Klaatu,
You might want to educate yourself about Islam from some sources that actually know what they’re talking about. For one thing, Islam does not have an hierarchy like Christianity does. The Big Thing in that religion is personal relationship between the worshiper and God, with no intermediating clergy.
Moreover, all of the banners appear to be written in the same hand; suggesting a quite small group is responsible for them.
Of course that isn’t to say that there are only a handful of violent Muslims in the whole world - I rather suspect there are more, but I thought it worth mentioning.
I remember a Lebanese song where one of the lines supposedly violated Sharia’a. Some Muslims in Lebanon tried to ban it. They failed. The Vagina Monologues (or a play based on it but just as explicit) was just performed in Beirut, in the heart of the Sunni Muslim area. Several allegedly offensive movies were quite big hits.
That’s funny, I see a lot of Sheikhs or Imams or what have you shaking hands with women in the Middle East. I’ve seen it in Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Then again, other sheikhs are just anal retentive and refuse to do that. You know, Liberals and Conservatives.
And what exactly about a mosque in the Netherlands bothers you? You think Muslims shouldn’t have freedom of worship, or that they should thank you for your magninimity and shut the fuck up?
I can’t defend that. But it is a Muslims school, it’s only fair that it acts in accordance with the prevalent socially conservative culture in the Muslim world.
See, again, this is funny. I’ve seen dogs in Muslims’ cars in Lebanon. I think I saw a couple when I was in Damascus, too. I didn’t stop to ask if the car owner was Muslim, though.
Run boy, run.
Look, do not try to paint Muslims with such an oversized brush, and then maybe we can communicate like adults. But you spewing anecdotes and someone else coming up with counter anecdotes is really not getting us anywhere. If you think that Islam is evil and all Muslims are bad, you’re an idiot. If you think there are major problems within Islam that need to be resolved, then we can talk, try to examine your perspective, mine, and that of the average Muslim. Maybe we’ll get somewhere. But cut it out with the generalisations.
Drawing an insulting inference about another poster, and then expressing it, is not appropriate to this Forum.
If you need to make observations about another poster’s intelligence, take it to the Pit.
[ /Moderating ]
Noted.
Out of idle curiosity, does your queen shake hands with male members of the Hasidic movement?
Not according to Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, general manager of Al- Arabiya news channel.
It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims.
The hostage-takers of children in Beslan, North Ossetia, were Muslims. The other hostage-takers and subsequent murderers of the Nepalese chefs and workers in Iraq were also Muslims. Those involved in rape and murder in Darfur, Sudan, are Muslims, with other Muslims chosen to be their victims.
Those responsible for the attacks on residential towers in Riyadh and Khobar were Muslims. The two women who crashed two airliners last week were also Muslims.
Bin Laden is a Muslim. The majority of those who manned the suicide bombings against buses, vehicles, schools, houses and buildings, all over the world, were Muslim.
Let us listen to Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Sheikh - the Qatar-based radical Egyptian cleric - and hear him recite his “fatwa” about the religious permissibility of killing civilian Americans in Iraq. Let us contemplate the incident of this religious Sheikh allowing, nay even calling for, the murder of civilians.
This ailing Sheikh, in his last days, with two daughters studying in “infidel” Britain, soliciting children to kill innocent civilians.
How could this Sheikh face the mother of the youthful Nick Berg, who was slaughtered in Iraq because he wanted to build communication towers in that ravished country? How can we believe him when he tells us that Islam is the religion of mercy and peace while he is turning it into a religion of blood and slaughter?
In a different era, we used to consider the extremists, with nationalist or Leftist leanings, a menace and a source of corruption because of their adoption of violence as a means of discourse and their involvement in murder as an easy shortcut to their objectives.
At that time, the mosque used to be a haven, and the voice of religion used to be that of peace and reconciliation. Religious sermons were warm behests for a moral order and an ethical life.
Then came the Neo-Muslims. An innocent and benevolent religion, whose verses prohibit the felling of trees in the absence of urgent necessity, that calls murder the most heinous of crimes, that says explicitly that if you kill one person you have killed humanity as a whole, has been turned into a global message of hate and a universal war cry.
We can’t call those who take schoolchildren as hostages our own.
We cannot tolerate in our midst those who abduct journalists, murder civilians, explode buses; we cannot accept them as related to us, whatever the sufferings they claim to justify their criminal deeds. These are the people who have smeared Islam and stained its image.
We cannot clear our names unless we own up to the shameful fact that terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly, implemented by Muslim men and women.
We cannot redeem our extremist youths, who commit all these heinous crimes, without confronting the Sheikhs who thought it ennobling to re-invent themselves as revolutionary ideologues, sending other people’s sons and daughters to certain death, while sending their own children to European and American schools and colleges.
Abdel Rahman al-Rashed is general manager of Al- Arabiya news channel. His article appeared in the pan-Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat.
This is old. I wonder if Abdel Rahman al-Rashed is still alive.
FWorld, Yep. I’m an idiot. I don’t mind you calling me that. 
I do think islam is rotten to the bone.
Here’s a video of the blind man [who called the police] and the reaction of the muslim cabdrivers:
http://www.at5.nl/video_player.asp?newsid=18331
Monty*
Out of idle curiosity, does your queen shake hands with male members of the Hasidic movement?*
Now that’s the funny thing.
In 1982 she refused to visit a group of radical Orthodox Jews because they…
…wait for it
…
refuse to shake hands with women.
Not that I am trying to back the OP, but
[pedantic nitpick] I’m assuming you were trying to use that group as an example of Shintoism? Aum Shinrikyo, later known as Aleph is the group responsible for the attack on the subways, and it has nothing to do with Shintoism, at least, not directly. It is a mixture of Buddhist and Hindu beliefs, but includes a fundamental notion that all religions are in fact merely different expressions of one true religion. [/pedantic nitpick]
Whether my assumption is right or wrong, it’s interesting (and scary) info either way.
Gum, I’m curious, do you agree with Al Rashed’s point of view?
He’s very much still alive by the way.
The mantra that “Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance” has become the liberal equivalent of Holocaust denial. Deny it all you will, Islam has a long history of aggression against non-Muslims, and the Crusades were a desperate response to centuries of Arab-Islamic aggression against Christendom. The facts are so clear I am astonished anybody would even try to deny them.
Quite literally, the survival of Western civilization is at stake here. Why are you people so determined not to believe this?
Are all Muslims terrorists? If violence is an integral part of Islam, then any Muslim who is not a terrorist must surely be a bad Muslim. Yet a billion Muslims manage to go a liftime without killing a Christian. You would think any religion whose adherents are so lax in the practice of their own tenets would certain fail. It must be frustrating to you to watch a religion grow and prosper when it obviously doesn’t practice what it preaches.
I’ll admit to not reading this whole thing. It gets tiring seeing some people saying that Muslims are violent murderers, then others saying Christianity, Judaism, whatever, has been just as bad.
I don’t think any of these religions are inherently violent, they’re just convenient for violent, power hungry people to use to get what they want.
Well, I don’t buy into the “mantra,” so I am not going to defend that strawman attack, but Madden’s article is so heavily biased as to be worthless.
His claim
is arrant nonsense. At the time that the Crusades were launched, the first burst of Islamic conquest had long since subsided. What was left was a series of small wars in which empires (Muslim and Christian) tried to nibble away at each other and smaller states (Muslim and Christian) attempted to secure their borders by taking land from their neighbors.
By the eleventh century, there had been no Muslim effort to erupt out of Spain for hundreds of years. The attacks on Malta and Sicily were the efforts of minor kingdoms, not the Caliphate or its successors. There was no serious effort to actually conquer the Italian penninsula and the wars against Constantinople were the typical feuds of empires in all times, regardless of religion.
As a counterbalance to the now popular notion that the Crusades were nothing more than an attempt by boorish Europeans to steal land from enlightened Arabs, Madden has a point. When he implies the “four centuries” of conquests were one long concerted effort to overwhelm Christianity, he is simply resorting to polemics and he is twisting facts to do so.
Who’s not believing it? Everybody knows that there is indeed a minority of Muslims who are violent theocratic extremists and who do indeed want to eradicate Western civilization and all other forms of society that are not Islamic theocracies. It is quite true that the survival of Western civilization depends on standing firm against those people.
However, what your melodramatic overgeneralizations are trying to conceal is that the people who really support this cause are actually pretty few in number. Worldwide, there are probably at most tens of thousands, or at a massively generous estimate a few hundred thousands, of Muslims who really want to wipe Western civilization off the face of the earth.
And that prospect simply doesn’t have the power to scare the way you’d like it to. There’s maybe half a million of them, tops, and there’s over a billion of us. Plus, we have tons more money and more equipment, as well as providing greater satisfaction to (most of) those who live under our rule. We’re going to win. Simple as that.
The only way you can make that prospect look really scary is by trying to conflate that minority of Muslims with all Muslims, or with some vaguely-defined “essence of Islam”. But the fact is, most Muslims worldwide don’t hate our freedoms and don’t care about eliminating Western civilization.
Yes, of course we need to be vigilant against the militant-extremist minority and to defend our principles against them. They could inflict some very serious and nasty damage on us if they get the chance, and there’s nothing they’d like better. But in the long run, they’re not going to win.
So you can quit worrying about the survival of Western civilization; in fact, you’re likely doing more harm than good by treating it as a debatable outcome. This is one of those cases where overreaction and hysterical exaggeration make us less ready and able to cope with the actual threat, rather than goosing us up to be more capable of coping with it.
I’m not, actually. In fact, I said in my post that broadcasting restraints on televised nudity and sex were pretty low on my list of free-speech concerns. It’s a measure of the weakness of your argument that you need to construct a strawman like that.
** Fear Itself** A non-involved, silent, and indeed completely HYPOTHETICAL peaceful muslim majority is completely useless - even if it does exist.
Something must be done about the Muslims who are going nuts. The other Muslims are either unwilling or unable to stop them. So what good does saying “not all Muslims are like that!” every five minutes doing? It neither provides a solution nor changes the problem
Are the violent Islamists a tiny but vocal and dangerous fringe group of Islam, or are they a large minority, or even a majority? Nobody knows. All we know is that their words and actions drown out what the rest of the Muslim world says and does. Is it because the rest of the Muslim world is too fearful of them to open its collective mouth? Or is it because the rest of the Muslim world pretty much goes along with them?
Meanwhile, here, in Europe, we pick the fruits of the oh-so peaceful islam:
"Since the early 1960s, Muslim Brotherhood members and sympathizers have moved to Europe and slowly but steadily established a wide and well-organized network of mosques, charities, and Islamic organizations. [Its] ultimate goal [is] to extend Islamic law throughout Europe and the United States.
"Four decades of teaching and cultivation have paid off. The student refugees who migrated from the Middle East forty years ago and their descendants now lead organizations that represent the local Muslim communities in their engagement with Europe’s political elite. Funded by generous contributors from the Persian Gulf, they preside over a centralized network that spans nearly every European country.
"These organizations represent themselves as mainstream, even as they continue to embrace the Brotherhood’s radical views and maintain links to terrorists. With moderate rhetoric and well-spoken German, Dutch, and French, they have gained acceptance among European governments and media alike. Politicians across the political spectrum rush to engage them whenever an issue involving Muslims arises or, more parochially, when they seek the vote of the burgeoning Muslim community.
"When speaking Arabic or Turkish before their fellows Muslims, however, they drop their facade and embrace radicalism. While their representatives speak about interfaith dialogue and integration on television, their mosques preach hate and warn worshippers about the evils of Western society. While they publicly condemn the murder of commuters in Madrid and school children in Russia, they continue to raise money for HAMAS and other terrorist organizations. Europeans, eager to create a dialogue with their increasingly disaffected Muslim minority, overlook this duplicity.
&
An Islamic Mufti in Copenhagen sparked a political outcry after publicly declaring that women who refuse to wear headscarves are “asking for rape.” Apparently, he isn’t the only Muslim in Europe to think this way:
The German journalist Udo Ulfkotte told in a recent interview that in Holland, you can now see examples of young, unveiled Moroccan women with a so-called “smiley”. It means that the girl gets one side of her face cut up from mouth to ear, serving as a warning to other Muslim girls who should refuse to wear the veil. In the Muslim suburb of Courneuve, France, 77 per cent of the veiled women carry veils reportedly because of fear of being harassed or molested by Islamic moral patrols.
http://www.cphpost.dk/get/82118.html
As I asked before:
Where are the human rights organisations?
*Where * are the feminists?
[Kimstu, I shall not debate with you on this subject.
Someone who makes a living out of islam can’t be very objective.
Your boss wouldn’t be too happy when you proclaimed islam an idiotic religion/political doctrine, right?]
.
They’re around and condemning Islamic extremism. Why do you think they’re silent on the issue?
Would you agree they’re few and far between in the Muslim world?
Could you give me some cites, because I can’t hear them.
*"As a mufti, a jurist who interprets Islamic law, Shahi Mehdi is in a special position of authority as a Muslim scholar. Mehdi is currently affiliated with the Islamic Cultural Center in Copenhagen.
Mehdi’s remarks could incite Muslim men to rape Danish women by insinuating that women who did not cover their hair were undeserving of basic respect. “*
And muslim men DO rape Danish women. And Australian women. And French women: " 11 young Muslim men were accused of pack raping a 14-year-old French girl in a cellar” http://www.hvk.org/articles/0702/140.html
And Dutch woman.
Mentally challenged girls, even…
http://krant.telegraaf.nl/krant/archief/20011117/teksten/bin.daders.werden.projectgroep.html
I haven’t heard ONE feminist condemning these cases.
Nor have I heard human rights organisations protesting against these muslim pigs.
How about replacing “muslim [sic]” with “Christian” and maybe then you’ll see that you’re not really debating in this forum; you’re ranting at worst. At best, you’re just refusing to recognize facts.
The rest of your posting was really Pit material, IMHO, but I’ll go ahead and ask you: What have YOU personally done about Fred Phelps? What have YOU personally done about those who target abortion clinics? What have YOU personally done about thow who kill doctors who perform abortions? Mind you, all of those to whom I refer do so under the guise of Christianity.