Beagle, you’re right, this country is doing way, way better than expected given the truly horrific provocation. However, it remains the case that the knee-jerk reaction among a small but significant segment of the population is to hate first, hate second, and hate third, anyone who doesn’t look the way they think an American should look, as soon as something like this goes down.
Now, yours truly is brown. Not black, not white, merely brown. Which makes me suspect now because I look close enough to Arab to be mistaken for one. (Of course, Arabs come in a wide variety of colors, but this thought doesn’t occur to the ignorant idiots who I’m addressing this to.) The fact that I was born and raised in NYC, that I’ve either lived or worked there every day of my life, and that it is therefore as much my hometown as it is anyone’s, would make no difference to these kinds of people.
So, when my brother was stopped in Dallas, and he talked to my sister, the first thought both of them had was to call me and warn me to be careful, because I’m the only brown one in the family. Both my brother and my sister have a difficult time generating a decent tan, for cryin’ out loud. This didn’t stop this customer from picking on my brother, obviously, probably because his features are just close enough to those of good ol’ Omar Sharif (I’m still handsomer than both of 'em, natch) for that fool.
So regardless of how enlightened or whatever you may be, there are still lots of people reading this thread, not all of them wonderful, enlightened people, I’m sure, and I want to make sure this message gets through.
The icing on this cake is that the only reason I managed to get home from my job in NYC before the next day is with the kind assistance of a Muslim in Queens and an Arab family in New Jersey. So consider this message my thank you to them.
Beadalin, thanks for the reference, but I’d already seen that thread – in fact, it’s the one that got me started looking up info on the web. However, that thread doesn’t really answer my question; it just says that Muslims can only actively fight opponents of Islam and cannot harm noncombatants. My question is, given that as premise, is there anything that specifically says “you can tell that someone is an opponent of Islam because they do a, b, and c, but not x, y, and z.” Saying “Leave is given to those who are fought because they were wronged” seems a little vague to me.
Of course, this is all academic anyway. Even if someone could prove Bin Laden theologically wrong, I suspect that he would still have the usual motivational suspects (politics, power, money, ego…) going on. For instance, if he were really a devout follower of Islam, would he be issuing fatwas? Isn’t it true that only a cleric can do that?