News flash – Jews were held under disenfranchisement in many if not most of Arab countries (google “Dhimmi”). Until 1948. Following which they were effectively kicked out altogether (and Israel, with its fledgling statehood and population of 600000 Jews, had to take in twice that number in refugees in the following five years. Gee, wonder why you don’t hear about that refugee problem anymore? Maybe because we actually did something about it!? :rolleyes: )
Tamerlane, This is my source: http://islamic-world.net/islamic-state/consti_muslimstate.htm
Scott Plaid, Pim Fortuyn is dead. Amsterdam isn’t a country and sadly, PF’s views are becoming close and are shared by many politicians now.
Most of those links are dead. One of the few working ones, for Albania’s constitution, explicitly states that Albania is a secular state. Actually if you read the sentence above that set of links, you’ll see that it mentions that it is an exploration of different ways state integrates Islam into its consitution - We will see that the degrees of Islamic provisions vary quite widely in the constitutions of those Islamic and Muslim countries.
In Albania’s case that would be not at all :). Turkey is another self-consciously secular state.
So at any rate my earlier comments ( or nitpick if you prefer 
) still holds - that list should not be taken to be either an exhaustive list of Muslim majority countries, nor as a list of countries that explicitly refer to themselves constitutionally as Muslim countries, nor even countries ( in at least Uganda and Kazakhstan’s cases ) that have a Muslim majority population at all.
In point of fact, probably most of the countries on that list do define themselves consitutionally as Muslim states in one way or another - most of the ME/NA countries do. But several of those on that list definitely do not - Albania, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Uganda, Turkey and Lebanon among them ( I just checked them ).
- Tamerlane
I checked Turkey, because that one is of interest to me.
Religions: Muslim 99.8% (mostly Sunni), other 0.2% (mostly Christians and Jews)
Oh, Tamerlane, could you give me some links about those other countries. I’d be happy to learn more about their religion[s].
Or we can spin it the other way, Sam.
Over 70% believe that Israelis have the right to live in peace and security. Nearly 75% believe that violence would subside if Israel lifted the seige and security belt from Palestinian territories. Over 75% support the continuation of peace with Israel. Over 75% agreed with Abbas’ call for Hamas to abandon violence. 65% agree that it is the right of both Palestinians and Israelis to live in peace in security. 54% of the people would like to see a two state solution and another 27.3% would like a binational solution. Less than 8% would like to see a single Palestinian state.
And the point is what here – that you were in favor of Jewish disenfranchisement, on the grounds that those were Muslim countries? It’s completely unreasonable to condemn the disenfranchisement of Jews, and then find the disenfranchisement of the Palestinians to be not just acceptable, but enlightened.
BrainGlutton, every post offered in this thread in defense of Israel drives home the point that Israel’s defenders have no other mode of proceeding than to attack the Palestinians on every point. Forget about a principled support for human rights, democracy and equality. And forget about any vision for the West Bank and Gaza that doesn’t amount to “more of the same, please, because we love it so much.”
The point is, if you would be so kind as to review gum’s post, your’s and then mine, that you asked for an example of disenfranchisement of Jews. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing to do with morality. Are you disputing my example?
Noone, I was talking about current Muslim countries, my point being that if any one of them had completely disenfranchised large numbers of Jews, I’d like to hear about it – as would you. Obviously, if you delve into the past, as you did, you can find numerous examples of the disenfranchisement of basically anyone. The larger point stands – if disenfranchisement is wrong, it’s wrong for everybody – Jews, Muslims, anyone. I would not have thought this was a controversial point, but apparently it is.
Let them have their democracy and human rights with their Arab brothers in Egypt and Jordan. A large proportion of the Palestinian population has repeatedly demonstrated that they have no interest in peaceful coexistence with Jews and Christians, whether Israeli or Palestinian. The Islamic fundamentalists will not rest until Israel has been destroyed and replaced with an Islamic state. In their view, the only good Jew or Christian is a dhimmi, under the oppressive thumb of Islam.
Yes, but my point was that significant percentages of the Palestinian people approve of the attacks on Israel, do not want to live in peace, and have demands that are unrealistic and impractical. And it only takes a small percentage of the population to continue the attacks.
And even among those who would like peace, their support for various peace proposals is lukewarm at best. The percentage of people who ‘strongly approve’ of just about any of the various moderate policies is very small.
Perhaps the solution to this problem lies outside of Israel/Palestine. Maybe there will be no peace until the Middle East as a whole is fundamentally changed. I don’t know, but I’m not hopeful.
Um, I know he is dead. However, it was a case of a country were it looks like, if given the chance, much of the citizens would vote away the rights of others. Much as in your own examples. What is your disagreement?
Well, at least this is a suggestion. Let the West Bank amalgamate with Jordan, and let Gaza join Egypt. Can’t say as I see Israel going for it, though.
You could with equal justice say, “A large proportion of the Israeli population has repeatedly demonstrated that they have no interest in peaceful coexistence with Muslims or Christians, whether Israeli or Palestinian.” But this is just hand-wringing. There’s obviously an impasse, and has been since the beginning of Zionism, and something is needed to break it. I propose complete equality for all, regardless of ethnicity or religion. But for whatever reason, this is regarded as an outlandish suggestion – even though everything in history suggests it is the right one.
Sevastopol:
I disagree. Anti-Semitism has historically been of a non-economic and usually irrational nature. Suspicion for everything from the occasional murdered child to causing the Black Plague, from national disloyalty to active disruption of other religions’ rituals, was always immediately hung on the local Jews with no evidence whatsoever. No matter how much a Jew tried to shed his religious trappings to assmiliate, he was never non-Jewish enough for his non-Jewish neighbors to consider him one of them (until, perhaps, immigration to America in the late 19th-early 20th centuries). Pogroms, blood libels, settlement restrictions and the like were not events that happened to “most everybody.” “Most everybody” might have been miserable due to economic servitude and/or national wars of conquest. The Jews had those conditions, PLUS.
Try this one. I won’t claim the source doesn’t appear to have a pro-Israel slant, but unless you have reason to think the writer’s sources don’t check out, it ought to be legit.
CMKeller,
We’ll have to disagree for the moment on your first point. Sporadic vs Continuing.
re your 2nd point, excellent cite. There’s food for thought there and I’ll quickly draw your attention to the author’s conclusions. Bedtime.
Do you mean that Egypt and Jordan should re-annex the Territories, or that the Palestinians should emigrate? The latter is not really an option. Other Arab states are not willing to take them.
To repeat the poster above, no, you’re not.
Nitpick: Throughout European history, Jews were welcomed into the local community if they converted to Christianity – and in one or two generations a convert’s descendants would assimilate completely and forget they had ever been Jewish. (Since Jews lived in practically every country of Europe at one time or another, and always came under pressure to convert, and some in every generation bowed to the pressure, none of us who think of ourselves as “white gentiles” can be sure of having no Jewish ancestors. Except maybe the Icelanders.) Antisemitism in the form of hatred of Jews as a race did not emerge until the 19th Century. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism#The_rise_of_racial_anti-Semitism
Turkey may not be constitutionally Muslim but the Turks are certainly engaging in a popular contemporary Muslim past-time: anti-Semitism.
Cmkeller, I don’t dispute with you that historically the Jews were persecuted worse than others (ironically, in Europe more so than in the Islamic world). But if we’re to generalize from this, what’s the message? That persecution of Jews is wrong? Or that persecution of anyone based on ethnic or religious identity is wrong? I would say the latter, and I think you would, too. That’s been my point all along. In the Occupied Territories, the demarkation between those who have rights and those who have no rights is entirely on ethnic/religious lines. Entirely. And I will continue to say that that’s wrong from a moral perspective, and also, as decades of recent bloodshed have shown, from a practical perspective.