Rush would send him coded messages through his radio.
My case it is rested, Hastings.
You are confusing India and Indonesia. Islam entered India with the Mogul conquerors. I have never claimed that entering India was “peaceful,” only that it was a normal human conquest, not some special religious effort. OTOH, Islam entered Indonesia peacefully with traders and was not brought with warfare, at all.
As to “atrocities,” that was no more a typical event under Islam than under Christians or pagans. (Although in later years, it is interesting to contrast the conquest of Jerusalem by Christians against its reconquest by Muslims.)
Piffle. Movement of people in Yugoslavia was the result of Tito’s efforts to mix up the ethnic groups to ensure that none of them had power. When he died and Yugoslavia began to break up, it was the Serbs who were the most bloodthirsty in every single one of the conflicts. Singling out Muslims as “bad” for defending themselves when Croatians and Albanians and the non-Muslim people in Bosnia all suffered at the hands of the Serbs looks a lot like simply swallowing Serb propaganda.
The majority of the world “hot spots” are places where the U.S. and U.S.S.R. made sure that peoples (generally coincidentally Muslim), were “controlled” throughout the Cold War and the ensuing troubles have much more to do with the normal struggles to fill power vacuums than any religious fervor. Ands your straw man argument fails. I have not claimed that all Muslim associated conflict is resistance to oppression, only noting that several instances that get labeled as though they were Muslim aggression have actually been defensive.
No. I am noting that I am not making any silly claim that Muslims are more peaceful than anyone else, only noting that they are no more violent than anyone else, current Islam-bashing propaganda notwithstanding.
Muslims can be as bloody as anyone else, but they are no more a threat to the world than any other group and it makes more sense to identify individual groups who threaten peace and address them than it does to stupidly and hatefully pretend that everyone who faces Mecca in prayer is a threat.
Actually, we have one anecdotal claim that one police liaison person used that excuse to avoid doing any more work. Not very persuasive unless one really enjoys indulging one’s confirmation bias.
If this is a routine event, it should be pretty easy to document.
(Of course, if your friends’ idea of “reaching out” to the Muslim community sounds anything like the way you speak, I suspect that the liaison officer simply did not want to encourage more of that behavior.)
You do not know the gay group in question, or the people in it, do you? So you have no way of knowing how effective the “reaching out” by my frends in Berlin would have been, do you?
You have not met the policewoman in question or have an iota of proof that she just declined this study because she was lazy, do you? It could be entirely true that the political masters of the police force have indeed told them not to get into stats about the number of Muslim immigrants involved in gay-bashing because they are scared shitless of the controversy. Would that be the first time politicians have supressed information to avoid controversy?
You have judged all of this in advance. . . . . say wait. . . . . pre-judged. . . . isn’t that where the word “prejudice” comes from?
If WHAT is a routine event? I don’t understand what you mean by “this”. Do you mean Muslim gangs attacking gays or police being afraid to document a trend and publish it for reasons of political correctness?
What do you mean “document a trend”? Certainly the police should comply with the law in making available to the public all information about individual crimes that the law specifies should be made public.
However, I don’t see why on earth the police should be the ones to “collect statistics on the ethnic/religious origins of suspected and/or convicted gay bashers”. Why would you want police officers to spend their time doing that sort of social science analysis? Surely that’s part of what actual social scientists should be doing.
I have never seen anyone on this thread say that everyone who faces Mecca is a threat, btw.
But Tomndebb’s general statement, above, is another version of the old politically correct canard that all religions are really alike.
Bullshit! Some religions have a doctrinal association with violence that gives us every reason to be wary of them. Others are pacifism personified.
Take Jainism, for example. Look it up in Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism Jainism is an Indian religion that prescribes a path of non-violence towards all living beings.
Jainists are vegetarians who do not even eat root vegetables because that kills the plant. Now ask yourself, what would an EXTREMIST Jainist do? He would strain his water in case there are any bugs in it, he would wear a surgical mask to avoid breathing in a bug, and he would walk looking down so as not to step on any living thing. I would not be very scared of a Jainist extremist, frankly.
So what would an extremist Muslim do? He would hijack planes, slit the throats of the flight crews and fly them into skyscrapers bringing death and destruction to thousands of innocent people in the name of Allah.
Look at Buddhism. Yes, Sinhalese Buddhists have fought with Tamils in Sri Lanka, but by and large, given their numbers, how often have you heard of Buddhists conquering countries to convert people to their religion?
The Buddha spread his doctrines of compassion and self-denial by preaching as a wanderer.
Islam was effectively founded by a merchant/warlord who tried for 10 years to convert people in Mecca peacefully and made very few converts. After he moved to Medina and got some military muscle, he discovered that violence works like a charm. The very literature of Islam, the Koran and the Hadiths, are filled with hundreds of examples of violence and barbarity, of Mohammed leaving his enemies to bleed to death after he had their limbs cut off, of an old woman being torn apart by horses, etc. Mohammed himself stated that he had been commanded to fight until all worship was for Allah. The whole culture of Islam is one of imposing things by violence on behalf of God. Surah 4, Verse 34 actually commands Muslim men to beat the wives “from whom ye fear rebellion”.
There have been books critical of Buddhism. Have you ever heard of a Buddhist “authority” pronouncing a death Fatwa against an author as Islam did against Salman Rushdie?
There are cartoons poking fun at the Pope. Does the Pope get the Swiss Guard to whack you?
Millions of Christians were offended by Martin Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ Did Christians riot, kill people and burn down embassies?
Would I be imprisoned if I went to any Christian country on Earth and named a Teddy Bear “Jesus”?
Is there any other religion in the world today besides Islam in which mainstream opinion says you should be killed if you decide to leave that religion?
No, not every single Muslim agrees with these violent means to brinmg about the world triumph of Islam. So fuckin’ what? Hundreds of millions of them obviously do.
The Japanese have Buddhism as a prominent part of their eclectic religious tradition, but they didn’t conquer to spread their religion, they conquered to conquer. For that matter, how do you know that people dead a thousand years weren’t similarly motivated, and that their purported devotion to Islam was the real motivating force?
“Gee, I don’t really like slicing people into cold cuts, but, heck, Allah says I have to, well, I guess…”
And its not that all religions are very much alike, its that people are very much alike. If you want to make a case for Islamic exceptionalism, well, then, are Islamic people somehow different? Because somebody wrote something down in a book?
And if that is the case, why aren’t the Jews more aggressive? The Old Testament is chock-a-block with genocides, massacres, and rub-outs. If you want to suggest that their circumstances were different, sure, but then you introduce the possibility that the Book has little to do with it.
Obviously? Lucky you, then, as you will have no problem proving it. Proceed.
Well, they’re friends of yours, so odds are pretty good that they’re assholes, too. I mean, who else would put up with you?
The city I live in, has one of the oldest mosques in this country. It has always had a lively and vibrant Muslim community.
They are not assertive, militant, aggressive or threatening in anyway. At all. It is to laugh to hear them described as such.
My gay friends, in this community, who have been brutally victimized by homophobia, were attacked by white red necks, not Muslims.
You happen to have any cites for Muslim homophobic attacks, on the rise, in Canada?
Fear fear more.
I don’t know about Canada, but here in the US, every reported gay bashing I’ve heard of was committed by either white rednecks or ghetto African-Americans, not Muslims.
Also, Dearborn Michigan has a thriving gay community.
I have not even judged your purported friends, much less prejudged them. I made an observation regarding their probable personalities based on the fact that you are willing to associate with them. Perhaps they are more tolerant than you are–which might explain why they are willing to associate with you. 
Pretty clearly, I was talking about a refusal to document Muslim attacks. If that refusal was real and common, there would be any number of groups up in arms about it, yet I cannot find any mention of it on the various gay and gay rights web sites.
So, it sounds as though your reported conversation is a one time event that may or may not have occurred.
Islamist extremists attacking gays is not a one time event and it has been reported.
That , however, is the gist of your ranting over many months.
You give lip service to saying that “some” Muslims may not want to harm homosexuals, then you go right back to treating all of Islam as a threat instead of actually taking the time to identify the specific groups within Islam that may actually be a threat.
If you don’t like to have your words portrayed as those of a shrill Chicken Little, stop running around crying “The sky is falling!”
It is extremely difficult to get those statistics in many cities of the world because the police keep the statistics politically correct by refering to the Perps as “Asians”. Now of course, an “Asian” can be a Chinese, a Mongolian, an Israeli Jew, an Indian, a Korean, someone from Siberia or a Pakistani or Bengali, a Syrian, etc. When you ask police how many of them were Muslims they tell you that they do not keep statistics on the religion of the Perps.
But in places like Amsterdam, for instance, gay people are especially afraid of Moroccan and Algerian gangs.
Thank you for your comments. Even though this is the Pit, I prefer not to descend to your level of childish name-calling.
Thank you for your comment. Even though this is the Pit I prefer not to descend to your level of childish name-calling.
Did you accidentally quote the wrong posts?
Neither, Miller nor Tom called you names.
Someone answer my questions: I repeat:
There have been books critical of Buddhism. Have you ever heard of a Buddhist “authority” pronouncing a death Fatwa against an author as Islam did against Salman Rushdie?
There are cartoons poking fun at the Pope. Does the Pope get the Swiss Guard to whack you?
Millions of Christians were offended by Martin Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ. Did Christians riot, kill people and burn down embassies?
Would I be imprisoned if I went to any Christian country on Earth and named a Teddy Bear “Jesus”?
Is there any other religion in the world today besides Islam in which mainstream opinion says you should be killed if you decide to leave that religion?