My mom seems convinced that the reason all these terrorist hate us is because its part of their religion. In fact she is convinced that most of muslims overseas have this view. Its strange but its true. I also hear all these accounts on tv how terrorist have hijacked the muslim religion for their purposes.
I also seen the 60 minutes piece just today about how religious schools in packistan do teach kids to hate americans and the jews and they pass it off to them as religion. So are they just plain out lying to the kids about the muslim religion ?
So what does Koran realy state about jihad and use of war against civilians?
Better yet, print out the whole thread, have the pages bound at Kinko’s with a nice clear plastic cover, wrap it up in some lavender mulberry paper, and give it to your mother as an early Halloween present.
Then read up on the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, The Reformation, the Great Schism, the Holocaust, Northern Ireland, the Khmer Rouge, Queen Mary, Operation Rescue, and any article by Ann Coulter, and see who really developed religious intolerance into an art form.
If Muslims in other countries hate other religions it is because they are brainwashed, as mentioned above, by their government, education system, etc. I understand that Palestinians learn that the Holocaust was a hoax. It’s no different with these people as it might be with someone in our country learning that gays are morally corrupt, etc. in some Christian school. People eat whatever they are fed.
I recently bought a translation of the Koran to see what the book has to say and to try to understand the outrageous attack of these avowed Muslin Fundamentalists. I’ve just looked at parts of it, but I was shocked by what I read. There is certainly a lot of harsh stuff in the Old Testament, but nothing to compare with what is in the Koran.
It’s OK, and indeed obligatory, to beat your wife and otherwise entirely subjugate her to your dominion. Women are clearly inferior and subordinate to men.
Muslims are considered slaves of Allah. This differs from the Chritian view of humans as the “children” of God.
There is nothing in Islam that allows for the toleration of “unbelievers.” There is nothing like Christ’s admonition to give unto Caesar what is Caeser’s and to God what is God’s.
It is apparently OK to wage Jihad and slaughter “infidels,” with the prohibition that children and old men should be spared (what about young and old women?). I guess the hijackers and anthrax spreaders forgot slipped up on that…they slaughtered indiscrimately…
What I find most telling, however, is that not one Muslim state tolerates other religions. When we went to fight in the Gulf War, Americans who needed visas from Kuwait or Saudi Arabia (such as reporters and some military personnel) were required to designate their religion. Those who wrote “Jewish” got a visa that stated in Arabic “none.” This was to get around the prohibition that Jews are not allowed into the country… Talk about institutionalized intolerance.
And there is the fact that none of the “mainstream” Muslim states seems to willing to entirely disown their fellow Muslim terrorists.
So yes, I think that Islam is a hateful and intolerant religion, that it is antithetical to freedom and democracy, and that it is entirely inconsistent with American ideals.
But I will continue to read my Koran to see if my opinion may change.
Neurodoc, what translation are you using? I’m sure that there is harsh stuff in there, but I would not put my memory for harshness in the Qu’ran against harshness in the Bible.
Historical point: Until the 20th century and the attempt by national groups within Islamic countries to react against or recover from European domination, Islam had a much better human rights record regarding people outside the Islamic faith than did Christianity. Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists were frequently treated as second class citizens, but they were rarely persecuted. Often, they were not even relegated to second class status.
Whatever hatred and intolerance we see in Islamic countries, today, can nearly all be traced to political movements or to pockets of specific national traditions that are not part of Islam, per se.
Keep reading until you get to the part about the “Peoples of the Book”. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s actually written in the Koran that Muslims are explicitly forbidden to discriminate against Christians, Jews, or other Muslims on the basis of religion.
The second book is where the maltreatment of women was found. I’m just starting out, and working with a translation, so I don’t want to make too rash statements, yet.
The Koran does say (see the posting above) that Jews, Christains, and Sabians (who are they?) will be rewarded by Allah IF THEY LEAD RIGHTEOUS LIVES…what does that mean? Does it mean the will be rewarded if they live according to the precepts of the Koran (i.e. beat or murder their uppity wives?) even if they are Christians or Jews? Note that this does not mean that Muslims have to “put up with” or otherwise tolerate unbelievers.
As regards Islamic tolerance of other faiths (such as two of the three specifically mentioned), what about the insulting designation on the visas of Jews (i.e. that their religion is “none?” Hmmmn? Here we are talking about “mainstream” Muslim nations, whose butts many Jewish US servicemen and (gasp) servicewomen risked their lives to save? What about the Taliban holding foreign Christian missionaries hostage? Hmmmn?
It is getting tiresome to me, and I think to most Americans after 9/11/2001, to hear people try to justify the murderous and totally unjustifiable behavior of these Muslim terrorists by referring to the alleged oppression and genocide of Christians and Westerners against Muslims.
The Crusades happened a long time ago. The Christains won. The Muslims may have never gotten over it. We have advanced a lot since then. These terrorists seem to be stuck in the past. Fortunately, at least for now, their warmaking capability is also stuck in the past, otherwise they would have probably placed a few nukes in NYC, Chicago, and SF…on Christmas Eve. It may be time for us to really flex our muscle in the part of the world these terrorist come from. Look where 55 post-WWII years of being Mr. Nice Guy have gotten us.
You’ll note they haven’t made any clear demands yet. They seem to merely want us dead. Seems pretty darned intolerant…
I’m not sure that there is any “nice” way we can deal with people who hold us in such murderous contempt. It really makes you wonder if the Crusaders had the right idea. I really hate to say that, but the crime committed against our citizens right in our homeland has modified my previous thinking about these folk.
You’re not paying very close attention–either to recent history or distant history. No one has been nursing a grudge for the last 600 years. Current calls by some Muslims against Western religions/politics/mores are the result of historically recent interventions by European and North American powers in the history of several Mid-East nations. Calls on their part to remember the Crusades are simply good propaganda, not the continuation of a long feud. (One of the reasons that it is good propaganda is that the Christians did not win. Or had you thought that Jerusalem had been a primarily Christian enclave for the last 757 years? They kicked our butts over 700 years ago and the latest crowd wants to repeat the performance.)
Regarding the placement of “none” for religion on the passports of adherents to Judaism: take the time to find out why that has been done and in which specific countries. Your statement falsely implies that every predominantly Muslim nation follows that practice.
Using the logic and history that you have so far displayed, we can rightly conclude that Christianity has declared that all homosexuals will burn in hell, that people who support separation of church and state are directly responsible for the WTC bombing, and that it is OK to cheat on one’s spouse as long as you get up in a pulpit and cry about it, later. Clearly, Fred Phelps, Jerry Falwell, and Jimmy Swaggart, as Christians, can be quoted as exemplars of all Christianity for all time.
Interesting, Tom, but don’t you think it reasonable to differentiate between the religious teachings of Muhammed roughly 15 centuries ago and that of Islam as currently indoctrinated and practiced by millions of fanatics spread from Northern Africa to Indonesia?
If not, can we reasonably conclude that Marxism is benign because its chief ideologist never portrayed it as such? Irrespective of the OP, I think we must assess ideologies/religions from where they are and what they do in the here and now, not as portrayed long ago by starry-eyed Utopians. (And I refer to all religions/ideologies, not merely to Islam.)
Also, you seemingly characterize Islam as rather benign in its treatment of dissenting groups, yet you omit women from your calculus. That’s half the population–and thus half the history you’ve overlooked. (Are we on the same wavelength here?)
Speaking of fanatics, our national media often characterize the “extremists” in Pakistan and Afghanistan as a nutty fringe who do not reflect mainstream values/attitudes, yet I’ve read several news reports from BBC and other international sources that suggest Islamic “extremism” is becoming quite the norm in many sectors of Muslim nations, especially among the youth and rural-dwellers.
And I have read several recent reports concerning the frustration of moderate Muslims in respect of being portrayed as an extremist religion.
In India recently on TV, a Muslim cleric referred to an actress as being a “prostitute” for wearing make-up and acting. It apparently has brought things to a head there, and moderate Muslims are calling for a more even-handed portrayal of themselves in the media.
Gee, neuro. For someone who, by your own admission, hasn’t read very much of the Koran, you seem to be throwing out a lot of definitive statements about what is and isn’t in the book, or the religion of those who revere it for that matter.
How’s about you take a breath, read the entire thing with an open mind, and then get back to us?
Fair enough, as long as you don’t equate those millions with the entire width and breadth of the Islamic community. There’s no denying the reactionary elements in Islam. But there is also no denying ( IMHO ) that that is not the only face of Islam.
I know anecdotes are poor evidence, but I’ll just throw this link out as a representation of a different viewpoint in Islam: http://www.shobak.org/islam/
But starry-eyed utopians ARE a facet of ( most ) religion, Islam included :-).
The only thing I ever object to in these arguments, is tarring with a wide brush. I have some problems of my own with organized religion and Judeo-Christian religions in particular. I see fundamentalism of an ugly sort in ALL of them. But I also see many fine, moral, intelligent, “moderate” believers. And that includes a great many Muslims. Too many for me to conclude that Islam is inherntly that much more virulent than the others.
More militant and political than some? Sure. Islam evolved in the midst of armed conflict and the history of that infuses Islamic ideology to some extent. It may well be that it is just a little easier for Islam to be twisted to violent ends for that reason. Maybe. But it still takes twisting.
Again, Islam can be benign or repressive. Sometimes it’s both. In Bosnia, Muslim women were ( and I assume they still are, the stress of war not withstanding ) perfectly westernized and in most respects, both before and after communism ( my Orthodox Serbian relatives, who were mostly country-folk in Bosnia as opposed to the urban Muslims, were likely rather more backwards and less cosmopolitan on average ). In Iran women are oppressed in some respects and not in others ( mandatory regressive morality codes, yet there are many women holding seats in the Iranian parliament ). In Taliban-controlled Afghanistan women are just repressed, period. But there IS a continuum.
Sadly, this is all too true. Rampant poverty, political repression and the perceived failure of the “westernization” ( which it really wasn’t ) that dominated high-level political thinking in the area post-WW II, is breeding reactionaries. Unfortunately for many of these people, “westernization” ending up being nothing more than a farce, with a tiny “westernized” oligarchy repressing the masses. The “socialist” Ba’ath Party that started as a pan-Arab democratizing movement still officially rules in Iraq and Syria :rolleyes: . The “western” governments of Egypt and Algeria are little more than dictatorships in sheep’s clothing.
But this is not the fault of Islam per se. The results would be the same, I’m dead certain, if the Middle-East were Christian - Like in Rwanda-Burundi. Or Buddhist - As in Burma/Myanmar. Demagogues can always find ideologies to make use of in times of acute stress - Islam, which was an overtly political religion from the get go, seems like a natural recourse for the oppressed. And being oppressed in a violent part of the world they lash out with violence. Then, as all men seek to do, they try to justify that violence - In this case appealing to their own personal vision of their religion.
But their vision is hardly universally excepted. Terrorism is still a minority occupation, even in the Middle-East . And even some terroists don’t accept that vision unhesitatingly. There was a split in al-Quaeda in 1992 because some Egyptian members wouldn’t countenance a planned bombing of the U.S. embassy in Riyadh, because of worry over innocent casualties. It seems even some scum have their limits at times.
I studied Islam in a Pakistani school for ten years. I was never once taught that Americans and Jews should be hated. I was taught that Jews and Christians are People of the Book and should not be discriminated against. I had friends in about a dozen other schools and they were all taught the same thing.
I scored the highest mark possible in every exam which I took in Islamic Studies.
I don’t doubt that there are some religious schools which teach Pakistani children that Jews and Christians are trying to wipe Islam off the face of the earth. But these are likely to be open-air schools where children sit on the ground and listen to some senile Mullah until they are old enough to work alongside their parents as domestic servants or farm labourers. I actually knew a couple of people who went to schools like this and more often that not, their grades depended not on their hatred of Americans but on the menial tasks which they performed for their schoolmaster.
I am not asking you to pity these people, but just to try to understand the situation.
I made no such comparison. I noted the difference between the general actions of a large group through 1500 years in contrast to a limited group within the larger group acting over the course of the last 80 years. Even if the “majority” of Muslims in five or seven countries act in repressive ways, that majority is not all and those few countries do not represent anything resembling a majority of the Muslim nations of the world.
If you’d like to address specifics, then do so. Making any statement that “Islam does/says/demands. . .” is simply a failure to take the time to know what is really done/said/required-of large numbers of Muslims in a wide variety of locations, political structures, and living conditions.
Muslim women have been treated no more or less fairly (in general) than Christian women throughout history. That the Christian societies tend to be about 100 years ahead of many Islamic societies in regards to Western views of women’s rights is a historical accident that is already correcting itself. Obviously, repression does occur in many parts of Muslim society, but it is not some great monolithic reality imposed on every human who follows Islam. While not frequent, we have had discussions on this MB regarding the “horrific” oppression of women by Baptists, Catholics, and Amish. Will you argue that women are universally oppressed in Christian countries?
Iran is a good example of the contradictions that too few people in the West actually study. One reason that the Ayatolleh Khomeini was able to return to Iran and lead his revolution was because Muslim women in Iran rebelled against the Shah’s laws that prohibited the many Islamic rules of dress and deportment. When the Ayatolleh gained power and imposed all the rules as law, there was a period (aggravated by the war with Iraq) in which those rules were very repressive. However, over the last 20 years, the Iranian people have been finding their own ways to find a middle course between the two extremes under which they have suffered. As noted, women are allowed in public, in the government, and in commerce.
Side note on the Pakistani religious schools: There are a lot of Afghan refugees in Pakistan and there are cultural groups within Pakistan who are allied, ideologically with the Taleban. The Pakistani group who is most reactionary was able to get support to establish schools for the refugees in which the version of Islam favored by Mullah Omar and his cronies was taught. As the refugees adapted to life in Pakistan over the last 15 years, many like-minded Pakistanis have attended those same schools. So it is not hard to find real schools teaching hatred. However, the people involved are not all the people of Pakistan. Numbers and polls are hard to gauge for accuracy in these conditions, but it appears that this group is a large minority within Pakistan, not a majority.
. And even some terroists don’t accept that vision unhesitatingly. There was a split in al-Quaeda in 1992 because some Egyptian members wouldn’t countenance a planned bombing of the U.S. embassy in Riyadh, because of worry over innocent casualties. It seems even some scum have their limits at times.