Clinton, after bombing Iraq and killing eight civilians, implied that by not overthrowing Hussein, they’d brought it on themselves.
After abortion-performing doctors are murdered, many US Christians bemoan their deaths but then say something about living by the sword and dying by the sword, or otherwise appear to say the deaths are justified.
After 9/11, a woman called my place of business and out of nowhere started talking about turning the entire middle East into a sheet of glass.
You ask me where I’d place a Muslim who implies that the cartoonists brought it on themselves. I’d place that Muslim beside some of the Christians I encounter in everyday life. I find the view abhorrent but unexceptional: people get upset over a perceived injustice, whether religious or secular, and are willing to dehumanize the person perpetrating the injustice, to the extent that they think the person deserves death.
For an atheist, you have a peculiarly sacred sense of religion. For me, religion is no more and no less than what its practitioners say it is. Calling ISIS a perversion of Islam is simply saying that it’s far outside of the mainstream of modern Muslim thought (and if you disagree with THAT, please explain why), and that varies from mainstream modern Muslim thought in an evil and insane way (and again, if you disagree with that, please explain why).
I never claimed to speak classical Arabic, did I? I use the English translation by Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall. And yes, I am well aware of the Muslim belief that only the Koran in Arabic is the real Koran, and all the others are not translations but “commentaries”. Which leads me to wonder why an eternal, all-knowing God, Allah, would communicate the most important message ever communicated (if it is really of divine origin, which I doubt) in a language spoken by less than 5% of humanity. It would be like Christians saying you cannot understand the New Testament unless you read it in Greek.
I am not here to give you a course on the Koran. You can find many Korans on the web.
There ARE indeed passages that are not warlike, cruel or bloodthirsty (although the Allah-will-fry-your-ass and doom-to-the-unbelievers are VERY numerous throughout the book. But let me give you one example. The famous “There shall be no compulsion in religion” verse, which is verse 256 of Sura no. 2 Al-Baqarah (The Cow).
Sounds nice and tolerant, does it not? But wait a second. Sura 2, the second Sura of the Koran, is a relatively early “revelation”. You should know that the Suras are not arranged by chronological date of revelation but generally by length, with the longest being generally towards the front and the shortest at the back. But it is possible tyo identify earlier and later revelations.
It has been noted that the verses that preach tolerance and peaceful relations are generally from the earlier revelations, when the Muslim group was weak and could not afford to threaten anyone. The more bloodthirsty and militaristic verses seem to be from later periods when Mohammed and his friends had conquered many of their enemies and had grown rich from raiding caravans and selling those who resisted into slavery.
Now look at that verse 2:256 again: (this is from the Sahih International translation). It reads:
“There shall be no compulsion in [acceptance of] the religion.”
So what is that “acceptance of” doing there in brackets? Well, as later hadiths from the militarily successful Mohammed make clear, apostates from Islam are to be killed (but cannot be burned because that particular form of sadism is reserved for the big mob boss upstairs, Allah). But killing apostates sure sounds like compulsion, doesn’t it?
So somebody added “acceptance of” and told everybody that was what the verse really meant. Presto, no more conflict. The verse means that you cannot force someone to convert (although you can put all kinds of pressure on him to make him see the light) but once he HAS converted, you can kill him if he tries to leave.
Kind of reminds me of the Borg on Star Trek, TNG.
Yes, there are verses that genuinely urge Muslims to be kind to widows and orphans, to give to charity. So friggin’ what? I am an atheist and I do good for the poor and give to charity. You don’t need some warlord religious fanatic to do that.
Are we really about to believe that there were no generous, kind and charitable people in Arabia before Mohammed came along?
Again. I was responding specifically to Valteron’s source that burning was prescribed. I make no claim that no Muslims “really” want to kill apostates. Some Muslims do believe that and I find their belief reprehensible.
I note that after repeated references to the “32 nations” with anti-apostasy laws on the books, when I mentioned that I would be interested to see how often it happened, Valteron and ITR champion hastened to provide citations for people persecuted under such laws. They came up with fewer than a half dozen examples. Among 32 countries, they can name only a half dozen victims of that barbarism?
In fact, one of Valteron’s links made the same point that I did:
Killing people for holding or changing beliefs is evil. The evidence provided, thus far, in this thread is that such behavior is cultural far more than religious. Note that when Muslims outside MENA are polled on the topic, we find rather different results. From my earlier link:
You folks on the politically correct brigade never tire of multiplying apples and oranges to establish some kind of “moral equivalence” which, even if such an equivalency existed, would not excuse the abuses in Islam, would it?
According to the article “Anti-abortion violence” in Wikipedia, in the U.S., violence directed towards abortion providers has killed at least eight people, including four doctors, two clinic employees, a security guard, and a clinic escort. You can crunch the numbers for other western jurisdictions like Canada, Europe, Australia, etc. but since murders of abortion providers is much more prevalent in the US, the number is probably less than 20. Muslim gunmen in Paris and Copenhagen have topped that in the space of a few weeks.
Are there states in the west that encourage the murder of abortion-performing doctors? Are there clergymen who regularly call for their murder from public pulpits? Do western states take out murder Fatwahs on abortion doctors along the line of what was done to Salman Rushdie?
I agree that was a terrible thing to say. But if we are trying to draw equivalencies between the west and Islam, this woman said that after 9/11 killed some 3000 innocent persons. Compare that to Muslim mobs burning embassies and demanding the murder of people for. . . . drawing some friggin’ cartoons!
You are making a lot of assumptions about what “mainstream” Muslims think. You seem to feel that a Muslim must either be a card-carrying member of ISIS or else be 100% opposed to everything they stand for. Just because a Muslim is not pointing a gun at you does not make him a peaceful moderate. In fact polls have shown large numbers of Muslims who want to see Sharia law in their countries (even if their country is France or Britain!) For example, PEW research has shown that Egyptians who do NOT believe apostates should be killed are part of a “perverted” minority of 15%. The vast majority of Egyptians apparently see eye-to-eye with ISIS on points like this and the stoning of women even though they are not ISIS members. This is what makes your ISIS/mainstream dichotomy so misleading.
First of all, what I said was: “In fact polls have shown large numbers of Muslims who want to see Sharia law in their countries (even if their country is France or Britain!)”
Now I realize this is not the same as my original point about how many want sharia law in France, but it is quite relevant to my broader point, namely, that the Muslim world is not neatly divided into ISIS bad guys and non-ISIS good guys.
I am going to say this one last time: Hundreds of millions of Muslims are not attacking us militarily at present, but they hold views about Sharia, the victory of Islam over the world, violence, cruelty, murder of apostates and dissidents, and a host of other beliefs that we in the west would consider extremist.
Yes, and those are the passages everyone is talking about, right? :dubious:
Wood interviewed and quoted only radicals and a “secular” authority (Haykel). No mainstream Muslim or widely accepted Islamic scholar was mentioned or offered a chance to give their views. Even Haykel had to clarify and expand in a later interview because he felt his statements were taken out of context.
First, those polls need to be considered with the circumstances in mind. The questions are written in English and then translated - sometimes distorting the meaning. The pollsters conduct face to face interviews in some places accompanied by government “minders”. Not the best situation to receive frank and nuanced views.
Second, should we judge whether someone is good or bad based on their opinions alone, regardless of their actions? I do not agree with your opinions expressed here, and find some of them repellant or frankly, delusional. Should I consider you a bad man on that basis, or warn that you might resort to violence against Muslims because of your posts here?
Your own example of your reading of the Koran illustrates how some people will come away with a distorted view of Islam, in service of their own ends. You read it in order to confirm your biases and justify your anger, and that is what you take from it. The majority of Muslims do not have that goal, and do not interpret it for that purpose.
I doubt that you have seen any such results from a reputable poll such as PEW or Gallup.
As to the poll you cite, here, the headline and story, (not the actual poll), are bullshit.
They polled 1001 French. The writers of the story, (not the actual pollsters), made the assumption that those polled included exactly proportionate numbers of Muslims as non-Muslims, yet there isno information in the actual poll to support that claim. The actual poll shows the numbers of people broken down by age and broad geographic area, but no indication that the people actually lived in Muslim communities. It is all extrapolated by the clowns at “Muslim Statistics” with no actual support for their claim.
Beyond that, of course, is the vague question on which your and their assumption rests: From what you know, please, tell me if you have a very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable or very unfavorable opinion of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant otherwise known as ISIS?
From what they know? What do they know? Favorable opinion? Unfavorable opinion? So someone who thinks that a group bringing stability to Syria but has not paid any attention to the actual events gets registered as “somewhat favorable” from which you and the twits at “Muslim statistics” draw the conclusion that 25% of French Muslim youth are actively in favor of beheadings.
:rolleyes:
No kidding.
Actually that has not been your broader point, which is that there are only “bad” Muslims, and apologist Muslims.
And hundreds of millions of people in the West believe that silliness without paying any attention to the multiple differences of opinion that are held by myriad Muslims, lumping them all into two groups, bad Muslims and unattentative Muslims.
There are certainly extreme views, even evil views, held by many Muslims. (There are also extreme views on different topics, held by millions of people in the West. ::: shrug :::) Your method of lumping them all together means that we can never work with any of them to resist the efforts of those who are truly evil.
It actually appears even worse than that: the folks at that hate blog consider a respondent who has a “somewhat unfavorable” impression of ISIS not to be in the unfavorable camp, or else they’d be “very unfavorable.” The actual numbers of “very” and “somewhat” favorable are 16% total–and France’s numbers are themselves far higher than the numbers in France or Germany.
What I couldn’t figure out from looking at the raw numbers was who was polled. Was it recent immigrants to the EU? If so, what percentage of these immigrants are Muslim? How do the numbers compare if you look at Muslims vs. non-Muslims? I ask because of the dumbshit contingent: I suspect that the number of Christians who would say they had a somewhat favorable view of ISIS would be in the high single digits if not low double digits, just because of how many ignoramuses might think, “Oh, Islamic state, I haven’t heard of them, but I don’t want to sound prejudiced against Muslims” or something.
A comparison, a control group, would be critical to a proper understanding of these numbers.
If your alleged majority of good and peaceful Muslims is as huge as you maintain, they should have no trouble reforming out the barbaric and backwards atrocities of their religion?
Why? How many of them think that it is their problem?
The response of the West to the “threat” of “communism” was to go out and kill as many third world people as they could find who wanted to experiment with socialism. There was never a serious effort to actually work with them to demonstrate how their socialist dreams would fail.
(And, to return to an earlier point, where are all the LGBT groups actively campaigning against NAMBLA and similar groups in other countries? I don’t have any reason to condemn the LGBT community for not engaging in a fight that is tangent to their general experience, but following your logic regarding Islam, you should be excoriating the LGBT community on a daily basis to get them to take action.)
Many Muslims are in direct conflict with ISIS and al Qaida. That they do not get the play in the news that ISIS gets is the fault of the news media, not them. And when they get lumped in with ISIS by people using your arguments, that is a pretty strong disincentive to do much of anything. If they are going to be condemned regardless of their actions, they have a strong motive to ignore the fight and spend their energy and money on their own projects.
I think the truth is in the middle too, but that the 10 second version of the truth is a lot closer to #2 than #3.
What about the 2 minute version? Well, I trust someone could argue that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were deeply familiar with Marxism and could quote chapter and verse. Ditto with Jim Jones and Christianity. But that misses out on the country bumpkin wacko-crazy aspect of their presentations.
I suppose you could stonewall it and say, “DAESH isn’t representative of Islam any more than the Fred Phelps or Jonathan Ruhumuliza are representative of Christianity.”
I do agree that the views of US Islamophobes and DAESH align perfectly on this matter. Basically the same, as far as I can tell. I disagree with their take.
You might have reason to believe that I would resort to violence against Muslims **IF ** I had stated, in my posts here, beliefs that God mandates me to kill westerners who convert to Islam, for instance. Or that I am in possession of an alleged Holy Book in which an alleged all-powerful God tells me to “Kill the unbelievers wherever you find them.” Then you would really have cause to fear me. Luckily, I do not believe any such thing and I have never expressed such opinions. But I know of millions of people who DO espouse such ideas, and I am scared shitless of their expansion into our western society. I am scared beyond belief when these people declare that their blasphemy laws trump our freedom of expression and go on to prove it by murdering people in cold blood.
Personally, I fear cancer more than the ravings of homicidal fanatics in foreign countries. And cancer doesn’t even run in my family.
I am also pretty sanguine about boarding an airplane though I read about aircraft incidents all the time. A plane crashes and its exciting, so it gets hyped. 30,000+ deaths from car collisions? Not so much.
911? While I have some familiarity with downtown NYC, I’m happy to report that the main perpetrator is currently residing under a couple of miles of Indian Ocean, thanks to Obama. Also risk assessment and car accidents.
I’ll confess that comparing Muslims to the Borg is vastly more original and a tad more amusing than comparing them to Nazis, but it’s equally ridiculous.
Dude, your fears are paranoid. Yes, there are Muslims who feel that way, and yes they are a very real threat…to Muslims in the Islamic World.
However the West is in no danger of being taken over by Muslims, particularly not Muslims who feel that.
I’d also question the idea that there are “millions” of Muslims in the West who feel this way and are planning on acting on such beliefs.
This might be a good way to put it. I consider Fred Phelps to have been a Christian in very much the same way that I consider ISIS to be Muslim. If Obama drew this parallel explicitly, I’d be fine with it.
Er, LHoD. Obama is in the public diplomacy biz at present: he’s not giving a seminar. I suspect that if somebody asked a State Dept spokesperson if they really, truly believed that DAESH was not Muslim, that they would say something like, “Well they may think they are, but the great majority of practicing Muslims, yada yada.”
I admit that nobody is giving a press conference in this thread, nor is Graeme Wood of the Atlantic. We’re here to fight ignorance. Fair enough. I’m just stressing that as diplomatic fudges go “DAESH is not muslim”, is pretty mild. Whether it’s diplomatically optimal is another matter: I frankly can’t judge as there are a few tradeoffs involved.