Ah yes, Islam, the religion of peace.

Sickening indeed.

Just because people use the name of God to commit atrocity doesn't mean that the name of God they use should be smeared.

If the Inquisition were happening today, would you roll your eyes and say, "Ah, yes, Christianity, the religion of peace" ? Of course not. Just because people pervert the ideas of a religion does not make the religion itself invalid.

I wonder if you were to take a spiritual scale, and you weighed this out, what woule the outcome be? I mean, on the one hand if you put all the known good and great things done in the name of Islam... and on the othe hand, all the known accumlative acts of downright evil and sin done in the name of Allah. I think the scale would tip out heavily on one side (guess which one). The fact of the matter is, those who are the leaders of Islam need to recognize this fact and do something about it. In the same way that Martin Luther and others did for Christianity. It's called reformation and Islam needs it, because as Islam as we "know" it is flat out rotten to the core.

And if I have offended you by pointing out the obvious: Not my problem.

r.

Oh... and my point is that evil is as evil does, and that by your works you shall be known...

r.

It's that kind of logic that leads gun-controllers to push for more gun control legislation. Look at the numbers, man! In the case of guns, less than 1 percent of the gun-owning population causes crime. In the case of Islam, terrorism is caused by people who compose but a fraction of the Muslim population.

The problem isn't Islam--it's certain fanatics. Perhaps that's a cliche, but it's also true. I grant you, it's a well-funded group of fanatics (thanks to our friends, the Saudis), but the majority of Muslims are not Wahabbi. Hell, the majority of Muslims don't even live in the Middle East!

Alex, until Islam reforms itself enough to give women equal rights and separate Church and State I'll continue to criticize it. In fact. any religion with core beliefs like theocracy and misogyny goes on my shit list automatically.

Sure, only a fraction of all Muslims are prepared to fly jetliners into skyscrapers, but remember-- That radical minority bent on destroying Western modernity is just a symptom of a deeper illness.

Saying that only a fraction of Moslems blow up day care centers is like saying that only a fraction of Nazis actually opened the Zyklon-B canisters. It's true, and beside the point.

The point is that just as Nazi atrocities could not have happened without the acquiescence and support of millions of Germans and other Europeans ("Hitler's willing executioners", to quote the title of a recent book), so too do terrorist groups require broad popular support for their atrocities in order for them to hide in the general population. The West's highest priority has to be to drain the moral swamp in which these insects breed.

Neither Islam nor any other faith has to be invalid as a personal faith to be invalid as a political program. God does not rule on this earth; humans do, and thus far there is no reliable method for determining that any particular human is God's preferred ruler. So all claims of divine right are self-asserted and inherently tyrannical.

The claimant cannot justify the assertion except to impose his will upon others successfully, which he then holds up as proof of God's favor. That self-reinforcing morality is the true evil here, which is why the West has no choice but to crush this brand of tyranny now before the world sinks into a new Dark Ages.

Look, a majority of Muslims *don't* accept misogyny or theocracy. And besides, it's obvious from the ranting by the loony left in the states and the elite media establishments in Europe that you don't have to be Muslim to support terrorism, either.

Alex, you know for a fact that the majority of muslims dont accept misogyny or theorcracy? How did you arrive at this conclusion? Because Oprah told you? Where are your statistics to back up your allegation? Remember, we did have some numbers a week ago that would suggest the opposite. Just because a fact may make you uncomfortable, doesnt make it any less of a fact.

Well, for starters, I don't trust numbers that originate from totalitarian nations. Becuase, you know, when the poll-taker might be a member of the secret police, you're definitely going to tell them that you disagree with their policies, right?

Secondly, since a majority of Muslims don't even live in Middle Eastern countries, and volunatarily migrate to western countries to build their lives. Hell, my roomate is an Arab Muslim originally from Iraq who first migrated to Canada and now lives here. I suppose he's an evil, woman-hating killer, right?

Alex, I would suggest that neither the absolute number, nor the proportion, of Muslims who are misogynistic, theocratic, etc., matter.

What does matter is that a controlling proportion of the ruling classes are.

Hey, hey, Yasser A! How many kids did you kill today?

John,

I wouldn't argue with that in the slightest.

It seems that many of the political leaders in the ME are pragmatic bending toward secularism, but Islam is THE state religion with many social strictures prescribed by the religious leaders.
Its like giving Falwell or Robertson an official post with police powers, scary. The Muslims need an Age of Enlightenment.

This news story is indeed sickening and without justification under any circumstances.

What it reminds me of, though, are all those people killed in western capitalist sweatshop and factory fires -- too many to list --, where the doors are locked to keep the exploited in.

Is that carnage due to profit any worse than this?

Jak--

No.

Actually, no. If it had just been a case of locked doors, then I agree they would be comparable.

The difference between this episode and, say, the famous Triangle Shirtwaist fire a hundred years ago is that in this instance the victims were prevented from fleeing by other people while the fire was known to be in progress.

Exactly, Craig -- I've never heard of a "capitalist" forcing his workers back into a burning building.

I'd wondered why American loony leftists were so sympathetic to Palestinian terrorists.

Now I know: the motto of both appears to be: "Never forget, never forgive".

Hey, hey, Yasser A! How many kids did you kill today?

1. Christian atrocities are not all long in the past as some here would indicate.

2. It was only a tiny fraction of Jews who opened fire with an Israeli-made machine-gun on a gay bar in New York back in the 80s. In fact it was just one. No one blamed the Jews, or even the Hasidim, as a group.

3. Alex, the Inquisition IS still going on. It has changed its name several times, but it's still there. Its comparative obscurity (and relative lack of temporal power) is due exclusively to changes in secular culture and law. Last I heard it was called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and run by Cardinal Ratsinger (or Cardinal Rat, as I'm in the habit of calling him).

4. Rob, I'm sure you believe a similar weighing-out of Christianity's good and evil acts would come out on the good side. Those of us of non-Abrahamic religions might not agree, myself included.

5. Probably you know this, but: Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians pray to "Allah" too. It's not the name of a different god. It's the God of Abraham.

Let's be current, anything less than 100 years. Islam seems to regularly produce such barbarism and twisted thinking. Does that mean all Muslims are that way? No, but it signifies that something is amiss. Christianity and Judaism managed to reform and humanize themselves, any fanatics are few and isolated. But when Islamic countries regularly produce such barbarism in the name of God(yeah, I know, Allah is just Arabic for the lord), the culture must be indicted so it has a chance to reform itself. Saudi Arabia is one of the richest and the heart of the Islamic world, so if they are total pigs, then that is an indictment. I mean it just ain't the Middle East, anywhere there's a majority of Muslims, there's bound to be mainstream fanaticism!

OK, all those lynchings in the early 20c by "good Christians" -- some of them hidden away in white hoods, others with their kids and picnic baskets.   They thought they were promoting virtue and preventing vice.  Christian virtue; Christian vice.  After all, God meant for the Negro to be subservient to the White man, whose innate superiority is obvious.

But, I hear you cry, this was the work of a small group of fanatics.  Well, why did the rest of the Christians ALLOW them to call themselves Christians, then?  Or better still, stop them?  This is the crap I keep hearing from people about Islam, and I'm sick of it.  It's just self-righteous bigotry.

So go ahead, tell me the KKK aren't "really" Christians.  Then I'll do one of two things: a) tell you about Abe, who runs our local Middle Eastern restaurant, and who told me that no one who does such things (as the WTC attacks) can possibly be a Moslem (he wasn't blaming someone else; he knew they were calling themselves Moslem, but he thinks they're vile blasphemers)--or b) laugh in your face.  BTW Abe closed the restaurant and got a bunch of guys from his mosque together to run down to Ground Zero on 9/11 to volunteer to help with the rescue effort.

And gays have been killed in the name of Christ in the past 10 years.  And Andrea Yates drowned her children because she thought Satan would get them otherwise.  If you don't allow the exclusion of fanatics and lunatics, you have to count those five murders as a Christian atrocity.

Or maybe not.  I've noticed that some Christians seem unable to handle basic logic like that.  One once told me that he didn't have to argue logically because he was right.

OK, OK.  Yes, I know Christianity isn't like that mostly.  And no Christians are endorsing Andrea Yates and saying she did the right thing.  My point is that there's at least great diversity of opinion in the Moslem world, and no American Moslem would support the vile murder of those 15 girls.  The Saudis are scum, I agree.  But your Moslem neighbors are here in America because they wanted to get away from such monsters.

Just give them the right you ask for for yourself: to be judged for yourself, and not by the actions of those who claim the same label you do.

Clarifications (damn, I wish this site had a preview feature!):

1. I meant, "better still, why didn't they stop the lynchings" in my second paragraph.

2. The last sentence of the first paragraph is SARCASM, and meant to characterize the mentality of the lynchers.  It is the opposite of what I believe myself.

3. Abe was shocked and appalled that people could call themselves Moslem and do such things.  He quoted me from the Qur'an where it says explicitly that civilians are not to be harmed in war.  And he's a Palestinian, by the way.

I am appalled that any religious thinking should be taken so seriously.
The behviour of Saudi zealots is simply a manifestation of the ignorance and misogyny that is so prevelant among those who refuse or are incapable of thinking. Misogyny in particular is the hallmark of phallically challenged immature men.
Among the advanced economies only Americans take religion seriously, mainly to compensate for modern Americans lack of history. Americans committed genocide against the native Americans and in so doing destroyed a rich and deeply spiitual culture. Modern Americans could have learned much from, not least how to be intelligent and human.

In more civilised places Americans are commonly regarded as obese and ugly playground bullies, who insist upon turning the rest of the world into a McDonalds strewn garbage heap, like so much of America.

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