People who break into restaurants and terrorize innocent people are racist thugs and the people who defend the EDL are either racists themselves or incredibly stupid.
I also wasn’t avoiding you, but merely noticed from your posting history that since you joined the SDMB almost all your posts have consisted of bigoted rants against Muslims obviously cribbed from various hate sites.
You also have come across as being somewhat impervious to logic and don’t even bother addressing arguments posed by others and continue posting the same arguments even after your arguments have been shredded.
That led me to certain conclusions about your own motivations and beliefs that I can’t go into without violating board rules about what can be said outside the Pit.
Sadly enough, you seem to have chosen a thread involving a group of Muslims who responded to a group of racist thugs with tea and crumpets by hijacking it to post bigoted nonsense about a group of people you passionately hate despite knowing utterly nothing about them and turn into the thousandth thread on this site squealing about evil Muslim immigrants out to destroy Europe.
Continuing such discussions outside the pit strikes me as beyond pointless for reasons I can’t go into without giving poor Marley or Tom headaches.
You really haven’t the slightest idea what I was talking about did you?
It’s always hysterical how the self-styled defenders of Western civilization against the evil Islamic hordes are completely ignorant of the civilization they claim to defend.
Since you obviously haven’t read it I’ll break it down for you.
Juliet was only 12 when she was to be married off to Paris, a much older man.
In medieval society, there was no concept of adolescence. As soon as girls and boys went through puberty they were considered adults and could get married and start boinking.
By today’s standards, Romeo and Juliet was kiddie porn and Muhammad engaged in statutory rape, but by the standards of those times Romeo, Juliet, and Aisha were all adults.
What is it about the word “fiction” that you don’t understand?
It’s true that child marriages took place in medieval Europe, but we have evolved since then. This is the crucial difference between Western civilisation and Islam, because Islam is set in stone and cannot evolve. Muhammad was a paedophile by modern standards, but because he is held up by Islam as a perfect figure to emulate, paedophilia and child marriage are still rampant in the Muslim world.
I was asked for a cite and I gave one regarding Dearborn. Here’s a piece of advice, address it rather than trying to hand-wave it away with wordplay. You can’t seem to deal with the fact that Mohammad was a violent person.
If you make a coherent, well-written argument and show you understand such basics about the people you hate as the difference between “radical Islam” and “fundamentalist Islam” I’ll be happy to address your arguments
Look we know you’re a strong proponent of racial profiling but most of us aren’t so paranoid about “the other.”
Oh please, have you the slightest idea just how stupid you look accusing someone with the username “Ibn Warraq” of being an apologist for Muhammad?
Beyond that you really ought to read the Bible before making such foolish comments. Yes, he fought against those who fought against him, was usually willing to show mercy but at times didn’t when he should’ve. He also hated dogs for which we should all condemn him, though he loved cats.
However, Muhammad was a pussy cat compared to the prophets of the Bible, such as Moses.
I made a coherent argument. And I don’t hate anybody except the terrorists we’re discussing. I made the argument that Muhammad was a warlord who killed and enslaved people and the most extreme of his followers emulate his behavior.
That’s a lie on your part.
Here’s an interesting fact. The Bible wasn’t written by Jesus. But compared to Jesus or Buddha or various other progenitors of religion, Muhammad was still a murdering warlord. And therein lies the problem. He was a control freak who wrote a book on how everybody else should live. People live by his rules of sharia law as if its still the 7th century.
He was doing what everyone was doing in the premodern era. According to Christian tradition, Joseph was 90 when he was betrothed to the 12 year old Mary (12 being the marriageable age for Jewish girls).
Do you even know what “mainstream Islamic sources” said was the reason for the attack on the Banu Qurayza?
I assume you’re referring to The Battle of the Trench?
The Banu Qurayza were a Jewish tribe who supposedly broke a treaty with him during a war and were accused of helping his enemies who were trying to conquer Medina.
He allegedly crushed them at the Battle of the Trench and, after they surrendered had all the men executed and all the women and children enslaved.
Obviously this is a story beloved by Muslim radicals who see it as a justification for their own atrocities and by racist Islamophobes who see it as proof of how evil Muslims and Muhammad are.
Historians familiar with that time will point out that was the normal course of warfare for that time.
Now, I’ve been using words like “supposedly” and “alleged” because what Mac is ignoring is that not only can we not be certain of as to whether the stories about the battle are true or if they are exaggerations, but we can’t even be certain the battle happened.
The source for it is Ibn Ishaq, a historian born almost a hundred and thirty years later who collected oral traditions and oral traditions, particularly ones that old are notoriously unreliable.
If it was true(and that’s a huge if) and Muhammad did execute all the men who surrendered to him, then it was wildly out of character of him and explicitly against what he claimed were God’s commands, since he repeatedly declared that captives were off-limits and not to be harmed, which was a huge departure from the tradition of that time.
The reason for this was he repeatedly said that you could only be aggressive in self-defense and only fight against those fighting against you.
Please don’t accuse me of lying. Besides, you spent numerous posts on the TSA thread arguing for adopting “the Israeli method” which explicitly involves racial profiling and you continued to do so after this was pointed out to you.
First of all, that’s not the way Sharia works.
Secondly, you really, really should read up on Islam and Muhammad if you’re going to attack him.
He didn’t write any books. The Quran was written years after he died and most of the hadiths weren’t written for decades and in some cases centuries after he died.
No, according to some mainstream and traditional Islamic sources, the Prophet Muhammad did something that would be considered illegal and probably abhorrent by 21st Century standards, but was pretty typical for the for time and place.
If you look at the rest of the sources describing Muhammad’s wives, it seems he had a thing for older women - A’isha, in fact, is described in these sources as intensely jealous of the feelings Muhummad still had for his first wife, Khadija (whom he married at 25, when she was 40), even years after her death.
Rape as legal term: it was not rape because it was legal at the time, as opposed to the idea that sex without consent is and has always been rape. The degree to which the behavior of prophet Mo is fetishized and emulated turns what would be a semantic quibble into one with serious implications for the safety of millions of children today.
People who sexually abuse children are very often married.
Up until very recently, hardly anyone, anywhere, in Arabia, Europe, or otherwise, bothered with consent from women when it came to marriage. Muhammad’s marriage to A’isha is wrong by today’s standards, but utterly unremarkable for the 7th Century.
Child marriage existed long before Muhammad (see, again, Joseph and Mary), and even today it’s a severe problem in countries around the world, both Muslim and non-Muslim (Latin America, for instance, has one of the worst rates of child marriage). Demonizing Muhammad is not going to fix the problem. Even if every single Muslim vanished off the face of the Earth, there would still be millions of children at risk.
Which has, quite literally, nothing to do with what we’re talking about.
Anyone who wants to rehash Beecher’s fixation on the purported age of Aisha is welcome to do so in a separate thread.
Anyone who wishes to go off on a tangent as to whether Romeo and Juliet (or Joseph and Mary) represent tales of ephebophilia or pedophilia may do so in a separate thread.
While the intention of those discussions may be to make a point, they are guaranteed to go on at great length without either side being persuaded and they provide nothing to further the discussion of this thread.
None of those “examples” address rape, while the “grooming” practices under discussion clearly are examples of rape.
Verse 004.023 sets out a list of women whom it is forbidden to marry. Verse 004:024 to which you linked, continues the list of women against whom there are prohibitions against marriage, noting that the some of those prohibitions do not apply to slave women. It then continues on to discuss the way in which wives, (regardless whether they were first free or slave), are to be treated. It is not an authorization to rape, but permission for a man to marry a slave.
Instead of trying to police the content of the discussion to the favor of your losing position, why not try moderating some of the many personal attacks that you consistently allow? You know the stuff that is against the rules, instead of discussions of contentious issues, which this forum is inteneded for.
Considering the extent of the problem among non-Muslims and in non-Muslim countries, that is a conclusion that does not follow from the evidence available.