What do ex-Muslims and disidents have to say about Islam.

The BBQ Pit
61

Than you for demonstrating (once again) that you are being an alarmist who has chosen to believe something and will use both eveidence and a lack of evidence to prove the same point to yourself.

The article simply did not provide any evidence that Indonesioa is currently “slipping” anywhere. The evidence provided indicated that it was actually resisting the efforts of the Islamists. Clearly, there are Islamists in Indonesia, just as there are Islamists in any nation with a sizable Muslim population–and just as there are Nazis and neo-Nazis and related groups in any sizable Western nation. The issue is how to address those specific groups on a case by case basis rather than screaming “Muslims!” in terror and driving more of the moderates into the wings of the extremists in the way that we did with socialists and communists from the 1920s to the 1980s. (We already tried that in Iran with such marvelous success.)

In your apparent idolization of Joe McCarthy and Robert Welch (I don’t know the Canadian equivalents), you are not really providing me any reassurance that your (inchoate) ideas are worth pursuing.

62

Why would they? My point was that the terrorism originated in one group and spread to others (in opposition to your assertion that they arose all through Islamic lands because of Islam, itself. Now that those ideas have spread, other groups may pick thenm up, of course. And, when we look at the linked story, what do we find?

Well, golly gee! The local terrorists are directly related to the Wahabbist al Qaeda. What a surprise!

63

Since we are in the pit we can be obnoxious

  • find their brethren and ask (pay) them to kill them
64

How far would you estimate we are from having to fear Islam in the US, Bluethree? Perhaps our disagreement is one of time frames, not basic principles.

Remember, France, which has had riots, physical assault of male doctors attempting to treat Muslim women, etc. etc., and which has actually begun to pass a few, admittedly timid laws to protect its secular republic, **has a 10% Muslim population. The United States has 1.5%. ** That is one important difference.

During the recent Quebec election (March 26), the issue of “reasonable accomodation” of religious minorities who make demands for society to adapt to them became an unexpected issue. These included such issues as Muslims refusing to let a female driving test inspector ride in the front seat with them when they were trying for their licence, a clear violation of the Quebec laws on equality of the sexes.

One party, the Action démocratique Québec (ADQ), the party that insisted that our societal values must be respected, shot up in popular votes and members elected on election night. They did not win, but their success surprised everyone.

Now, the “reasonable accomodation” issue was far from being the only issue in the election. And in case you are wondering, Quebecers are among the most liberal people in North America. For example, they are 80% in favour of same-sex marriage. Two of the members elected to the Quebec assembly March 26 are black and both were elected from districts do not have large black minorities.

Naturally, knee-jerkers of the same intellectual bent as the ones on this thread yelled that it was a victory for bigotry.

Josée Legault, a Quebec journalist writing in the Montreal Gazette yesterday (yes our secularized Quebec society publishes newspapers and has stores open on Good Friday), wrote the following refutation to these facile and specious charges of “bigotry” that are so easy for the PCers to trot out. The following quotes sum it up nicely.

“(The other party leaders) didn’t get that this has nothing to do with ethnic nationalism. It was a refusal, as in other Western countries, to let private religious practices, whether Christian or non-Christian, over take the public sphere.”. . . . . . . .

“Many Quebecers over 40 are fiercely anti-clerical. They’re the ones who applauded the deconfesionalization of school boards. People who took Chrsitian religions out of public schools don’t take to seeing practices from any religion being imposed in public… . . . .”

“. . . . It’s a sign of an increasingly secular society that doesn’t fear multi-ethnicity, but rejects the return of conservative religious practices in public.” (end of quote)

“Bigot” is an easy insult to yell. And I have had multiple insults directed to me for expressing my viewpoint. Tomndeb, by moving this thread to the Pit, even made it open season on me for insults.

But I do not mind one bit. Why? Well, as we say in French, insults are the weapons of the person who has no valid arguments.

65

I’ll admit it wasn’t the best of all possible links. You may find this one to be better: Sliding Towards Conservative Islam; Indonesia’s Secular State Under Siege.
Here are some quotes:

Please don’t lump me in with anybody who thinks Islam is a threat in itself, or that Islam is inherently worse than any other organized religion. I do not hold those views. But it hurts my soul to see another secular country slide towards religious fanaticism. It can’t possibly be easy to win those freedoms back once you’ve lost them.
Freedom of religion is enshrined in the Indonesia constitution, as it is in ours. As an American, I treasure that freedom. I’d hate to see America go down the same road Indonesia is going down. Of course, in America, it’s the radical Christians who are threatening our freedom.

66

I don’t know. Maybe four hundred years?

67

That is significantly more troubling.

I do note a couple of things: the article notes that the rise in Fundamentalism corresponds pretty closely to economic downturn and that the Wahabbists of Saudi Arabia are flooding the country with literature.

It would seem to me that a good start to fight the “slide” would be to take steps to help the economy stay healthy while countering the Wahabbist literature with materials from more moderate groups.
(Or, of course, we could stand in the West and simply make rude noises about “Islam” and wonder why they are not responding to our condemnation of their religion. I guess that might work.)

68

Perhaps our problem is that I am using “Islam” partly to mean a social/political/religious philosophy, more than in the geographic sense. You seem to be using “Islam” more in the ethno-geographic sense of the “uma” the world-wide community of Muslims as persons.

It seems to be a matter of incredible importance to you Tom, that Islamic extremism does not enjoy unanimous or even majority support among Muslims. To me, it is the social/political/religious philosophy of Islam, which is fundamentally supportive of violent jihad, which I fear.

The fact that every single Muslim does not (or does not yet?) subscribe to that violent mentality of jihad is interesting but is only useful as a measure of how much further the extremists have to go.

I am at a loss to find where I said that terrorism “arose all through Islamic lands” as if I had alleged that it was spontaneously generated in very single Muslim community on Earth at once. I realize there are a couple of dozen Islamic or largely Islamic countries in the world, encompassing many local cultures. I realize that Turkey is not Saudi Arabia. So if I said that it is inaccurate and I will apologize.

I suspect you will not find such a quote because one of my basic theses is that Islam itself, as a philospohy, is of a nature to foster violence terrorism and the “bloody borders” of present-day Islam, through its espousal and glorification of violence in both the Koran and the Hadiths, and in its many commands to the faithful to participate in jihad. You will probably find quotations of that kind for which I do not apologize because they are correct.

However, as I pointed out in another posting some time ago, a world-wide survey of Muslims quoted by Sam Harris shows that huge minorities (and in some countries majorities) of Muslims in Islamic countries agree with suicide bombing.

As to the dozens of wars and conflicts ongoing between Muslims and their neighbours, as Samuel P. Huntington says in The Clash of Civilizations,

“In all of these places (the author previously describes conflcts in in Kashmir, Assam, Bangladesh, southern Thailand, the Phlippines, East Timor, Israel, Lebanon, Sudan, Nigeria, Chad, Kenya, Tanzania, etc.) the relations between Muslims and people of other civilizations – Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Hindu, Chinese, Buddhist, Jewish – have been generally antagonistic; most of these relations have been violent at some point in the past; many have been violent in the 1990s. Wherever one looks along the perimiter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors.” (op. cit. , pg. 256).

By the way, Samuel P. Huntington is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard University, where he is also the Chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. He was a director of security planning for the National Security Council in the Carter administration.

69

I’ll bet a lot of Frenchmen would have given you a similar estimate 30 years ago.

70

I believe it was way back an hour ago that Tomndebb was saying that things are not that bad in Indonesia, and that the original link supplied by Bluethree didn’t prove much. Now he sees another piece of the picture forming. He reminds me of a guy who looks at some supposedly unconnected pieces of a jigsaw and suddenly sees another part of the picture.

Tomndebb proposes defensive counter-measures we can take in Indonesia. You horrible Islamophobe bigot, Tom! :stuck_out_tongue: Don"t you know that not all Indonesians are like that???

MY concern is that we defend ourselves right here with vigorous laws to protect our secular societies.

Say, do you suppose any Wahabbist literature is being sent to America, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, to the growing Islamic communities there? D’ya think, huh?

71

No. This is the bullshit part that simply demonstrates your phobia. No one will persuade you otherwise because you need to fear them just as your parents (and perhaps you in your youth) needed to fear “communism” and no evidence that there are different strains of thought within the group(s) can get past your your dearly held beliefs.

In every example you provide, there are specific origins for the conflicts (that tend to be economic and political rather than religious). You simply ignore similar conflicts when they do not include Muslims because that does not fit your desired phobias and you ignore lacks of conflict between Islam and other cultures because they do not fit your need to have a monolithic bogeyman to fear.

You had a thread in GD that already addressed this topic. You abandoned it to open a new thread based on rants. This is the Forum for ranting. I noted when I moved this thread that if you actually had a discussion in mind, the other thread was still available. The only thing that keeps you in this thread rather than debating facts and logic in the other is your personal need to make insulting comments about Islam.

72

I see Islam as similar to organized Communism. Communism was not monolithic, and communist countries were often in sharp disagreement with each other, and its founders probably meant well, and there were a lot of decent Communists, and most people in Communist countries were mainly concerned with just making a living and going about their day-to-day life. That doesn’t change the fact that, as a whole, Communism was commited to making all non-Communists into Communists and all countries into Communist ones, whether by force or by peacable conversion, with the ultimate goal of eliminating the idea of countries and nations entirely, with everybody just being Communist.

The same is true of Islam, except with making people and countries into Muslims.

When I left Islam, it was on good terms. It was becoming Orthodox, and so learning about what life is like for non-Muslims even in relatively tolerant Muslim countries like Indonesia and Turkey (and don’t get me started on that one) that made me actively anti-Islam.

73

I am sure there is. I have no problem taking (Constitutional) steps to counter that propaganda. Note that the difference is that I recognize (as I have pointed out to you while you ignored me for the last couple of weeks) that there are specific ideological trends in Islam just as in any large movement or religion and that we should addresss those movements that are pernicious rather than stupidly claiming that the entire religion is evil (thus prompting even those who are not part of the nastier movements to move further from us and closer to the zealots simply bacuse we are pushing them in that direction).

I suspect that you have put your finger on the exact difference between us: I look at information and evaluate it; you start out with blind emotion and collect only those facts that you believe support your desires.

74

In fact Quebec and Newfoundland have gotten rid of all confessional school boards, Catholic or otherwise. And as a Quebecer I say hooray!

75

[QUOTE=tomndebb]
No. This is the bullshit part that simply demonstrates your phobia. No one will persuade you otherwise because you need to fear them just as your parents (and perhaps you in your youth) needed to fear “communism” and no evidence that there are different strains of thought within the group(s) can get past your your dearly held beliefs.

/QUOTE]
The comparison with Communism is VERY apt, and I think the poster just below your post, YBeayf, a former Muslim you will note, says it so well that I cannot do better than quote anew what he says. Yes, we needed to fear Communism, because Communism was a world-wide philosophy bent on world domination. The fact that there were different forms and opinions within Communism made no real difference. Or as our ex-Muslim friend puts it:

"I see Islam as similar to organized Communism. Communism was not monolithic, and communist countries were often in sharp disagreement with each other, and its founders probably meant well, and there were a lot of decent Communists, and most people in Communist countries were mainly concerned with just making a living and going about their day-to-day life. That doesn’t change the fact that, as a whole, Communism was commited to making all non-Communists into Communists and all countries into Communist ones, whether by force or by peacable conversion, with the ultimate goal of eliminating the idea of countries and nations entirely, with everybody just being Communist.

“The same is true of Islam, except with making people and countries into Muslims.”

Well said, Ybeayf, well said! But of course Tomndebb will tell us how wrong you and I are.

76

And this is different from Christianity how? Both faiths believe that it is their mission to convert the unconverted. And both faiths have denominations that feel that such conversion must be voluntary, without duress, and freely done to be valid.

I’ve no problem with those sorts of denominations.

77

This expalins quite a bit. You swallowed the propaganda of the Cold War without actually making the effort to see how much of that propafganda was pure bullshit and now that we no longer have the commies to fear, you have simply transferred your fears to the next bogeyman that has been hoist up for you to bow down and fear.

(Please do not try to turn this into some foolish claim that I am saying the U.S.S.R. was not a threat or that at different times, individual national commuinist movements were not threats to the nations in which they arose. I am simply pointing out that the “world wide communism” threat (which was always negligible, at best), died out in the 1930s, to be replaced by the same old national attempts at hegemony that was known as The Great Game in the nineteenth century and the “communism” aspect of it was little more than a cultural marker with no serious ideological strength any more than the “democracy” claim that we used to prop up dictatorship after dictatorship, providing little more than ways for demagogues like McCarthy and Nixon to libel their opponents for political gain.)

78

Thanks for this. I admit I could have just asked you without trying my best to piss you of, and I probably would if this thread was in Great Debates. And now you make me look bad by replying politely. In the Pit. :slight_smile:

You have some points here and there, but they are mixed with anecdotes appealing to worst in us all, ment to raise anger, not discussion. As for the jigsaw puzzle, you could keep showing red pieces telling me the big picture is red and I could keep showing the green ones. When I saw your OP i thought I recognized a brand of pieces that I’ve previously encountered and I knew didn’t belong to the puzzle. Anecdotes where my home Sweden was described as overrun by muslims and … just wrong. Just lies.

79

Digressing slightly.

With 9/11 it was mainly a bunch malcontents from Saudi who had been brainwashed by their ridiculous religious schools. In effect it an attack from outside the USA.

In London on 7/7 the suicide bombers had British passports, were educated in Britain and may have been born here. To me that is something radically different and a lot more disturbing than an attack from outside.

Also I have a first hand report that on 7/7 young guys of Pakistani origin were driving around Luton honking their horns and cheering.

We have plenty of instances of schoolgirls supposedly wanting to dress like Darth Vader.

There is a cancer within the UK.

80

Heck, just for the sake of argument, I’ll stipulate that Islam is a barbaric force invading and corrupting every noble western venue within its tentacled reach.

I eagerly await Valteron’s suggestions on what we can and should do about it.