Everneo said:
In christian-muslim debates, comparative mud-slinging is expected one.
If non-christians, agnostics & atheists ask questions they least expect any comparative examination involving bible or christianity to start the discussion.
At some point, we need to look at the question, or the issue at hand.
And I'm
not even reaching to the metaphysical and nihilistic wall of why decapitation is bad.
If I question, as I do, the assertion that decapitation is "sacred," how can I demonstrate that context other than saying, "No it's not," while someone else says, "Yes it is"?
Well, we look at what it's worth in history, and at that point, comparisons become necessary, because Muslims don't exist in a vacuum, nor have they ever.
So it depends on the question. The label of the questioner is only important if the question is insufficient to communicate itself, and one must seek other keys to interpreting its need.
None could impose that there should not be any comparative discussion, including the topic poster.
And yet the topic poster requests it. We've obviously had our own discussion, but it's not the topic poster's discussion we're having.
Didn't you post sh@t about bible in this thread in line with the topic posters prediction ?
Not quite. And not just for the detail you mentioned. Specifically, I was responding to you, and discussing the reasons why those comparisons are important. Had Snip given an answer, I would have been able to choose whether or not to invoke that part of the discussion there. Perhaps Snip would have provided an avenue of discussion not mentioned in the scant topic post that would take us away from such issues. Perhaps that lesson, to Snip, was more obscure than the last two sentences of the article.
When you wrote to Surenderer,
How it is mis-interpreted to suit a few, then, you pretty much summed up a major problem. There's a difference between that and the topic article. However, without a comparative context, the counterpoint becomes a mere exercise in the "minimization" of a functional tragedy.
In fact, if you read the article and click on a link that appears in the text near the end, you'll find a page excerpting another website. For whatever reasons, Frontpage was apparently unable to either provide or direct us to the original article, and so they excerpted it. And they even excerpted it, quite accidentally, I'm sure, to their own detriment. What that excerpt suggests is that a finely-educated mind, a college professor (of medicine, but who's counting?) can't read critically. Reading the excerpt also suggests that dealing with the terrorists isn't enough for the article author, and that we must necessarily make this about all Islam.
Especially at that point, the comparative becomes important. Because what the article proposes, in effect, is that Muslims owe a specific examination of the relation between cultural processes both obscure and apparent that mutate interpretations of an idea that other cultures are somehow exempted from. The exemption is implicit, though, inasmuch as the author names a number of political conflicts in countries where we cannot isolate Islam as either the only participant or the underlying cause. Economic issues tend to underpin all wars, and religions are just warped to suit the occasion. This, however, becomes a self-referencing issue, a loop of sorts that plays on the relationships and associations that come with "arriving" (e.g. being born)
in media res. In the modern day, the actual causes of strife are long-sublimated, and the superficial is the rallying banner. Muslims are human beings. Given identical opportunity to Americans, they will conduct themselves at least as well and at least as poorly. Indonesia, the Philippines, and Nigeria are some of the places mentioned in the article where identity politics and economic/resource conflicts mingle to a deadly rhythm, and the author would pretend that the issue is and always has been Islam.
Even I drip with sarcasm over any given event: "Oooh, so they only massacred fifty people and not five hundred. Brilliant!" I won't directly minimize the decapitations or injustices of history, but neither will I compound injustice by exaggerating something so vital to the underlying article. While exaggeration is par for the course in the political arena, one must show considerably greater caution when scrutinizing the underlying themes.
To dip squarely into the comparative:
• In the Bible (1 Samuel, ch. 15) God repents of his action: specifically, his act of making Saul king. Why does God repent of his action? Because Saul did not kill every last Amalekite; he spared one, their king Agag. Because Saul did not complete the genocide (Samuel would hack Agag to death), he is stripped of his kingship. This massacre is the last word on the Amalekites, whom God promised to blot out from history--our only record of their existence comes from the Bible and associated legends. I don't recall that there's a whisper of them in the historical or archaeological record. This is a long-running grudge, over the course of four centuries, dating back to King Amalek (
cf Exodus 17). The point is that Amalekites were a thorn in the side of the Jews, and the Jews destroyed them entirely on God's command. Now ... does it worry me that the term "Amalek" has come up in Christian circles supporting the modern Israeli cause? Actually, not nearly as much as it would if Ariel Sharon uttered the name. But that's like telling Muslims a crusade is afoot--a bunch of people are about to die terribly. But the Jews at war with Amalek stopped shy, and their king was punished for failing to blot them from the earth. The obvious but irrelevant question is whether to test the theory again. But more directly, we might ask:
Does the tale of the Amalekites in any way justify the Islamic-based extremists? No.
Does it in any way excuse those extremists? No.
What, then, is the point? Well, with Amalek rhetoric swirling around the Israeli cause, should I truly make the leap to the conclusion that genocide is a sacred practice in Judaism? No. It's absurd. And that's the kind of leap the author makes in the Frontpage article. Is genocide alien to true Judaism? What I want to show is that the leap from the extremist to the Quran to all of Islam is just as absurd as the leap from Amalek to the Israeli/Palestinian issue. After all, at the moment I'm looking at a
blog page that cites a reform rabbi who notes that, "... we, too can be Amalek." It's not like I can fairly claim the Kahanists speak for all Jews and thus paint the Jews as genocidal. (Or
this ... how could I possibly ascribe
such extremism to all Jews?)
In the end, the punchline can be summed up by looking back to the topic article:
Empty claims that jihad decapitations are somehow "alien to true Islam," however well-intentioned, undermine serious efforts to reform and desacralize Islamic doctrine. This process will only begin with frank discussion, both between non-Muslims and Muslims, and within the Muslim community.
Source: Frontpage.com
I don't think the leap made in the article constitutes "frank discussion" of anything.
I am, for example, not interested in either hellelujah chorus or biblical precedences. Just answers, if not ready call me islamaphobe, i will go away calling nuts.
Er ... okay. This is about you. Right. I forgot.
gee.. thanks. But i did not say that the west is blameless. Just wanted to indicate how the muslims are exposed to western manipulations and their historical vulnerability to manipulations by their own; the culprits could be found within muslim community, even when no western country was around to play.
So in other words, we're back to faulting Muslims for being human?
And I'm sorry to take your sentences as exclusively as they're written. I'll try to interpret you more loosely in the future. And no, that's not sarcasm.
I would rather ask you not to pretend muslims are granted to err
To err is
human.
Most of your take on muslims exclude Islam, it seems.
How so? Oh, right ... that makes sense if we throw out the comparative and pretend Muslims live in a vacuum.
No major religion had influence on its adherents in everyway,including politics, of life than Islam.
Makes sense to me, then, that these folks would be the fiercest to f@ck back when f@cked with. Hell, it's
doctrinal to fight injustice until injustice ceases. What? Did nobody think of that going in?
The degree may vary on inividuals and groups.
So diversity is irrelevant to the generalism?
There were times in history when islamic world produced better talents as per our standards. To check-out where & how they lost out needs a self-criticism that you seem to consider unfair.
Hmm ... maybe you missed that part when I wrote,
Tiassa said:
When the Muslims control a modern-day empire of 300,000,000 people . . . .
And of course the passage you were responding to:
Tiassa said:
Lacking the same conditions, the same foundation, how can we possibly expect a people to respond to stimuli according to our standards?
Now, forgive me if I skip the many words that came immediately before that question, but you do recall that those "same conditions" and "same foundation" involve modern aspects not present in those glory days of old? (I'm also aware of your note about the length.)
And speaking of those glory days, the history of what happened at the end of those days running on up to the start of the Israel/Palestine dispute after WWII is rather enlightening.
Everneo said:
If i am firm that my backyard should be clean, i will take on anyone who dares to dump in my backyard.
Then
why are Muslims not allowed the same?
I agree, you yankees have to look at your system before dropping tonnes of bombs and indulging in subversive activities around the world.
But, as a nation and culture, we don't really ever get around to it, do we?
We're too busy dumping sh@t in everyone else's backyard. I mean, not to restate that part of your point, but that's the reason we don't ever take on the group introspection. Kind of cyclical. Perverse. Incidentally, does it mean I hate America if I want that cycle to be broken?
Suppose if an atheist started this topic not willing to hear anymore comparision with sh@t in other religions that he himself would have questioned and ridiculed seperately plenty of times, would you still insist on comparision ?!
For all I know, an atheist
did start this topic. However ....
Taking the point in what seems to be the intended context, yes. The argument is still about the religion, and if we're supposed to learn something new or be affected or otherwise respond to the stimulus of the article and the endorsement, we will still necessarily require certain comparative issues by which we're supposed to measure something so subjective as outrage.
To close out this one, a note on backyards:
When the Ottomans had tried to reorganize their army along Western lines in hope of containing the threat from Europe, their efforts were doomed because they were too superficial. To beat Europe at its own game, a conventional agrarian society would have to transform itself from top to bottom, and recreate its entire social, economic, educational, religious, spiritual, political, and intellectual structures. And it would have to do this very quickly, an impossible task, since it had taken the West almost three hundred years to achieve this development.
(Armstrong, 141)
The intervening history describes a period of conflict and exploitation in which the West is the clear victor to this point and Islam the clear loser. This ongoing process has created quite a mess in everyone's backyard, but especially in Islamic society.
Was the Shah of Iran operating by or merely exploiting corrupt religion? While the Shah was the willing party, what of Mossadeq? He
was elected. And then the US helped overthrow him in order to shore up power for the Shah and Western interests.
The people tried to clean up their backyard. And they got squashed for doing so. And soon enough they will try again. Let us hope the West is more supportive of justice and not its projected profits.
To wrap up this last note, I wish to drag out a link to a short citation from Hunter S. Thompson, which I posted somewhere around here once before. I put it together in the first place because I think it's a striking analogy in some certain aspects, to how some Americans seem to regard the war in Iraq, but it works reasonably well here, too. At any rate, to avoid even more copyright violations, I won't reproduce the text here. It's just squirreled away
at my homepage.
____________________
• Armstrong, Karen. Islam, A Short History. New York: Modern Library Chronicles, 2000.
