or clergyman in the west, no matter how right-wing or conservative, who has asked that these biblical provisions be enacted in law?
But all over the Muslim world, from Pakistan to the suburbs of Paris to Dearborn MI, Muslim children are, AS I WRITE THIS, being taught that theirs is a religion that is meant to replace all the others and that its ultimate victory will be the Islamization of the whole world.
Surah 9:123 O ye who believe! Fight those of the disbelievers who are near to you, and let them find harshness in you, and know that Allah is with those who keep their duty (unto Him).
4:74 Let those fight in the way of Allah who sell the life of this world for the other. Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward.
4:75 How should ye not fight for the cause of Allah and of the feeble among men and of the women and the children who are crying: Our Lord! Bring us forth from out this town of which the people are oppressors! Oh, give us from thy presence some protecting friend! Oh, give us from Thy presence some defender!
4:76 Those who believe do battle for the cause of Allah; and those who disbelieve do battle for the cause of idols. So fight the minions of the devil. Lo! the devil’s strategy is ever weak. Believers fight for Allah; disbelievers fight for the devil. So fight the minions of the devil.
4:77 Hast thou not seen those unto whom it was said: Withhold your hands, establish worship and pay the poordue, but when fighting was prescribed for them behold! a party of them fear mankind even as their fear of Allah or with greater fear, and say: Our Lord! Why hast Thou ordained fighting for us ? If only Thou wouldst give us respite yet a while! Say (unto them, O Muhammad): The comfort of this world is scant; the Hereafter will be better for him who wardeth off (evil); and ye will not be wronged the down upon a date-stone.
I could go on with dozens of similar quote from the Koran, which somehow manages to be violent, cruel, and yet incredibly boring and tedious. The question is simply, how could a religion that teaches that this book is the inerrant word of God to be studied and believed by all MUslims be anything but a society that breeds conflict, suicide bombers, terrorism and an arrogant and intolerant belief that they ar the only true faith, to which the entire world must eventually submit?
Yes, it is true, as a number of posters have pointed out, that one might say that Christian fundies and even atheists would like their view to prevail as much as Muslims would.
But unless you are so brainwashed by your own moral relativism that you can no longer see straight, are you seriously going to compare the bloody trail of suicide bombing, terrorism and interminable warfare inspired by Islam with the comic opera battles of fundies and secularists over hanging up the ten Commandments?
Have you seen any atheists who have blown themselves up in the town square to take out the local pastor when he was putting up a manger scene?
As Sam Harris says in The End of Faith (pg. 33) “Anyone who says that the doctrines of Islam have “nothing to do with terrorism” – and our airways have been filled with apologists for Islam making this claim – is just playing a game with words.”
Well, one way would be to read actual history and use one’s brain to note that for most of the history of Islam neither the conflicts not the intolerance were part of that history; note that the current terrorism arose among one specific sect of Islam, not from among all believers; note that each case of current Islamic related conflict is occurring in places where people are battling over resources (as people have always done) and that much (not all) of it has been a reaction against suppression or theft directed against Muslims earlier.
In other words, do not turn off one’s brain at the sight of the word “Islam.”
Actually, QG, it wasn’t a long time ago; it’s still going on. Those of you who live in the USA, or anywhere that the Catholic Church is a minority religion andrestricted by the Constitution in their behavior have no idea how the RCC behaves where they can get away with it. Here in Oaxaca, for example, there are at least 12,000 indigenous people (and at least another 20,000 in Chiapas) who have been driven from their homes by Catholics because they converted to Protestantism. A number have been killed, a lot more beaten or stoned- two Evangelist preachers were stoned to death two years ago- and this behavior has been repeatedly, publicly approved of by the Papal Nuncio. The various Cardinals have been asked many times to denounce the practice and have refused. We have also seen the Primate, Cardinal Rivera, send Opus Dei thugs to destroy works of art of which the Cardinal disapproved, and then publicly state that he approved of the destruction and planned to repeat it if any artist dared to “insult the Church” in any way. The RCC’s backing of the wealthy and powerful, including some of the most bloodthirsty and greedy dictators in history, is and has been public and obvious for centuries.
It’s not just the Muslims that will oppress anyone they don’t like.
Thanks a million for the article, Magellan. I will bookmark it. And thanks for your support.
I have indeed wondered if I was wasting my time. I was fully expecting the sort of moral relativist, knee-jerk political correctness that I am getting from most replies. OTOH I am actually surprised at the number of people supporting me, when you consider that I was expecting to be a lone voice crying in the wilderness.
But there is another reason I think this is worth the effort. While posters like Tomndeb and Miller and others will come up with the predictable responses, we do not know how many hundreds (dare I say thousands?) are reading this debate without posting anything themselves.
I do not mean to brag, but he point is that most people who post frequently on SDMB are pretty good writers. Believe it or not, my longer “rants” on this thread are knocked off in 10-15 minutes including time for necessary research in books and online. I imagine you are a pretty good writer too, as are Tomndeb and the others.
Posters, almost by definition, have probably already adopted a viewpoint. But readers are another matter. I do not mean the readers are stupid, but that their talents may not run to writing and posting a lot. I may have a facility in writing, but I can’t throw a baseball or sing a note. We all have our talents.
I am willing to hope that many readers following this thread began quite naturally thinking I am a nutjob bigot, but as the facts keep getting posted, they are at least willing to listen and think.
And when you get right down to it, getting people to think about what Islam really represents and how we can react to it is all I really wanted to accomplish in this thread. The bullshit about mobs with torches and pitchforks, deporting Muslims, putting them in concentration camps, etc. are all rantings by people like Tomndeb and others.
Another point that makes this thread worthwhile is the anonymity it affords. I can write these facts without fearing that I will get a Muslim at the door ready to avenge Allah.
I have been offered (and may accept) a position as a columnist for a twice-weekly newspaper in my area. The editor has promised me a fair amount of creative freedom, but do you think I could really bring out the arguments I am bringing out here without some no-balls editor getting terrified at the first threat and telling me can’t print stuff like that?
Come to think of it, the anonymity of the internet must indeed be frustrating for many Muslims, who used to have a very effective and direct way of dealing with their critics. Somehow, smashing the computer screen and shouting “Allahu achbar” just doesn’t cut it. 
Yeah, but since you quoted this at us:
…as if it were something that anyone on this board (or, for that matter, this planet) had ever advocated, I thought I’d just play along with your game.
I wish you would read Sam Harris, if you have not already done so. He has a fairly long passage on the liberal delusion that it is our fault if the Muslims hate us, for having controlled them through colonialism etc. One might just as easily say that the peoples of the Balkans are justified in hating Mulsims because of the centuries of conquest, occupation and control by the Ottoman Turks, or that the people of India are justified in hating Muslims because of the centuries of conquest and rule by the Islamic Mogul Emperors.
If it is true that “each case of current Islamic related conflict is occurring in places where people are battling over resources (as people have always done)” as you allege, Tom, then it is indeed an odd coincidence that Muslims are located in areas of disputed resources so much more aften than any other civilization. As Samuel P. Huntington notes (Clash of Civilizations, p. 256-57):
"(An in-depth analsis by Ted Robert Gurr revealed that) There were. . . .three times as many intercivilizational conflicts involving Muslims as there were conflicts between non-Muslim civilizations. . . . . . . .
(and also) "Of the six wars in which Gurr estimates that 200,000 or more people were killed, three (Sudan, Bosnia, East Timor) were between Muslims and non-Muslims, two (Somalia, Iraq-Kurds) were between Muslims, and only one (Angola) involvedd only non-Muslims.
“In yet another analysis, Ruth Leger Sivard identified twenty-nine wars (defined as conflicts involving 1000 or more deaths in a year) under way in 1992. Nine of twlve intercivilizational conflicts were between Muslims and non-Muslims, and Muslims were once again fighting more wars than people from any other civilization.”
When Britain and France controlled many Muslim countries in the last couple of centuries, and before petroleum became a major trump card in the world’s economy, Muslim fanaticism was capable of very much less than today.
But the idea that Islam suddenly stopped being a philosphy of agression and war about 100 years after the death of Mohammed is knee-jerk political correctness in the extreme. The battle or Tours and driving the Moors out of Spain in the 1400s, as well as the halting of Turkish advances in Austria, had a lot more to do with making Islam temporarily a religion of “peace”.
What has NOT changed in all that time are the agressive an warlike declarations of the Koran, many of which I have quotd in other posts, which are still taught today to hundreds of millions of Muslim students as the inerrant word of God.
So you are saying that the Palestinian suicide bombers, Al-Fatah, Hamas, the people who carried out 9-11, the bombings in the London subways, the bombings on Spanish trains, the bombing of the Bali nightclub, the people who blow themsleves up almost daily in Iraq, the people who bombed sites in India and Kashmir over the past few years, the people who terrorize non-Muslims in the Philippines, the terrorists who blow up Americans and Canadians in Afghanistan, the people who kidnap and kill social aid workers and journalists in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan, the central Asian Muslim groups who massacred Russian schoolchildren and bombed sites in Russia, the guys who slit Daniel Pearl’s throat on TV. . . . . . every man Jack of them is a member of one single sect? Care to tell me which one?
It seems to me that when Shiites and Sunnis blow each other up with terrorist bombs, by definition, more than one sect is involved.
If what you’re thinking of is this thread (“Bringing a Bible into Saudi Arabia”), then you recall wrongly.
What was widely condemned in that thread was not Christians who legally bring Bibles for their own use into Muslim countries, nor Christians who openly protest or challenge the laws in some Muslim countries against Christian proselytization. Rather, the condemnation was directed at Christians who attempt to illegally and secretly smuggle Bibles into places like Saudi Arabia in order to engage in illegal and secret proselytization, and then try to invoke the idea of civil disobedience in the name of religious freedom when they get caught.
Civil disobedience in the name of religious freedom means openly disobeying a repressive law and taking the consequences. Bible-smuggling covert missionaries may be heroes of the church and martyrs for Jesus for all I know, but they are not practicing civil disobedience.
Therefore, there is no inconsistency in the viewpoints you were attempting to find an “ironic” contrast between. Nobody is suggesting that Christians who want to bring Bibles into Islamic countries should “just shut up”, any more than gays in the US who want to adopt children or Muslims who want their fellow Muslims not to eat ham should “just shut up”. Everybody should obey the law (or else violate it openly and peacefully as an act of civil disobedience), but nobody’s being told not to express objections to laws they don’t like, however wrong-headed their objections may seem to some other people.
But nobody here is making any kind of excuses for “Islamism” or advocating any “toleration of atrocities under the umbrella of relativism”. Everybody here is firmly opposed to theocratic-extremist Islamism and the repression it uses to enforce its fundamentalist code.
The only place we part company with anti-Islam bigots like you and Valteron is when it comes to your desperate insistence that theocratic-extremist repressive fundamentalist Islamism is the same thing as the religion of Islam in general.
The Muslim ex-terrorist you cited seems to have enough basic common sense to draw a reasonable distinction between specific entities like “Salafism”, “radical Islam”, and “Islamism” on the one hand, and Islam per se on the other. I wish you and Valteron would emulate him in grasping that simple concept.
The fact that Valteron and you have to keep resorting to such a feeble strawman argument is proof of the weakness of your position. If we actually were making excuses for theocratic-extremist Islamist atrocities and repression, you’d be right to complain about it. But we’re not.
All we’re saying is that Islam as a whole does not equal its subset of theocratic-extremist Islamism. Both you and Valteron seem quite intelligent enough to understand this; I can only conclude that you prefer to keep denying it because, as I noted before, what you really care about is not actually defending Western values, but just insulting Muslims.
Well, I certainly hope you’ll try, and I hope that your editor will be willing to print what you write. Your uninformed and bigoted arguments may unfortunately temporarily reinforce the prejudices of the ignorant and the unthinking, but they will also cause more intelligent and better-informed readers to turn away from your views in disgust.
And promoting disgust among intelligent people for uninformed and bigoted anti-Islam views is good for the cause of reasoned and thoughtful debate on the issue of Islam and modern society. So, best of luck with your literary efforts!
More importantly, people were objecting because the actions of these missionaries put the lives of genuine aid workers at increased risk, and made it more difficult for other aid workers to gain entry to the country, as all such groups came under suspicion of being fronts for Christian missionaries.
That is the choice, eh?
It seems that whenever someone ties to point out the clear bigotry in Valteron’s posts he loads up the thread with examples of sexism/homophobia/intolerance from Muslims.
So, I ask you Valteron, is that the trade off? To defend women and gays we all must turn into bigots? There really isn’t any middle ground. A place where we can call out those who practice discrimination against women, gays and YES, Muslims too?
If you think you can use my disgust of sexism or homophobia as a tool to get me to lash out at Muslims. You are mistaken. My only sadness is that you might win some weak minded converts.
I’m one who has been reading this debate without posting. And you’ve made a good point that people who subscribe to a fundamentalist, expansionist version of Islam are not only a threat to their own countries, but to countries all over the globe.
What is a shame is that nobody disagrees with you. So, rather than getting anywhere in the last few pages, you continue to knock down strawman arguments gleaned from far left wackos. It is certainly easy to do, and may be just perfect for a column, but it isn’t very successful in an actual debate.
You are right, Kimstu, that I am quite able to understand that there are different opinions in Islam. And I also understand that that is an artificial distinction and a convenient cop-out. The more you allow that distinction to operate, the more you blind yourself to the big picture of Islam.
Read what I have posted above, regarding all the wars and conflicts Islam is carrying on throughout the world. Read about how Muslims, with one fifth of the human population, are involved in conflicts out of all proportion to their numbers. Tell me if you see a global pattern.
The distinction you make is unhelpful and dangerous, because Muslims are not issued membership cards that say either “Nice, moderate Muslim” or “Evil, theocratic-extremist Muslim”. And I will remind you again that my thread is entitled “Defending western values against the attack of Islam”, not against individual Muslims.
The comaprison I made before with Nazi Gemany still stands. Millions upon millions of Germans were Nazi party members at the height of Nazi power. Were they all necessarily war-mongering, racist genocidal sadists? I doubt it. Some joined to protect their jobs once Hitler came to power. Others were “born into it” in the sense that they may have been born in 1928, say, and by 1941, knew of nothing other than a god-like leader who had vanquished German’s enemies and made Germany great.
Were some Nazi Party members (or pro-Hitler Germans) nice people? I have no doubt of it. Simple logic tells us that out of a nation of about 80 million, perhaps millions of Germans who were either Nazis or Nazi supporters were also kind, gentle, loving decent people. But people in Nazi Germany were not issued cards saying “nice German” and “nasty German”. And yes, there were entire ranges of opinion among Germans, even if it was often unhealthy to express some of them.
But the fact remains that those people were imbued and indoctrinated into a vicious, warmongering, murderous, racist philosphy that masqueraded as righteousness and common sense and the destiny of the Aryan race.
It is neither harder nor easier to believe that there is an Aryan master race with a destiny to exterminate other races and rule the world than it is to believe that God taught an illiterate caravan driver named Mohamed to read in one night and gave him a mission to fight until all the world is brought under Islam.
I just said that Muslims cannot be neatly divided into “nice” and “evil theocrats”. No doubt their opinions run from theocrat fundamentalists like the Taliban to some Muslims so liberal you would think they were New England Democrats.
But look at the whole picture of Islam and what do you see? Where were the Muslims defending the right of those papers to publish the Mohamed cartoons? Okay, maybe you can trot out one or two, but what was the overall reaction in the Muslim world? It was anger because they simply cannot understand why we would put Freedom of the Press in capital letters and hold it higher than the Prophet of Allah.
No matter how nice they would like to be, it is difficult to impossible to be a devout Muslim and to embrace western ideals.
As Sam Harris says in “The End of Faith”:
“The reality is that the West currently enjoys far more wealth and temporal power than any nation under Islam is viewed by devout Muslims as a diabolical perversity, and this situation will always stand as an open invitation for jihad. Insofar as a person is Muslim – that is, insofar as he believes that Islam constitutes the only viable path to God and that the Koran enunciates it perfectly – he will feel contempt for any man or woman who doubts the truth of his beliefs.”
To be sure, your Protestant fundamentalist neighbour may feel the same about you if you are a Catholic or an atheist. But we in the west, fatigued and disgusted by centuries of religious fanaticism, have worked out a system involving separation of Church and State, secularization, and the firm belief that religious opinion is a perfectly private matter. And it woks largely beause most westerners, whether they claim membership in a church or not, simply do not care that much about religion.
Essentially, western democratic states declare, without saying so in so many words, that all religious opinions are equally true and equally false, and that none is better than another. It is true that this principle is not followed perfectly. The British Monarchs are crowned in an Anglican Church, not a Synagogue or an RCC Church. American dollar bills declare the existence of God.
But Islam simply does not operate along those lines. We are sick and tired or religious conflict. Some Chrsitians may still look forward to winning the whole world for Jesus, but if we can be honest for a moment, I think most of us in the west regard them as fanatic nutbars.
But the idea that the entire world is meant to be won for Islam is still a perfactly mainstream and current idea in the Islamic world. Not to believe in the fundamental rightness and superiority of Islam is to not be a Muslim.
It is not impossible that some Muslims may adapt to our western values and remain Muslims. But all I am saying is that the west must understand what it is up against with Islam as a whole. All of the examples I have given in all my posts, from ham sandwiches to locker rooms for the circumcised to war after bloody war between Muslims and their neighbours in dozens of countries are all part of the bigger picture we need to look at.
If you want to bury your head in the sand, think that Muslims are just another religion like Methodists but with funny head scarves, and pretend that everything I have said is bigotry, go ahead.
I regret that the earlier part of this thread got hijacked into discussions of which countries murder gays and opress women. While the points I made in this regard are in my opinion quite valid, they are only part of the bigger picture. But homophobia and sexism in Islam are just two of the distrurbing trends in this religion, and do not deserve all the attention.
If you will read some of my later postings today, I think you will see it is not that simple. I would also recommend you read *The End of Faith * by Sam Harris and *The Clash of Civilizations * by Samuel P. Huntington.
You might also profit from reading the blog of terrorism expert Daniel Pipes here
And, although it is an old article, (2003) don’t miss the piece about “The Islamic Society of Boston & the Politicians’ Red Faces” here . After Boston politicians hailed a new Islamic centre being built something that would “help to create a dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims so we may learn more about each others’ traditions.” they found out what some of those “traditions” involved.
Phil, it is easy to yell “bigot”. It is easy to qualify those who agree with me as “weak-minded”. It is another to think this whole business through.