Frustrating e-mail fwd from my Mother: Islam

[Fastidiots]

After a bit of a blow up with my father last week over religion, my mother sent the following e-mail to me:

" A Holocaust Survivor’s View on Fanatic IslamThis is one of the best explanations of the Muslim terrorist situation I have read. His references to past history are accurate and clear. Not long, easy to understand, and well worth the read. The author of this email is Dr. Emanuel Tanay, a well-known and well respected psychiatrist. A Holocaust Survivor’s View on Islam

A man, whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II, owned a number of large industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism. ‘Very few people were true Nazis,’ he said, 'but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen.Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything.I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.'We are told again and again by ‘experts’ and ‘talking heads’ that Islam is the religion of peace and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march… It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africaand are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers.The hard, quantifiable fact is that the peaceful majority, the ‘silent majority,’ is cowed and extraneous.Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant.

China’s huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.

The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across Southeast Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet.

And who can forget

Rwanda

, which collapsed into butchery? Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were ‘peace loving’?

History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason, we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points:

Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence.

Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don’t speak up, because like my friend from

Germany

, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.

Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.

As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts – the fanatics who threaten our way of life.

---

Lastly, anyone who doubts that the issue is serious and just deletes this email without sending it on is contributing to the passiveness that allows the problems to expand.

So, extend yourself a bit and send this on and on and on!

Let us hope that thousands, world-wide, read this and think about it, and send it on - before it’s too late."

It frustrates me because it ignores my point to them, that both Islam and Christianity are ideas based on false premises and ultimately become dangerous excuses for unacceptable choices.

Specifically, I was you to help me with an informed (and gentle) retort.

Thanks for any help.

[NinetyWt]

I’m not sure about the authenticity of the piece. I found this:

it appears that the author of this essay is not Emanuel Tanay, M.D., who is identified on the internet as a clinical professor of psychiatry at Wayne State University - though I cannot find a listing or address for him on the Wayne State University web site. (I have added the email address of the chairman of the Psychiatry Department there, Dr. Manuel Tancer, to this message, in the event he wants to pass it on to Dr. Tanay, if indeed there is a Dr. Tanay.)

So far as I can determine, the author of this essay in its original form is a guy named Paul E. Marek. I cannot find any contact address for him, either;

Here.

And

Anyway, notwithstanding whether Mr. Tanay is a Jew or not, one thing is fairly certain … he is not the original author of the article. Far from being the work and attaining the resulting credibility of being penned by a holocaust survivor, eminent psychologist etc it originates from nothing more than a Canadian blogger. That’s the problem when you start just lifting stuff from the net that appears to fit your own opinions.

Here.

[lavenderviolet]

Haha. I’m sure the Chairman of Psychiatry at Wayne State has nothing better to do than reply to emails about a chain letter that he had nothing to do with. I’m sure he loved that someone dragged him into this when an inquiry about if Dr. Tanay still works there probably should have been addressed to the secretary of the department instead.
Dr. Tanay has a wiki entry which seems to indicate that the banal reality is that he forwarded the email around and someone was confused by that into thinking he personally wrote it: Emanuel Tanay - Wikipedia

[Fastidiots]

@NinetyWt

I’m not sure about the authenticity of the piece. I found this:

it appears that the author of this essay is not Emanuel Tanay, M.D., who is identified on the internet as a clinical professor of psychiatry at Wayne State University - though I cannot find a listing or address for him on the Wayne State University web site. (I have added the email address of the chairman of the Psychiatry Department there, Dr. Manuel Tancer, to this message, in the event he wants to pass it on to Dr. Tanay, if indeed there is a Dr. Tanay.)

So far as I can determine, the author of this essay in its original form is a guy named Paul E. Marek. I cannot find any contact address for him, either;

Here.

And

Anyway, notwithstanding whether Mr. Tanay is a Jew or not, one thing is fairly certain … he is not the original author of the article. Far from being the work and attaining the resulting credibility of being penned by a holocaust survivor, eminent psychologist etc it originates from nothing more than a Canadian blogger. That’s the problem when you start just lifting stuff from the net that appears to fit your own opinions.

Here.

Thanks, that helps.

[lavenderviolet]

@Fastidiots

It frustrates me because it ignores my point to them, that both Islam and Christianity are ideas based on false premises and ultimately become dangerous excuses for unacceptable choices.

Specifically, I was you to help me with an informed (and gentle) retort.

Thanks for any help.

I wouldn’t count on convincing your elderly parents of anything. Old people are pretty set in their ways usually. Besides, in their minds, you’re still the kid whose butt they used to wipe. If convincing them that you know best didn’t work when you were a teen I doubt it will now.
If I were you, I’d just say something like, “You’re right, mom, we should all be on guard against fanaticism within our own group” and remember not to bring up religion around them anymore. Everyone will be happier that way.

[Reply]

He has a point, sort of: “All it takes for evil…”, “First they came…”, etc.

Beyond that, I’m not sure what he’s calling for. For Muslims to stand up against extremists in their midst? Nothing wrong with that, except you can be sure they’ll just be next in line to be silenced.

For non-Muslims to kill ALL Muslims lest the extremists among them take over the world? Um, right. Preventing the Holocaust by killing all Germans doesn’t exactly sound like the path of greatest good.

Besides, if the letter is targeted towards your stereotypical Muslim-hater, suggesting that Christianity is a useless lie is not going to win you any friends. Maybe you could bring up the Crusades and the Inquisition – the religion of Jesus’s love is hardly immune from violence – but ultimately this is an emotional argument that logic won’t win. The only thing that letter deserves is a :rolleyes:

[Tim_T-Bonham.net]

You’l think “a well-known and well respected psychiatrist”, with a doctorate, would know how to write in paragraphs.

[even_sven]

A good argument would be to ask how you could have prevented the mild popular support that kept the really bad guys in power.

The one thing that certainly would not have helped make Hitler less popular would have been to isolate and condemn Germans as a whole. To stereotype, reject, exclude and persecute the German people would have led to more popular support for Hitler, not less. Indeed, that is a lot of what led to his rise. Fanatic leaders get their popular support by making people feel like the rest of the world has somehow wronged them, and that only extreme actions can restore their place in the world. If Germany had come out of WWI in better shape and was on better terms with the rest of the world, Hitler would have probably not had the support he did.

If we wanted to fight Hitler, we’d have had to discredit him to his own population. Look at how the Soviet Union fell- it fell because it’s people stopped buying into it and found the rest of the world more attractive than what they had. It didn’t fall because we finally managed to bully them enough.

Or look at China. Now that we have normalized relationships and began to work cooperatively, human rights abuses have vastly decreased. The times that we were the most distant or aggressive towards China were exactly the times that the worst abuses happened.

In any case, whatever he is trying to say about Africa is not true. Islam is not “gradually taking over the continent in a wave” or whatever. Islam has been there pretty much from it’s inception, and has been the main major organized religion in West Africa for over 1,000 years. One of the first universities in the entire world was the Islamic university in Timbuktu. Islam has shaped West Africa for hundreds of years, it’s nothing new.

Nor are Muslims “systematically slaughtering” Christians. Muslim-Christian tensions in Africa are very complicated and at their root not particularly religious. It’s more about land use, resources, and what ethnic groups get access to them. While some ethnicities are predominately Muslim and some predominately Christian, and sometimes Christian ethnicities clash with Muslim ethnicities, their religion is usually just one attribute of many. The bigger difference is the sorts of land they occupy, with Christians staying in the dense fertile green forest and grasslands and the Muslims traditionally in arid desert and sahelian regions- all for very reasonable historic reasons. Of course now these different groups have been randomly grouped together and called a “country.” Both groups want to gain access to the resources and try to enrich their people- because they are their people, not because of their religion. This disparity is what is really causing all of the problems.

[Fastidiots]

@even_sven

A good argument would be to ask how you could have prevented the mild popular support that kept the really bad guys in power.

The one thing that certainly would not have helped make Hitler less popular would have been to isolate and condemn Germans as a whole. To stereotype, reject, exclude and persecute the German people would have led to more popular support for Hitler, not less. Indeed, that is a lot of what led to his rise. Fanatic leaders get their popular support by making people feel like the rest of the world has somehow wronged them, and that only extreme actions can restore their place in the world. If Germany had come out of WWI in better shape and was on better terms with the rest of the world, Hitler would have probably not had the support he did.

If we wanted to fight Hitler, we’d have had to discredit him to his own population. Look at how the Soviet Union fell- it fell because it’s people stopped buying into it and found the rest of the world more attractive than what they had. It didn’t fall because we finally managed to bully them enough.

Or look at China. Now that we have normalized relationships and began to work cooperatively, human rights abuses have vastly decreased. The times that we were the most distant or aggressive towards China were exactly the times that the worst abuses happened.

In any case, whatever he is trying to say about Africa is not true. Islam is not “gradually taking over the continent in a wave” or whatever. Islam has been there pretty much from it’s inception, and has been the main major organized religion in West Africa for over 1,000 years. One of the first universities in the entire world was the Islamic university in Timbuktu. Islam has shaped West Africa for hundreds of years, it’s nothing new.

Nor are Muslims “systematically slaughtering” Christians. Muslim-Christian tensions in Africa are very complicated and at their root not particularly religious. It’s more about land use, resources, and what ethnic groups get access to them. While some ethnicities are predominately Muslim and some predominately Christian, and sometimes Christian ethnicities clash with Muslim ethnicities, their religion is usually just one attribute of many. The bigger difference is the sorts of land they occupy, with Christians staying in the dense fertile green forest and grasslands and the Muslims traditionally in arid desert and sahelian regions- all for very reasonable historic reasons. Of course now these different groups have been randomly grouped together and called a “country.” Both groups want to gain access to the resources and try to enrich their people- because they are their people, not because of their religion. This disparity is what is really causing all of the problems.

Bravo! Now to re-word and plagiarize. Thank you.