P.S. - As a courtesy to those posters who have been around here longer than I and who, for understandable reasons, may not wish to be mistaken for someone perceived as an “Islamophobe” by dickheads like wolfpup, I’ve applied for a username change. Don’t worry fellas, you won’t have to put up with it for much longer 
Make sure to snuggle with Eos one last time.
That’ll be even funnier when you see my new username 
Speaking as a fan of Greek Myth…cool!
Christians defending “The Paris of the Middle East” against an Islamic invasion.
Obviously, Beirut is a much better place to live since the Christians were invaded and outbred by the Muslims, isn’t it?
These four “slides”, presented in two tweets and taken from screenshots of a recent issue of ISIS’s magazine Dabiq, should disabuse any Chomsky or Greenwald fans of their distorted perceptions of Islamic jihadists’ “true” motives:
They should. But they probably won’t. I can only try.
SlackerInc: The two links go to badly formatted sources. One is cropped badly and unreadable; the other also has cropping problems. The photograph only shows someone’s shoes.
Is this your idea of substantive debate?
If this is an attempt to claim that the Lebanese civil war was some sort of “defense” against “Islam,” it is an attempt that fails miserably on the facts.
As the political football of the PLO, Israel, and Syria, in the 1970s and 1980s, no place in Lebanon is a particularly good place to live, now. Note that every one of those groups, (plus the Christian militias responsible for the worst massacres during those years), is basically secular in nature, with religion being the cultural marker by which one identifies friend and foe but having no serious motivation for any of the groups. (That has changed only recently with recruitment by al Qaida and the rise of ISIS, but the original conflicts were not based on religious beliefs.)
The issue has never been what the motives of the extremists are. The issue, (the point that prompted you and Trump to go off on similar diatribes), has been the desire for anxiety laden people to appeal to irrational fear that assumes that some very large number of Muslims embrace the views of the extremists.
They look fine to me. But the way you are stating this makes me think that perhaps you’re not familiar with Twitter? Each link goes to a single tweet. Each tweet has two photos. But you have to actually click each photo to see it full-size.
And the motives of the extremists is certainly an issue. People like Noam Chomsky and Glenn Greenwald make it their business to ascribe secular and anti-imperialist motives to them, and I am currently debating on Facebook with people who buy into that narrative and still refuse to accept the motives that I am laying out in black-and-white.
Of course, he is nothing more than a gross religious bigot, as always.
As of course the modern Lebanon is a creation of the French invasion of the Ottoman sanjak Mount Lebanon in the post WWI as part of their colonial rule, and then adding to it the already muslim majority provinces to make a larger territory for their Maronite Catholic allies. Not christians generally, the Catholics (against the Druze interests, against the Sunni Muslim interests, against the Orthodox interests).
It is gross idiocy and pure religious bigotry to frame the Lebanon as 'invasion.
it is purely of course ahistorical bigotry as an assertion since the ethnic-religious balance where the Druze and the large muslim populations were added to the Mount Lebanon that became the modern Lebanon by the French invasion (with the usual faux secular excuses of the French (whose only secularism is simply anti-Rome) but in fact allied on a religious sectarian basis to the catholics against all the other sects).
Sam Harris, whom I’ve mentioned several times as the public intellectual for whom I have the greatest respect, just released a speech he wrote for Hillary Clinton. Not that she’s going to give it, but it’s in the spirit of an “open letter”. To my eye, he meets her, and Democrats generally, surprisingly far–at least halfway. I’m curious, though, to hear if you guys see it differently:
It’s always so amusing how the clowns on the left fall more in love with Islam with every suicide bomb that goes off. It’s certainly consistent with their “progressive” ideals to cheerlead the most violent, misogynistic, homophobic “religion” on Earth. Luckily, despite their whining and crying, no one’s buying their horseshit anymore. Islam is inextricably linked to terror and there’s nothing they can do to stop it
Have you heard his latest podcast? He goes through that whole Dabiq article. It’s both fascinating and disturbing.
Oh yeah, it’s intense. That Finnish woman! :eek:
I have been forwarding his podcasts (the YouTube versions, very handy) to my gun nut, white nationalist (but nonreligious) cousin. I’m trying to gently lure him into the light. He really likes the podcasts (especially the most recent two), but he hates Hillary and laments Sam’s “tepid” support for her. I just sent him this speech–we’ll see what he says. I suspect it may be a bridge too far, and he’ll complain that Sam’s sold out.
ETA: I may as well include the YouTube versions of those podcasts, since I mentioned them.
The most recent, on Dabiq: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMKOV2zA9Wc&feature=youtu.be
The previous one, on Black Lives Matter and related topics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W77iAQyioM8
Yes, it’s a major blind spot and weak point of hypocrisy on the left, as much as it galls me to have to admit (one of the reasons, beyond just the substance, I’m fighting to change this).
However, you on the right are wrong about pretty much everything else. And you’re full of it even on this issue: you don’t oppose Islam because of the misogyny, the homophobia, or the oppression of atheists and other freethinkers. You oppose it because it’s not Christian, because it’s “the Other”, because it’s mostly brown people who practice it. And then you give people like me and Sam Harris and Bill Maher a bad name because others on the left associate anti-Islam positions with this bigoted white Christian perspective, and thus you make it harder for us to make headway.
I think you need to stop using a lot of straw men to do that.
Speaking by myself I do think like the atheist that said that maybe we should drop a lot of leaflets with Bertrand Russel musings about religion in the middle east. What you and many right wingers see as support of the radicals in reality is support for the vast majority of Muslims that are not using Islam as a call to do war or terrorism. What I do believe is happening is that many on the left do assume that most intelligent people already knows that we do also hate the terrorists.
Sadly, many on the left are wrong. Many on the right are not that bright.
And on this I do think that you are right.
But I’m not just against the Muslims who are terrorists, or even just the ones who support terrorism. I’m against all the Muslims who expect their women to be covered while the men wear whatever. I’m against all those Muslims who would shun anyone, even a family member, if he or she declared they were atheist or gay, or just a woman who wants to go get drunk at the bar and have casual premarital sex with someone she meets there, even if they (the ones doing the shunning) wouldn’t commit or advocate violence against them.
IOW I’m against the vast, vast majority of the world’s Muslims, based on polls and all the other information I have been made privy to. As Sam says in that speech, this is not so much true of *American *Muslims, and for that I’m glad–and I’d like to keep it that way.
So do I. So I guess you are still showing some ignorance.
And I was also talking about the Muslims in America and also for the ones that risk their lives elsewhere to fight to stop other Muslims for not progressing and realizing that there should be a separation of church and state.
BTW many of those are the ones that are vetted to come to America and eventually a good number of them or their descendants do fight for America and oppose the troglodytes. Unfortunately, there are troglodytes like Trump that would prefer that the American armies of the future do not get enough people with a deep knowledge of the customs and language where current or future conflicts will take place.
I have to mention also that I also looked at what many Muslims do think. While many would support nonsense from the sharia laws most did not approve of using terror or violence to impose it or to deal with other faiths. There was AFAIK one notable area where a majority did approve of terror and it was among the Palestinians and areas around Israel. I can understand why (it does not mean that I approve of it, and yes, sadly one has to mention that as many are not that bright as mentioned); but again speaking for myself, if war comes I go more for the side of Israel, now if only they would stop building more settlements…
Concentrating on ISIS specifically the opinion of a super majority of Muslims is that they are viewed very negatively in the Muslim world.
Extramarital… “premarital” implies intent to marry.