Insomniac

Honestly, SS, your whole post was just one big attempt to insult me and it failed miserably. I see no facts, no quotes, no doctrine, no credible evidence, no support, no actions that support your words, and no point. Simply saying Shek is right without support does nothing.

If you haven't noticed, the fact that Muslims are taught lies about Christians and then told to kill them is absoluetly true. The words of the Quran in comparison to the Bible, the convert in Afghanistan, and the situation in Sudan are hard core evidence to prove that. Did you just get on this thread and comment without even skimming through the other posts made on this thread?

The doctrine of Christianity has not changed at all. You simply called it a theory with no evidence to support your claims, needlessly insulted me, and then moved on. Christianity really does teach the opposite of Islam. In fact, they are so opposite of Doctrine I think Muhammad literally took the teachings of the Bible and flipped them upside-down, so to speak.

Shek was right about one thing: Most Muslims are not violent, only 10%. Most of them are only Muslims for family tradition or because the society will oppress them if they choose not to be or because they are threatened with death. However, that 10% has carried out 4,593 terrorist attacks since 9/11. That is not even counting the ones before 9/11. They've killed more Americans than the Japanese did at Pearl Harbor. What was Pearl Harbor?: An act of War. All those Muslim terrorists have said they do it for the "Love of Allah" or "Allah's will" and they are all able to easily get an Islamic justification for violence straight from the Quran and the Hadiths.

To make one thing clear, I do not fear Islam. I just find a problem when someone says it's okay to kill me because I don't believe the same thing they do. If I see a Muslim in the streets and using the American freedom he has I will greet him with every bit of respect and dignity that any fellow citizen deserves. For all I know he could not even be a true Muslim, but just someone following family tradition. Whoever he is he deserves to be treated like a human being until he acts inhumane. If I see him waging Jihad against the citizens of my country and disobeying the laws of my country, while commiting the act of murder, I will not stand by and watch mass amounts of people be murdered for their right to freedom of religion.

I believe that by the time someone is able to reform Islam, terrorists will have nuclear weapons and it will be too late. Aside from that, reformists or anyone attempting to change the words of Islam will be called heretics and killed mercilessly by Islamic law itself. Muslims will kill anyone who attempts to change their Doctrine. That is simply the way they are raised and the way their own doctrine is taught.

I don't want to oppress Islam or act like the Nazi's did during WWII. I want to root out the problem in simple and civilized manner. My suggestion is to show everyone in the Islamic world the contraditions and fallicies of the Quran and the Hadiths, then encourage a religion that really does teach peace (ex: Christianity, Buddhism etc...). Hopefully they'll realize that their religion is logically and scientifically false because Allah is supposed to be perfect and contradictions in the Quran and Hadiths prove that is wrong, thusly the whole religion is wrong. As for those who will still follow the Quran without question and continue to wage the Jihad, there is simply no choice for my country except to defend itself. They choose to attack us because we believe what we want. That is an attack on Freedom itself and Freedom is almost everything my country stands for.

Shek

By my math, 10% of 1.3 billion Muslims means that 130 million Muslims are violent. 4,593 terrorist attacks seems a rather paltry achievement given that you claim that 130 million Muslims are violent. One of these numbers has to give, and given that I trust the 4593 number, that leaves only your 10% figure in question.

__________________
"So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

Anon

Blow a nailbomb in a crowd and you kill 4-5, you probably wound 30 more, 10 of which will be terribly disfigured for life.

Then you have to add in foiled/failed attacks, and to me, you have to add in all the IED attacks in Iraq to boot.

Run the math on that template and you come up with a HUGE body count of Westerners since 911 even though '4593' doesnt seem like a huge number.

Consider the toll in the last week alone:

Weekly Jihad Report
(3/19 - 3/25)
Jihad Attacks:

51
Dead Bodies:

221
Critically Injured:

241

If it's just .1% of Islam(assuming a total pop of 1.2B) that's radicalized and actively fighting(i suspect it's probably more like .25%) you're still talking about 1.2 million ACTIVE terrorists(or 3,000,000@ .25%).

That's a big friggin number.

troung

How many of these armed Muslims would be "guerillas" and not "terrorists"? And I doubt there are 3 million armed Muslim rebels to start with and sure as hell not 3 million terrorists.

How many of those were done by Sunni guerillas compared to card carrying AQ members?

Shek

Snipe,

That 4593 number is the number of attacks and not body count.

I've heard the 0 .1% number before, and I think that that number is pretty credible if you are talking about those who are either actively fighting what they consider to be an external jihad and/or are actively funding those who are fighting an external jihad.

To put Insomniac's 10% figure into perspective, if every single violent Muslim took part in only a single terrorist attack, that would mean that over 25,000 terrorists were involved in each attack. Sure!

Shek

Thanks for the Nation of Islam information – it’s hard to find good stats on Muslim demographics, but I think it’s safe to say that NOI doesn’t represent ALL African Americans. Anyways, I find it interesting that your argument is that the racial teachings of NOI to hate non-black America are what make it heretical for Middle Eastern Muslims, and yet, on the other hand, you argue that these same Middle Easter Muslims want to kill Americans. These two arguments seem to be somewhat at odds with each other, do they not?

Also, you seem to have completely ignored Ray’s rejoinder, which drives at my original argument before we went down the NOI rathole, which is if Islam is inherently racist, then why do black orthodox Muslims exist at all?

Do you have literary examples to back this up? Also, you are now conflating the text, which separates “raisin” and “head”, i.e. “whose head looks like a raisin.” Maybe this seems a little too heavy on semantics; however, we are analyzing a single verse, and so it deserves close scrutiny. If one wanted to call someone a “raisinhead,” why go through all the extra trouble to state “whose head looks like a raisin.” For example, when I want to chew out someone and call them a “sh!thead,” I don’t say “Come here o’ you whose head like looks like sh!t.”
How does it show that Mohammed thought less of them, even if your assertion that raisinhead = ni****? Because you say so? Does he state they are inferior? If this was the case, then why even say to respect them? Why not just state that Africans are turds and are considered to be permanent infidels? Or was the point to demonstrate that no matter how strong one’s prejudices are, that Allah won’t accept these?

Why does skin color stick out more? Because you say it does? Furthermore, how does the Hadiths and the Quran support your argument? Because you take it out of context? Because the Jesus is Lord website says so?

So far, you have cited a Hadith that states that you shouldn’t judge someone by their skin color (and in fact, it sends the opposite message), you have a dream that fits neatly into the historical context of an ongoing plague (see below), and you have a passage that can be translated differently, and even when it is translated as you argue, it fits with symbolism that is several millennia old and corresponds with the exact same symbolism that is found in the Bible.

Can you provide the documentation that specifically states that this Sura specifically refers to Africans? After all, the symbolic use of white and black to represent good and evil, respectively, is quite prevalent. After all, there are numerous references to white robes of prophets/angels in the Bible, with the connotation being that they are pure, good, etc., while Satan is described as the “power of darkness,” with darkness being black. The dark arts? Black magic?

I’ll tell you what, let’s examine how the FBI translates Sura 3: 106, 107. I think that they are a pretty reputable source since it is their job to go after extremists that threaten the domestic security of the United States:

It seems as if the verses appear to be speaking about light and darkness, whose effects are to make a face appear white or black, respectively. Now, let’s look at how the Bible (both Old and New Testaments) treats the same subject of darkness and light:

Maybe it’s just me, but I seem to take away the same messages about light and dark from the Bible as you have put forward from the Quran. Of course, that shouldn’t be a surprise since Quran recognizes the Bible and fills many of its pages with the same stories as the Bible covers.

Based on the dates, the Justinianic plague erupted within 30 years of the birth of Mohammed, with Africa being one of the likely sources, and lasted for at least 150 years, meaning that it outlived Mohammed. Thus, you once again strike out on trying to debunk my theory, and in fact, the Justinianic plague serves to make my explanation even more plausible since there was a plague that was believed to have possible originated out of Africa, just like prior plagues, and it was still afflicting populations during Mohammed’s time.

Anon

None of course.

I think there sure as hell are between .1 and .25% that are either terrorists, supporters, or sympathysers.

Who cares? It's irrelevant. They are interchangeable to me.

Anon

I know sir, i merely wanted to illustrate that though 4593 is a relatively 'small sounding' number, that the actual carnage is many, many times greater.

I agree 10% is wildly too high as a general whole of the Muslim population.

What do you reckon the ratio is to Haji nail-bombers and logistic support hajis?(figuring in funding, technical, PR, transportation, document forgers, etc, etc, etc)

Shek

I'd say that they have a larger "tail" because terrorist ops take more planning and more contacts to make it happen. You don't just send a platoon of thugs to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings - you need to train them, you need guards for the training camps, you need brains to run your info ops campaigns, you need to send dudes to Western school to get credentials that may make it easier for them to get visas down the road, etc. However, in places like Iraq, the tail is shorter because you can just be an a$$ to local villages and intimidating them into providing your log support. I think it's probably about 3 loggies/facilitor types for every "Allah Akbar" warrior (who may not be gunning for certain death, but welcomes the opportunity!).

Ray

All I find is that the TEEMING majority of Moslems are following ISLAM as I SLAM for ISLAM!

__________________


"Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

HAKUNA MATATA

Lunatock

Might depend on the number who'd rather behead aid workers, or those Iraqi civilians and/or Tribes that got irked at the former enough to start shooting at them.

Ditto for Albanians willing and able to check out a Serbs ugly mug with a rifle scope, and little more than the crosshairs to hide his before & after looks.

Or maybe having pretty much the same idea about Russians that roll into a Chechen village and demand to see i.d.'s, then randomly shoot the locals who comply.

Probably not something the (non-attrocity commiting) Soldiers they target would stop to think about. Sunni guerrilla or card carrying AQ = just as dead if they have their way.

astralis

http://www.slate.com/id/2138731/nav/tap1/

What Clash of Civilizations?
Why religious identity isn't destiny.
By Amartya Sen
Posted Wednesday, March 29, 2006, at 6:02 AM ET

Identity and Violence by Amartya Sen
This essay is adapted from the new book Identity and Violence, published by Norton.

That some barbed cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed could generate turmoil in so many countries tells us some rather important things about the contemporary world. Among other issues, it points up the intense sensitivity of many Muslims about representation and derision of the prophet in the Western press (and the ridiculing of Muslim religious beliefs that is taken to go with it) and the evident power of determined agitators to generate the kind of anger that leads immediately to violence. But stereotyped representations of this kind do another sort of damage as well, by making huge groups of people in the world to look peculiarly narrow and unreal.

The portrayal of the prophet with a bomb in the form of a hat is obviously a figment of imagination and cannot be judged literally, and the relevance of that representation cannot be dissociated from the way the followers of the prophet may be seen. What we ought to take very seriously is the way Islamic identity, in this sort of depiction, is assumed to drown, if only implicitly, all other affiliations, priorities, and pursuits that a Muslim person may have. A person belongs to many different groups, of which a religious affiliation is only one. To see, for example, a mathematician who happens to be a Muslim by religion mainly in terms of Islamic identity would be to hide more than it reveals. Even today, when a modern mathematician at, say, MIT or Princeton invokes an "algorithm" to solve a difficult computational problem, he or she helps to commemorate the contributions of the ninth-century Muslim mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, from whose name the term algorithm is derived (the term "algebra" comes from the title of his Arabic mathematical treatise "Al Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah"). To concentrate only on Al-Khwarizmi's Islamic identity over his identity as a mathematician would be extremely misleading, and yet he clearly was also a Muslim. Similarly, to give an automatic priority to the Islamic identity of a Muslim person in order to understand his or her role in the civil society, or in the literary world, or in creative work in arts and science, can result in profound misunderstanding.


The increasing tendency to overlook the many identities that any human being has and to try to classify individuals according to a single allegedly pre-eminent religious identity is an intellectual confusion that can animate dangerous divisiveness. An Islamist instigator of violence against infidels may want Muslims to forget that they have any identity other than being Islamic. What is surprising is that those who would like to quell that violence promote, in effect, the same intellectual disorientation by seeing Muslims primarily as members of an Islamic world. The world is made much more incendiary by the advocacy and popularity of single-dimensional categorization of human beings, which combines haziness of vision with increased scope for the exploitation of that haze by the champions of violence.

A remarkable use of imagined singularity can be found in Samuel Huntington's influential 1998 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. The difficulty with Huntington's approach begins with his system of unique categorization, well before the issue of a clash—or not—is even raised. Indeed, the thesis of a civilizational clash is conceptually parasitic on the commanding power of a unique categorization along so-called civilizational lines, which closely follow religious divisions to which singular attention is paid. Huntington contrasts Western civilization with "Islamic civilization," "Hindu civilization," "Buddhist civilization," and so on. The alleged confrontations of religious differences are incorporated into a sharply carpentered vision of hardened divisiveness.

In fact, of course, the people of the world can be classified according to many other partitions, each of which has some—often far-reaching—relevance in our lives: nationalities, locations, classes, occupations, social status, languages, politics, and many others. While religious categories have received much airing in recent years, they cannot be presumed to obliterate other distinctions, and even less can they be seen as the only relevant system of classifying people across the globe. In partitioning the population of the world into those belonging to "the Islamic world," "the Western world," "the Hindu world," "the Buddhist world," the divisive power of classificatory priority is implicitly used to place people firmly inside a unique set of rigid boxes. Other divisions (say, between the rich and the poor, between members of different classes and occupations, between people of different politics, between distinct nationalities and residential locations, between language groups, etc.) are all submerged by this allegedly primal way of seeing the differences between people.

The difficulty with the clash of civilizations thesis begins with the presumption of the unique relevance of a singular classification. Indeed, the question "Do civilizations clash?" is founded on the presumption that humanity can be pre-eminently classified into distinct and discrete civilizations, and that the relations between different human beings can somehow be seen, without serious loss of understanding, in terms of relations between different civilizations.

This reductionist view is typically combined, I am afraid, with a rather foggy perception of world history that overlooks, first, the extent of internal diversities within these civilizational categories, and second, the reach and influence of interactions—intellectual as well as material—that go right across the regional borders of so-called civilizations. And its power to befuddle can trap not only those who would like to support the thesis of a clash (varying from Western chauvinists to Islamic fundamentalists), but also those who would like to dispute it and yet try to respond within the straitjacket of its prespecified terms of reference.

The limitations of such civilization-based thinking can prove just as treacherous for programs of "dialogue among civilizations" (much in vogue these days) as they are for theories of a clash of civilizations. The noble and elevating search for amity among people seen as amity between civilizations speedily reduces many-sided human beings to one dimension each and muzzles the variety of involvements that have provided rich and diverse grounds for cross-border interactions over many centuries, including the arts, literature, science, mathematics, games, trade, politics, and other arenas of shared human interest. Well-meaning attempts at pursuing global peace can have very counterproductive consequences when these attempts are founded on a fundamentally illusory understanding of the world of human beings.

Increasing reliance on religion-based classification of the people of the world also tends to make the Western response to global terrorism and conflict peculiarly ham-handed. Respect for "other people" is shown by praising their religious books, rather than by taking note of the many-sided involvements and achievements, in nonreligious as well as religious fields, of different people in a globally interactive world. In confronting what is called "Islamic terrorism" in the muddled vocabulary of contemporary global politics, the intellectual force of Western policy is aimed quite substantially at trying to define—or redefine—Islam.

To focus just on the grand religious classification is not only to miss other significant concerns and ideas that move people. It also has the effect of generally magnifying the voice of religious authority. The Muslim clerics, for example, are then treated as the ex officio spokesmen for the so-called Islamic world, even though a great many people who happen to be Muslim by religion have profound differences with what is proposed by one mullah or another. Despite our diverse diversities, the world is suddenly seen not as a collection of people, but as a federation of religions and civilizations. In Britain, a confounded view of what a multiethnic society must do has led to encouraging the development of state-financed Muslim schools, Hindu schools, Sikh schools, etc., to supplement pre-existing state-supported Christian schools. Under this system, young children are placed in the domain of singular affiliations well before they have the ability to reason about different systems of identification that may compete for their attention. Earlier on, state-run denominational schools in Northern Ireland had fed the political distancing of Catholics and Protestants along one line of divisive categorization assigned at infancy. Now the same predetermination of "discovered" identities is now being allowed and, in effect encouraged, to sow even more alienation among a different part of the British population.

Religious or civilizational classification can be a source of belligerent distortion as well. It can, for example, take the form of crude beliefs well exemplified by U.S. Lt. Gen. William Boykin's blaring—and by now well-known—remark describing his battle against Muslims with disarming coarseness: "I knew that my God was bigger than his," and that the Christian God "was a real God, and [the Muslim's] was an idol." The idiocy of such bigotry is easy to diagnose, so there is comparatively limited danger in the uncouth hurling of such unguided missiles. There is, in contrast, a much more serious problem in the use in Western public policy of intellectual "guided missiles" that present a superficially nobler vision to woo Muslim activists away from opposition through the apparently benign strategy of defining Islam appropriately. They try to wrench Islamic terrorists from violence by insisting that Islam is a religion of peace, and that a "true Muslim" must be a tolerant individual ("so come off it and be peaceful"). The rejection of a confrontational view of Islam is certainly appropriate and extremely important at this time, but we must ask whether it is necessary or useful, or even possible, to try to define in largely political terms what a "true Muslim" must be like.

******

A person's religion need not be his or her all-encompassing and exclusive identity. Islam, as a religion, does not obliterate responsible choice for Muslims in many spheres of life. Indeed, it is possible for one Muslim to take a confrontational view and another to be thoroughly tolerant of heterodoxy without either of them ceasing to be a Muslim for that reason alone.

The response to Islamic fundamentalism and to the terrorism linked with it also becomes particularly confused when there is a general failure to distinguish between Islamic history and the history of Muslim people. Muslims, like all other people in the world, have many different pursuits, and not all their priorities and values need be placed within their singular identity of being Islamic. It is, of course, not surprising at all that the champions of Islamic fundamentalism would like to suppress all other identities of Muslims in favor of being only Islamic. But it is extremely odd that those who want to overcome the tensions and conflicts linked with Islamic fundamentalism also seem unable to see Muslim people in any form other than their being just Islamic.

People see themselves—and have reason to see themselves—in many different ways. For example, a Bangladeshi Muslim is not only a Muslim but also a Bengali and a Bangladeshi, typically quite proud of the Bengali language, literature, and music, not to mention the other identities he or she may have connected with class, gender, occupation, politics, aesthetic taste, and so on. Bangladesh's separation from Pakistan was not based on religion at all, since a Muslim identity was shared by the bulk of the population in the two wings of undivided Pakistan. The separatist issues related to language, literature, and politics.

Similarly, there is no empirical reason at all why champions of the Muslim past, or for that matter of the Arab heritage, have to concentrate specifically on religious beliefs only and not also on science and mathematics, to which Arab and Muslim societies have contributed so much, and which can also be part of a Muslim or an Arab identity. Despite the importance of this heritage, crude classifications have tended to put science and mathematics in the basket of "Western science," leaving other people to mine their pride in religious depths. If the disaffected Arab activist today can take pride only in the purity of Islam, rather than in the many-sided richness of Arab history, the unique prioritization of religion, shared by warriors on both sides, plays a major part in incarcerating people within the enclosure of a singular identity.

Even the frantic Western search for "the moderate Muslim" confounds moderation in political beliefs with moderateness of religious faith. A person can have strong religious faith—Islamic or any other—along with tolerant politics. Emperor Saladin, who fought valiantly for Islam in the Crusades in the 12th century, could offer, without any contradiction, an honored place in his Egyptian royal court to Maimonides as that distinguished Jewish philosopher fled an intolerant Europe. When, at the turn of the 16th century, the heretic Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Campo dei Fiori in Rome, the Great Mughal emperor Akbar (who was born a Muslim and died a Muslim) had just finished, in Agra, his large project of legally codifying minority rights, including religious freedom for all.

The point that needs particular attention is that while Akbar was free to pursue his liberal politics without ceasing to be a Muslim, that liberality was in no way ordained—nor of course prohibited—by Islam. Another Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, could deny minority rights and persecute non-Muslims without, for that reason, failing to be a Muslim, in exactly the same way that Akbar did not terminate being a Muslim because of his tolerantly pluralist politics.

The insistence, if only implicitly, on a choiceless singularity of human identity not only diminishes us all, it also makes the world much more flammable. The alternative to the divisiveness of one pre-eminent categorization is not any unreal claim that we are all much the same. Rather, the main hope of harmony in our troubled world lies in the plurality of our identities, which cut across each other and work against sharp divisions around one single hardened line of vehement division that allegedly cannot be resisted. Our shared humanity gets savagely challenged when our differences are narrowed into one devised system of uniquely powerful categorization.

Perhaps the worst impairment comes from the neglect—and denial—of the roles of reasoning and choice, which follow from the recognition of our plural identities. The illusion of unique identity is much more divisive than the universe of plural and diverse classifications that characterize the world in which we actually live. The descriptive weakness of choiceless singularity has the effect of momentously impoverishing the power and reach of our social and political reasoning. The illusion of destiny exacts a remarkably heavy price.

Amartya Sen is the Lamont University Professor at Harvard and the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics. Adapted from Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, by Amartya Sen. Copyright 2006 by Amartya Sen. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. This material may not be reproduced, rewritten, or redistributed.

Insomniac

I hate to say this, but the only place that information can be located is probably held by the U.S. or European governments. Many successfully prevented bombing attempts have been covered up quickly in order to keep the public calm. I only know about the terrorist attempts that succeeded. However, if you look at the numbers of success for the terrorists over the years you will see that they number 4,593 since 9/11 (2001-2006). That is roughly a little less than 1,000 bombs per year and that is still a lot bombs going off frequently considering that there are only 365 days a year. Atleast 1-2 bombs went off almost every day of the year for four years starting from late 2001 September to early 2006 March.

They are not two contradicting arguments. Those are just the way things are.

Like I said Muhammad is described as white and teaching to hate white people is roughly teaching to hate Muhammad so the Middle Eastern Muslims see it as heretical and demonic. They are actually enjoying the fact that they are making the murder rate in America rise, but they see them as evil that just so happens to be fighting another greater evil.

You do realize that people talked in a different manner and order of words back then. Today you would really call someone a “raisin head,” but back then you would refer to them as “you whose head looks like a raisin.” That name was just made because it insulted the race of black people in general. It is only something you call black people in specific when you want to insult them. That is the general purpose of it and that is the general purpose of the “N” word today, just