Willravel

Good post!

Locobot

I got a good laugh out of this too.

crossova

if you're going to post verses of the Quran, post the ENTIRE verse

the translation is varies slightly, depending on the translator, but cleary this part "Then when the Sacred Months have passed," is not even part of the original verse...


They wish that you reject Faith, as they have rejected (Faith), and thus that you all become equal (like one another). So take not Auliyâ' (protectors or friends) from them, till they emigrate in the Way of Allâh (to Muhammad S.A.W). But if they turn back (from Islâm), take (hold) of them and kill them wherever you find them, and take neither Auliyâ' (protectors or friends) nor helpers from them. (An-Nisa 4:89)

the FULL text of both verses:

5. Then when the Sacred Months (the Ist, 7th, 11th, and 12th months of the Islâmic calendar) have passed, then kill the Mushrikûn (see V.2:105) wherever you find them, and capture them and besiege them, and prepare for them each and every ambush. But if they repent and perform As-Salât (Iqâmat-as-Salât), and give Zakât, then leave their way free. Verily, Allâh is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful.

6. And if anyone of the Mushrikûn (polytheists, idolaters, pagans, disbelievers in the Oneness of Allâh) seeks your protection then grant him protection, so that he may hear the Word of Allâh (the Qur'ân), and then escort him to where he can be secure, that is because they are men who know not.

O you who believe! Fight those of the disbelievers who are close to you, and let them find harshness in you, and know that Allâh is with those who are the Al-Muttaqûn (the pious - see V.2:2).....

and here is V.2:2....."This is the Book (the Qur'ân), whereof there is no doubt, a guidance to those who are Al-Muttaqûn [the pious and righteous persons who fear Allâh much (abstain from all kinds of sins and evil deeds which He has forbidden) and love Allâh much (perform all kinds of good deeds which He has ordained)].


to read verses from the Quran visit http://www.thenoblequran.com

jorgelito

I agree with Lebell here: I've been following this thread trying to find a place to add something constructive.

Everyone male interesting points and such, but we are fast deteriorating in to a mudslinging contest.

Maybe we should "reset" and start over with arguments supported by facts, and theories etc to parse here in a civil debate.

I will attempt here:

*************************************************************

Oddly, I find a bit of logic and (sort of agree) with the contention by Lebell and others that statistically, if more Muslims/Arabs commit an act of terrorism, then extra scrutiny should be given to them.
Thus, since statistically blacks commit more crimes then they should also be scrutinized as well as white collar criminals so on and so forth. But somehow, something just doesn't feel right with this type of logic. I can't really pinpoint it. IT seems too simple. If statistically many American athletes are using steroids, should all American athletes be banned from competetion, or more accurately, tested more strenuously?

On the other hand, it doesn't seem to make sense to "pat down" grandma given the limited resources (time & money) we are willing as a society to devote to "security".

So then it maybe becomes a matter of prioritization and resource management.

Because we as a people or whatever do not think of white collar crime as being important or a priority, therefore we are not willing to spend the necessary resources to fight it. Nor do we really care about the steroids issue (otherwise we would of done something about it already, like boycott baseball etc.).

But, national security (terrorism) for whatever reason, media or government induced, right or wrong, IS a priority.

Therefore, we are more prone to scrutinize the elements involved in this issue. But because we are still too cheap to pay more in taxes to or devote more spending (we want more security but don't want to pay for it) to security, corners must be cut, and priorities made.

Thus, instead of screening everyone, we check those deemed statisticlally more likely to commit terrorism. But, statistics can be flawed or manipulated too. People's tolerance fluctuate with perception. People are willing to stand in line for 3+ hours without complaint because they "feel safer". Would they tolerate 5 hours, ten hours plus $100 tacked onto plane ticket for "security" costs? What would it cost to be "fair and equal" in nondiscriminatory measures?

Same with terrorism. Statistcally less likely than say tax evasion or famine or drug-related deaths.

What would happen if we had to take off our clothes instead of just shoes? (an extreme example I know, but just trying to illustrate).

From a historical perspective, terrorism has been around for years, millenia even. We only started to really care about it after 9/11 to any significant measure. Compare and contrast Israel and the US in security policy. Their airlines (El AL) are deemed the safest due to the meticulous measure they take but would seem rather extreme or invasive by our standards. We are lax by comparison, but Israelis are more tolerant and accepting of those measures.

In terms of actual security, I think it is more dangerous to drive than to fly still so maybe we are too worked up over "nothing"? If the next attack occurs by car or bus, do we stop and search all car and busses at every stop light?

More people die each year of smoking related causes. My neighbor smokes. Terrorist? He's causing a bunch of us to die slowly.... or is he? But nevertheless, more dangerous, lethal and likely statistiaclly to cause harm than terrorism.

Remember the phenomenon of "scares"? When Colombine happened, we were hysterical over school shootings and the like. But gradually it settled down and statistically, less likely to happen.

Everyone demanded more school security, metal detectors. People blamed parents, parents blamed teachers, everyone blamed guns. The ACLU fanatics claimed infringement of civil rights because of searches and stuff. But gradually it all settled down. We don't hear about it much anymore beause "terrorism" is much more exciting and sexy and headline grabbing.

Maybe we're all "victims" or suckers of "fear-mongering"? I don't think terrorism is to be dismissed or taken lightly, but rather maybe we should think it out more thoroughly and act rationally as opposed to re-act hastily with no planning or endgame in sight.

What do you guys think?

Willravel

jorgelito: Thank you for a good effort to get this back on track. I admit to being sucked in just like everyone else. The central issue is still tolerance vs. statistics.
Good points were made in mentioning the basis of this perception of airborn danger based almost solely on 9/11, only one attack. Out of the hundreds of thousands of flights in America, only 3 have been used as weapons. And, yes, statistically you are infanitaly more likely to die from smoking than terrorism in America. I predict that this will blow over eventually.

You should remember we've been assured of peace more times than we've been threatened by the al-queda though, which bares remembering. Before going off on a rant, let me just say that you need to hear what Osama Bin Laden really has to say before you go ape nuts on him. He is an intelligent, thoughtful man (obviously misguided in a serious way), but in knowing what his goal is - removal of the US from the Middle East - you may begin to understand him. I suggest getting a full transcript of one of his messages, instead of getting the cut and pasted bs that CNBC feeds us.

Ask youself this: What do I think the ultimate goal of society is? Am I doing everything I can to help to progress modern society towards this?

In my case, I see peace and tolerance. I see mass empathy. I see a world where sadness has been reduced to almost nothing; to the amount that is trivial. I see everyone working towards the goal of bettering all people. Selfishness is extinct. Learning and thinking and enjoying life. I see a world void of lies. Complete truth in every thought and word. I see religions and countries at peace with each other, understanding each other and accepting each other as they are.

Ustwo

Will humans be allowed on this world?

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powerclown

Excellent, thoughtful post jorgelito. Well done.

My point in all this simple:
1) acknowledge that a problem exists,
2) work as humanely as possible to solve - not ignore or talk around - the problem.

Lebell

I fully agree with both of those.

I also agree that our present system has far too many holes in it for my liking and is in need of change. This is one reason I support training and arming all pilots that desire it.

__________________
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." – C. S. Lewis

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roachboy

[QUOTE]The ACLU fanatics [/QUOTE}

who are these people? do they exist in the real world? i know they walk about in right ideology, much like the muslim=terrorist couple does.

the problem with the thread from the outset is that it was and remains framed by a basically conservative understanding of the questions at hand, and so it (the thread) works mostly as a symptom of just how difficult it is to switch ways of thinking once that framework is in place.

i remain completely unconvinced by this type of argument: i think that it does, in fact, substitue racism for thought, the appearance of coherent response for coherent response. it contributes to positions like powerclowns, which simply refuses to think about islam in differentiated terms while at the same time wrapping itself in the discourse of "realism"--and the sad reality is that racism in this case can be spun as "realism"....

i have not seen--ever--from anyone on the right a single attempt to situate "islamic fundmentalism" socially or historically. i have not seen a single person from the right even start to consider the sorry usage that, say the algerian government put to the f.i.s.---no consideration whatsoever of the question of how the present administration is instrumentalizing the notion of "islamic fundamentalism" for its own political ends--nothing, not once. i draw from this the conclusion that the ideology renders folk incapable of thinking in differentiated terms about this, and that there is something functional for them about that incapacity.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

powerclown

I respect Islam as one of the world's Great Religions. I respect the BILLIONS of peaceful adherents of Islam. My neighbors are Muslim, our children play together, we've had dinner at each other's houses, we have discussed the issues. They are hard-working and extremely friendly people. I pass no personal judgements on the Q'uran. I disagree strongly with your appraisal of the situation as one of 'racism replacing thought'. It's just too simple of a deduction, in my opinion, and ignores the facts. I don't see the point of denying the problems facing the Arab World.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just today in the NYTimes, an article discussing some of the difficulties facing Arab Reform:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Holding Up Arab Reform
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: December 16, 2004
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates

For years now it's been clear that the Middle East peace process has left the realm of diplomacy and started to become an industry, with its own G.N.P. of conferences and seminars. But there is a new industry rapidly overtaking it in the Middle East, and that is the "reform industry." Every month there seems to be a new conference on reform in the Arab world. Indeed, I have been attending one here in Dubai, an amazing city-state on the Persian Gulf that is becoming the Singapore of the Arab East.

What the reform process and the peace process have in common is that neither advances when we Americans tell the parties in English that they have to change. Progress happens only when the people here tell themselves in Arabic that they must change. So I took heart from the blunt manner in which Dubai's crown prince, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, opened his conference by saying, in a speech broadcast by Arab satellite TV, "I say to my fellow Arabs [in power]: If you do not change, you will be changed."

I didn't hear talk like that five years ago. Nor did I hear an Egyptian friend remarking to me that she had absolutely no problem with Hosni Mubarak's son, Gamal, one day succeeding his father. Gamal is a good man. She just had one condition, that Gamal Mubarak succeed his father the same way George W. Bush succeeded his father: in a free election.

Meanwhile, last Sunday, about 1,000 Egyptians gathered in downtown Cairo, many wearing over their mouths yellow stickers with the Arabic word for "enough" written on them, to protest plans by President Mubarak to run for a fifth term.

Yes, there is definitely something stirring out here, but it has miles to go before meaningful changes occur. It is something America should be quietly encouraging, so it is inexplicable to me that the Bush administration is holding up publication of the next U.N. Arab Human Development Report. Let me fill you in:

In 2002, the U.N. Development Program sponsored a group of courageous Arab economists, social scientists and other scholars to do four reports on human development in the Arab world. The first one, in 2002, caused a real stir in this region - showing, among other things, that the Arabs were falling so far behind that Spain's G.D.P. was greater than that of the entire Arab League combined.

That first report, published in Arabic and English, was downloaded off the Internet one million times. It was a truly incisive diagnosis of the deficits of freedom, education and women's empowerment retarding the Arab world.

In 2003, the same group produced a second Arab Human Development Report, about the Arab knowledge deficit - even tackling the supersensitive issue of how Islam and its current spiritual leaders may be holding back modern education. This was stuff no U.S. diplomat could ever raise, but the Arab authors of these reports could and did.

So I eagerly awaited the third Arab Human Development Report, due in October. It was going to be pure TNT, because it was going to tackle the issue of governance and misgovernance in the Arab world, and the legal, institutional and religious impediments to political reform. These are the guts of the issue out here. I waited. And I waited. But nothing.

Then I started to hear disturbing things - that the Bush team saw a draft of the Arab governance report and objected to the prologue, because it was brutally critical of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Israeli occupation. This prologue constitutes some 10 percent of the report. While heartfelt, it's there to give political cover to the Arab authors for their clear-eyed critique of Arab governance, which is the other 90 percent of the report.

But the Bush team is apparently insisting that language critical of America and Israel be changed - as if language 10 times worse can't be heard on Arab satellite TV every day. And until it's changed, the Bush folks are apparently ready to see the report delayed or killed altogether. And they have an ally. The government of Egypt, which is criticized in the report, also doesn't want it out - along with some other Arab regimes.

So there you have it: a group of serious Arab intellectuals - who are neither sellouts nor bomb throwers - has produced a powerful analysis, in Arabic, of the lagging state of governance in the Arab world. It is just the sort of independent report that could fuel the emerging debate on Arab reform. But Bush officials, along with Arab autocrats, are holding it up until it is modified to their liking - even if that means it won't appear at all.

It makes you weep.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Willravel

I'd like to think we have a good future. If no one is optimistic, nothing will ever get better (not to say I'm better than anyone).

jorgelito

Nice bit of comic relief for an intense but engaging debate! My own response to Willravel was going to be, "Isn't that a song already?" (thinking of John Lennon's Imagine) *chuckle*

Thanks for everyone's responses, many good points here.

To try and answer your question Mr. Roachboy, in as much as it is possible, the questions and direction you're going in is quite advanced.

In fact, I would encourage, if you desire it, to look even further back to the emergence of the "modern states period", "decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire" and "creation of the modern Middle East" for more solid theories and arguments relating to our current situation. From a historical perspective, both Western and Near Eastern, many critical events led to the evolution of the current crisis including:

1. Rise of nationalism and creation of the nation-state
2. Western imperialism/colonialism and quest for preeminence in Europe,
leading to spillover in other regions (Africa, Asia, Middle East)
3. Importance of OIL as a resource
4. Partitioning of Iraq, post-Ottoman period*note- this is critical
5. Creation of Israel
6. Autocratic (monarchy) regimes in the Middle East (weak)- creates
underdeveloped societies, never evolvong or advancing.
7. Environment of Fear - Each state fears the other - become dependent
upon US or UK for protection - This is an oversimplified reason why there
is NO SINGULAR PAN-ARAB STATE. Ever wonder about that?
8. Key element: Cold War politics and the geo-political game out of
bi-polarity.


In my opinion, Islam, while a big deal, is less of a reason for the current phenomenon than say nationalism or good ol' fashioned power politics.

Now the above is only an attempt to outline history, events that have contributed to the current situation. I am in no way excusing or endoring terrorism mind you (thank you very much), but rather trying to scratch beneath the surface. (we all know what happens when you pick at a scab!)

jorgelito

Oh yeah,

I didn't mean to come off as "hating" the ACLU when I called them fanatics. They are what they are and that's it. I think thay can get fanatical, just like I think FOX NEws Channel can get fanatical etc..etc.

sob

They seem to have worked well for the Israelis.

How many more US hijackings have taken place since the stepped-up security was implemented?

sob

Looking at it from the opposite direction, I would be very comfortable boarding an airplane whose other occupants were Japanese, notwithstanding their behavior in WWII.

I also believe a lot of this discussion references "race" when they actually mean "culture."

Manx

Israel is a success story now?

Tarl Cabot

So those religions that have embraced human sacrifice are not evil?

Your last sentence is quite a generalization. I'll leave it to others to discredit it, if the interest is there.

sob

And THAT is what is referred to in the legal trade as "pounding on the table."

Would you be so kind as to mention what trade you were referring to?

jorgelito

No, I think he might be referring to just airline security, but I see your point otherwise.

jorgelito

Israli, or EL AL Airlines' security is generally considered the best of the best.

sob

You forgot the correct answer, which is "Black Africans." Unless you're one of those people who hasn't ever asked themself who was SELLING the slaves.

And by the way, they're still doing it at present, although not many of them reach the "new world."


...Perfect example.

Using the logic of the ACLU, if a group of people were standing around a truck containing fertilizer and fuel oil, a white male such as myself would be no more worthy of suspicion than an 80-year-old grandmother in a wheelchair.

Thanks for illustrating that.

sob

You're correct. Since the thread is about airline security, my post was not intended to encompass all aspects of the Israelis.

Kadath

You don't really understand, do you? Religion is belief. No one is forced to practice a religion, no one must believe in a doctrine. An idea is not evil -- only the people who embrace it are evil.

__________________
it's quiet in here

jorgelito

To clarify,
You mean "only people who embrace evil, are evil."

Therefore, a/the religion itself, is not evil, but rather, those who would twist it for evil purposes are (evil, that is).

Locobot

sob, thanks for letting us know how comfortable you'd feel on a plane full of recently tamed and harmless Japanese. This may be from "the opposite direction" but it's still a racial stereotype and it's just as false.

Pragmatically how successful do you feel your system of racial identification would be in seperating asupposedly harmless Japanese from a North Korean, Thai (they have a problem with Muslim seperatists too), Chinese, Vietnamese, Philippino, etc.?

alansmithee

By that logic, death penalties/ Life without parole should be the penalty applied to all crimes, since differentiating between varying degrees of crime is not allowed.

jorgelito

I think the religious aspect of the debate may be a dead end. The three Abrahamic rellgions have been at odds for a while. There will always be "extremist" on either side, whether Fundamentalist Jihadists (not the majority mind you), Right Wing Evangelicals who are bent on forcing their ways on everyone else, or Right Wing Likudites who want to destroy the Arabs and "return" Israeli borders from the Nile to the Euphrates.

Manx

You misunderstood.

The principle that is being argued here is whether racially profiling is beneficial. People who agree with racial profiling claim that it is beneficial (it does more good than harm), people who disagree with racial profiling claim that it is not beneficial (it does more harm than good).

Therefore, if it is beneficial it should be applied to all crimes. The harm factor vs. the good factor would naturally scale with the penalty for the crime - murder still produces a stiffer penalty than theft, racial profiling simply results in more arrests (depending on your position: by virtue of the numbers game or by virtue of targetting a race that is somehow genetically prone to the crime).

mo42

Now, there is a point which I haven't seen mentioned in this thread and I would like to make it.

The only groups which heartily believe in suicidal terrorism are Muslim fundamentalist movements. If you're going to screen for bombs in luggage, screen it all. But among people getting on the plane who are willing to crash/destroy the plane with them on it, only Islamic terrorists are willing to do so. It seems to make sense, therefore, that if you are trying to keep people from getting on the plane who could be planning to blow it up, looking primarily at Muslims will result in far better security than avoiding looking at Muslims for fear of lawsuits.

Granted, we shouldn't focus solely on those who look Muslim, but watching them a little more carefully seems fine to me.

__________________
It's not getting what you want, it's wanting what you've got.

jorgelito

You know it sounds logical, but the main problem is that:

What does a Muslim look like? Is there a consistent set of norms and standards that can be applied wholesale to a group of people? What identifying characteristics are reliable?

For example:

Turban, goatee or lots of facial hair, shifty gaze.

Or is it blond hair blue-eyes too? Lots of Muslims fit this description too.

You couldn't even say just Arab - Lots of Hispanics, mixed-race people, and random Asians look "Arab" too. Iranians are Muslim but not Arab. Now what?

If I'm some airport security screener getting paid $7.00/hr to check, do you think I could really tell? Or would I need some thick manual with an ID key?

Shaquille O'Neal is Muslim. Or do we only apply it to foreign Muslims? There are some Palestinians I know who look generically "white" to me.

I suppose we could issue "Muslim Identity Cards" but that's a can of worms.

In principle I see the logic, but there is no way to really put it into practice.

Kadath

Precisely. When people say "Muslim" in this context, they mean "Arab-looking" and the problem is that most of your average Americans haven't seen that many different skin colors in their lives. Anything that doesn't fall under white, black, hispanic or east Asian is now "Muslim" to them. A coworker of mine is Indian. He could not look more stereotypically Indian, he looks like Ben Kingsley in Ghandi for god's sake and yet people mistake him for an Arab.

__________________
it's quiet in here

roachboy

i dont have time to respond in detail to your post at the moment, jorgelito, so i'll defer until the weekend...for the moment, i dont think you necessarily have to go as far back in time as you are going, though the very general contexts you point to would ultimately figure and you would have to know something abut them in order to think in a differentiated way about this "fundamentalist" matter.

you already have a fine example of a regime instrumentalizing fear of a "fundamentalist" movement for its own political ends in algeria--teh fln was worried that it was behind in polls, so soon after this problem became clear, a sequence of massacres happened that were attributed to the islamic salvantion front (fis)--most of which were in fact carried out by the fln itself, it turns out.

now i want to be clear: i am not saying that the present american administration has gone this far--what i am saying is
1. almost from the outset, these movements have been used to generate fear in a given population
2. that fear has been predicated on a totally undifferentiated understanding of who was responsible for attacks and why
3. this fear was generated with the end in mind of helping the party in power to remain in power.

this political usage of "islamic fundamentalism" is being repeated in the states--this law is a fine fine index of it. one way to counter it is to insist that one think otherwise about these movements--seperate them from each other and from islam in general; think about the particular conditions that shape them (economically, generationally, socially, religiously, etc)--each step in such an understanding is a push through the logic of bushworld----which believe would not still be in place politically had it not been for the extended, cynical usage the administration made of fear to legitimate itself.

most of these movements have been underway since the early 1980s--the horizon for understanding them is often shaped by political and economic developments that have unfolded since the 1970s---signposts include the mobilization around the iranian revolution, through the rise of parallel groups in egypt, through the rise of parallel movements in saudi arabia, to the rise of movements superficially similar in western europe.

the general explanations include (in some cases) the nature and degree of state repression, the extent to which that repression drove political opposition into the mosques because theyu were among the only spaces not directly and often brutally repressed (such was the case in iran--the pattern repeats in many cases): in western europe, you have a whole host of other factors, liek the ending of the more open immigration policies that had obtained at least since world war 2 during the period of the oil shock, which fundamentally transformed the kind of relation you see between what was migrant labour and the spaces to which they migrate....

out of time, but the point is that when you talk about "islamic fundamentalism" you are not talking about a single phenomenon.

all this "facing reality" or "acknowledging the problem" talk in this thread is reduced to nothing by this fact alone: laws like those being discussed in this thread are not at all about facing reality: they are about facing a particular, cynical, incoherent way of enframing reality. outside the logic of bushworld, the "reality" being faced across laws like this is an incoherent fantasy.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Lebell

jorgelito,

I agree that there is no formula for deciding who is a muslim extremist and who is not, nor would it be wise to focus all of our efforts on middle eastern muslim males, but again, looking at the extremes, it seems clear that there is a place in the middle and that a weighted approach as far as scrutiny would be appropriate.

The other general comment I would make is that unlike Christianity, Islam's Holy Book was written by one person, and as such is given extra weight as far as "truth" goes. Therefore it makes sense that entire nations are under "sharia" and Imams regularly preach the hatred that is contained.

This contrasts to Christianity where the differences in authorship and interpretation of the Bible have led (among other things) to radically different understandings and beliefs and that the most radical (i.e. the Fred Phelps crowd) are marginalized by the majority of society. Also, it is extremely rare that any "Christian" calls for the murder of another person and when it does happen (e.g. anti-abortionists calling for doctors to be killed), no nation-state or national leader supports them, but rather condemns them.

You cannot say this about Islam.

__________________
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." – C. S. Lewis

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powerclown

Disagree. The fact is, the paranoid 'bushworld' fantasia will be over in 4 years, with a 50% possibility of being replaced by someone from the Democratic Party.

Bush is dealing firmly with a very real threat. What do you suppose would happen if the same ideology that raized the WTCs to the ground did, in fact, get hold of WMD? Or is this outside the realm of your reality, too?

sob

I am forced to admit you hit the nail on the head when you said I don't understand. After reading your statement that no one is forced to practice a religion:

I don't understand why the history books say that the US was founded by a group who no longer wished to be forced to practice a religion.

I don't understand why anyone would say Saddam forced people to practice a religion.

I don't understand why anyone would say the Taliban forced people to practice a religion.

A partial list of what the Taliban declared illegal:

Music, movies and television, computers, picnics, wedding parties, New Year celebrations, any kind of mixed-sex gathering.

Children's toys, including dolls and kites; card and board games; cameras; photographs and paintings of people and animals; pet parakeets; cigarettes and alcohol; magazines and newspapers, and most books. Talking with foreigners. Paper bags.

Penalties: Imprisonment, flogging, or execution. Religious police, part of the "Department for the Propagation of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice," roamed the streets. They carried broken-off car aerials or electrical cabling to whip women whom they decided were not properly observing the regulations.

But I'm sure no one was "forced" to go along with them.

I disagree with this statement when I think of slavery, child porn, and a host of other ideas that people have come up with.

sob

And your statement is still wrong. It's a CULTURAL OBSERVATION. In spite of the aberration of the idiots with the Sarin gas in the subway, Japan's crime rate is admirable in relation to many countries (and no, I'm not going to bother to Google it to recite it for you.) The reason is cultural, not racial.

However, I wish you'd define a racial stereotype for me. If I said, "Most Africans are darker than most WASPs," is that a racial stereotype? How about if I said some types of surgery are more difficult on blacks? (And yes, I have an answer ready for that one.)

I would answer that if your response had any chance of being pragmatic, and if it had anything to do with my previous statements.

Since that is not the case, you will have to troll elsewhere.

jonjon42

anyone who gets sufficiently fanatical about a cause will give their life for it. It can be seen throughout history. It can be traced back to the Crusades.(christians destroyed one of their own ships to kill many more muslims) The Japanese suicide bombers of WWII are a prominant example but not the only ones. In Vietnam, the viet minh "death volunteers" attacked both the French and the Americans.

besides the fact that muslims can be white, black, brown, or even purple

__________________
A damn dirty hippie without the dirty part....

martinguerre

I scarcely know where to start. Yes, Christianity by and large, has moderated itself. We took a long time to get there. We killed "infidels" "witches" and "heretics" too. I just don't think this is a point of pride...

I guess i'm waiting for your commentary on Christendom during the 30 Years War. Those differences haven't always been an impetus towards moderation or peace.

i'd rather stand with the ones who grieve that their tradition has been used to justify violence...

__________________
For God so loved creation, that God sent God's only Son that whosoever believed should not perish, but have everlasting life.

-John 3:16

Lebell

That is actually one of the bones that is picked in my other current thread; the idea that the sins of the father are visited on the son.

Like not feeling responsible for slavery, I do not feel responsible for the real or imagined sins of Christianity stretching back into history.

What I can feel responsible for is what Christianity is doing today and how I support it or work to change it.

Likewise, I don't expect Muslims to feel responsible for the invasion of Europe, but I do expect them to speak out against and actively work to change radical Islam (something many are loath to do).

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"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." – C. S. Lewis

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martinguerre

i'm not saying that we bear guilt for witch burning. but we need to know that Christians who thought themselves loyal to God did that. we have, in our tradition, the seeds of things that are truely evil. knowing that they are there is the only way to avoid bringing such sins back.

where you see a fundamental essence of Islam that is amenable to radicalism, i don't. someone might have said the same of us. some still do. i just don't think the question is worth asking. are there people working to free their tradition, whatever it may be, from violence and injustice? Then i stand with them.

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For God so loved creation, that God sent God's only Son that whosoever believed should not perish, but have everlasting life.

-John 3:16