thebin
Diamond Hoya (over 2500 posts)
Posts: 3,848
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Post by thebin on Nov 13, 2009 17:53:37 GMT -5
It's amazing that one still has to explicitly say this, I would have thought it would have been assumed on such a board, but you do not have to treat all Muslims as terrorists or anything like it to admit the FACT that islam is very much a part of the problem rather than trying to wish the situation away by using that cheap "extremism" sleight of hand. I am well aware that most of the world's 1.5 muslims pose no more harm to me than I do to them, but the fact that their "extremist" element is in the best case a in-power minority in countries like Iran and a substantial popular movement in places like Saudi Arabia makes it a very different conversation than the one we might have about Christian nuts in our country who can't even win local election, to say nothing of compel non-Christians to do things they don't want to. The fact is, abortion is legal in the most backwater county of Alabama and BEING A CHRISTIAN is illegal in Medina or Mecca. These are not differences of degree, they are differences in type. We are not playing with remotely the same rule book and that's a problem that needs addressing if we are going to work this out in our lifetime without constant war. At the center of that difference in our respective outlooks is un-Reformed Islam itself- the religion and the perversion of the same. Not just "extremism" itself, which is a rhetorical distinction that is as useless as it is cowardly.
We can't begin to address this problem, even in conjunction with the sane elements of the Islamic countries in question, until we can all agree to this very plain fact like adults.
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Nov 13, 2009 20:18:11 GMT -5
I would not set Turkey as the great model. Christians there face severe restrictions on property ownership and cannot build places of worship or run seminaries to train their clerics. And the Catholic Church has no legal recognition.
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EasyEd
Platinum Hoya (over 5000 posts)
Posts: 7,272
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Post by EasyEd on Nov 14, 2009 13:48:33 GMT -5
I would not set Turkey as the great model. Christians there face severe restrictions on property ownership and cannot build places of worship or run seminaries to train their clerics. And the Catholic Church has no legal recognition. Very similar to Northern Ireland in the near past.
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Filo
Diamond Hoya (over 2500 posts)
Posts: 3,910
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Post by Filo on Nov 15, 2009 11:01:32 GMT -5
I would not set Turkey as the great model. Christians there face severe restrictions on property ownership and cannot build places of worship or run seminaries to train their clerics. And the Catholic Church has no legal recognition. Doesn't that just illustrate the problem, though, if Turkey is the best model out there? I think what bothers me the most in these discussions and in what we are seeing in the MSM, is that there is a reticence to engage in open debate about the role of Islam and/or Islamacists. The question is, is that reticence to engage in open debate the result of political correctness run amok or just plain fear of the lunatic fringe of Islam, or other factors. I am all for respecting ALL religions, but it just seems that open dialogue regarding Islam is pretty much off limits (e.g. Danish newspaper cartoons (Jyllands-Posten cartoons)).
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thebin
Diamond Hoya (over 2500 posts)
Posts: 3,848
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Post by thebin on Nov 16, 2009 12:52:47 GMT -5
Hitchens hits upon a few important points here..... ".....What about the emphasis on Hasan's supposedly knife-edge mental state? Well, even supposing it to have been precarious, it can hardly have been improved by immersion in the rantings of Anwar al-Awlaki. I do not say that all practitioners of woman-hating, anti-Semitic, sadomasochistic suicide immolations are themselves insane, but I do say that the teaching itself is demented. In the same way, I do not say that all Muslims are terrorists, but I have noticed that an alarmingly high proportion of terrorists are Muslim. A paranoid or depressive person—of whom we have many millions in our midst—does not have to end up screaming religious slogans while butchering his fellow creatures. But a paranoid or depressive person who is in regular touch with a jihadist "spiritual leader" is presented with a ready-made script that offers him paradise in exchange for homicide. All right, then, wasn't the gallant major also subject to ill treatment and even abuse? Only up to a point, when you consider that his parents had been given refuge from Palestine and enabled to build a life here, that he himself had knowingly joined an all-volunteer army, that he had been promoted (it seems rather faster and higher than his true abilities warranted) and allowed on the job to vent extremely noxious opinions about members of other faiths, to say nothing about his adopted country. No doubt he came in for a taunt or two, but if you want to avoid that, then don't express contempt for your fellow soldiers while in uniform. Black Americans used to be segregated. Jewish recruits were mercilessly hazed, as were men or women who looked as if they might be gay. Did any of them ever come up with an act of mass murder as a response? Did any of them ever offer a black or Jewish or gay ideology in justification of it? Would they have earned sympathy and understanding if they had? By the time the mushy "pre-post-traumatic" school was done with the story, Maj. Hasan was not just acquitted of being a bad Muslim. He was more or less exonerated of having even done a bad deed. This is not at all a matter of the usual stupid refusal of the FBI and other security services to understand an early warning even when they have detected one. It is a direct challenge to the unity and integrity of the armed services, which have been one of our society's principal organs and engines of ethnic and religious integration. A U.S. soldier who wonders about the reliability of his, let alone her, Muslim colleague is not being "Islamophobic." (A phobia is an irrational or uncontrollable fear.) If Maj. Hasan has made this understandable worry in the ranks more widespread, he has done his fanatical preacher friend the greatest possible service. But that's his fault for doing what he did, and his superiors' fault for letting him openly rehearse it for so long, not mine for pointing it out......" www.slate.com/id/2235760/
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Post by AustinHoya03 on Nov 16, 2009 13:54:30 GMT -5
Great stuff from Hitchens as usual.
One fact that nobody has discussed: Hasan attended what appear to be mainstream mosques in suburban Washington and Killeen. Did Hasan get all of his ideas regarding jihad and martyrdom from al-Awlaki, or did some of these ideas come from his peers in local faith communities?
I can't answer this question without speculating wildly. Are there any Muslims on the board who can speak to whether discussions regarding jihad/martyrdom occur openly in American mosques on a regular basis?
(I am sure there are Muslims who DON'T talk about these things, and I am sure there are Muslims who OPPOSE such things, and I assume such opposition would be part of the conversation. I'm just curious to know whether the conversation is occuring in American mosques, and if so, whether it is common or uncommon for some American Muslims to advocate actions such as Hasan's.)
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