Should western democracies self-censor to suit Islamic militancy?

[tagos]

@intention

However, this does not negate my point, which is that Islam is not just another religion among religions. It is a religion that glorifies and sanctifies violence. I think this is the biggest difference between you and I, tomndebb. You think that the violence in Islam occurs in large part because their cultures have been disturbed. I, on the other hand, think that their cultures have been disturbed in large part because Islam itself is so violent.

Trying to make that sort of distinction is pointless IMHO as culture and religion has been so intertwined for so long to try and parse the two is just playing ‘No True Muslim’.

Religions are what religions do and Islam and violence currently go together like crusading and witch-burning was part and parcel of Christianity at one time. If it’s done by the religious in the name of their religion, then apart from quibbling about numerical thresholds, then that is an aspect of a religion.

Therefore honor killings and all the other lunatic crap about women is part of Islam today and can’t be hand-waved away a la Tomndebb stylee. A for crying out loud - you only have to read the Koran to see it is a violent religion at heart.

And before the same old tired apologetics are dragged out about the Bible - the Bible and the Koran are not the same thing. Only lunatics believe the Bible is the direct word of God and should be obeyed in all things. In Islam the Koran is the dictated Word of God to be interpreted in the light of his perfect messenger’s life.

Both offer ample and firm foot-holds for violent interpretations. For me it is those who argue against this position who are straining at gnats and practically breaking their spines to see a glimmer of some sort of liberal islam.

It hasn’t happened in all the intervening centuries and instead Islam has solidified into two huge and antagonistic blocs, albeit with a fringe of powerless and inconsequential sects who have no hope whatsoever of influencing anything.

The West should not give one hair-width of ground ever to external Muslim ‘outrage’ or internal Muslim demands for compromise over social mores, political policies or legal structures.

[tomndebb]

@tagos

Religions are what religions do and Islam and violence currently go together like crusading and witch-burning was part and parcel of Christianity at one time. If it’s done by the religious in the name of their religion, then apart from quibbling about numerical thresholds, then that is an aspect of a religion.

Therefore honor killings and all the other lunatic crap about women is part of Islam today and can’t be hand-waved away a la Tomndebb stylee.

Actully, you make my point. “Witch-burning” (which rarely involved burning) only occurred in a relatively narrow strip of Europe and the lands held by England for around 100 years. It was never widely practiced throughout Christendom and it was totally absent from most of Christendom. The execution of witches simply did not occur in Scandinavia, Poland, Austria, Hungary, central or Southern Italy, Spain and Portugal, the majority of France, and the lands of the Eastern churches.

Honor killings go on, today, in Christian and Hindu lands, as well as in Muslim lands.

I am not “hand-waving,” you are cherry picking then over generalizing.

[tagos]

@tomndebb

Actully, you make my point. “Witch-burning” (which rarely involved burning) only occurred in a relatively narrow strip of Europe and the lands held by England for around 100 years. It was never widely practiced throughout Christendom and it was totally absent from most of Christendom. The execution of witches simply did not occur in Scandinavia, Poland, Austria, Hungary, central or Southern Italy, Spain and Portugal, the majority of France, and the lands of the Eastern churches.

Honor killings go on, today, in Christian and Hindu lands, as well as in Muslim lands.

I am not “hand-waving,” you are cherry picking then over generalizing.

Your take on witch-burning history is simply wrong and is just a further example of your hand-waving apologetic tendency when dealing with the crimes of religions. Witch killing, if that term makes you happier, was a feature of Christianity for three centuries.

Then of course we can throw in the various Inquisitions and colonial genocides, the Crusades etc.

I’m entirely uninterested in religious mumbo-jumbo as theology. It’s all nonsense. What I’m interested in is what use the religious put it to, what crimes it encourages and justifies in the eyes of believers and it is completely undeniable that the various blatherings of a murderous epileptic are used to commit heinous crimes and foster oppressive social attitudes and policies.

That you may or may not be able to parse the mumbo-jumbo in a different way is irrelevant.

At this moment in time Islam is an almost entirely negative force in the world. It does not foster democracy, liberty, equality, fraternity or any other of the principles we value in the West. And due to the ever-present threat of violence we in the West are self-censoring to pander towards our Muslim minorities.

But we’ve been over this before. You’ve seen the statistics concerning Muslim desire for sharia law in the UK (40%) and how many express support for the feelings and motivations of terrorists (1 in 5).

Yet another posting of the same survey

And I suppose we might as well post this again.

PEW poll on Muslim attitudes

We’ll take it as read that you’ll find that in the Islamic Poster Child for Reasonableness state of Indonesia a mere 35% give the thumbs up for Bin Ladin as a world leader compared to 49% previously a cause for rejoicing.

The sheer fact that in the 21st bloody century a major world religion is still debating whether executions for apostasy is okay, speaks volumes.

The fact that such a debate is conducted in terms of what some guy from the Dark Ages might have spluttered out of foam flecked lips is simply a sign of collective cultural insanity. The sort of insanity that leads to this:

Daughter of Iman in hiding

The daughter of a British imam is under police protection after she received death threats from her family for converting to Christianity.

The woman, aged 32, whose father is a Muslim imam in Lancashire, has moved house 45 times to escape detection by her family since she became a Christian 15 years ago.

In my own bloody country this sort of shit is going on all the bloody time. As I’ve said previously - changing trains at Birmingham in the company of a woman who had run from her family is a fraught affair because as she warned me. If any of her relatives see her they will try and kill us both.

This is the UK in the 21st century.

And no - don’t even bother spinning your No True Muslim counter arguments. They are done by Muslims in the name of their religion. If it was the odd Muslim outrider you might have a point but it isn’t. All over the Muslim world this is goinmg on.

Gendercide

A human-rights report published in March 1999 stated that “honour” killings took the lives of 888 women in the single province of Punjab in 1998 (Hassan, “The Fate of Pakistani Women”). Similar figures were recorded for 1999. In Sindh province, some 300 women died in 1997, according to Pakistan’s independent Human Rights Commission. (Goldenberg, “A Question of Honour.”) It is unknown how many women are maimed or disfigured for life in attacks that fall short of murder.

In fact I’m simply not interested in any of your apologetics. That you choose to go to bat to defend this dreadful belief system in the abstract by inventing a specious division between ‘culture’ in the abstract and the concrete, real expressed beliefs and motivations of the criminal savages carrying out these acts and the vast underlying societal support for such actions to deny Islam is responsible for the deaths of thousands of real, flesh and blood people is beyond me.

Islam, in the world today, is a force for barbarism and no amount of outsourcing of responsibility to ‘culture’ will change that.

[chowder]

[QUOTE=tomndebb]
Actully, you make my point. “Witch-burning” (which rarely involved burning) only occurred in a relatively narrow strip of Europe and the lands held by England for around 100 years. It was never widely practiced throughout Christendom and it was totally absent from most of Christendom. The execution of witches simply did not occur in Scandinavia, Poland, Austria, Hungary, central or Southern Italy, Spain and Portugal, the majority of France.

The last burnings of witches occurred:

1745…France
1775…Germany
1782…Switzerland
1792…Portugal.

Early burnings:

1512…Strasbourg
1571…Amsterdam
1574…Strasbourg
1676… Lyon

[tagos]

This says a lot of sensible things:

Tolerance: A Two-way Street.

Religious fanatics, regardless of what name they give their jealous god, invariably have one thing in common: no sense of humor. Particularly about themselves. It’s hard to imagine Torquemada taking a joke well.

Today’s Islamists seem to have not even a sense of irony. They fail to see the richness of the following sequence. The pope makes a reference to a 14th-century Byzantine emperor’s remark about Islam imposing itself by the sword, and to protest this linking of Islam and violence:

· In the West Bank and Gaza, Muslims attack seven churches.

· In London, the ever-dependable radical Anjem Choudary tells demonstrators at Westminster Cathedral that the pope is now condemned to death.

· In Mogadishu, Somali religious leader Abubukar Hassan Malin calls on Muslims to “hunt down” the pope. The pope not being quite at hand, they do the next best thing: shoot dead, execution-style, an Italian nun who worked in a children’s hospital.

“How dare you say Islam is a violent religion? I’ll kill you for it” is not exactly the best way to go about refuting the charge. But of course, refuting is not the point here. The point is intimidation.

First Salman Rushdie. Then the false Newsweek report about Koran-flushing at Guantanamo Bay. Then the Danish cartoons. And now a line from a scholarly disquisition on rationalism and faith given in German at a German university by the pope.

And the intimidation succeeds: politicians bowing and scraping to the mob over the cartoons; Saturday’s craven New York Times editorial telling the pope to apologize; the plague of self-censorship about anything remotely controversial about Islam – this in a culture in which a half-naked pop star blithely stages a mock crucifixion as the highlight of her latest concert tour.

[gonzomax]

Does a small group that wants to do something stupid when a person dares to "insult " islam reflect the whole society. ? Yes ,when the powers do not stop the sects from persecuting an imagined insulter ,They are complicit and it damns the entire society. The teddy bear incident should have been immediately stopped by the government. When it was allowed to go as far as it did, it sweeps the whole society into the problem.

[chowder]

When all is said and done one thing is apparent.

Islam is a religion founded on violence and that violence continues to this day.

There can be no denying this.

[Bridget_Burke]

@chowder

When all is said and done one thing is apparent.

Islam is a religion founded on violence and that violence continues to this day.

There can be no denying this.

Did your research convince you to hate all Muslims? Or did your hated of all Muslims come first?

(And–do tell us more about Geert Wilder–the poster boy for this entire thread!)

[chowder]

@Bridget Burke

Did your research convince you to hate all Muslims? Or did your hated of all Muslims come first?

(And–do tell us more about Geert Wilder–the poster boy for this entire thread!)

Did I say I hated Muslims?

Pay attention as I object to your insinuation

[tomndebb]

Chowder, do you have a citation for you claims of witch burning?

AS to my statements, I refer to Recent Developments in the Study of the Great European Witch Hunt:

Witchcraft cases increased slowly but steadily from the 14th-15th century. The first mass trials appeared in the 15th century. At the beginning of the 16th century, as the first shock-waves from the Reformation hit, the number of witch trials actually dropped. Then, around 1550, the persecution skyrocketed. What we think of as “the Burning Times” – the crazes, panics, and mass hysteria – largely occurred in one century, from 1550-1650. In the 17th century, the Great Hunt passed nearly as suddenly as it had arisen. Trials dropped sharply after 1650 and disappeared completely by the end of the 18th century.

bolding mine

When all trials are plotted on a map, other surprising patterns emerge. First, the trials were intensely sporadic. The rate of witch hunting varied dramatically throughout Europe, ranging from a high of 26,000 deaths in Germany to a low of 4 in Ireland. Robin Briggs’ Witches and Neighbors can give you a good feel for how erratic the trials were. It contains three maps showing the distribution of trials throughout Europe, throughout Germany, and throughout the French province of Lorraine, which Briggs studied in depth. They reveal that some of the most enormous persecutions (like the panics of Wurzburg, Germany) occurred next to areas that had virtually no trials whatsoever.

Second, the trials were concentrated in central Europe, in Germany, Switzerland, and eastern France. The further you got away from that area, the lower the persecution generally got.

Third, the height of the persecution occurred during the Reformation, when the formerly unified Christian Church shattered into Catholic and Protestant sects. In countries like Italy and Spain, where the Catholic Church and its Inquisition reigned virtually unquestioned, witch hunting was uncommon. The worst panics took place in areas like Switzerland and Germany, where rival Christians sects fought to impose their religious views on each other.

Fourth, panics clustered around borders. France’s major crazes occurred on its Spanish and eastern fronts. Italy’s worst persecution was in the northern regions. Spain’s one craze centered on the Basque lands straddling the French/Spanish border.
Fifth, although it has become commonplace to think of the outbreaks of witch hunting as malevolent pogroms imposed by evil elites, in reality the worst horrors occured where central authority had broken down. Germany and Switzerland were patchwork quilts, loose confederacies stitched together from dozens of independent political units. England, which had a strong government, had little witch hunting. The country’s one and only craze took place during the English Civil War, when the government’s power collapsed. A strong, unified national church (as in Spain and Italy) also tended to keep deaths to a minimum. Strong governments didn’t always slow witch hunting, as King James of Scotland proved. But the worst panics definitely hit where both Church and State were weak.

c) Christianity’s Role in the Persecution For years, the responsibility for the Great Hunt has been dumped on the Catholic Church’s door-step. 19th century historians ascribed the persecution to religious hysteria. And when Margaret Murray proposed that witches were members of a Pagan sect, popular writers trumpeted that the Great Hunt was not a mere panic, but rather a deliberate attempt to exterminate Christianity’s rival religion.

Today, we know that there is absolutely no evidence to support this theory. When the Church was at the height of its power (11th-14th centuries) very few witches died. Persecutions did not reach epidemic levels until after the Reformation, when the Catholic Church had lost its position as Europe’s indisputable moral authority. Moreover most of the killing was done by secular courts. Church courts tried many witches but they usually imposed non-lethal penalties. A witch might be excommunicated, given penance, or imprisoned, but she was rarely killed. The Inquisition almost invariably pardoned any witch who confessed and repented.
. . .
The vast majority of witches were condemned by secular courts. Ironically, the worst courts were local courts. Some authors, like Anne Llewellyn Barstow (Witchcraze), blame the death toll on the decline of the “community-based” medieval court, and the rise of the centralized “national” court. Nothing could be further from the truth. “Community-based” courts were often virtual slaughterhouses, killing 90% of all accused witches. National courts condemned only about 30% of the accused.

There may have been a few odd cases of witch burning in your entire 300 year period, but most of them appear to have had more to do with people ignoring their churches and falling prey to private superstitions. (Note the point in the article where the author points out that (gasp) the Spanish Inquisition, [del]murdered[/del]. . .ooops, suppressed a witch scare while refusing to convict anyone of witchcraft.

The evidence presented by that (neo-pagan) author demonstrates that witch scares and witch hunts had far less to do with religion that they had to do with disrupted societies. (Gee. Where have I seen a similar situation described in the last few weeks?)

[chowder]

[QUOTE=tomndebb]
Chowder, do you have a citation for you claims of witch burning?

A simple Google will take you to various sites listing burnings, there are also engravings made of these.

In some cases mass burnings were the order of the day.

In any event, this has nothing to do with the question posed by the OP

[intention]

Emphasis mine …

@tomndebb

Actully, you make my point. “Witch-burning” (which rarely involved burning) only occurred in a relatively narrow strip of Europe and the lands held by England for around 100 years. It was never widely practiced throughout Christendom and it was totally absent from most of Christendom. The execution of witches simply did not occur in Scandinavia, Poland, Austria, Hungary, central or Southern Italy, Spain and Portugal, the majority of France, and the lands of the Eastern churches.

Honor killings go on, today, in Christian and Hindu lands, as well as in Muslim lands.

I am not “hand-waving,” you are cherry picking then over generalizing.

Haven’t read the book you mentioned, but one of the authorities in the field is B.P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt, Longman (New York), 1987. He estimated numbers from the records of the trials. He is quoted here :

Levack makes estimates
of the deaths in all of early modern Europe (ca. 1450-1750):

@Levack

Even if we make allowances for trial records that have been lost
or destroyed, the total number of persons who were actually
tried for witchcraft throughout Europe probably did not greatly
exceed 100,000. About half of these persons lived in German
lands within the Holy Roman Empire. A project organized by
by Heinrich Himmler in the 1930’s to obtain information
regarding persons tried for magic and witchcraft in the past
yielded a file containing data from some 30,000 prosecutions,
the great majority of which took place in Germany. Since some
of the entries in this file contain the names of more than one
person, and since the records of many prosecutions are for one
reason or another not included in the file, the total number
of German prosecutions could easily have been 50,000 [6].

Levack counts trials in the rest of Europe as follows: Poland: 15,000;
Switzerland: 9,000; Lorraine, Franche-Comte, France and “a string of
autonomous states within the Empire”: 10,000; the British Isles: 5,000
(Levack remarks that more than half of these were in Scotland; note that
nevertheless his estimate exceeds Ewen.); Scandinavia: 5,000; Hungary,
Transylvania, Moldavia, Wallachia, and Russia: probably not more than
4,000; **Spain and the Italian States]: 10,000[/B [6].

Levack comes to a total of 110,000 trials and estimates that, "European
communities executed about 60,000 witches during the early modern period.

[tomndebb]

Levack’s “Polish” trials tended to be in areas that could be considered “German” depending on who was describing them. The total numbers (and Levack’s potential 60,000 deaths is far lower than other persons’ estimates between 100,000 and nine million) only addresses the the body count. The more pertinent point was that witch hunts were not really an example of “Christianity.” The majority of witch trials occurred in a limited number of locations for a (historically) brief period and was actually opposed by the majority of the actual religions. The original claim was that

@tagos

witch-burning was part and parcel of Christianity at one time.

However, rather than “part and parcel” of Christianity, witch fears and witch hunting was actually a social phenomenon that sprung up in spite of Christianity, was never embraced by all Christianity, and was actually suppressed by the religious leaders. If one wants to assert that violence is “part and parcel” of Islam in the same way, I would tend to agree–it is a cultural phenomenon that is only coincident to the religion. People who are devoted to the “convert by the sword” motif tend to ignore the fact that the Muslim invaders of India tended to not convert their conquered peoples, simply placing their Muslim governments over the Hindus, many of whom then converted and many of whom did not. It also studiously ignores the fact that Southeast Asia/Oceania was converted by missionary work, not by conquest. If Islam demands conquest by the sword, why was the world’s largest Muslim country converted by peaceful methods?

[intention]

tomndebb, thanks for your response. You said, inter alia:

@tomndebb

… However, rather than “part and parcel” of Christianity, witch fears and witch hunting was actually a social phenomenon that sprung up in spite of Christianity, was never embraced by all Christianity, and was actually suppressed by the religious leaders. If one wants to assert that violence is “part and parcel” of Islam in the same way, I would tend to agree–it is a cultural phenomenon that is only coincident to the religion. People who are devoted to the “convert by the sword” motif tend to ignore the fact that the Muslim invaders of India tended to not convert their conquered peoples, simply placing their Muslim governments over the Hindus, many of whom then converted and many of whom did not. It also studiously ignores the fact that Southeast Asia/Oceania was converted by missionary work, not by conquest. If Islam demands conquest by the sword, why was the world’s largest Muslim country converted by peaceful methods?

I agree with you that witch burning was not “part and parcel” of Christianity. And the Inquisition, although it was “part and parcel” of Christianity, killed fewer people in three centuries than died in 9/11.

I disagree that “the Muslim invaders of India tended to not convert their conquered peoples” … Unlike the Romans or Alexander the Great, who didn’t particularly care about the religion of their conquered people and who truly did not try to convert them, the Muslims gave conquered people a choice: convert, or live as a second class citizen and pay taxes for your beliefs. Taxing someone and making them a second class citizen for their beliefs is “tending to convert” rather than “tending to not convert”.

Naturally, a number of those who were thus conquered decided to convert to Islam. You may say they weren’t converted by the sword … I say without the sword, without being conquered and taxed, they would never have converted, and thus they were converted by the sword.

I don’t understand your final point about Indonesia. There is no requirement in Islam that the religion be spread only by the sword. It is a very tempting religion for young men, because it glorifies men over women and glorifies violence over boring old peace and promises all the pleasures of paradise, including nubile women, to those who die in that violence. In short, it’s a teenage boy’s wet dream, how can you beat a religion that promises you guns and pussy and domination over women? So no, I’m not surprised that it spreads both by the sword and not by the sword.

However, even when it does spread without the sword, the sword somehow seems to come along with it. It is not a coincidence that the Indonesian Muslims bombed Bali, the least Muslim island of Indonesia.

w.

[tomndebb]

@intention

[I don’t understand your final point about Indonesia. There is no requirement in Islam that the religion be spread only by the sword.

But you were so desperate to have conversion by conquest be one of the strictures of Islam. Now you change your position when contrary evidence is presented?

Why are not the Muslim missionaries to Southeast Asia condemned by their fellow Muslims for failing to sweep across that region conquering and converting?

[intention]

@tomndebb

@intention

[I don’t understand your final point about Indonesia. There is no requirement in Islam that the religion be spread only by the sword.

But you were so desperate to have conversion by conquest be one of the strictures of Islam. Now you change your position when contrary evidence is presented?

Why are not the Muslim missionaries to Southeast Asia condemned by their fellow Muslims for failing to sweep across that region conquering and converting?

'Fraid I don’t understand this, tomndebb. I have not changed my position. Nor am I “desperate” to have conversion by conquest be one of the things that Islam strongly encourages. I just note that conversion by conquest is a central part of Islam, with special sections written into the Koran and the Hadiths (e.g. dhimmi taxes, virgins for the faithful martyrs, regulations about dividing the war booty, glorification of the person who “strikes unbelievers and idolaters with his sword until it breaks, and he is completely dyed with their blood”) to encourage the process.

This means nothing about whether Islam either can be spread, or has been spread, by missionaries, by radio or TV, by men’s desire for a religion that subjugates women, or by plain old garden variety stupidity. All of those are still possible. Why on earth would you think that they would not be?

w.

[tomndebb]

@intention

'Fraid I don’t understand this, tomndebb. I have not changed my position. Nor am I “desperate” to have conversion by conquest be one of the things that Islam strongly encourages. I just note that conversion by conquest is a central part of Islam, with special sections written into the Koran and the Hadiths (e.g. dhimmi taxes, virgins for the faithful martyrs, regulations about dividing the war booty, glorification of the person who “strikes unbelievers and idolaters with his sword until it breaks, and he is completely dyed with their blood”) to encourage the process.

This means nothing about whether Islam either can be spread, or has been spread, by missionaries, by radio or TV, by men’s desire for a religion that subjugates women, or by plain old garden variety stupidity. All of those are still possible. Why on earth would you think that they would not be?.

I am not the one who keeps repeating the claim that “conversion by conquest” is some central part of Islam when that claim can only be supported by quoting statements out of context and ignoring the reality that it has not been any such thing.

[Valteron]

@chappachula

a bettter analogy woud be if someone decided to mock the Amish by publishing a few cartoons in an obscure Danish newspaper…
…imagine the riots that would ensue at embassies aroung the world…

In fact as I recall, National Lampoon, before it stopped being funny, once had a cartoon story about Amish in Space. The Amish mother, thinking an alien on her ship was some sort of cow, brought up a milking stool and pail and pulled his penis until he had an ejaculation. Funny, but I don’t remember any rioting Amish.

[intention]

@tomndebb

I am not the one who keeps repeating the claim that “conversion by conquest” is some central part of Islam when that claim can only be supported by quoting statements out of context and ignoring the reality that it has not been any such thing.

That is correct. You are the one who keeps repeating the claim that there is no particular violence in Islam, that there is no “conversion by conquest” in Islam, who keeps ignoring other people when they disagree with you.

You did not, for example, comment on my statement that the role of conquest in Islam is supported by such things as "(e.g. dhimmi taxes, virgins for the faithful martyrs, regulations about dividing the war booty, glorification of the person who “strikes unbelievers and idolaters with his sword until it breaks, and he is completely dyed with their blood”).

Now I truly, truly don’t understand how you can ignore that last one. The person Muhammed calls on us to emulate, the man he urges us to be like, is covered, drenched, “dyed” in the blood of unbelievers … not Muslim blood, not the blood of his enemies, but the blood of “unbelievers”.

But tomndebb tells us things like “Ignore the man behind the curtain, I am the Great Oz, there is no violence in Islam, he’s not trying to spread the religion, it’s just coincidence that the blood is from unbelievers, besides, we can’t judge him by the morals of our time” …

But when a guy comes into a town, as Muhammed did, and kills all the men, and takes all of the women and children as slaves, I doubt very much if any of the survivors said “hey, it’s the 7th century, we can’t judge the killer of our husbands too harshly, he’s not trying to spread his religion or steal our possessions, and besides, we probably deserved it …”

You claim that when a guy comes to town, as Muhammed did, and conquers the town, and then says “OK, convert or be a second class citizen and pay extra taxes for the rest of your life”, this is not to be understood as any kind of extortion, or pressure, it is not spreading Islam by conquest. It’s just … just … just what? Conquering people, and then forcing them into a second-class life and taxing them if they don’t convert to Islam is really what? It’s not spreading Islam by conquest, it’s just a polite request in disguise?

Or we can look at it from the other direction, we can look at the pressure on people leaving the religion rather than the pressure on people entering the religion. If you want to leave Islam, your punishment is to be that the true believers either kill you, or crucify you, or chop off a hand and a foot on opposite sides of the body … please explain to me, tomndebb, **how is this not spreading your religion by violence? ** This is definitely a “central part of Islam”, it’s spelled out in the Koran, and it is still happening today.

If anyone else on the planet did this, if some cult leader told his followers that if they tried to leave him he’d cut off a foot and a hand on opposite sides of their body, and he did it to a couple of people to keep the rest of his followers in line, you would say he is using violence and the threat of violence to spread his beliefs. No question. Cut and dried.

But hey, not so fast, let’s not jump to conclusions here, if it’s just those goofy Muslims, that’s not spreading their religion by violence, it’s not a way to increase the number of believers. In fact, it doesn’t have to do with increasing the number of believers at all. It’s just their homespun, folksy way of showing you how much they would really appreciate your not reducing the number of believers, and that’s a very, very different thing …

w.

[Liberal]

After having slogged through this entire thread, I’m going to have to come down on the side of “no”.