So, you agree that we are enemies? Good.
We and Al Qaeda and possibly other extremist Muslim organizations. We are not at war with Islam. And if we are, I surrender, because it’s both a) a no-win war against a billion people and b) morally wrong.
Oh, and c) really, really stupid.
Nope. We have the ability to level Baghdad and the whole country from afar, without putting U.S. soldier at risk. We didn’t do that. We used a lighter touch, putting boots on the ground, knowing that some of them would become casualties. We did that in order to minimize the death of innocent Iraqis.
Wrong again. We (wrongly, in hindsight) thought they had WMDs and that Saddam might give them to a group like that that murdered thousands on 9/11. Now, while you can legitimately argue that we shouldn’t have gone into Iraq, to claim that we had less justification than the barbarians that killed people as they showed up for work goes lightyears to far. But that’ what I expect of you. So, good job.
I agree that we are not at war with all of Islam. What is unknown is to what portion of Islam is at war with us. It’s not a handful of guys, that much is clear. And the fact is that if people are at war with us, we’d best adopt a posture that we are at war with them. That’s not immoral, that’s the moral, responsible position.
We did that because we were interested in conquest, not annihilation. We put “boots on the ground” because that’s how you conquer a country, and we’ve protected those “boots” with a complete disdain for the lives of Iraqis.
Pure garbage. We knew that there were no such WMDs, and that Saddam was the enemy of Al Qaeda. We wanted the land, we wanted the oil, and we wanted to use Iraq as a lab experiment for extreme free market economic policies. A concern over WMDs was never anything but blatant lies on our part.
It’s hard to know what to make of these statistics. If you look at them over time (rather than just looking at one isolated poll) there seems to be a downward trend in terms of support for extremist groups. Seems like there was a peak after 9/11 which has been dwindling ever since:
sorry for the big quote
Who is suggesting that?
You think Muslims are your enemies? Seriously? All of them?
You are making a baseless assumption that a majority of Muslims think this way.
Here’s how it works. If some Catholics priests molest children and are shielded by the church over it, that’s a just a few bad apples and not a reflection on Catholicism. If a few Muslim fanatics kill some Americans, that shows that Islam is intrinsically evil.
The Catholic Church did not task priests with the job of molesting children. This is in stark contrast with Imams who intentionally task people with murder.
That’s no “stark” difference; people are still victimized who would not have been without the deliberate acts of religious authorities, either way.
And the Catholic Church has tormented and killed as many or more people in its time, up to and including the present day with its crusade against abortion and its lying about condoms and therefore aiding the spread of disease. I see no evidence that there’s anything especially barbaric about Islam. Islam is evil and destructive because that is what religions are, not because of anything special about it.
The crusades, what’s that? Tell us professor Der Trihs. Does homeland security know?
True enough, although in most of these countries Muslims represent a large-ish portion of the population, or at least a visible minority if you will. Going by Wiki numbers :
France : ~10%
Switzerland : ~5%
Germany : ~5%
Bosnia : ~40% (5% in the greater Yugoslavia area)
Compare to the US, where estimates on the total number of Muslims vary from 1.3 million to 5 millions. Since the total population of the US is 310 millions, that’s between 0.4% and ~2%. Canada also rocks 2%.
What I’m saying is that the grand majority of French, German, Swiss nationals will have had a few Muslim classmates, co-workers and neighbours over the course of their lives. Visible minorities will always get some flak, it’s the nature of the beast.
But can the same really be said of North America ? Especially of Texas, or Florida, or Alabama ? How many of the good people of Murfreesboro, TN have even seen a Muslim in the flesh, and how rational is it to fiercely hate something you don’t know and has no impact whatsoever on your daily life ?
What I mean is that in other countries, some people will flock to the banner of anti-Islam out of their actual interaction with Muslims, and some politicians or journalists will and have tapped into that latent, existing xenophobia to drum up votes and sales.
In the US however, it seems to me that the xenophobia stems almost entirely from Fox-like propaganda and daily Islam-bashing. It’s manufactured hatred… to drum up votes and sales too, I guess. Maybe I’ll be the only one seeing a distinction here, I dunno.
Nonsense. Nobody was desperate to believe that and Bush got his share of flack for saying it. After September 11th Muslims were harrassed and a few ‘Muslim-looking’ people were shot in cold blood. I lost track of how many people advocated dropping nuclear bombs on Mecca or on the entire Middle East around that time. And it’s not as if anti-Muslim sentiment got started on September 11th either. This isn’t a reaction to anything terrorists are doing. The public that has been deliberately goaded into this kind of freak out for years, and now some politicians are trying to take advantage. There’s no other sensible explanation for people going crazy about local Muslim groups with long roots trying to build facilities.
Take a look at what went on after the Danish newspaper published the Mohammed cartoons-people were burning Danish flags, tossing Danish milk and cheese into the street, and rioting and setting fires.
Heck, let’s burn a few cars and kill a few people to let those rotten danes know how we feel!
This kind of behavior is what puzzles me-if they thought a bit about it, most of the harm was inflicted by muslims upon muslims-makes perfect sense!
Rioting is a stupid reaction to a cartoon, but the reactions to those drawings were stirred up by lying religious leaders who had something to gain. So as far as that goes it’s the same as the situation with the community center in New York: people got upset because they were misled by fanatics who had something to gain. That’s also true of a lot of other outrages in Muslim countries, I think. The dictators who run those countries try to convince their people that all their problems are caused by America and the Jews when actually there’s not much of an economy aside from oil revenue, and most of that is going straight to the dictators and their families.
I gather that there are more Muslims in Tennessee than one might think, but happily some of their interactions with Christians proceed quite warmly.
Of course it’s a fad. That isn’t to say that anti-Islamicism isn’t always around, just like anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism and anti-Mormonism.
Another good example would be the Swiss minaret ban; I fail to see how banning minarets is any less stupid than rioting over cartoons.