Al-Qaeda threatens jihad over Pope's remarks

[eloisel]

Mentalist, I adore you. I think you're one of the brightest bulbs in this pack. However, you don't get to use your canned man words.

I'm a woman. On top of that, I grew up in a university town where there were and are many foreign students. I spent several years working in the legal system helping escape American women who made the unfortunate decision to marry a foreign student from Iran, Iraq and Pakistan and then move there with their husbands and have children. (Don't look surprised - I told y'all I was a spy once upon a time.) In addition to that, my paternal grandmother and her family fled Armenia back in the late 1890's because of the horrors they suffered at Muslim hands. And, for some reason unknown to me, Pakistani's gather around me like moths around a flame.

I tell you these radical facist terrorist insane muslims are a threat and I want that threat removed. Do you deny they are a threat? Maybe under muslim rule you'd do okay. You could convert or pay a head tax to keep your head on your shoulders - though you'd have to give up the liquor. However, I'm a woman, and a single woman at that. Under muslim rule I wouldn't be allowed to work to support myself. I'd be forced to sit on the roadside covered up in my burka to beg for scraps and hope the men didn't decide I deserved to be beaten. Or, I could live behind blacked out windows, never being allowed to go outside without being escorted by my brother or son-in-law. I did tell you my brother is a genius but he is also a manic depressive paranoid schizophrenic and my son-in-law is most successful as a paperweight. Don't tell me stripping women of their rights can't happen because it has happened elsewhere in muslim countries over the last 30 years. Even in muslim societies that are more in keeping with the teachings of Islam, they are still a patriarchal society where women's rights are secondary to men's with respect to work and education and women may even be completely left out of the political process. It is all fine and good to say what Islam teaches, but it is something else entirely on the practice. While a woman who is raised in a society where she is dependent on the good graces of the men in her life may not consider her situation oppressive and while she may find wearing a burka freedom from bad hair days, for a woman raised in the west, those are terrifying situations.

 

[Mentalist]

I have no problem bashing Islam as a religion. I also have no problem bashing Christianity as a religion. The Muslim world is a complete wreck, most of the world is infact. I don't contest any of this whatsoever.

I merely made a point of saying that Islam unfettered by human interpretation as a religion is certainly no more violent or oppressive than any other religion. Religion fucks everything up and people take it waaay too seriously. This is true across the board. It is the draconian cultural pit-falls the Middle East - for the most part - has been unable to clamber out of in, well, forever that is to blame and I firmly do not believe that it's because they are all arabic.


What I have a primary problem with is singling out an entire race for the actions of terrorists and those less enlightened. After all, most of the worlds combined population is as dense as lead. Culture in the Middle East is for the most part uncivilised and fucked up. But just because one is a Muslim or of arabic decent doesn't mean they are more prone to acts of violence or are unable to respect women or want to kill everyone that lives on the West side of a compass. We can single out the inherent problems with religion and culture of which there are many but lets not bring race into it because it's not logically pertinent to the conversation. That's all, I am no great fan of the Middle East as it stands. For a place which was once known as Mesopotamia and once stood the gardens of Bayblon and the Great Library of Nineveh they have squandered just about everything. But people must be given the right to be judged as individuals. To judge people because of their race has been the cause of mythic hate and oppresion through history, we must not stand for it.

 

[eloisel]

Actually, I'm going to have to disagree with you that race does not play a part in this ongoing and current conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim. How many European/western countries are muslim? The terrorists are what? What is it that they want?

You mentioned the Grand Wizard of the KKK not being exemplary of the west in an earlier post. Okay. Let's look at that. If the Grand Wizard of the KKK murdered one person minding their own business sitting in their office doing work that had nothing to do with the KKK, society at large would want the Grand Wizard found, judged, put in prison, perhaps even given the death penalty. When the planes crashed into the Twin Towers, murdering thousands of people sitting in their offices doing work that had nothing to do with al-Qaida, what did the muslim society at large do? Did they demand that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida be hunted down, brought to court to answer for their crimes, be imprisoned, be killed? No. They went out in the streets, passed out candy and shot their guns into the air in celebration of the murders. Osama bin Laden was great in their eyes, doing allah's work.

I do agree with you that people should be judged as individuals. However, there are some factors that make the society at large directly responsible for the action of the individual. For example, there are a huge number of "insurgent" fighters in Iraq. They aren't a fighting force wearing the uniform of a country. So, who are they? Where are these insurgents getting their weapons and supplies? Who is handling their logistics? Another example, Islam teaches that the men are supposed to be taking care of the women in their family - their mothers, sisters, daughters. If the man is off fighting in the streets of Iraq, kidnapping, torturing, beheading and dumping bodies, who is taking care of the women in his family? Whose kids are those - you know, those kids that are filling up the schools where radical islam is taught? Those are the same kids that are flooding in behind the terrorists taken down. Where are those schools? Do the kids just appear out of the ground one day, motherless, fatherless? Who is following those clerics that are always being quoted in the papers? Is a cleric a cleric if nobody pays any attention to him? Is a leader a leader if nobody follows? If the billions of muslims mostly disagree with the method of the terrorists and believe their teachings of islam to be twisted, then why don't the billions of muslims descend on that minority subset and eradicate or absorb them instead of enable them?

And, yeah, it is a shame that the middle east thinks it is a shining star of wisdom and learning in these days when they've taken nations that had 100% literacy 30 years ago and reduced them to the situation they are now in. A good argument for why fundamentalist junk science should not be allowed in schools.