Rushdie said that?
Islam vs. the Western World: off-topic posts from a Religion thread
- Thread starter kks
- Start date
Enough, apparently, to force their target into hiding under armed protection, for more than a decade, and to kill numerous others related to him and his writings, and generally give most everyone the world over a dim view of the various enterprises they claim to be acting on behalf of.
Yep.
Sort of. These being intelligence agencies, nobody really knows exactly how much continuity there is. But there is no question that the intelligence rosters were cleansed of those insufficiently faithful to the Islamic Revolution.
And it is also uncontroversial that they stepped up their repression of the Iranian people radically, after the Islamists took control. Go read any of the numerous books that Iranian dissidents have written over the decades, and you will observe their heartbreak when the revolution they had fought and died for ended up being perverted by the Ayatollah, who was drastically more repressive than the Shah.
Then I guess it's a good thing for me that the US never funded or trained the faction that gained control of the Iranian Revolution.
The Iranians are the ones chanting "Death to America" and supporting Shiite insurgent groups in neighboring Sunni countries. The CIA work with the Sunni neighbors to thwart them.
If you think that statecraft and intrigue are the exclusive province of the CIA/US, well, you're so obviously wrong that one has to wonder if anything beyond simple bigotry is driving your assertions.
Mrs.Lucysnow
Valued Senior Member
John99: And you do Lucy? Where are you from?
Arent you doing the same thing with your constant blanket statements about Americans? tbh, i notice that you are particularly arrogant, is there a reason for this?
Well if I were French I could claim arrogance but instead I am a british national who has lived on and off in NY for many years. The blanket statements are backed by evidence which is more than I can say for Baron's remarks.
Baron: History is a wonderful thing, Lucy, but it's most often not applicable to conditions in the present.
Its what you asked me to do Baron. You had asked for evidence that U.S foreign policy has done more harm than good in the middle-east. How else could I do that without looking at the past? I find it amusing that an american would find it absurd to try and learn from history. What did Gore Vidal call it? Oh yea, the 'united States of amnesia'
Rock on idiots.
Arent you doing the same thing with your constant blanket statements about Americans? tbh, i notice that you are particularly arrogant, is there a reason for this?
Well if I were French I could claim arrogance but instead I am a british national who has lived on and off in NY for many years. The blanket statements are backed by evidence which is more than I can say for Baron's remarks.
Baron: History is a wonderful thing, Lucy, but it's most often not applicable to conditions in the present.
Its what you asked me to do Baron. You had asked for evidence that U.S foreign policy has done more harm than good in the middle-east. How else could I do that without looking at the past? I find it amusing that an american would find it absurd to try and learn from history. What did Gore Vidal call it? Oh yea, the 'united States of amnesia'
Rock on idiots.
Mrs.Lucysnow
Valued Senior Member
Q: So, if someone changes their ideologies, from Christianity to Islam, is that the same thing as getting a heart transplant, for example?
No and I never implied it was, and how would I know as a non-believer what it is to change beliefs and traditions? You seem to know exactly what its like for the religious, I wonder why that is!
Q:I don't need to be steeped in a psychosis to understand the psychosis.
Well there you go! I don't consider merely being religious a sign of mental disturbance.
Do you consider all those who adhere to science as a sign of mental stability?
Q: How is it that people are even allowed to re-interpret their religion, the word of their god, to suit their agendas? Isn't that hypocrisy?
Its not uncommon for traditions to update themselves. Its not uncommon for people to change their convictions. In the bible alone the 'eye for an eye' transformed into 'turn the other cheek'. I just don't understand how you can profess to know so much about the religious experience when its an experience you never had nor seem to care for. Is this something you have spent a lot of time thinking about or are they simply groundless assumptions on someone elses experience?
No and I never implied it was, and how would I know as a non-believer what it is to change beliefs and traditions? You seem to know exactly what its like for the religious, I wonder why that is!
Q:I don't need to be steeped in a psychosis to understand the psychosis.
Well there you go! I don't consider merely being religious a sign of mental disturbance.
Do you consider all those who adhere to science as a sign of mental stability?
Q: How is it that people are even allowed to re-interpret their religion, the word of their god, to suit their agendas? Isn't that hypocrisy?
Its not uncommon for traditions to update themselves. Its not uncommon for people to change their convictions. In the bible alone the 'eye for an eye' transformed into 'turn the other cheek'. I just don't understand how you can profess to know so much about the religious experience when its an experience you never had nor seem to care for. Is this something you have spent a lot of time thinking about or are they simply groundless assumptions on someone elses experience?
i wont even dignify that with a response.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Absolutely. We're horrified at the fact that it's actually illegal over there to sell a copy of Mein Kampf or display a swastika. Look at the difference in effect. The Nazis aren't allowed to meet openly in Europe, so they had to hold their Holocaust Denial Festival in Tehran. A place where everybody thinks like they do and they came home feeling like they were the majority.
We, on the other hand, issue parade permits to the Ku Klux Klan. They march down the street and Jews, African-Americans and every other ethnic and religious minority line the sidewalks and throw things at them. They are reminded that they are the hated minority.
Justice Brandeis said it well: "The best disinfectant is sunshine." I put it differently: "Keep the cockroaches on top of the linoleum where you can see what they're up to."
Most of the Americans here are too young to remember any of that. I remember it in the 1950s and early to mid-1960s. Even though it was primarily Christian fundamentalists who were doing the banning and burning, it was generally not religious or anti-religious material that was banned and burned. It was sexually explicit stuff. Novels like "Lolita" (Vladimir Nabokov 1955) about an adult man having sex with a 12-year-old girl. And "Tropic of Cancer" (Henry Miller 1934 but published in the USA in 1961) with its graphic sex scenes. It was the latter book that was the subject of a trial that overturned our obscenity laws, one of the milestones that marked the beginning of the "Swinging Sixties" and the Sexual Revolution.
The British Invasion hit the music scene in 1963 and rock'n'roll songs with suggestive or downright explicit lyrics became the new object of the wrath of the fundies. A fundamentalist congregation gathered around a pile of burning vinyl records in front of their church became an iconic image and even appeared in a movie--was it "Footloose"? However, I've smelled burning plastic and I think that might be an urban legend because they would have all been hauled off to the emergency room.
In America the religious people are more easily offended by sex than by hostility toward their religion.
This raises an interesting point. I recently read an op-ed by an analyst of Middle Eastern affairs. He declared that there is really only one thing that the Muslim world hates about America: our attitude about sex.
There's something symmetrical about that, considering that that "attitude about sex" encompasses our outrageous custom of "permitting" women to have control over their own lives and be academic, business, cultural and political leaders. Arguably, the one thing Americans hate most about Islam is the way women are treated, at least in the most extreme countries like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Nigeria. Benazir Bhutto got to be Prime Minister of Pakistan, to be sure, but then she was gunned down by Islamists.
But, not common sense.
You can read, can't you? So can I.
I don't get your point, the two are mutually exclusive.
The "religious experience"? I've heard a myriad of explanations as to what theists refer to as the "religious experience," which is little more than their overactive imaginations running wild.
But exactly how many of those tens of millions that listened to him in his own country bought tickets to go to England or wherever Rushdie was and then try to kill him? Surely, if these people were die-hard fanatics who did everything their supreme religious ruler said without question, we would have flights booked full with people coming to kill him, right? Exactly how many of those people did all of that? And where they captured? If so, by whom?
Thanks for most of your post Fraggle. You see, the point I tried to raise was that a lot of things were and are still not acceptable in society. Even here nowadays, in the UK and Europe, a lot of stuff is still banned and or cant be talked or written about. A lot of stuff got banned and a lot of stuff didnt. But somehow when the Muslim world does something, we instantly see people react as if its the worst thing ever and then try to connect that with their personal dislike and or ignorance of Islam and try to generalize about a lot of people who simply dont care or didnt react that way, like me and others on here. Its that attitude that is annoying.
Yes, your paranoid delusions and intellectual dishonesty are annoying.
Only a few.
But many more supported the effort, in various ways. By paying taxes to the Ayatollah's state, and so funding its intelligence agencies, for example. Or by generally working to provide political and moral cover for the enterprise, when it encountered criticism in various corners.
I never suggested that all, or even most, Iranians were die-hard fanatics.
They needn't be. It only takes a few die-hard fanatics, when you have millions supporting them morally, financially and politically.
So, in that sense, all Americans support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by extension, the large number of people that have been killed? Also, does this mean that all Americans support Israel killing all those people because the US provides Israel with the weaponry?
You are arguing with Americans, mostly.arsalan said:
Not a lot of stuff is banned, even in Europe. Most of the pressure to ban stuff is coming from Jews and Muslims, in Europe, and fundie Christians, in the US.arsalan said:
Your habit of assigning that attitude to people who don't share it, as a rhetorical ploy or whatever, is likewise annoying.arsalan said:
As you have been informed, speaking personally but in line with others, it wasn't Ayatollah fatwa and bushwa that disturbed me about the "Muslim world" in its reactions to Rushdie's book. We have religious leaders like that in the US, and if somehow they acquired political power we would see very similar edicts and ukases and pronouncements and fatwas and whathell. One more argument for separating church and state, is all that was. It was and has been ever since the reaction of people such as yourself, the reaction we see on this forum from you, SAM, Diamondheart, and seemingly every other self-proclaimed and self-evidently reasonable and articulate representative from (if not of) that Muslim world. This has become a touchstone reference of mine, an enlightening event and moment, in considering the role of religion and the effects of theistic belief within religion.
Last edited:
What I found enlightening was the total dismissal of the hurt the long period of colonialism inflicted and with that the inability to understand the reaction without involving only religious feelings. And just for the record im not anything "self-proclaimed special". Im just an average guy, not any more reasonable, articulate or intelligent than any other average person.
Last edited:
Of course, all Americans have some degree of responsibility for everything that our state does in our names. Have you ever heard me pretend otherwise?
It's you and your buddies that are always trying to evade responsibility for the actions of groups you belong to, even as you comport yourselves as spokesmen for said groups.