So I guess you’re a retail conservative.
I think that it’s fairly clear that I’m an online store.
I don’t respond to command and control vocal tones, gestures, body postures, facial expressions, etc. My experience is that Muslims who engage in this behaviour are far more likely to continue their mind games against me (often by concocting inventive lies) than followers of other religions and ideologies. Note that I say “Muslims who engage in this behaviour” … authoritarianism coming at me from manipulative “foreigners” is not easy to combat when one runs a very real risk of being called an Islamophobe or racist.
It sounds like there are some fascinating stories behind this paragraph. I hope you’ll share some of them with us some time.
Americans ask, “Why do they hate us?”
Here’s a good article giving the answer:
Why Do So Many Americans Fear Muslims? Decades of Denial About America’s Role in the World.
*"…Meanwhile, in private, the non-crazy members of the U.S. foreign policy establishment aren’t confused at all. They understand quite well that Islamist terrorism is almost wholly blowback from the foreign policy they’ve designed.
Richard Shultz, a professor at Tufts whose career has long been intertwined with the national security state, has written that “A very senior [Special Operations Forces] officer who had served on the Joint Staff in the 1990s told me that more than once he heard terrorist strikes characterized as ‘a small price to pay for being a superpower.’” That small price, of course, is the deaths of regular Americans, and is apparently well worth it.
The 9/11 Commission report quietly acknowledged, hundreds of pages in, that “America’s policy choices have consequences. Right or wrong, it is simply a fact that American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American actions in Iraq are dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world.” A senior official in the George W. Bush administration later put it more bluntly to Esquire: That without the post-Gulf War sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, “bin Laden might still be redecorating mosques and boring friends with stories of his mujahideen days in the Khyber Pass.”
Intelligence professionals were quite aware that an invasion of Iraq would take the conditions that led to 9/11 and make them far worse. …"*
GreenWyvern: While you make some good points, it’s completely wrong to blame America only, or even America first. The British and French did more to fuck up the Near East than the U.S. did.
If your source had blamed “The West,” I’d be on board with it.
Can we somehow get Islam and Catholicism to mutually cancel?
Good point, and I mostly agree. But the US has taken the lead in aggression against Middle East for the past few decades.
I think most Americans don’t realise just how aggressive, violent, and destructive their foreign policy has been for the past 50 years or so, not only in the Middle East, but in South America, South-east Asia, and Africa. They are told soothing do-gooder stories by their politicians, and mostly they believe them.
According to the CIA World Factbook 99.8% of Turks are Muslims … the remaining 0.2% being mainly Christians and Jews. My experience of Turkish people in London is that most of them come across to me as not being “religious” in tne way they conduct their lives … Islam is in no way the primary driving force behind their thinking.
What?
Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher both make a big distinction between Islam and Christianity. They have no time for those “liberals” who try to make the equivalence ploy.
So, they are equivalent in their xenophobia.
In any event, if they have something against “liberals”, (your scare quotes appear to indicate you are talking about some other group rather than actual liberals), it is pretty much irrelevant to this thread.
Well, good for them. What does that have to do with the beliefs you hold? At most, you seem to be saying that you’re pro-Islam simply because Maher and Dawkins are, or because you want to oppose what “liberals” think.
Personally, I recommend thinking for yourself, rather than taking positions on things just to keep in or out of some particular group.
I’m not pro Islam - and never have been. Just pointing out not all liberals accept the nonsense line about Islam and Christianity being of the same concern. It’s you that needs to think for yourself, instead of blindly taking the PC line.
Do you seriously think they are xenophobic because they think it ridiculous to claim Islam and Christianity are equally of concern?
It’s no wonder they are so dismayed by “liberals”.
I think that it is xenophobic to regard any group of over a billion people that differs from oneself as “dangerous.”
And your repeated use of scare quotes regarding “liberals” is silly.
Do you not follow the news,even?
I have finally done as you asked and watched a few clips of Bill Maher. (I live in Europe and was not familiar with the name so far.) To my surprise I found his line of argument to be not unreasonable. I do not agree with him on all counts, but he certainly is making a few good points. Basically what he is saying is that all religions are stupid and dangerous but that Islam is more dangerous than others. But he does not stop there. He says that Islam needs to be reformed, that moderate Muslims should be empowered. He specifically has hailed the fact that London elected a moderate Muslim as it’s Mayor. He has called the travel ban un-american and not helpful and predicted that it was only going to make things worse. So in short he is far from the raving islamophobe that I had half expected. I take him for someone who is actually looking for a solution to the problems we are faced with.
Since you pointed him out to me, may I ask: Does your agreement with Bill Maher’s positions and ideas go beyond the simple "Muslims are bad!" sermon?
Christianity and Islam are of the same concern: quite little, actually.
Radicalized Muslims and Christians are dangerous. There may be more of the former. But that does not mean that Islam is more dangerous, only that it contains more bad guys.
New York City contains more bad guys than Chicago. Therefore New York is dangerous, and should be shunned. No one from New York should be allowed to enter Chicago. Someone could start a thread on “I don’t like New York.”
For all the howls from celebs about Trump trying to cut down terrorist threats getting into the country, we don’t seem to hear anything from them when it comes to (just one example) the case reported, by some,this past week concerning the woman flogged with a cane in public, in Indonesia, as a punishment from a Sharia court-in front of a crowd of cheering males.
Allahu Akbar indeed.