With all due respect and as politely as this claim desrves: bullshit.
You have not posted throughout this thread that Islam has become a threat or that Islam is going through a dangerous phase or that today Islam is dangerous. Your entire thesis for six and a half pages is that Islam is intrinsically disordered and we must guard against its very evil nature.
In fact, directly following your quote of Huntington, you posted
That is a declaration of what Islam must be, not an observation regarding its current status. Later in the same post, you claim
This, again, is a declaration of how (in your view) Islam is–previously, now, and in the future (while conveniently ignoring long periods of peace and current peaceful regions of Islam, today).
Sorry, the fact that you could go back over thirteen hours after our initial exchange is to dig out the the “current” nature of Huntington’s remarks in order to retroactively plead a distortion of your position does not, in fact, indicate that I have attibuted anything to you incorrectly. It appears that you are simply more desperate to squirm out of beng caught in your own thesis.
Oh, and speaking of distorting the words of others:
I did not fault the studies or the authors as I have no idea what their purpose was. They may have been perfectly appropriate to some specific purpose. I fault you for cherry-picking specific studies and extrapolating (and now back-pedalling like mad) some grand and insupportable claim about Islam.
For some reason, you implied that the authors of the studies carefully waited until Islamic nations were no longer under colonial control and could engage in their own “brawls” before making these studies. This rather preposterous suggestion of Islamophobic malice on the part of Ted Robert Gurr and Ruth Leger Sivard does not seem borne out by any evidence.
I replied that they anaylsed conflicts going on in the early 1990s. They are given in Huntington’s 1996 book. Huntington cites them in support of his contention that modern Islamic Nations and communities seem to have a lot of trouble getting along with their neighbours. His book is an anlysis of present and future trends.
In other words, the first part of my post was quotes from Huntington and the analyses that he quotes about he present nature of Islamic violence an conflict.
The second part of my post was my observation that Islamic thought and the Koran in particular very much approve of violence and jihad. I quoted extensively from the Koran to prove my point.
The first and second parts of my post were logically related in terms of subject matter but were two separate ideas.
Is there some SDMB rule that every posting can contain only one idea?
Please do not accuse people of “squirming” when you have not correctly read or interpreted the flow of their ideas and they make an attempt to explain them to you.
I am sitting here quite unsquirmingly, I assure you!
But it depends how you defiine the terms you’re using here. It is possible that a religion be intrinsically flawed and for those flaws to not show themselves 100% of the time. A better test would probably be if it repeatedly fell into similar expressions of its flaw(s) over the millenia. Don’t you think that the discussion must necessarily look for patterns in the past? And since no one has claimed that Islam is evil or bad 100% of the time, doesn’t it make perfect sense that attention is paid to those times when it was abusive, murderous, and barbaric. I think that Jeffrey Dahlmer had many, many times more days when he was not killiong or eating someone then when he did.
I don’t think this is fair. I doubt anyone would argue that Valteron was merely interested in discussion having to do with the past. His thread title itself frames the debate in the present. A look to the past 1400 years of the religion seems perfectly in bounds without reverting the argument exclusively to the historical.
Oh, question about this back-pedaling accusation. True or not (I say it is not), would you say this is more of an attempt of poisining the well or an ad hominem attack?
I made no slur on any of the authors. I pointed out that by shaping dates and ignoring ourtside circumstances, one could draw any number of different conclusionds without coming close to the truth. It appears that you were the one shaping the dates and ignoring the outside circumstances, not the poor authors who you dragged in to support your claim. So be it. They are now free from taint (as long as no new evidence arises to indicate that they were behaving as you are).
I implied no mailce or Islamaphobia on the part of any author. You did not provide any context for the studies and I noted that by shaping dates, one could arrive at predeterined conclusions. If all they happened to be doing was documenting a brief period in history for some different specific purpose, then the onus falls upon you for abusing their studies. If they did, indeed, run out to gather "proof’ that “Muslims” were evil, then my point stands.
Probably true. Some people are simply unaware of when they should be uncomfortable regarding their behavior.
No, actually, that is not that at all, Your opinion, apparently, is that more vigilance is necessary. You have neither given any explanation of what you mean by this, nor are you willing to explain how we are not sufficiently vigilant at present. I ask this not because I am trying to score debating points with you, but because I simply have no earthly clue what you are talking about.
Since you refuse to answer a simple question, I will therefore presume that your only intent in posting this nebulous opinion was to express bigotry toward muslims. Have a nice day yourself.
Right. All his claims about how Islam can only be violent and abusive are simply framing statements that can be overlooked when we have periods of peace and trotted out again when there is conflict.
That is just silly.
Not a claim in there about “Muslims today.” It is a persistent claim that Islam has an inherent problem that is intrinsic to it for all time that cannot be changed.
I would say that it is a fair response to the numerous posts by **Valteron[/n] in this thread that have falsely accused several different posters of being apologists for the abuses of Islam. Since you have not cchallenfged him on any of those misstatements, I can only conlude that you are attempting, here, to either hurl an ad hominen attack or poison the well of the discussion.
Afraid not. The default is for a religion to not be murderous, so that gets the attention when they are. Your tactic is an attempt to prevent assessment of the religion. We could look to all the peaceful eras in the religion and compare them to the peaceful times of Quakerism and Buddhism and guess what: the three are equally peaceful! Okay, everyone can go home now. That is absurd, we look to the murderous, barbaric behavior and judge, the same way we look to the behavior of those in society like Dahmer, Manson, and Bundy.
Whether the problems with the religion are intrinsic is the part of the deabte. Whether it can be changed or not is a question for Muslims. As per my article, some are trying. In the meantime, the sentient among us are right to try to identify threats in order to avoid the atrocities before they happen. That’s true whether that threat comes from Muslims, Skinheads, the KKK, Phelps and his crowd, or liberals running for office.
NICE! That’s why you’re the Master. If you’d only put your amazing powers to use for good…
Now I must have missed where he falsely accused people for being apologists for the abuses of Islam. But I very well might have missed it, perhaps you can point them out. I recall that he accused people (as do I) of being apologists for the religion in general, and either intentionally or unintentionally giving cover to those who do abuse it. Again, the article I supplied makes that point rather well.
Tomndeb’s theory as stated above is interesting, and it also fills the need to make the west the guilty party. It is WE, the west who treat them harshly. It is OUR fault.
The analogy with Catholic immigrants to America between 1850 and 1950 is interesting, but like all analogies is it not a perfect fit.
Our western society in 1850 and 1950 was not the same as our society today. Protestants and Catholics in 1850 and even 1950 had a centuries-old, fully developed and deeeply rooted loathing for one another, already created in the old world. And by the way, I assume you are willing to admit that the Catholics arriving in mainly Protestant America were not somehow marvellously free of anti-Protestant feeling. :dubious:
There have indeed been Muslims in western countries, and Mosques as well, for decades. Did you know that the Al Rashid Mosque in Edmonton, Alberta dates from 1938?(see here)
The mosque in my city in Canada was built in the 1970s. At the time, I remember not a word of anti-Muslim hostility from other Canadians. Local suburbanites said they enjoyed the “exotic” touch that the graceful minaret and Islamic architecture added to their street.
While I am not naive enough to pretend that western democracies are bigotry-free zones, I DO believe bigorty is far less acceptable now than it was during the period of heavy Catholic immigration from 1850 to 1950. It is because bigotry is so unacceptable that posters who have no good arguments against me fall back on the strategy of yelling “bigorty” at me.
The Muslim immigrants who arrived in the west up to about 1990 were by and large people who were prepared for the west and its cultural values. And if they were not, they were present in such small numbers that they had to learn to adapt and accept, period.
Much of the Muslim immigration to France decades ago was the result of he French decolonization of Algeria and Tunisia. The people who came over were often termed “Les Français musulmans”, implying that they were both, and indeed they were often of mixed parentage as well as culture. Some had to leave, but others took one look at what life would be like in an indpendent Muslim society and decided they liked the values of France.
If France was the haven of anti-Islamic bigots that it is now being made out to be, one wonders how it is that all of these people got along in French society.
Tomndeb is perfectly right to attribute the problem to RECENT immigration.
But instead of using knee-jerk political correctness to make the western society responsible for the backlash, let’s look at another theory.
The recent Muslim immigrant comes to the west for economic reasons. But this is the very crux of the problem. As Sam Harris says in “The End of Faith”:
“The reality 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. . . .” (op. cit., pg. 32)
In other words, the Muslim immigrant arrives seeking a better material life, but armed with a political, moral and religious philosophy so foreign to western culture that he cannot help but be stunned by the culture shock.
Back home, when his daughter asked him why she should wear a hijab, he would tell her that any respectable woman who is not a slut or a whore covers her hair outside he home. But if he looks out the window in the west, he and his daughter can see five of her schoolmates off to the mall bareheaded, without one of them being a slut or a whore.
All his life, he has lived in a society where homosexuality is an abomination and homosexuals are flogged, imprisoned, entrappd and even put to death. He turns on the TV in the west and he sees Will and Grace and Rosie O’Donnell. He reads that a handful of western countries have actually allowed homosexuals to form legal marriages.
All his life, he has believed what the Koran says about men and women: Surah 4:34 Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded.
But he gets a job in a company where the chief executive is a single woman who has control over 100 men and 50 women who work together.
All his life he has been told that sex and pregnancy out of wedlock are so horrible that some cultures in Islam even accept the murder of family members who transgress these laws. But in the west, TV shows and movies show Murphy Brown and charcters on “Friends” as getting preganant out of wedlock without a word or condemnation. As to sex outside marriage, it is almost a given. One day, the single, female CEO of his company is reported to have had herself voluntarily impregnated because she WANTS to be a single parent.
By this time, Abu’s head is ready to explode.
All his life, he has been told that religion is necesssary for morality and that without the puritanical laws of Islam, society would fall apart.
But here is the west, filled with perfctly moral atheists who behave no worse than anyone else, and who hold the “March of Godless Americans” in Washington.
Here he is in the west, where he wants to stay becuse he is making far more money than he could ever make in his Islamic homeland.
But here he is faced with a quandry: Either he dumps much of his Islamic blief and accepts that it was all puritnical bullshit and repressive theocracy, or else he clings harder than ever to pure, conservative Islam. If he accpts the second, then he MUST view the west as incredibly corrupt.
A secular culture is nothing more than a culture of infidls. Gay rights is no progress and freedom, it is legalized filth by people who have lost all moral sense. Western women are not free, they are sex dolls competing for the next man to knock them up. Andso on and so on he goes, wedded to the west’s material posperity and freedom, but despising the culture he lives in.
Every day, he must assert himself to validate his Mulim belifs.
For example, we now have cases of Mulims in England refusing to use the disinfectant hand lotion that all visitors to hospitals are required to use. Why? Because it contains alcohol!See the Sun article here
Did we know this would happen when we let thse people in? How do we get out of this mess?
And BTW, France is NOT my whipping boy. I admire the courage of French politicians who have passed law to defnd secularlism such as the banning of ALL overt religious displays in public schools, including hijabs.
No pitchforks, no mobs, no torches, no concentration camps. Just firmness from a western society that can stand up for itslf.
If you will please look at your own posting, #302, Tom, you will see that what you said in your exact words is this:
"Or did these studies carefully wait until enough Muslim dominated nations had finally gotten out from under colonial control so that they could engage in their own brawls."
So I guess we are both wrong. What you alleged was that the “studies” carefully waited, not the analysts. It was those sneaky studies, sitting on the shelves, that hate Muslims and carefully waited for just the right moment to discredit the Islamic world by picking a year when they had most of the conlicts. Damned studies! Sitting there on the shelf, biding their time.
If the studues were not doing the waiting, who did Tom? The analysts? And why did they “carefully” wait? Is there not some suggestion of a willful attempt to skew the facts by waiting to collect facts at just the right moment?
Surely you are not saying that I carefully waited and arranged the timing of these studies, are you? I do not even know Gurr or Sivard, the two analysts I quoted. I certainly do not control the timing of their research.
I will admit one thing I did wrong. If you will go back to my post you will see that I clearly identified the research by Sivard as being from 1992. But in trying to shorten a rather long passage about Gurr’s research with the use of (. . . . . ), I should nonethless have included the fact that the wars he is examining were in 1993-94. In fact, I thought I had included those dates when I originally posted. But I made up for this lack by telling you as soon as you asked.
So can we put this particular sub-argument over nothing to bed?
Weather report: The large area of low pressure on the left side of Tom’s teapot is in danger of turning into a full tempest with gale-force winds and high waves.
So, you recognize that your abuse of the data was so horrendous that you now have to hijack the thread with word games to avoid studying the actual situation?
The corpus of your posts in this thread, Valteron, show that you wish for Western societies “to defend themselves against Islam.” You have clearly stated that Muslims are a danger. And you have refused to ask the pointed question I posed.
The remainder of Valteron’s wholly imaginary scenario created to make him feel good about his beliefs snipped.
I notice, however, that you have repeated your false claim that I have claimed that any particular phenomenon is OUR (or anyone’s) “fault.” That is one of the falsehoods you have repeated throughout this thread that magellan01 has filtered out of his reading.
You have drawn the rather silly inference that the presence of Muslims is–because of the nature of Islam–a cause of strife in France. I look at the same situation, include all the relevant information (including the information provided by clairobscur that you are afraid to read), and note that there is a cultural conflict in which both sides engage that is exactly analogous to similar conflicts at other times and other places that did not involve any Muslims, at all.
You first ascribe the conflict to Islam without showing how Islam makes the situation different than any similar situation. You then pretend that I have assigned blame to “us” when I have done no such thing so that you can repeat your well-poisoning (or is that ad hominem–ask magellan01), attacks on my point while avoiding addressing the issue.
And, in order to do that, you invent a whole scenario out of your own imagination.
Ahh , yes. Pointing out that your preconceived notion of how multiple cultures in multiple locations across the entire world are involved with a Borg-like attempt to suppress the entire world are not supported by facts and that you are willing to overlook (or deliberately misinterpret) any contrary information is “nitpicking.”
Well, you would know about reaching, Tom. Look, this discussion now VERRRY long and I have to get going up to my country home for the Easter break. The rest of you don’t need my permission to keep on going with the discussion (or you can just send a bunch of butt-kissing emails about how the god-like Tomndebb trounced me seven ways from Sunday, yadda, yadda, yadda.)
Of course my hasty exit cannot possibly because I am sick and tired of repeating the same thing to the deaf. It really means I am running away in shame and utter defeat having been crushed by the immutable weight of Truth and Logic. (Note for those who don’t understand: I am being sarcastic here: See the litle :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:)
And yes, Elizabeth, in answer to your question I have accepted the offer of a local newspaper to write a twice-weekly opinion column on socio-political issues. If you want to make some crack about the quality of my writing, or my thinking, now is the time.
The editor says I will have a lot of creative freedom, so let’s see what happens.
I want to thank you all for giving me this chance to hone som of my ideas an to do some research on this important topic.
And remember: If the Easter Bunny brings you raisins, don’ eat 'em!
