How Do I Surrender [to Islam and/or Islamist terrorists]?

Great Debates
81

See, that’s why I said “true democracy”. Democracy is a lot more than only freedom of speech. For example, freedom of press is quite important, and I know that the media in the US isn’t officially censored. But it still doesn’t any longer fulfill its function of fourth estate, an independet watchdog over the govt., due to concentration, and a fixation on “telling what the people want to hear” (high ratios), instead of what the people need to know.

An obvious disregard for human rights, as shown by the current admin., for example in Gitmo, and the large part of the population that doesn’t understand why that even is a problem, shows that there’s still some way to go before the US is a true democratic country beyond just freedom of speech and quasi-electing (if the election isn’t stolen or rigged again) the president every four years.

82

Yah, the state run and taxpayer funded BBC is the giver of truth while and all the media outlets in the United States are answering to “the Man”. Let me rephrase that, a country that is 39 times the size of the UK, with independent news outlets, a country that invented the Interenet which allows the exchange of information from every corner of the world… cannot disseminate information. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

That’s funny on so many levels. What’s next, a lecture on meddling in Mid East boundaries, politics and culture? That’s going to get ugly.

83

WTH are you talking about? This is the 21st century, there are no Popes or Arch-bishops or Cardinals or Reverends or any other Christian church leader asking for the destruction of other countries let alone actually engaging in terrorism. Same for any other religion… except Islam.

84

Islam doesn’t have any Popes - it’s not organised centrally like the Roman Catholic Church, but rather like the many “Protestant/Evangelical” churches everywhere in the US. Just as any layman can start his own church with his own interpretation of the Bible, so any Muslim can give off his own interpretation of the Koran, and even issue a fatwa against anybody.

As for Christians engaging in terrorism - in the US, there’s bombing of abortion clinics, and rallys against gays, and one Tele-evangelist (I think Pat Robertson, I would have to look up) calling publically for the US to assassinate the leader of another country (Chavez) only because he had dared to go against the will of the United States. In other countries, when there’s fighting between different groups, Christians are also engaging in terrorist acts. E.g., the IRA and the Protestant Fighters bombed and shot people, until the IRA finally declared a standstill.

85

I didn’t say the state-run BBC is the giver of truth - but it certainly has a much better track record for factual reporting than CNN and FOX, who have been found in many instances to report false news or one-sided news. I didn’t say that state-funded media is always the best - in Italy, the public TV Rai is certainly only a spokespiece for Berlusconi in the last years, and was pretty unreliable before that, already.
And yes, there certainly are independet media in the US. But the largest newspapers and important TV stations are in the hands of a few people.
And in polls, a large amount of Americans say that they only listen to CNN or FOX, not to other media sources, and these people are badly informed about issues that have been disproven.

I don’t want to give lectures. I apologize if this may have come across. But in my opinion, it is a bad idea to meddle in the Middle East for selfish purposes, yes.

86

No. On the other hand just a few weeks ago, the Grand Imam of the esteemed Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt and former Mufti of Egypt, a person who in the press was widely described as the equivalent of the Catholic Pope, demanded the closure of Jyllands Posten, the paper responsible for publishing the dreaded Mohammed Cartoons. He also demanded the chief editor Carsten Juste should be thrown in jail, and that Flemming Rose, the editor of the paper’s cartoon section, should be depicted as a pig.

This was a paper published in Denmark they want to control. There can never be any surrender to such complete bullshit. And the only talk should be the Danish PM telling them to go fuck a donkey.

While it’s nonsense to say the free privately owned US media is generally inferior to the state controlled European, because they give the people what they want rather than what some self appointed experts think the masses should be told, I do feel a certain disappointment that the US media so massively opted out and let itself be bullied out of showing the cartoons during crisis.

The conflict in northern Ireland was never a religious conflict and IRA was never a religious organisation. No IRA attack was ever started with terrorists screaming The Pope Is Great! Indeed many prominent IRA members were self declared atheists.

87

Religion was used as a cause in the Northern Ireland conflict. I agree with you that the conflict really was about power struggle - but that’s true for a lot of “religious” conflicts. It’s easy for the leader to incite people along religious lines (or ethnic lines), esp. in a homogenous area. The leaders may not believe in what they are preaching, but they know what to preach to the masses who do believe.

88

I’ve seen that letter before. I realize it’s a lot of words, but do try reading the whole thing before you go throwing around cites that you apparently don’t understand.

Every single one of the examples you extracted comes in his expositions on the answer to Q2.

He rather explicitly states, in the section that you so conveniently skipped over, why he’s actually fighting us.

In other words, what VarloZ said.

89

Woah. I forgot this isn’t the Pit. If I could retroactively turn down the vitriol of my last post, I would. Sorry.

90

Costanze: Would it shatter your world view if I told you that both Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter were born-again Christians?

You failed the test. You are a very provincial person…defined as someone who thinks the customs of his tribe are laws of nature.

91

I don’t have personal information or opinion on Jimmy Carter (before my time), so I can’t comment. With Bill Clinton, since he never acted ostenatiously Christian, I wonder how you know this.

Um, I do know that the customs and laws of all cultures are man-made. But - coming from a humanist standpoint - I think our approach makes the most sense, and therefore, I would like to see Human Rights, and secular laws, with educated citizens and a rational approach, as basis for other societies and countries, too. (That doesn’t mean forcing our way of life anywhere - there are enough regional differences in Europe, but people still agree on basics.)

92

I wish peoploe would stop using the word democracy to equal everything that is good. Democracy just means that the people have a vote and the majority decides (let’s leave aside republic vs democracy). It is perfectly possible to have a democratic govt that severly limits freedoms. There is nothing undemocratic about 51% of the public dictating what the rest of the country should do. We see it all the time with regards to gay rights, drug use, etc.

What protects our freedom in the US is the constitution. It provides a check on democracy to make sure it’s not just mob rule.

We can see the problem in Iraq right now. If a true democratic govt were to be created it would probably round up all the Kurds and Sunnis and shoot them.

93

You missed Pat Robertson’s recent call for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez? It’s admittedly milder than asking for the destruction of an entire country, but it’s the same sort of barbaric approach.

And it won’t work to claim that Pat Robertson somehow isn’t “really” a Christian church leader, either. Of course he is, with a large popular following and a lot of influence in the conservative right wing.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that US media is “generally inferior” to European media—I think they both have their strengths and weaknesses—but I wouldn’t automatically assume that the US media has to be superior either, or that it is necessarily always more “free” just because it’s privately owned. For example, it seems to me that US television is far more deferential and subservient in posing questions to the President than, say, the BBC is towards the Prime Minister. If what the people want is serious journalism that digs deeply into important issues without toadying the people in power, I don’t think it’s necessarily true that US media “give the people what they want” more than European media do.

94

Bwah-huh?

Constanze, the sainted Bill Clinton WAS an ostentatious born-again Christian. Al Gore as well. I suppose the biased media in your country never reported on it?

How could anyone in the world who pretends to have an opinion on American politics not know this? How can you dismiss anyone with a public profession of christian faith as a “fundamentalist”. I would suggest doing some research on what this word means before you embarass yourself further. This is on a par with someone pontificating about the intersection of politics and religion in Iran without knowing that there is such a thing as Shi’a Islam and that it is different than Sunni Islam. This is on a par an American unable to understand why France would elect a Soviet agent as president in 1981.

Which is why I called you provincial. You know nothing about America or American politics, yet you feel comfortable pontificating about American politics. We have plenty of non-Americans who pontificate about American politics, but most of them seem to have done some thinking about the subject beyond, “America is different than my country, therefore it must be bad”.

95

Given the emphasis on “WAS”, are you saying these two are no longer born-again?

96

Not that I intend to defend Pat Robertson but he is not advocating the destruction of a country or an act of terrorism. Just the opposite. He’s talking about removing someone who poses a danger to the US to prevent a war. He said the same thing about Saddam Hussein. He also retracted the statement:
“Is it right to call for assassination? No, and I apologize for that statement,” Robertson said. “I spoke in frustration that we should accommodate the man who thinks the U.S. is out to kill him.”

You cannot make the case that Christian leaders are involved with the concept of indiscriminate killing or are remotely active in the physical act of terrorism. The closest thing to acts of violence associated with Pat Robertson were the riots that ensued because a group of people didn’t like his religious opinions. And that group would be… Muslims. Just for the record, I disagree with a lot of his religious concepts. Haven’t killed anyone over it.

97

No, IS would work just as well. They both campaigned as born-again christians, and although they perhaps played up their religion back then, especially Bill, I have no reason to believe either weren’t sincere.

98

He was widely described as the equivalent of the Catholic Pope by idiots then. 95% of muslims probably never even heard of him (including me), much less give any weight to his words. I don’t think 95% of catholics have never heard of the pope. Muslims are much more similar to protestants as someone else has mentionned.

99

Gay bashing, domestic violence against women and children, and attacks on abortion clinics and those associated with them come to mind. Then there’s the question of how much of the war in Iraq is motivated by Christian apocalyptic yearnings. The Vatican’s anti condom campaign also qualifies as indiscriminate killing, on a scale far vaster than Al Qaeda is ever likely to achieve. The general Christian effort against sex education and abortion has killed many as well, one way or another.

100

Of course we are NOT at war with terrorism! Who ever heard of being at war with a tactic?

We are at war with a fascistic IDEOLOGY that masquerades as a religion. And the stakes are nothing less than the survival of human freedom and the modern, secular and democractic state.

People in the west are so incredibly ill-informed about Islam and what it stands for that western ignorance has become Islam’s secret weapon.

The stated purpose and mandate of Islam is to bring the entire world to submit to this religion. By force or by choice makes no difference. Mohammed was mandated to fight until there is no worship but that of Allah.

Here are a few facts they do not tell you.

To a Muslim, the world is divided into two “realms” or “dars”. The “dar el-Islam” or “realm of Islam” is the realm of “submission”. This mean countries where Islam has already triumphed. And the penalty for a Muslim who renounces Islam is death, so once it is in a country, it is there to stay!

The other realm is the “dar el-Harb” or “war zone”. I leave you to imagine who that is!

The means of conquest used by Islam frequently involve disguising its real objectives in countries stupid enough to ignore its true nature. This is the Muslim tactic of Al-Taqiyah.

Al-Taqiyah was a Muslim concept devised in the early years of the conquest of the Arabian peninsula. It is derived from the verb “Ittaqu” which means “to dodge” and in terms of Islamic conquest, it means putting on whatever disguise you need to win the war against the enemy.

Under the concept of Al-Taqiyah, Muslims are granted the Shariyee (legitimacy right) to infiltrate the “war zone” and spread as much discord, sedition and misinformation as possible to prepare the target countries for the eventual triumph of Islam.

In the Islamic view, such persons are not liars or infiltrators, but legitimate mujahedeen waging psychological warfare for Allah.

Any of this sound familiar to western ears?

“Oh no, Islam is not really like that!”

“You are misinterpreting Islam because of a few fanatics!”

“Most Muslims are against fanaticism and repression.”

“The fatah against Salman Rushdie was a terrible, repressive move that most Muslims condemn.”

“The vast majority of Muslims believe in freedom, equality, tolerance, etc.”

So, my friends, where are all these liberal, tolerant, non-sexist, non-homophobic, non-violent, non-anti-semitic Muslims? If they are really such a huge majority of the Islamic world, they must have HUGE organizations all over the place. Surely they will be out in their MILLIONS to decry the 5th anniversary of 9-11?

Surely there are huge Muslim gay rights groups? Muslim feminist groups? Surely there must be at least one Islamic democracy (and don’t cite Turkey. . . . .get serious!) Surely there is ONE large Muslim group that is willing to grant little Israel the right to survive?

The west can either wake up or lose to Islam.