Well lets stop and look at that for a moment. The Secretary of State said that the actions were outrageous distressful and disgraceful. Not the riots of course, but of Reverend Jones for threatening to burn a [del]flag[/del] book. This was the Secretary of State. She might as well have made the statement wearing a Burka for all the perspective it had.
Sure. Just like it’s an option to tell someone to take a valium when they flip out over Gideon Bibles.
Yeah, lots of Christians get killed everytime that happens.
Outrage is so similar to death.
I don’t remember setting fire to the Gideon headquarters, or declaring a fatwah on the Gideons, or chanting “death to the Gideons”, or murdering translators of the Bible, or. . . . . you get my drift.
In relation to the Koran burning, this is what I posted on my facebook…
It’s stupid that the actions of ignorant, stupid, attention seeking fuckwads who hate can be used to justify or incite violence against the innocent, removed by 1000s of miles. Its ironic that any such violence will just be used to justify the original stupidity in a downward spiral.
And it’s something that I very much stand by.
It strikes my as being totally stupid that because of the actions of some inflammatory idiot in the states, there is concern about the safety of the troops of the troops :rolleyes:(actually soldiers) in Afghanistan.
If there had been violence against those that had no part in the burning following the incendiary publicity stunt, wouldn’t it have just confirmed the correctness of his actions? (at least to some)
I sure hope so, 'cause I had Islamic Violence in the betting pool.
Nobody wants to jail Terry Jones for what he said. But he did not deserve front page news or endless coverage on the news networks. He was a joke and should have been ignored. Not only was a hopeless bigot, but he did not speak for a large group of people. He was a creation of the networks.
Nobody.
Nobody disputes that he has a Constitutional right to burn a bunch of Korans if he wants to. I think several U.S. leaders made a point of saying that. Everybody else had the right to tell him he was being an idiot and going out of his way to make problems.
I think you’re nitpicking their wording for no particular reason.
Not surprising given that he was deliberately provoking people and hoping to blackmail another Islamic group into doing what he wanted.
This is a point that does need to be made and I admit I didn’t see it very often during this brouhaha. (I also wasn’t watching a lot of coverage so I may not have seen it.) Like any other book, Korans are words on paper. Physically venerating a book rather than the principles in it is stupid to begin with. Apart from that, we do have the right to treat our own books how we please.
Your reading of the situation is wrong from what I can tell. He did not give in because of threats of violence. Assuming he ever intended to go through with this in the first place - which we don’t know - he gave in when the government intervened to point out that his actions were going to cause a major problem in U.S. relations with the Islamic world. That’s a huge issue to begin with.
Probably not. Then again, atheist terrorism isn’t a major worldwide issue related to violence and instability in many countries, and atheist-Western relations are also not a problem.
Of the U.S. Scolding the citizens of other countries is not her job. Her job is international diplomacy and she stated correctly that this was causing a big problem, and if the burning had happened it would’ve been worse.
What’s your point? Does that there are worse acts mean we cannot castigate those that are merely unpleasant? If we have to go through the list of all the things that are worse than something before we say something is bad, we’re going to be there all day.
Are you accusing the Secretary of State of not believing that the riots are outrageous, distressful, disgraceful, or worse? I can only speak for myself, but I would tend to say that violence of such kind is pretty much implicitly accepted as a bad thing. Whereas there was debate about whether burning Korans was a good thing or not. It seems somewhat blinkered of you not to recognise that.
I note that you have not in this thread castigated those riots yourself. Of course, having read posts by you in other threads, I am quite capable of understanding that you are against them without you having to mention that fact in each post you make on the general subject. Am I wrong to do so? Should I be holding you to a higher standard? Will you be placing an order for some more covering apparel?
Yes, I am well aware of my 2008 thread regarding a Gideon Bible placed in my hotel room, even though I never asked for it. I find the Bible to be objectionable for a wide range of reasons, and I consider it hate propaganda. I expressed my opinion calmly using a thread on SDMB. So what the F— is your point? I did not burn embassies, throw someone in jail for naming a teddy bear Mohammed or kill people in mindless violence. I did not declare a fatwah against the Gideons. I merely expressed a viewpoint. At no point in that thread was I in the least violent.
If a Muslim wants to come on SDMB and start a thread about why Draw Mohammed Day or South Park or the Danish Cartoons offend them, fine.
SDMB is an excellent forum for peaceful, democratic debate. That is why I am curious as to why so few Muslims choose to come on here and express their viewpoints. Could it be that democratic debate in which contrary viewpoints have full freedom is a hard thing for Muslims to get their minds around? Could it be that Achmed the Dead Terrorist (see YouTube) and his famous “Silence, I keeeel you!” , while satirical, are actually closer to the reality of the Islamic mindset than one might think?
I’m sure this has been pointed out to you already, but this is a ridiculous analysis that only shows off your own preconceptions. There is no basis for projecting SDMB membership onto the world at large, especially when it comes to religion. Most of the board’s membership is in the U.S., where the column is based. And the U.S. is maybe 0.5 percent to 2 percent Muslim. Could the SDMB population be similar? It might be. Don’t forget that not everybody here talks about their religion all the time. There are definitely Muslims here, and for all you know, everyone who does not disclose their religion upfront could be a Muslim choosing not to mention it.
I’ve seen plenty of verses of the Koran that says unbelievers should be despised, and to fight the enemies of Islam. In spite of this, I don’t believe that all 1.5 billion muslims hate non-muslims. A lot of people treat religion like a buffet table; they can pick and choose the things they like about it and discard the things they don’t like.
I really, really don’t want to agree with the Fundamentalist Christian nutjobs that are burning the Korans. But where the heck are the verses that the “peace loving” muslims could latch on to in order to support their beliefs? Does the Koran have anything similar at all to “turn the other cheek”?
:rolleyes: Christians try to get things that religiously offend them banned too, it isn’t something that that Muslims have a lock on. And Christians also attack people physically for doing or being something they disapprove of; I’m sure that the gay guy being beaten to death is just as dead being murdered by peace loving Christians as he is dead at the hands of nasty brutal Muslims.
Of course, when Christians do things like that, we get the speech about how it was an isolated incident that doesn’t reflect on Christianity and not the one about how it shows the innate evil of Islam.
And I suppose a mouse and a blue whale are equivalent because they are both mammals. I am no more a fan of Christianity than you are, Trihs. But if you want to talk about homophobia, look at proportions. What “religious background” are the 10 countries of the world that allow full same-sex marriage rights? What religion predominates in most of the states at the other end of the spectrum that have the death penalty for homosexuality? Yes, yes, I know, there are Christian countries like Jamaica that make some Muslim countries seem like homophilic sweethearts. But what are the overall tendencies and proportions of the problems in Christian and Muslim countries?
Or for that matter, do you know of a single Chrisitian country where a majority of the population believe that apostates from Christianity should be killled? But PEW Research shows that a majority of Muslims surveyed (and as high as 78% in Pakistan) believe that apostates from Islam deserve to die.
Yes, I admit it, a blue whale and a mouse are both mammals. They both suckle their young, and have hair and warm blood. But I find it hard to see them as equivalent.
But how is it that we are to know that those results are purely as a result of idealogy? Even when the reason given is idealogy, we need to take other things into account; poverty levels, national history, natural resources, and so on. Correlation is not causation, and all that.
I don’t know of a single christian country at all, which would make your comparison rather difficult to carry off. Theocracies have become passe in the west.
Christianity has, rather recently historically speaking, lost a lot of its strength as a dominating political power. So christain-instigated witch-burnings have become comparatively rare, relatively recently. But I strongly suspect that this has more to do with our general cultural level of secularism than the fact that the religion we’re not-as-devoted-to-anymore was christianity or islam or whichever.
It would be somewhat interesting to see a correlation between that majority of surveyed muslims and their relative standards of living.
Do you suppose a majority of the poor Roman Catholics in Brazilian slums believe people who leave Roman Catholicism should be killed? Have you ever heard a Buddhist of any social class or cultural background call for the death of anyone who leaves Buddhism? Do atheists call for the death of the occasional atheist who embraces religion? Do Mormons take out death Fatwahs on people who mock Mormonism? Did Mormons ever threaten Parker and Stone for an entire South Park episode mercilessly mocking Joe Smith and showing the Book of Mormon to be bullshit?
You seem to have cunningly skipped the whole “other factors” point halfway through your post. But the answer to your question is; I do not know. Do you?
I will admit that most of what I find frightening and revolting about the Islamic ideology, its cruelty, its intolerance, its murder of dissenters, its brutal imposition of puritanical morality, its sexism, its homophobia etc. etc. was in fact practised in equivalent forms by western Christian countries in centuries past. Muslims do not burn heretics and witches, but that is just a detail.
But that admitted, the fact is that Torquemada and Cotton Mather and Matthew Hopkins (the Witchfinder General of England) are long dead and gone. They are not part of a world-wide, rapidly reproducing political reality of 1.5 billion people flooding into our western secular democracies with contempt for our freedoms and tolerance and a determination to bring us all to the “truth” of Islam.
I realize that there is a sub-caste of educated and prosperous Muslims in the west who are not generally fanatical. On the other hand, do a bit of research about the surprising education levels and prosperous family backgrounds of many Muslim terrorists and would-be terrorists, many of whom were raised in the west.