Er, I get the intent of this story, but the regulator needing to be sent a letter explaining matters rather than not just finding out themselves does paint them in rather a bad light. I mean, presumably they read the correspondence before that point, and found no Nazi-esque sentiments. I’m not really sure you can put this down to not involving racism at some level.
The correspondence was simply a cover letter on an application for a zoning amendment to permit construction of a community hall, so not the sort of place you’d typically find Nazi sympathies expressed, even by people who held them.
I put it down to ignorance and misunderstanding rather than racism; the regulator was affability itself once they knew they were dealing with Hindus rather than White Supremacists. Of course, a single in-person meeting would have shown them that; our clients were from South India.
I wasn’t suggesting that.
Or… reading the cover letter, no? Or the application? I presume “Hindu temple and community center” were somewhere on there, at least. And that the signature was presumably followed by the name of the group represented other than just the word “Aryans”?
9/11 was the single greatest terrorist attack on the United States. It did 1/2 trillion dollars of damage to the economy. Beyond that we spend billions of dollars in the effort to prevent it.
Gnats ? You’re barking mad.
Compared to the self inflicted damage of the pointless war in Iraq, even 9/11 was almost nothing.
We do far more damage to ourselves than they do, when we overestimate the threat.
You made a completely bogus statement about Islamic terrorists being gnats in the face of the worst attack in the history of the country.
9/11 consisted of a handful of people with box knives. Your gnats now have millions of dollars at their disposal and are anxious to kill themselves spending it.
All that’s off topic as it relates to the thread.
Mohammad specifically outlawed homosexuality and it carried severe penalties. There is no interpretation of his words or actions regarding this.
The gay community appreciates your concern. For the first time now that you can pin it on Islam.
I wonder how most people would feel if you said that to them. Tell that to the families of involuntary terror victims, rather than parents of voluntary soldiers. That’s not to demean either, but 9/11 was far worse in terms of the effect on the country’s psyche and families and friends of casualties.
September 11 was an attack on America. The Iraq War was not. The end.
Whoa! My bad. My memory failed me. Alzheimer’s moment. This was a Krishna Temple, not a mosque. I apologize for getting the story wrong.
The moral lesson, of course, is the same: the city was applying Freedom of Religion in a preferential way, discriminating against a minority faith.
How does this further the argument? “9/11 was bad, the Iraq war was worse.” That doesn’t diminish 9/11 one bit. It just means one was worse than the other. They were both bad.
One was carried out by Islamic extremists.
One was carried out by “Christians” pretending to “defend” us from a secular state in the name of fighting Islamic terrorists, (and creating a situation in which actual Islamic terrorists can inflict more harm on us).
In that context, all the panic about “Islamic” terrorism is demonstrably stupid when it is actually a combination of a limited number of Islamists, (not “Islam”) and our own stupidity.
Right. A wasp sting that inflicts pain and a week or two of itching is far more dangerous to the nation, as a whole, than simply pointing a shotgun filled with 00 buckshot at one’s leg and pulling the trigger.
The WTC/Pentagon attacks resulted in just under 3,000 deaths. The military deaths in Iraq numbered just under 4,500–meaning Iraq cast us more in straight up body count. Beyond that, the harm to the U.S. in lost international influence compared to the sympathy extended to the U.S. for the WTC/Pentagon attacks is massively disproportional. The cost of actual materiel loss is orders of magnitude higher in the Iraq war than in the WTC/Pentagon attacks. Beyond that, there are the (mostly self-inflicted) injuries to the U.S. military in which it treated returning wounded soldiers as malingerers for the first ten years of the conflict along with any future harm that ISIS may inflict on us (since we created the situation that permitted ISIS to arise).
You are so caught up in your irrational hatred of Islam that you do not appear to even understand the actual situations and their results.
if you really want to parse this, consider; 3000 people died in a span of 2 hours on September 11, 2001. The Iraq War occurred over 8 years; the death toll per minute, hour, day, week, month, season, year, decade was far lower in Iraq than on September 11, 2001.
Also, September 11 was a complete surprise to everyone; the Iraq War wasn’t.
The Iraq War was not done to promote Christianity’s cause, spread Christianity, for Jesus Christ, or a world order dictated exclusively from the teachings of Christ. You’re the one so caught up in the progressive line that you lose sight of what actually IS vs. some false notion of making up “equality.” If you’re trying to make 9/11 and the Iraq War some kind of moral equivalents, you’ve basically shown the world the caricature of a Michael Moore-type.
Death tolls “by the minute” are meaningless.
I am not the one trying to make them equivalent. You are the one who tried the “equivalency” nonsense with your utterly silly claim that the WTC/Pentagon attacks were worse than the Iraq war in terms of its affect on the nation.
Far more citizens have been harmed in the Iraq War: injured military, the failure to support those wounded, the families who have to tend those under-supported wounded, the billions of tax dollars wasted on an unnecessary war, the creation of conditions that promote the rise of ISIS, the loss of moral rectitude in the lies told to promote the war, the loss of ethics or morality with the acceptance of torture, the tolerance of mindless hatred toward people based on religion, etc. And you want to evade those issues by setting up some sort of meaningless “death by the minute” evaluation.
And your evasion of religious responsibility also fails. The WTC/Pentagon attack was not done to promote a “Islam’s cause” but to get the U.S. to stop supporting the House of Saud–a political goal that happened to have religious overtones, but that did nothing to promote Islam. (And even if one decides to pretend that it was a religious cause, it would not have been the cause of Islam, but the cause of Wahhabism. By your logic, the European religious wars of the late Medieval and early Renaissance periods were undertaken for the cause of Christianity.)
But is the claim of an inerrant and perfect text not something “intrinsic in Islam”? and does that persisting claim in the modern era mark it out as a very different kettle of fish to the other major religions?
I’ve not seen anyone make the claim that the koran will magically turn every reader into a terrorist, nor that every muslim is a violent homophobe.
However I can see how a group of 1.6 billion, mostly peaceful and kind people, all generally accepting that a text is perfect, unchangeable and divine can provide a direct line to, and tacit approval of, greater levels of intolerance and bigotry (if that text already has problematic content.)
This was the case in previous christian eras and has been repeated throughout history with any number of other ideologies. Get a large enough number of people, provide them with a ideology or authority that is not to be questioned, throw in a charismatic figurehead for good measure and await for (or create) an opportunity (sectarian, political, military, financial…it doesn’t matter) and…Boom! Adolf’s yer uncle.
Remove any one of those factors and you will lessen or even avoid the bad shit happening. However, for islam the absolute divinity of the text is built in and accepted by a large number of believers. That provides a shorter and easier walk from mainstream to extremist. That is not to say that such a journey is likely, or that other groups cannot make such a walk within their own ideologies, just that…when other conditions are ripe…it is easier.
Say I write a book and claimed it was absolutely correct and perfect. If a group decided to live their life and create society according to that text and by doing so caused mayhem then I can either give up claiming it is perfect and admit the errors or accept that the group is partly my responsibility. You can’t have it both ways.
Lest it be unclear, I think that the islamic world will be less prone to groups such as ISIS if it were to take the former path. i.e. officlally discard the idea that the koran is perfect. I’m aware that there is no equivalent to the pope in islam to offer such “official” decrees and by doing so offer a worldwide influence so that may well be a problem…again, is that structure (or lack of) not something also “instrinsic to islam”? A dead figurehead with an unchanging message of questionable content does not sound like a promising starting point for everlasting peace and tolerance.
This would’ve worked better as a rhetorical question, with the questioner already knowing the answer to be “no”. The rest of your post is stunning in how you’ve managed to avoid so many issues already address in this very thread as to why it is not Islam that drives homophobic violence.
Worst attack? Utter bullshit. Pearl Harbor was far, far more damaging to the nation than 9/11. We were under attack from a country that actually was an existential threat. The terrorists aren’t even close to an existential threat.
And all they’ve managed is inspiring idiots to shoot people in public places. That’s a terrible thing, but it’s a statistical blip even if we only compare it to gun crime in America, much less actual threats to America’s security.
Sure there is – there are many other quotes about forgiveness, kindness, peacefulness, etc., just as there are in the Bible. It’s trivially easy to find passages in the Quran that support a peaceful and tolerant way of life – and many Muslims, especially American Muslims, have done so.
Are you kidding? After 9/11 the country was united, at least for a time. Enlistments into the military skyrocketed (I had signed up for the Navy a few months before 9/11, but I saw the recruitment numbers in the aftermath). The entire world looked on us with sympathy and was ready to assist us.
Compare this to the Iraq war – not only were far more Americans killed, but orders of magnitudes more American lives were shattered – by injuries both physical and psychological. Enlistments into the military plummeted. National unity splintered, and the economy went into the toilet. Hundreds of billions of dollars were wasted. The world no longer was so favorably inclined to us, and lost their sympathy for us, because of our massive stupidity.
The Iraq war was more damaging to America than anything since the Vietnam war. It will take decades more to recover from that blunder, one of the worst in American history. Military recruitment still hasn’t recovered, meaning that the services can’t be nearly as selective.
Yes – an attack by pissants that killed many, but united us and inspired the world’s sympathy. The self-inflicted wound of the Iraq war damaged us for a generation or more.
That was part of the name of the group: the ‘Vedic Aryans’ wanted to build the ‘Vedic Aryan Cultural Centre’. Evidently, the regulator did not know what a “Vedic Aryan” was, they just saw the term “Aryan” and jumped to conclusions.
It has been more than 20 years, so I can’t remember exactly what they put on the form. I don’t think they ever used the actual term “Hindu” anywhere. Nor the term “temple”; rather, a “mandir”. Again, presumably the regulator had no idea what that was and was disinclined to look it up.
That the answer is “no” is not clear at all from this thread, that specific question has not been asked and clearly answered though the subject has been touched upon. And it is certainly not rhetorical as I’m interested to know the answer.
The rest of my post was pulling together some observations and thoughts on why it may be that islam in the modern world remains appears to be more prone to extremism than other major religions. I am allowed to take other points already made and debated and put them into a coherent whole and I’m not obliged to counter all other arguments made.
If you think it is merely repetition then feel free to ignore it, If your opinion is that I’m wide of the mark then please do counter it.