I’m not sure I follow…
And what does that tell you about the majority population?
That they were pricks. But they were secular pricks that actually stamped out many of the old order religious and cultural traditions deemed backward…
And if we’re talking about death tolls, genocide, and population reductions, we hardly have to look at the Muslim world for that…
But conveniently that historic memory is selective and reaches exactly only back to the crusades and not a second further.
What about WWI and WWII, the Nazi Holocaust, and the Communist purges of Joe Stalin’s gang? I think if we’re talking about history in general, I still fail to see how Muslims are in any way inherently more violent based on their religion…
Oh please. This might be the case for east asia, but hardly the middle east. They had been under muslim rule for 1000 years and only after 1900 and ww1 that changed for a very short period, historically speaking.
And they are stoneage wonders. They could buy all the fancy stuff they have now with petrodollars, but if it wasn’t for that …
Well then, that makes them much less effective at killing then, doesn’t it?
We had the same shitty governments in europe during the enlightenment and industrial revolution, that’s hardly an excuse. It’s their inflexible mindset which keeps them down and always will if they don’t get rid of it the same way christianity did.
Of course. But what makes any of this relevant is the fact that we need their oil to keep our fragile, technology based world afloat. If that were not the case, then no one would give a shit about the “Islamofascists.” Would they?
Never said we europeans hadn’t been bitches in the past and particularly during the age of colonialism, but early christianity didn’t conquer anything, quite the opposite. That started out only a few hundret years later (I’d say around 400 AD) and then mostly for political reasons and it was definatly a perversion of jesus’ teachings and it took more than thousand years to remedy that. Contrary to that violence is the birth defect of islam, mohammed himself already led 66 mostly aggressive wars against non believers. That’s how it is and there is no quibbling around that.
But what is the point? Why would we even care if they were violent? If they’re crude and primitive, then what threats can they pose against Europeans and North Americans, that have killed far more people in the last 400 years than any Islamic culture has in recorded time?
Btw. slave trade is still up and running in muslim cultures. You should read what Churchill had to say about islam in that regard in his first or second book.
Yes, and so are genocides. But the victims are mostly other Muslims in Darfur, so nobody cares that much since we don’t want to piss off the Sudanese benefactors, the Chinese.
BTW, there is also a slave trade that exists in Western and Eastern Europe. It’s mainly a sexual one where girls are forced into servitude and prostitution. And rings of illegal immigrants used as indentured servants exist in the United States as well…
That’s good for you but personal experience is hardly representative. That “to some extent” only lasts for so long, this is very evident in europe.
It’s at least just as “representative” as posting signs of Muslim lunatics with “kill whitey” written on them!
The fact that it is a worldwide phenomenon with muslims vs. any other culture/religion indicates otherwise. Indians and Pakistanis in GB would be quite a good example, they are basically the same people, had been under one rule for a long time but the ones causing the integration problems are the latter.
Concerning the immigration and integration policies I would agree, if it was only germany who had the problems, since we essentially didn’t have that in the past. But Belgium and Holland for example are well known liberal countries with very similar laws as the US etc. and what happens there is just sickening.
You cannot simply lay all of the blame for the Kashmir problem on just the Pakistanis. India is far from a utopia and that area is still largely fighting the last battles of their civil war. Of course Hindus and Sikhs tend to be more pro-Western. I guess their immigrants tend to be more passive, but then again, I think they have actually resettled on a much smaller scale in most parts of the world, and they were often in the first wave of post-colonial immigration. But then, the United States and much of Europe has underwritten a series of shitty gov’ts in Pakistan, even as they were playing both sides and factions of their intelligence agency, the ISI, were still assisting the Taliban that they largely created to kill NATO troops…
But that’s the point, Islam didn’t reform and is thus not suitable for our modern western world.
But that’s clearly not true. There are in fact advanced states such as Turkey, Egypt, and Bahrain. The problems these societies have faced are far from being based solely on religion. The political despotism is ingrained. Even Iraq was in many ways an advanced state until Saddam made the mistake of trying to secure Kuwait’s oil. Up until then, he was merely mimicking his heroes in the West --Stalin and Churchill-- in his ruthless purges and remorseless suppression of the ethnic majorities that comprised his fragile multi-ethnic state. What in anyway do these polices have to do with Islam? They often killed and suppressed Islamic clerics in fact!
But, in denouncing Saddam, Hosni Mubarak, Ataturk, the Shah, or the Algerian military: can you really claim that the sources of the inherent corruption, ethnic pogroms, class stratification had any thing to do with religious extremism? Their tyrannies are what popularized it, but had there been more pluralistic political representation in these countries and the Islamics had not been forced underground, they may well have been far more moderate and not turned into the fucking Taliban.
There are those that theorize that the reason why Islamic “extremists” seek to destroy “democracy” is because in the two or three elections they have won, the gov’ts (usually by way of the Army) have prevented them from taking political power in every nation save one: Turkey (and that’s only recently). And in Turkey, the religious parties have been forced to put on business suits and to moderate their political goals because they’ve had to become technocrats working WITHIN the system. Not violent radicals trying to overthrow it, or warlords trying to extinguish all resistance to their rule in a multi-ethic tribal nightmare, which is a big difference. This is essentially the way to moderation, to pragmatism…
And while the fringe sects of christianity are polygamist mormons, the fringe sects of islam are the more secular modern ones.
Yet the vast majority of Muslims are practicing moderates…
And do you really compare the european antisemitism with the violent ranting of the koran. There is a profound difference there. While the church had to interpret quite a lot into the bible to justify and propagate hate vs. jews the koran is very very very explicit in that regard.
Yeah, the difference is that Jews were allowed to live in the Middle East, interestingly. Though often in the same conditions as social outcasts looking inward…
Secondly, out of all the claims of the “evil” Koran I’ve seen, most have been severally quoted out of context and much of it propagandized into a much more insidious document than it actually is. The Koran also condemns the murder of women and children, and should be interpreted to condemn suicide bombing and the murder or any sort of innocence. You can pretty much find passages to justify whatever you want in most obscure religious texts, and the sheep will follow…
