Yes, they certainly can. Which is quite unfortunate. For you.
Well, that is pretty much the point. The fact that you cannot bring yourself to see that Islamic terrorism is a far more serious problem for the US than Christian terrorism means that your judgment of the issues is questionable.
Which was, obviously, the point of the bee sting vs. cancer comparison.
People die of cancer, and of bee stings. But bringing up the subject of death from bee sting in discussions about how to reduce death from cancer is either ridiculous, if done out of lack of understanding, or dishonest, if it is done as a sort of tu quoque. This appears to be what you were doing. It doesn’t appear to have come off very well.
Perhaps this will be clearer to you if you answer a question - do you believe that bees have been given a pass in discussions of causes of death in the US?
Given how you’ve intentionally misrepresented what I’ve said multiple times and purposely ignored my arguments, you should be flinging accusations of dishonesty at yourself.
I am afraid I don’t much care about this kind of nonsense. I am more interested in an answer to the question - do you believe that bees have been given a pass in discussions of causes of death in the US?
In the first place, I wonder why you do not have an ounce of outrage for the way the British mistreated Wilders just to appease Muslim fanatics.
In the second place, as a gay person, I would be murdered in the name of Allah if Islam ever imposes itself on our society.
I am fighting for my very life here, fella.
9-11, the London Bombings, the Madrid Bombings — wake up! We are at war with an ideology (much more an ideology than a religion) that would destroy our secular freedoms and in many cases our very lives.
Show me bees who believe that they are commanded by an invisible guy in the sky to sting gay people to death and who have made it their mission to subvert and take over the world, and I will worry, I assure you.
Two people killed at the Centennial Olympic and 111 injured. Far less than Sept. 11, but let’s agree that a single human life or injury is one too many.
But let’s look at similarities between the perpetrator, Robert Eric Rudolph, and Islamists, shall we?
We have no trouble understanding why Rudolph did it. He obligingly gave out a statement saying “…the purpose of the attack on July 27 was to confound, anger and embarrass the Washington government in the eyes of the world for its abominable sanctioning of abortion on demand.”
The same person also bombed two abortion clinics and a lesbian nightclub. Since presumably the lesbians were not practising abortions, what we have here is a religious fanatic who imposes his version of the will of his God by killing those who do not obey his God’s commandments.
So what do you suppose Islamists would do to gays, lesbians, and abortion doctors?
The difference is that people like Rudolph or McVeigh are a tiny nutjob minority. But as a PEW research poll showed a few years ago, 27% of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims agree that suicide bombs against civilian targets can be justified. That is something like 400-500 MILLION Muslims who agree with suicide bombings worldwide.
I wonder of the OP has stopped to consider that the growing fear and revulsion in the west to the ever more strident demands of Islam and its medeival and uncompromising ways is perhaps NOT based on ignorance or homophobia? Here we have people like the Danish Cartoonist, Salman Rushdie, Geert Wilders and Ayan Hirsi Ali, who have stood up for western values and for freedom of speech, who now live under police protection because Muslim thugs want to kill them.
Unbelievable as it may seem, as “proof” of the “persecution” of Muslims in the west, CheapBastid offers us a news story about how Wilders, a Member of the Dutch Parliament, is being crucified in the judicial system for warning about the dangers of Islam to western society. This same Geert Wilders was physically prevented from entering the UK to meet a British Parliamentarian, and forcibly put back on a plane. While people like Theo van Gogh and translators of the “Satanic Verses” lie dead for having dared to use the spoken and written word in ways that displeased Muslims.
Perhaps it is you, CheapBastid, who should seek to overcome his ignorance.
This is not true and your call to wake up is empty rhetoric. The ideologies you mention have specific political goals and I am not aware of any significant ones with agendas such as taking over the USA, abolishing your religious freedom, and killing or converting all the population.
Have a look through this thread again. All these terrorists you live in fear of have very specific political goals arising from documented political grievances. They’re not coming after you just because they hate you. Once again I am pleading for a slightly more sophisticated and competent analysis of the problem. “They hate us” is nonsense pure and simple.
I might also add that ideologies in the US have not been especially friendly to GBLTs. I’m not just talking about the rabid hatred from Fred Phelps and his idiotic ilk: across the Christian spectrum homosexuality is typically considered a sin. In politics, it is typically a career-ender. In everyday life you face stereotyping and discrimination because of your orientation.
Traditional Western cultures (I refer here loosely to cultures of the Book) consider homosexuality to be immoral, sinful, and wrong. Even in cultures where religion and state are putatively dissociated, the intolerance persists. Even in countries that explicitly safeguard your rights, you will STILL face prejudice and discrimination from members of society (if not institutional organs).
It’s only been since 2003 that homosexuality was legalized in the USA, in Jordan since 1951. In Singapore, male homosexuality is illegal but female homosexuality is fine. In Uzbekistan, male homosexuality is illegal only as far as concerns anal sex, so if your activity of choice is oral sex you are technically fine there.
I think you will agree that this confused picture looks much more like a human and a cultural problem than it does religious. The picture is hardly as straightforward as you try to paint it.
I am strongly opposed to Islamic fundamentalism, but who are we to cast the first stone? A majority of American Christians seem to support drone bombing hundreds of civilians in Pakistan in order to kill a dozen or two al-Qaeda leaders. A majority of American Christians also supported the bombing of Gaza that killed a thousand civilians. American Christians are killing way more innocent Muslims than Muslims are killing innocent Christians. Shouldn’t Middle Eastern and South Asian Muslims have a greater fear of American Christians than American Christians have of those Muslims?
And what makes a death from a bomb dropped by a drone acceptable while a death from a suicide bomber is not acceptable? The answer is that most American Christians don’t really care if a few hundred Muslims get killed in the Middle East. The same is true in the other direction. Most Middle Eastern Muslims don’t care that much if a few hundred American Christians get blown up in a suicide bombing. People tend to care more about themselves and people associated with them than foreigners who have some crazy religion.
Good examples Kenner116, case in point is the war in Iraq, which has resulted in the deaths, by some reckoning, of over a million people.
Yet the burning issue for the average American is not how many hundreds of thousands of people, almost all of them civilians, have been slaughtered. No, the really pressing issue to many Americans seems to be that a few thousand US troops were killed in a war of aggression.
In the face of such historical facts I find it amazing that people can pull out their shoddy little soapbox and try to demonize a quarter of the world’s population as rabid fanatics who are only out to get them. That requires an incredible level of ego- and ethnocentrism, not to mention ignorance.
This is why Christian extremists are less of a threat in the US; they can get the military to do their killing for them. With a country full of white Christian males (to quote someone upthread) the Christians already largely have things their way; it’s only the extreme extreme fringe who think things need to change to a degree that violence is justified.
Those Muslims who oppose the West for whatever reason, however, don’t have a military that can rival the US, so they’ve resorted to asymmetrical warfare. It’s a serious threat by any standard, but pretending that it’s some intrinsic genetic flaw of all Muslims is to misunderstand the problem entirely. It’s as much a way of calling attention to a cause as it is a means of killing people.
And also: sure, the Muslims have blown up or attempted to blow various things in my neck of the woods over the past few years. But before that, it was the Catholics. Where was the outrage over Catholic extremism, especially given that it was heavily funded by Americans?
This is a common trick of useful apologists for Islamism. There is not 100% acceptance of gays in the West anyhow, so why worry about Islam? It reminds me of when American pacifists in the 30s used to tell Jews in America to stop criticizing Nazi Germany because there was plenty of anti-semitism in America and there always had been.
As Bruce Bawer says in his book "Surrender - Appeasing Islam Sacrificing Freedom":
Women, Christians, Jews, Hindus, atheists; all of them stand at least a chance of surviving in a Muslim polity if they submit to Muslim authority, and if they live according to the rules set down for those of their station under sharia law. But for individuals who are known to be gay, no compromise is possible.
As the hadiths (quotes of Mohammed) say of gay sex: “Kill the one that is doing it and also kill the one that is being done to.”
Oh yes, opinions do vary. One religious school of thought demands one hundred lashes for a first offence (this is the extreme liberal end of the spectrum) and another school prescribes the death penalty for all such acts. Muslim States that have obligingly complied with this second idea (there being no such thing as separation of Mosque and State) and who impose the death penalty are Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen, and Mauritania. Many Muslim States impose severe physical punishment, in violation of all civilized rules of justice. The supposedly “liberal” United Arab Emirates provides for up to 14 years imprisonment. In 2001, Saudi Arabia sentenced nine men to prison terms and over 2000 lashes for this “crime”. Egypt sentenced a dozen or more men to prison in spite of international objections a few years ago. Estimated thousands have been executed in Iran since the country was “liberated” by Khomeini.
Jordan, with its decriminalization in 1951, (many devout Muslim Jordanians are now demanding recriminalization, btw) is indeed oddity in the Muslim world. But what you are overlooking is that the vast majority of murdered homosexuals in Islamic countries are never formally tried and executed, even in Jordan. They are subjects of “honour” killings. A favourite tactic is for the family to have the gay person arrested and then have them allegedly commit suicide in their jail cell after a suitable bribe has been paid to a guard.
Another disturbing trend is the fact that gays in European and North American cities are reporting an increased incidence of gay bashing by Muslim thugs. Cities like Amsterdam that were known for their tolerance have now become dangerous for anyone who even looks like he might be gay. The partner of author Bruce Bawer, who is gay, has been assaulted twice in Oslo and twice in Amsterdam, in each case by Muslim thugs.
Your comment that homosexuality was legalized in the US in 2003 and Jordan in 1951 is very misleading, Abe, and an example of using relativism to whitewash Islamic homophobia. Since criminal codes are made by the individual states in the US, most progressive and modern states had decriminalized years or decades earlier. The 2003 SCOTUS decision did nothing more than strike down remaining laws that even the affected states themselves said were rarely enforced. Legislators in conservative (backward) states were afraid to abolish these laws and relieved that the Supreme Court did it for them.
To imply (as your comment does to the casual reader), that American gays were languishing in prisons from the Empire State to the Goden Gate until 2003 while Jordanian gays were living in freedom and acceptance since 1951 is typical of the apoligists’ use of the old “Who are we to point the finger?” ploy when it comes to Islam.
Nobody is saying that gay bashing does not exist outside Islam. Indeed, apologists for Islam are more than happy to exagerate and detail every case of violence or discrimination in the West in order to make Islamic homophobia seem less disgusting. But at the very least, even people like Pat Robertson and the Pope do not condone physical violence against gays.
On the other hand, few if any important Muslims in western communities have spoken up for the rights of gays. As Danish cultural psychologist Kirsten Damgaard says “. . .the Muslim immigrants I have personally met who find homosexuality acceptable can be counted on one hand.”
A recent poll in Britain showed that 72% of Muslims want to recriminalize homosexuality in Britain. What will happen to gays in the West if Muslims continue to repreduce as they do? How long before the advocates of recrimionalization are in the majority? Happily, the poll did not specify their preferred penalty for this “crime”.
A Muslim leader in Australia was more specific. In 2002 he demanded that Australia establish a sharia court that would give Muslims the power to stone gays to death. Abe, can you seriously tell me if Pat Robertson or Jerry Fallwell have ever in their most bat-shit crazy moments come up with such revolting homophobia?
A Muslim leader in Jamaica recently called for the death penalty for gays, but said it would not be done until Jamaica became in Islamic society. (He obviously believes it can and should happen).
Abe, the long and the short of it is that in 62 years as a gay person, I have fine-honed instrincts for identifying dangers to my survival. I do wish you would show that more respect than pooh-poohing my concerns about Islamic homophobia, violence and murder of gays as mere paranoia.
Nobody is suggesting that Islamist-extremist homophobia, violence and murder of gays aren’t serious problems.
But what you seem to be trying to do is to conflate Islamist extremism with Islam per se, which is not rationally defensible.
The fact is that views on homosexuality vary widely in Islam. On the one hand, you’ve got lots of radical-Islamist shari’a zealots who think homosexuality is deserving of capital punishment. On the other hand, you’ve got Muslim-majority nations like Jordan and Turkey where homosexuality isn’t even a criminal offense.
Nobody’s saying that we shouldn’t be worried about the serious threats to liberty posed by radical Islamist extremists. What we’re saying is that it’s extremely unjust, not to mention idiotically stupid, to attempt to paint ALL Muslims with the radical-Islamist-extremist brush, or to claim that the religion of Islam by its very nature is the same thing as radical Islamist extremism.
Think about it: when you claim that Islam is intrinsically or essentially homophobic or repressive or violent, you’re playing right into the hands of the homophobic repressive violent Islamist extremists trying to impose their own definition of Islam on the rest of the world. Why are you trying to help out the enemy here? Why aren’t you instead supporting the cause of Islamic moderation and tolerance by promoting the position that Islam doesn’t have to be repressive and violent? When you refuse to make a distinction between radical Islamist extremism and Islam as a whole, you’re just helping throw tolerant moderate Muslims (including many gay Muslims) to the wolves.
Pointing out these similarities between homophobes of different faiths is not being an “apologist for Islamism”, as you seem to think. Rather, it’s attempting to show you the stupidity of buying the stereotype of Islam that the hostile violent radical Islamists are trying to sell you.
First bees, now alligators. The level of moral depravity in your comparisons is so utterly disgusting, I don’t see any point in trying to engage you in rational debate.
**On the contrary, the last thing an Islamic extremist wants people in the west to think is that Islam is extremist, repressive or violent. **
This is the art of Taqiyya which today essentially consists of saying one thing in Arabic and another for the consumption of naive, guilt-ridden westerners. Luckily, apologists whose only strategy is moral relativism and exagerating the faults of the West make this easy for them.
And before you tell my that Taqiyya means only the right to deny you are a Muslim to avoid immediate danger of death, look up the subsequent meanings it has evolved. To quote the hadith that defines it in Sunni Islam (the vast majority of Muslims)
". …Surah al-Imran 3:118 mentions Taqqiya, this is according to Ibn Kathir and the hadith.: . . . . . such believers are allowed to show friendship to the disbelievers outwardly, but never inwardly. For instance, Al-Bukhari recorded that Abu Ad-Darda’ said, "We smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them. Al-Bukhari said that Al-Hasan said, "The Tuqyah is allowed until the Day of Resurrection.
As one author put it, there IS really no moderate Islam. There are, to be sure, Muslims who are friendly and get along with their “infidel” neighbours. But if they really are Muslims, then their aim of world domination for Islam is part and parcel of their belief no matter how much they smile at you.
Your problem, Kimstu, is that you seem to think that the label “Islamist extremists” applies only to persons rushing at you with a sword or explosive and yelling “Allahu akbar!”. My definition of extremists includes vast numbers of Muslims in Europe and America (such as the 72% of British Mulsims who want recriminalization of homosexuality in the UK). It includes the millions of Muslims in Europe and America, including Imams and “scholars” who, polls have shown, think rape victims should be punished if they “excited the man by immodesty”.
It includes the millions of Muslims in the West who remain oddly silent, or perpetrate absurd myths such as September 11 being the work of the CIA and Israel.
Or how about the Muslim fathers here in Canada who ask my friend, a professor in the university medical faculty, to sign notes saying where their daughters have been when they attend her class? Do you consider them moderates?
Here is another good example. Have you heard of Tariq Ramadan? He is rated as an international Muslim megastar. He is lauded as a “moderate”. In a French television debate in 2003 with Nicolas Sarkozy, he discussed the stoning of adulterers, a punishment stipulated in the section of the Islamic penal code known as hudud. (Just because it is not in the Koran does not mean it is not Islamic). He said that he favored “a moratorium” on such practices but refused to condemn the law outright.
American publisher Caroline Fourest analysed Tariq Ramadan’s 15 books, 1,500 pages of interviews, and some 100 recordings to conclude “Tariq Ramadan is slippery. He says one thing to his faithful Muslim followers and something else entirely to his Western audience. His choice of words, the formulations he uses – even his tone of voice – vary, chameleon-like, according to his audience.”
Another commentator mentioned: “When Ramadan speaks of ‘resistance’ and calls on Muslims everywhere to wage it…” “Europeans… have chosen to believe that… he really means ‘reform.’ He does not. He means jihad.”
He is a true master of taqiyya. Yet here is a man that the “usuful apologists” (Lenin called them something else) in the West have hailed as a “moderate” and the “Islamic Martin Luther”.
An Imam from the Mosque in my city in Canada attended a meeting of the Humanist society. I asked him three times what he, as a Canadian citizen, would do if he know that Salman Rushdie were in town and that a Muslim was going over to murder him. Three times he refused to answer what he termed a “hypothetical” question. At no time would he condemn the Fatwah against Rushdie, despite being repeatedly asked to do so. Taqiyya anyone?
So in fact it is just the opposite. The more violent the Islamist, the more likely he will be to use taqiyya. Islam does not want to alarm the West because Islam would never win an outright confrontation with western civilization that is fully aware and ready to fight.
But why would they need to fight with apologists to help them pretend they are the “Religion of Peace”. As Muammar al-Gaddafi sated, there probably will be no need to conquer Europe to bring about its Islamicization. Not after the Muslim birth rate, endless concessions like Sharia Law, and further immigration have worked their magic to bring the “World Caliphate” closer to reality.
It has just occurred to me, Abe, that the above comment encapsulates everything we mean when we talk about apologists for Islam using moral relativism. The purpose of this thread is to discuss Islam. Specifically, we are discussing the OP’s gratuitous and patronizing contention that fear of Islam is based on ignorance and Xenophobia.
If you wish to find discussion (and bitter criticism of) the invasion of Iraq) you will find it on other threads. And I myself am a severe critic of that invasion, BTW.
But assuming that this one million figure is correct, what does it include? Does it include innocent Iraqis killed when fanatical Christians hijacked jets and flew them into buildings fulkl of innocent people working? Were the Chrsitian hijackers sacrificing their lives in the belief that they would be entertained for all eternity in what amounts to an opoen-air brothel?
How many of those million dead Iraqis were Sunnis killed by Shiites or Shiites killed by Sunnis?
By the way, do you know, Abe, WHY Islam cannot come to terms with Israel, and recognize its right to exist? Because Islam preaches that no inch of land once conquered for the “Religion of Peace” can ever be surrendered. That is the real reason that the eternal cycle of conflict between Israel and her neighbours continues. Because nothing short of wiping Israel off the map is acceptable to Islam.
