Society/Culture Why I blame Islam for the fact it's raining today....

[Procrastinator35]

and you're still here to tell the tale? Broady's a breeding ground for t'rists

Absolutely......Eddie Maguire has been terrorizing us all in the media for years now......When Will it end?

 

[CLUBMEDhurst]

So by your twisted analogy, because there are other people doing it then that makes it okay for Islamic extremists to murder? Why do you keep referring to other incidents in comparison?

We have the ability to protect our country by stopping or increasing the the vetting of Muslim immigration. That is within our control. So let's do it. The safety of Australians of all backgrounds is always more important than the rights of those to murder us.

If you invade a country, throw the military command (majority Sunni) into prison with the local jihadis, you can only expect ISIS and what's transpired since.

I keep hearing about this "mistake", but it's got me f**ked how anybody with even a cursory knowledge of history would not be aware of the eventual outcome.

The Global War On Terror NEEDS terrorists, and ISIS NEED people like YOU, to push the fear, increase marginalistaion of muslims, so that their savvy "recruiters" can effectively groom the misguided jihadi-in-waiting into commitiing violence.

Oh whatta wonderful self fulfilling prophecy.

 

[Eagle Empire]

No, the public did not elect the government for foreign invasion.

 

[Maggie5]

and you're still here to tell the tale? Broady's a breeding ground for t'rists

Do car hoons count?

 

[CLUBMEDhurst]

Do car hoons count?

Nah, common garden nuisances

 

[Dragz]

I don't want any white males from that baptist church in the US to move to Australia. Does that make me racist

 

[Lakeside Swan]

I don't want any white males from that baptist church in the US to move to Australia. Does that make me racist

No. Apparently racism only works one way so you're good. Hatred towards white people is just a justified opinion.

 

[Ratts of Tobruk]

Alongside this dude apparently not being motivated by Islamism, it should also be pointed out that FGM is not an Islamic thing, it's more an African thing. And for people thinking the Munich kid's Iranian background might make him a bit terroristy, be aware that Persians aren't Arabic and they're mostly Shia, while 'Islamic terrorists' have largely been Sunni. The poster directly above claimed it had been confirmed it was Islamic Terrorism so you know he is unsurprisingly FOS.

I don't want any white males from that baptist church in the US to move to Australia. Does that make me racist

Because you have said 'white' is does suggest you're bringing skin colour into it. If you mean the 'God Hates F*gs' people, then I believe that is just one family that gets way too much publicity. In that case, they are all white and so your stipulation that they're 'white' could be explained away as simply being a description. Similarly the father is the head figure so you could try and explain your stipulation for 'males' as being because you feel the women have been misled, but otherwise there really is no need to bring skin colour or sex into it so someone could rightly say you are being racist or sexist. Of course, that doesn't 'shut down' the conversation as right-wing ragers like to claim online, but should cause you to pause and check why you used that language.

 

[little graham]

Its really sad religion is still used by the ruling class to divide. this is the age of information,ignorance is choice. you're allowing yourself to be exploited. In the forties, no one had the ability to research their own opinion extensively. they were sitting ducks.

 

[coerced]

Does anyone have the number of victims of the terrorist act called the Iraq War?

It's fewer than the Wahhabist repression of the Houthis by last count.

 

[Exe Gesis]

From Howard Bloom's The Lucifer Principle....

Some readers will be outraged by my presumption. How dare I regard any group as barbaric. What appalling ethnocentrism! There are no barbarians. There are simply cultures we haven’t taken the time to understand. Cultures to whom we haven’t given sufficient aid. Cultures in need of development. Beneath the skin, all men and women are the same. They have the same needs, the same emotions, and the same ideals. If you simply took those folks you speak of so contemptuously out for a cup of coffee, you would discover that they are just like you and me.

But there are barbarians—people whose cultures glorify the act of murder and elevate violence to a holy deed. These cultures portray the extinction of other human beings as a validation of manliness, a heroic gesture in the name of truth, or simply a good way to get ahead in the world. Certain Islamic societies tend to be high on this list.

On November 28, 1943, Franklin Roosevelt met secretly with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill in Iran. When Roosevelt returned home, he sent a telegram to the Shah thanking the Iranian ruler for his hospitality. The president explained that he’d noticed the hills in Iran were bare. American agronomists had learned to prevent soil erosion and enrich the landscape by planting trees on slopes like these. Roosevelt suggested an experimental tree-planting program. The Iranian leader thanked FDR. But privately the young potentate was highly insulted. According to Moslem standards, the gift demeaned his virility. Stalin was far more understanding of Mohammedan culture. He offered the Shah tanks and planes.

Hafez al-Assad, current leader of Syria, worked hard to solidify his position as the country’s undisputed ruler. He didn’t do it by selling Syria’s citizens on the values of his political platform. Instead, he slaughtered twenty thousand Moslem fundamentalists who opposed him. According to the New York Times, in 1980 Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, had a Lebanese imam (a holy man roughly equivalent to a pastor) shot in the head for refusing to preach the propaganda of the PLO. Then Arafat visited the imam’s Lebanese home, took his ten-year-old son aside, explained to the little boy that his father had been murdered by the Israelis, handed the lad a gun, and said, “When you grow up, use this to take revenge.” Arafat wanted the boy to be a killer. Holiness, righteousness, and even day-to-day propriety in Islamic cultures are based on the example of Mohammed.

Though Islamic literature praises Mohammed as a man of peace, he was also a military leader. In A.D. 624, the Prophet announced the concept of the jihad—the holy war. He said in the blessed book, the Koran, “I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them. . . . And slay them wherever ye catch them. . . .” In the next nine years, the man of peace ordered a minimum of twenty-seven military campaigns. He personally led nine of them. It is not surprising that Moslem jurists would later declare that there are two worlds: the world of Islam, Dar al-Islam, and the non-Islamic world, Dar al-Harb. These two territorial spheres, explained the Moslem scholars, are in a state of perpetual war.

According to some Koranic interpreters, any leader who fails to “make wide slaughter” in the land of the infidel is committing a sin. A statesman is allowed the temporary expedient of peace only if his forces are not yet strong enough to win. This may explain why Elias Canetti, in his Nobel Prize—winning book Crowds and Power, calls Islam a killer religion, literally “a Religion of War.”

In reality, Islam, like most other religions, has both its positive and its negative sides. It imposes a host of admirable responsibilities on its adherents: for example, zakat, the presentation of regular, substantial contributions to the poor. Allah also demands that his followers “give glad tidings to those who believe and work righteousness,” “cover not Truth with falsehood nor conceal the Truth when ye know [what it is],” and “treat with kindness your parents and kindred and orphans and those in need.”

However, Allah issues many a darker order as well. And the percentage of modern Islamic adherents who have focused on Allah’s calls to combat is dismaying. Today, the descendants of the Persians who fought the Greeks in 480 B.C. are devout Moslems. In the thirties, one of them labored diligently to become an Islamic scholar. He pored over the Koran for years. As he demonstrated his superior knowledge of Allah’s pronouncements, he rose in the ranks of Iranian holy men. Finally he achieved the second-highest title—ayatollah (roughly equivalent to a Catholic cardinal). His name was Ruhollah Khomeini, and he wrote books and pamphlets and even taped and distributed his speeches to inspire the citizens of Iran with sacred virtue. The ayatollah’s words roused Iranians to overthrow the shah and usher in a government based on strict Islamic doctrine. What did the ayatollah’s pronouncements say? Among other things, that infidels are like dogs. Their existence is an affront to Allah. Here’s how the ayatollah himself put it:

“Moslems have no alternative . . . to an armed holy war against profane governments. . . . Holy war means the conquest of all nonMoslem territories. . . . It will . . . be the duty of every ablebodied adult male to volunteer for this war of conquest, the final aim of which is to put Koranic law in power from one end of the earth to the other. The leaders of the USSR and of England and the president of the United States are . . . infidels. Every part of the body of a non-Moslem individual is impure, even the hair on his head and his body hair, his nails, and all the secretions of his body. Any man or woman who denies the existence of God, or believes in His partners [the Christian Trinity], or else does not believe in His Prophet Mohammed, is impure (in the same way as are excrement, urine, dog, and wine)[sic].”

Concluded the ayatollah, “Islam does not allow peace between . . . a Moslem and an infidel.” Though many of us imagine that the promotion of harmony is a prime objective of every major world faith, the ayatollah disagreed. “The leaders of our religion were all soldiers, commanders and warriors,” he wrote; “. . . they killed and they were killed.’’ The concept of a peaceful prophet was so alien to the ayatollah that he was convinced Christ’s message had been deliberately distorted by Westerners. Said Khomeini, "This idea of turning the other cheek has been wrongly attributed to Jesus (peace be unto him); it is those barbaric imperialists that have attributed it to him. Jesus was a prophet, and no prophet can be so illogical.” Khomeini’s dicta may seem irrelevant now that he has long been dead, but his words have gained in influence since his demise.

Early in the nineties, Iraq’s humiliation in the Gulf War undermined the credibility of the secular Moslem regimes, leaving a power vacuum into which fundamentalism leaped. There are currently roughly 100 million Islamic fundamentalists (rechristened “Islamic revivalists” by some scholars). Activists among them, employing the slogan “Africa for Islam,” are making diligent—and often violent—efforts to seize power in numerous sub-Saharan states. They have gained sufficient favor with South Africa’s ANC that Nelson Mandela, in a 1992 visit to Teheran, told the Iranians that Africa must be reshaped along the lines of the Iranian revolution. (Ironically, when South African leader Bishop Desmond Tutu gave a speech to a Palestinian crowd in 1989 lauding Palestinian interests, he failed to realize that the Arabic banners carried by his listeners read, “On Saturday We Will Kill the Jews, on Sunday We Will Kill the Christians!”) Khomeini-style fundamentalists have become vigorous political forces in areas like China’s Sinkiang region (where as of 1994 Beijing officials were seriously concerned that the area’s inhabitants, influenced by propaganda from Iran, would attempt to break away and found a fundamentalist Islamic republic). Islamic fundamentalists have been involved in the Indian state of Kashmir’s vicious civil war. They’ve been active in Malaysia, Thailand (where Moslem guerrilla forces were fighting in 1993), and the Sudan (where an Iranian-backed fundamentalist regime is engaged in a campaign to subjugate, exterminate, or—according to the United Nations International Labor Organization—literally enslave the black Christians and animists in the southern region of the country). Followers of Khomeini have been moving aggressively in Algeria, Jordan, Tunisia, Lebanon, Kuwait, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan (where by 1992 posters and portraits of the ayatollah had become a particularly strong sales item in local stores), France, and, according to Greek Defense Minister Ioannis Varitsiotes and the University of Belgrade’s Dragoljub R. Zivojinovic, Czechoslovakia, Albania, and Yugoslavia.

In many of these cases, fundamentalists are sweeping elections, manipulating generals, funding insurrections, sponsoring terrorism, or actually taking control. Islamic fundamentalists have poured money into America’s black communities in an effort that has brought more than a million African Americans over to the one true faith. While most of these converts remain peaceful, Al-Fuqra, a predominantly African-American Islamic group under the leadership of the Pakistani Sheikh Mubarak Ali Jilani Hashemi, has declared a jihad in North America and, according to law enforcement agencies, has been involved in bombings, murders, and other forms of bloodshed in Colorado, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Canada. It has been reported that Al-Fuqra also had a hand in the 1993 effort to blow up New York’s United Nations building, the city’s FBI headquarters, and its Holland and Lincoln Tunnels. When the Iranians declared a death sentence on the British author Salman Rushdie, black American imams everywhere from Brooklyn to Los Angeles enthusiastically supported the move. (So did the Moslem head of UCLA’s Middle Eastern Studies Department.) Even a loyal African-American Gulf War veteran, won over to Allah in 1991, stated after his change in faith that “soon it [Islam] will take over all of America, then the world.”

The U.S. African-American community is only a beachhead. Islamic forces have been attempting to gain control of U.S. media outlets in the hope of using them as propaganda tools for the Moslem point of view. The Saudis and America’s Christian fundamentalists battled in the early 1990s for the right to purchase America’s second largest wire service, UPI. Ultimately, the Arabs won. In addition, Amal Adam, the former head of Saudi Arabia’s equivalent of the CIA, was the primary backer of a British-based firm called Capcom, whose chief officers were the heads of TCI (Telecommunications Incorporated), America’s largest player in the cable television game. In 1993, TCI made headlines when it came within a hair’s breadth of merging with Bell/Atlantic. Had the effort succeeded, it would have formed what financial analysts universally heralded as one of the giants of the coming interactive media revolution, giving the Saudis additional leverage for American media manipulation.

The ground is ripe for worldwide Islamic fundamentalist expansion. Mohammedanism is currently the fastest-growing religion on the planet. There are a billion Moslems—as many as Jews and Christians combined—and that number is increasing daily. According to Cairo University’s Professor Ali Dessouki,” fifty countries are now Islamic. What’s more, there are massive Mohammedan populations everywhere from Nigeria to Mongolia, the former Soviet Central Asian republics, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines. The countries with the world’s largest Islamic bodies of citizenry are not even parts of the Arab world—they are Indonesia and China. To top it off, Islamic public opinion, if the Arabs, Iranians, and Pakistanis are an accurate barometer, is virulently anti-American.

Today’s Islam extremism is the perfect example of a meme grown ravenous. Saddam Hussein, in his 1990 drive for expansion, claimed to be following Allah’s message. The late General Zia, former head of Pakistan, who masterminded the fundamentalistled Afghan resistance efforts using U.S. funds, kept a map in his office with all of Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Soviet Central Asia marked in green. It was the symbol of his ultimate ambition—unified Moslem rule extending through every green-marked territory. In 1990, one enthusiastic Turkish official, Minister of State Ereument Konukman, noted the substantial Turkish populations in the former Soviet Union and China and looked forward to uniting them “under the colors of the Turkish flag.” A fundamentalist clergyman in Lebanon says, “Don’t believe that we want an Islamic republic in Lebanon. . . . What Hezbollah wants is a world Islamic republic.” Cairo constitutional lawyer Dr. A. K. Aboulmagd adds, “I even venture sometimes to say that Islam was not meant to serve the early days of Islam, when life was primitive and when social institutions were still stable and working. It was . . . meant to be put in a freezer and to be taken out when it will be really needed. And I believe that the time has come. . . . The mission of Islam lies not in the past, but in the future.”

Dr. Abd El Sabour Shahin of Cairo goes a step further and warns that Western civilization makes a big mistake when it “thinks it will endlessly remain dominant.” Even secular Moslem intellectuals teaching in the top universities of the United States and Europe have joined the expansionist bandwagon, calling for a leader who will pull world Islam together into an unstoppable force. “Islam will . . . take over the world,” said an Egyptian in Cairo in the late eighties to a crew from Britain’s Granada TV. No isolated, gray-haired zealot, he was one of a new breed of young university graduates, members of the middle class, and professionals, often among the highest achievers in their region. These religious devotees do not have a happy fate in store for those of us in the West. Explained the young Egyptian, “Islam is a tree that feeds on blood and grows on severed limbs.”

In the early and mid-nineties, a spate of books and articles appeared proclaiming that, despite such rhetoric, Islam poses no geopolitical danger. Abul Aziz Said, of the School of International Service at American University, said point-blank that “Islamic fundamentalism is not the enemy of the West.” “Islamic fundamentalism,” he declared, “is a defensive social and political movement, a reaction to westernization and modernization.” It is, he insisted, ‘an attempt to restore an old civilization, not create a new empire.” Yet, later in his article, Said said that ancient imperial triumphs were at the heart of the “world influence” fundamentalists were legitimately attempting to “regain.” And the veil slipped a bit from his true feelings when, zeroing in on his conclusion, he declared that “imitative responses of Muslims to the challenge of the West . . . evince . . . identification with the ‘enemy.’ “ John L. Esposito, former president of the Middle East Studies Association, criticized “the creation of an imagined monolithic Islam” and contended that those apprehensive about fundamentalism “fail to account for the diversity of Muslim practice.” Palestinian-born Columbia University scholar Edward Said echoed the assertion that diversity renders the notion of an Islamic threat, in Said’s word, “phony.”

However, diversity within a cultural community does not necessarily halt its expansionist drive. The European West spread its often brutal control over every continent while so divided and “diverse” that it was engaged in an almost nonstop series of internecine wars. And early Islam conquered a territory almost equally vast while its leaders squabbled and fought and its religious sects were rent by schism. Esposito, like many other writers on the topic, justifies the ferocity of anti-Western Islamic sentiments by reminding us that ‘’many in the Arab and Muslim world view the history of Islam and of the Muslim world’s dealings with the West as one of victimization and oppression at the hands of an expansive imperial power.” There’s no question he is right. However, the Islamic world held the upper hand in the struggle between the Occident and the Levant for over 1,100 years. The West managed to turn the tables briefly when the Crusaders established a short-lived Middle Eastern toehold. But the Crusader states were not planted on undisputed Moslem land. The heartland of the Islamic empire, the section bordering the Mediterranean rim, was a deeply Christian area, a vital spiritual and economic core of a “Western” imperium, which, for over six hundred years before Mohammed’s birth, had included the non-Arab provinces of Turkey (known then as Asia, Galatia, Bithynia, Pontus, and Cappadocia— where Saint Paul established many of the first churches), Syria (whose city of Damascus was one of the earliest major Christian centers), Israel (homeland to the Jews since roughly 1200 B.C. and, despite Roman efforts to expel the native population, still dotted with Hebrew villages when the Moslems arrived, sword in hand), Egypt (populated at the time by rabidly Christian descendants of the pyramid builders, along with significant numbers of Greeks and Jews), Libya (the former Cyrenaica), Tunisia (Carthage and its environs, where Saint Augustine was born and eventually became bishop of Hippo), and Northern Algeria and Morocco (then called Mauretania). These were the countries that had produced the Bible, the Christian monastic movement (born in Egypt), Saint Jerome’s conversion (in what is now Turkey), Saint John of Damascus, the famed early church historian Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, Origen, Saint Athanasius, the Aryan heresy, and a significant number of fathers of the Roman Catholic faith and the Eastern Orthodox creed. The knights of the cross did not retain their reconquered kingdoms long. They took Jerusalem in 1099 and were expelled by 1187. Nonetheless, according to historian Amin Maalouf, the author of The Crusades through Arab Eyes, modern Arabs tend to see today’s world events as a continuation of the Crusades.

For six hundred years after the fall of the Crusader states, Islamic forces returned to the attack, capturing Greece and chunks of Eastern Europe, raiding towns in Sicily and the Italian coasts for goods and slaves, preying on Mediterranean shipping, chaining Europeans like Miguel Cervantes to the oars of their galleys, and until 1826 forcing the Christian citizens of Yugoslavia and Albania to give up their children to Moslem overlords (who brought up the males on the Koran, then turned them into soldiers known as Janissaries). It wasn’t until 1798 that Napoléon began to shift the balance between East and West again when he briefly invaded Egypt, from which he was ignominiously expelled by the British and the Turks. But the heavy-handed fertile crescent “imperialism” so resented by the Arabs didn’t begin until after the First World War, and it lasted less than forty years. Southern Spain remained under the Moslem yoke for 781 years and Greece for 381, and pieces of longtime Christian terrain like Saint Augustine’s North African homeland and the religious and secular capital that eventually eclipsed Rome in power and splendor— Byzantium—are still in Moslem hands today. Syria, on the other hand, was only under Western control for 21 years, Egypt for 67, and Iraq a mere 15.

If one accepts Esposito’s reasoning, Westerners—who were bludgeoned by “an expansive imperial” Islam for well over a millennium—have more right to fear an Islamic revival than Moslems have to hate the West. More to the point, Phebe Marr, of the National Defense University’s Institute for Strategic Studies, contends that militant extremist groups dedicated to violence and an absolute rejection of the West are small. In addition, she claims, “The radicals do not have a broad base of popular support. . . . Even in Lebanon, however, where such groups flourish, a poll of university students taken in 1987 indicated that more than 90% disapproved of . . . assassinations, hostage taking, and sabotage of government installations.” On the other hand, Marr admits that “there may be only a thin line between the open, mainstream movements and their clandestine [violent] counterparts.” She concludes that “the Islamic revival is not only here to stay but is likely to be a leading domestic political force shaping the Mediterranean region during the coming decades. Despite political vicissitudes, the various movements loosely collected under the rubric of ‘Islamic Fundamentalism’ have shown a staying power that indicates they have achieved both breadth and depth in their indigenous societies.”

Like Marr, Abbas Hamdani, professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Wisconsin, asserts that “to propose a monolithic view of Islam and then equate it with fundamentalism would be wrong. . . . Except for mass followings in Algeria and Tunisia, fundamentalists represent a small segment, although a popular, vocal, and highly motivated one, of the total population. [Hamdani overlooks the Sudan and Afghanistan, both of which, at this writing, were in fundamentalist hands.] Even in Iran, which appears to be totally convulsed in fundamentalism, it is a small minority that has monopolized power.” As the case of Iran demonstrates, it only takes a minority to seize control of a country, especially if that minority is enthusiastic about using violence.

In Germany’s July 1932 elections, 63 percent of the voters cast their ballots against the Nazis. By the November elections, the anti-Nazi vote was even larger. Yet Adolf Hitler was able to achieve dictatorial power only four months later on March 23, 1933, in part because his storm troopers — like the militant gangs controlled by the fundamentalists—were willing to murder their opponents. Khomeini’s works advocate vigorously converting or murdering all those who do not embrace Allah’s holy meme. Then they urge a holy war on the nations of the West. The ayatollah wrote, “Any nonreligious [i.e., non-Islamic] power, whatever form or shape, is necessarily an atheistic power, the tool of Satan; it is part of our duty to stand in its path and to struggle against its effects.

Such Satanic power can engender nothing but corruption on earth, the supreme evil which must be pitilessly fought and rooted out. To achieve that end, we have no recourse other than to overthrow all governments that do not rest on pure Islamic principles, and are thus corrupt and corrupting, and to tear down the traitorous, rotten, unjust, and tyrannical administrative systems that serve them. . . . If Islamic civilization had governed the West, we would no longer have to put up with these barbaric goings-on unworthy even of wild animals. . . . [Western governments are] using inhuman laws and inhuman political methods. . . . Misdeeds must be punished by the law of retaliation: cut off the hands of the thief; kill the murderer instead of putting him in prison; flog the adulterous woman or man. Your concerns, your ‘humanitarian’ scruples, are more childish than reasonable.” Khomeini had a prescription for such problems: “All of humanity must strike these troublemakers [the governments of the West] with an iron hand. . . . Islam has obliterated many tribes because they were sources of corruption [i.e., sources of nonIslamic influence].” Judging from the ayatollah’s rhetoric, the next tribes he would have liked to see obliterated were those in Europe and America.

Allah is rapidly providing Khomeini’s followers with a sword to carry out their master’s wishes. He has offered Islam the fire in which the Koran says those who follow false faiths are destined to burn: nuclear weaponry. He has also provided the long-range missiles needed to use it. According to the late imam’s logic, there may be only one just and righteous thing to do: employ this technology to wipe out recalcitrant heathens like you and me. The modern growth of Islam is the coalescence of a superorganism drawn together by the magnetic attraction of a meme. But this meme has an advantage: The social body it is trying to pull together has existed as a unified social beast in the past. The old reflexes of solidarity are still there, waiting to be aroused. The meme of the new Islam is not laboring to generate a small and fragile embryo. It is simply attempting to awaken a sleeping giant.

 

[Geelong_Sicko]

Does Bloom have a solution? A 'final' solution? Are we to butcher 'the Mohammedans' before they butcher us? Should we all embrace the coming 'race/culture wars' that the Far Right (and I include religious fundamentalists among their diseased number on this particular point) masturbate furiously about?

Because that's what I read into that excerpt. "Islam is a threat no matter how moderate it seems and the solution is obvious."

I don't, and never WILL, share that belief.

 

[Exe Gesis]

Does Bloom have a solution? A 'final' solution? Are we to butcher 'the Mohammedans' before they butcher us? Should we all embrace the coming 'race/culture wars' that the Far Right (and I include religious fundamentalists among their diseased number on this particular point) masturbate furiously about?

Because that's what I read into that excerpt. "Islam is a threat no matter how moderate it seems and the solution is obvious."

I don't, and never WILL, share that belief.

When they're cutting off the head of your wife because you won't convert to Islam, we'll see.

 

[Geelong_Sicko]

When they're cutting off the head of your wife because you won't convert to Islam, we'll see.

Yeah, we will. Fundies are a threat for damn sure, but I just don't see any kind of a threat coming from the rest of Islam. Unfortunately they, the fundies, are speaking with the loudest voice at the minute.

We must NOT let the Far Right speak the loudest on our own behalf.

 

[Thats Wright]

Does Bloom have a solution? A 'final' solution? Are we to butcher 'the Mohammedans' before they butcher us? Should we all embrace the coming 'race/culture wars' that the Far Right (and I include religious fundamentalists among their diseased number on this particular point) masturbate furiously about?

Because that's what I read into that excerpt. "Islam is a threat no matter how moderate it seems and the solution is obvious."

I don't, and never WILL, share that belief.

Depressing read. There's not much that can be done GS. Just tell your kids not to breed too heavily.

Unless geographic, educational, financial, recreational and gender equality springs up in all Islamic nations, it's just a matter of time.

Patenting the survival kit with added Koran versus could be a good little money spinner in the future.

 

[Exe Gesis]

Yeah, we will. Fundies are a threat for damn sure, but I just don't see any kind of a threat coming from the rest of Islam. Unfortunately they, the fundies, are speaking with the loudest voice at the minute.

We must NOT let the Far Right speak the loudest on our own behalf.

Unfortunately, it's all out of our hands. The world. The most powerful and most numbered on opposing sides are heading inexorably toward a collision.

 

[Eagle Empire]

The possibility of civil war in a Western country is highly unlikely.

In decades to come, I think European countries with high numbers of Muslims will see the far-right and Islamic political leaders form alliances in government.

 

[Exe Gesis]

Howard Bloom....

The Islamic world today does not see us as respecting human life. It views
Westerners—and Americans in
particular—as the ultimate destructive
force, the civilization that indulged in
two world wars and capped that carnage
with the creation of the atomic bomb. In
the minds of Moslems, only believers in
Islam are true champions of peace and
justice. To Moslems, we are the people
whose hands are perpetually stained
with blood.

Like most of us, Moslems see only
their better side. And like us, they
imagine that their darker impulses do not
really exist. Instead, they feel that the
urge to destroy and conquer belongs only
to their enemy. That’s how the Moslem
world justifies our imminent conquest
and how the Moslem superorganism
excuses its hunger.

What is the difference, then, between
Americans, Africans, Latin Americans,
and Moslems? Why do I claim that they,
not we, are the barbarians? It’s a
question of degree. No American leader
has ever followed the path of Syria’s
Assad and embarked on a mass
extermination of political opponents to
secure his position in office. No Yankee
presidential candidate has emulated
Equatorial Guinea’s Francisco Nguema
and wiped out fifty thousand members of
a rival ethnic group in some electoral
ward that was rooting for his opponent.

There is a little bit of the barbarian
in all of us, but some are far more
barbarous than others. There are cultures
that idealize carnage. Others—we hope
ours among them—put a premium on
human life. Some cultures feel that
debate is superior to battle, that
discourse is preferable to the sword.
These cultures stress conciliation, not
violence, as a means of conflict
resolution. They measure political
manhood by the ability to produce
voluntary consent. Their memes
generate democracy and pluralism.
Some of us in the West have a
tendency to justify the proviolence
stance of third world countries. We turn
our backs on African genocide or Syrian
political killings as the good Germans
turned away from the murder of six
million Jews under the Nazis, or we find
excuses for it. When we do, we become
implicit accomplices in murder. Many of
those who romanticize homicidal
peoples have gone a step further. They
have striven to replace the melting pot’s
leashed hostilities with “multicultural”
enclaves roused to permanent anger by
the dogmatic language of ethnic
“struggle.”

It is important that the societies
which cherish pluralism survive. It is
critical that they spread their values. It is
vital that they not mistakenly imagine all
other societies to be equal and their own
to be inferior. It is imperative that they
not allow their position in the pecking
order of nations to slip and that they not
cave in to the onrush of barbarians.

 

[fleabitten]

it should also be pointed out that FGM is not an Islamic thing, it's more an African thing.

Sure it is, Reza.

Weird that Indonesians are so into African culture and a coincidence that they only started the practice of FGM after Islam arrived. Another weird coincidence that Filipinos on Mindanao would fall in love with African culture and that their term for FGM is Pag-Islam. It makes heaps of sense that Asian Muslims would cut off their daughters' clits for Africa.

 

[fleabitten]

Just because I really dislike this lie about FGM, here's the truth about Africa's FGM problem. Every country where it is practiced has a Muslim population. Every country where it is prevalent has either a Muslim majority or a large Muslim minority (with the possible exceptions of Liberia which has 12% Muslims but also a feminist cult that practices FGM, and the Central African Republic which has 9% Muslims but has borders with Chad and Sudan where it is much more widespread). The few countries with Christian majorities and a FGM problem have Muslim-majority neighbours where FGM is widespread and/or have a history of being under Islamic rule.

It's not an African problem, it's an Islamic problem that Africa suffers from.

 

[Ratts of Tobruk]

Just because I really dislike this lie about FGM, here's the truth about Africa's FGM problem. Every country where it is practiced has a Muslim population. Every country where it is prevalent has either a Muslim majority or a large Muslim minority (with the possible exceptions of Liberia which has 12% Muslims but also a feminist cult that practices FGM, and the Central African Republic which has 9% Muslims but has borders with Chad and Sudan where it is much more widespread). The few countries with Christian majorities and a FGM problem have Muslim-majority neighbours where FGM is widespread and/or have a history of being under Islamic rule.

It's not an African problem, it's an Islamic problem that Africa suffers from.

So you call it a "lie" despite the fact it is a pre-Islamic practice?

From wiki:

Surveys have shown a widespread belief, particularly in Mali, Mauritania, Guinea and Egypt, that FGM is a religious requirement.[2]:69–71 Gruenbaum has argued that practitioners may not distinguish between religion, tradition and chastity, making it difficult to interpret the data.[97] FGM's origins in northeastern Africa are pre-Islamic, but the practice became associated with Islam because of that religion's focus on female chastity and seclusion.[n 16] There is no mention of it in the Quran. It is praised in several hadith (sayings attributed to Muhammad) as noble but not required.[n 17][19]:6 In 2007 the Al-Azhar Supreme Council of Islamic Research in Cairo ruled that FGM had "no basis in core Islamic law or any of its partial provisions."[98][2]:70[n 18] There is no mention of FGM in the Bible.[100] Christian missionaries in Africa were among the first to object to FGM,[101] but Christian communities in Africa do practise it. UNICEF reported in 2013 that, for example, 55 percent of Christian women and girls in Niger had experienced FGM, compared with two percent of their Muslim counterparts.[102] The only Jewish group known to have practised it are the Beta Israel of Ethiopia. Judaism requires male circumcision, but does not allow FGM.[103] FGM is also practised by animist groups, particularly in Guinea and Mali.[2]

And whoever Howard Bloom is, he is wrong. The West is looked up to by many Islamic communities. You'd be pretty stupid to not notice the wealth and innovation in the West and leaders have long looked to borrow ideas from the West off the back of that. The way he slips between discussing 'the West' and discussing 'America' in that second post shows someone keen to deceive, rather than keen to inform.

 

[fleabitten]

So you call it a "lie" despite the fact it is a pre-Islamic practice?

It was a pre-Islamic practice in the same part of the world where Islam sprouted from, was praised as "noble" by Mohammed and then spread where Islam spread, including to other continents. But it's an African problem.

 

[JackOutback]

To be fair, America is undoubtedly the most destructive force on the planet. It has more civilian blood on its hands than ISIS. But, of course, they're the 'good guys'.

 

[Ratts of Tobruk]

It was a pre-Islamic practice in the same part of the world where Islam sprouted from, was praised as "noble" by Mohammed and then spread where Islam spread, including to other continents. But it's an African problem.

So it wasn't a lie. I don't know what else you are trying to say.

 

[coerced]

To be fair, America is undoubtedly the most destructive force on the planet.

In what sense is that remotely true? The political organisation currently in power in China has killed more people since WW2 than the rest of the world combined.

Stunningly naive comment.