A solution for Iraq

[Funky]

You are incorrect in your assumptions, and nothing has [peeved] me off more than people trying to make that hateful woman a martyr.

Listen, I don't care about Geller. I don't care about the mosque. I live in Germany, it doesn't effect me in the slightest. What I do care about is misrepresentation and double standard.

There are thousands of Muslim preachers in Europe and America who call for violence against infidels every day. They preach that Jews should be killed, as should blasphemers, apostates and homosexuals. This is real hate speech. And it has disastrous consequences. In Britain, they are supported by half the Muslim population. 61% of British Muslims want homosexuality punished, 45 percent say Jews cannot be trusted. After the Charlie Hebdo attack, 27 percent openly supported violence against cartoonists. In the Netherlands, 80 percent of young Dutch Muslims don't see a problem in fighting Holy War against non-believers. In my own country of Germany, 47 percent consider Islamic rules more important than both German laws and democracy. These numbers are absolutely shocking. This is a huge problem. I don't know why you can't see this. And this is just in Europe. In Muslim countries we are talking about substantially higher numbers.

Pointing out the fact that we have a problem with large parts of our Muslim population is not hate speech. Being opposed to the building of a mosque is not hate speech. Calling for the murder of whole groups of people is hate speech. I mean come on, this is not rocket science.
I find it incomprehensible how you can ignore all this and focus on a woman in America who is opposed to a mosque. What kind of lense are you viewing the world through? Again, find me a single quote from Geller in which she vilifies Muslims as people or calls for their death. I will immediately change my opinion of her. But please acknowledge that even then it would be insane to even mention her in the same breath as the vast numbers of Muslims who hold extremely dangerous beliefs.

If you want to pretend your problem is only with the radicals, then at least stop throwing everyone else under the effing bus.

This time the misunderstanding seems to be on your part. Nobody has ever talked about all Muslims. I haven't done it, Spencer, Geller and Wilders haven't done it. Nobody has.
I listed a bunch of horrendous and dispicable acts that are done almost entirely by Muslims. That doesn't mean the entirety of Muslims does them. It means that with few exceptions noone else does. Feel free to name me another existing and virulent ideology which causes its adherents to kill blasphemers and apostates on a regular basis. To systematically subjagate women and perform FGM. To commit terror attacks on a daily basis.
No, not all Muslims do these things. But very many do. Can we not move past that?

Realistically, a program of education, accurate medical advice for midwives, modern medical treatment for new parents, broader political rights for women, etc. is going to be far more successful at addressing this issue.

Yes, equal rights for women would be a great way to combat FGM. Now, please tell me the reason why women don't have equal rights in most Islamic countries. Please tell me why they are denied rights and are forced to cover up. Why girls' schools, if they even exist, are regularly being massacred and destroyed. Why there are girls' schools in the first place, instead of mixed schools like everywhere else in the world? It cannot be culture - Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt don't share the same cultural background. It cannot be lack of wealth - the Arab states are extraordinarily wealthy. So what, then, is keeping Muslims from noticing that giving women equal rights is a good idea?

Education would also be a great weapon against FGM. Why is education so scarce in the Muslim world? Could the fact that most Muslims consider the Koran to be the best book ever written have something to do with it? What about the widespread view that supposing there are natural laws or the use of human reason are considered blasphemous, as they limit Allah? Could this have anything at all to do with the lack of education in the Muslim world? If not, please enlighten me and tell me the actual reasons, I am curious.

I dont want to make it into a discussion about religion

While it is pleasant to talk to you, I will indeed pass on this topic in this thread. It is simply too large to cover adequately in a few side notes. In short, while I understand your unease about abandoning religion, the evidence doesn't seem to support your worries. Quite the contrary. Generally speaking, living our lives as close to reality as we can should allow us to make the most informed, rational, and thereby most moral decisions.
Perhaps we can delve deeper into this discussion at a later time.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I live in Germany, it doesn't effect me in the slightest. What I do care about is misrepresentation and double standard.

Ah. This explains it. Equal treatment for Muslims as was given those pesky Jews, right? No double standards.

 

[Phrossack]

Ah. This explains it. Equal treatment for Muslims as was given those pesky Jews, right? No double standards.

What year are you living in? Do you know anything about modern Germany? Do you seriously believe it's militantly bigoted against Muslims and Jews anymore?

Its intense war guilt has led Germany to be more anti-racist than probably any other country. Don't play the "Germans are all just Nazis" card like so many Germanophobes do today. It's old and wildly inaccurate.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

What year are you living in? Do you know anything about modern Germany? Do you seriously believe it's militantly bigoted against Muslims and Jews anymore?

Its intense war guilt has led Germany to be more anti-racist than probably any other country. Don't play the "Germans are all just Nazis" card like so many Germanophobes do today. It's old and wildly inaccurate.

My comment was directed at a single individual and based only on his comments. It was not in any way meant as an indictment of modern Germany. My apologies for any misunderstanding.

 

[Formaldehyde]

There are thousands of Muslim preachers in Europe and America who call for violence against infidels every day.

With that sort of attitude it makes me wonder why you also don't criticize the Muslim haters who incite violence against Muslims. Or didn't you know that Muslims have been the victims of Islamophobia-induced violence ever since 9/11 in far greater numbers than they were previously?

Spoiler :

And that is likely under reported by as much as a factor of 1000:

One significant hurdle is simply getting hate crimes against Muslims reported to authorities. FBI statistics show that about 160 Muslims were victimized in hate crimes each year between 2011 and 2013. This number is a result of significant underreporting. American Muslims experience prejudice far more often than they report to authorities. When asked anonymously in a 2011 Pew poll if they had been threatened or attacked in the past year, 6 percent of Muslims said they had. Given that the Muslim population was 2.6 million in 2010, responses to the Pew poll suggest that about 156,000 Muslims were victims of hate crimes. The Justice Department notes that two out of every three hate crimes are not reported because victims believe that police cannot or will not help. This is especially true for Muslims, who have been targets of massive surveillance, deportation, questioning and other harassment by local and federal law enforcement during the past 14 years. That excessive scrutiny has eroded the trust necessary for victims to report hate crimes.

Even if a victim knows how to navigate the law enforcement system and file a hate-crime complaint, there are dynamics that may make it more difficult for Muslim victims to win convictions. In surveys conducted in 2006 and 2007, Georgetown University researchers found that Muslims, whether or not they are American, face severe stereotypes in the United States. Americans stereotype Muslims as far more untrustworthy and violent than whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians. This can create barriers to gaining empathy from police, attorneys, judges and juries.

Even with these hurdles, a chilling truth remains: The number of reported hate crimes motivated by anti-Muslim bias is five times higher than before 9/11. From Oregon to Ohio, mosques and Islamic centers have been torched and defaced. The lives of innocent Muslim workers have been threatened, and people even suspected of being Muslim have been killed by perpetrators invoking the 2001 terrorist attacks. In December, a 15-year-old Muslim, Abdisamad Sheikh-Hussein, was run down and killed in Kansas City, Mo., by a man in an SUV who had a history of anti-Muslim views and had made threats against the local mosque. The SUV had an anti-Muslim message, comparing the Koran to Ebola, in its rear window at the time of the attack. This disturbing level of hate crimes, coupled with an increasingly prejudiced and vicious environment of anti-Muslim rhetoric, has led our nation to a crisis point.

Where do you think these hate-filled bigots get these ideas to commit actual violence against completely innocent people on such a regular basis? Their sources are the very same people you claim aren't Islamophobic.

Furthermore, why aren't these individuals you claim exist by the thousands not been identified and prosecuted for their own supposed rhetoric to incite hate crimes? Nearly all Muslims are closely watched in virtually any mosque in the US and Europe, much less their religious leaders. Or didn't you know?

Here is one such example by a single police agency:

The NYPD ’s Intelligence Division uses a variety of methods to spy on and monitor Muslim communities without any suspicion of wrongdoing. They include:

Mapping of Muslim Communities: The NYPD’s Demographics Unit (now the Zone Assessment Unit) has mapped neighborhoods predominantly occupied by 28 so-called “ancestries of interest”—i.e., national origin associated with Muslim populations—as well as “American Black Muslims.” The NYPD expressly excluded from its surveillance and mapping activities non-Muslims such as Coptic Christian Egyptians or Iranian Jews.

Photo and Video Surveillance: NYPD officers, stationed in cars outside of mosques, have taken pictures and video of those leaving and entering places of worship, and recorded the license plate numbers of worshippers attending services. Remotely controlled NYPD cameras have also been placed on light poles, aimed at mosques.

Police Informants: The NYPD has recruited so-called “mosque crawlers,” to act as inside observers in mosques. They report on sermons, provide names of attendees, and take pictures inside of the mosques. Employing a method called “create and capture,” the NYPD has instructed informants to “create” conversations about jihad or terrorism and “capture” and report the responses to the police. Informants are often selected from a pool of arrestees, prisoners, or suspects who are pressured into becoming informants.

Police “Rakers”: Teams of NYPD plainclothes officers—called “rakers”—have been deployed to Muslim communities where they can blend in “consistent with their ethnicity and or language.” They aim to compile information on the community, listen in on conversations at Muslim restaurants and businesses, and identify Muslim “hotspots.”

Tracking Individuals: The NYPD tracks people who changed their names, investigating those who could be Muslim converts or who were “Americanizing” their names.

Intelligence Databases: The Intelligence Division has generated daily reports on innocent Muslims’ lives. The names of thousands of innocent New Yorkers have been placed in secret police files. Information is kept both in an intelligence database and on a standalone computer used to generate intelligence reports.

Chilling Free Speech: The NYPD’s discriminatory surveillance has chilled religious speech and political activism—from engagement in public debates and protests, to friendly coffee-house banter.

Not only are there likely hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the US and millions in Europe who have been the direct victims of this hate-filled rhetoric (and even persecution by government agencies at the local, state, and federal level), they can't even enjoy the very same First Amendment rights as you enjoy anymore. If they do voice their opinions, they are at great risk of being falsely identified as those who "call for violence against 'infidels'".


Link to video.

Unemployment began to rise and a scapegoat was needed, and there's no better scapegoat than Arabs and Muslims.

The Charlie Hebdo killers are people who have used and abused Islam to commit their atrocities, just as others (the French state) use and abuse Islam to implement their security policies. It's like George Bush, a black and white view of the world.

But Islam isn't like that, Islam doesn't say: you need to kill people because they did some drawings. That's against Islamic values.

So for me those people who did those crimes are not Muslims.

How often have we heard Christians say the very same thing about Christians who commit clearly un-Christian acts?

Interesting video I just found surfing anti-Muslim protests (which I can't post here due to the language used...):


Link to video.

It is reassuring that many people will come to the defense of Muslims who are being subjected to hatred and bigotry in public.

 

[Funky]

With that sort of attitude it makes me wonder why you also don't criticize the Muslim haters who incite violence against Muslims.

Bing! We have it again. Don't like the facts that have been brought up? No problem, just change the topic. And don't just change it to anything, no, blame America. Blame the Whites. You know, those racist Judaeo-Christian bigots.

This is so predictable. It's so see-through. And it's sad. You are simply unable to talk about Muslim violence or problematic beliefs stemming from Islam. There must be some voice in your head that, every time you hear the words "Muslim" and "violence", says "Noo... must not think about it.... must blame Whites... must blame America..." I mean seriously, this is worrying.


I could leave it there, noticing that you totally missed the topic, didn't go into any of my points, but just brought up a new topic, namely hate-crimes against Muslims in the US. As if two wrongs make a right. As if by mentioning another problem, the first problem simply poofs away in a cloud of smoke.


The real comedy though, is that even in your new topic there are errors on so many levels. One can sense the bare desperation in your attempt to google search anything that could help your cause to expose this terrible white supremacy, which is constantly responsible for massacres and makes life miserable for the entire society. So you come up with a chart which shows that there are 150 hate crimes against Muslims every year. 150. Not 150 thousand, 150. That is laughable. It is nothing. Not all these cases even included violence, let alone murder. Most of them were likely about insults. How do I know that? Because otherwise we would hear about them much more often. You know, like we hear about the Muslim terror, which is newsworthy because people actually get tortured and killed. The worst one could come up with is the Chapel Hill guy, and officially this was not even regarded as a hate crime. Should we condemn these cases? Of course we should. We do that all the time. The media does it, politicians do it, most individuals do it. This goes without saying. What is your point?

But it gets better. The author of the Washington Post article (who works for a group called Muslim Advocates, you figure) quotes the Pew poll result that 6 percent of Muslims say they have been threatened or attacked in the last year. He concludes that in reality, hate crimes must be 1,000 times higher, namely 150,000. I cannot fathom how idiotic that is. You can ask anyone from any group the same question and will get similar results. Hell, I was threatened in the last year. Football fans get threatened every week. Go to the disco a few times and you will probably at some point be threatened by someone. So yeah, all these people must be victims of hate crime. Such nonsense. I am even surprised it is only 6 percent. Ask Christians, ask atheists, ask Jews if they have been threatened in the last year, I am sure the number will be higher than 6 percent.

Speaking of Jews, while 13,4 percent of religiously motivated hate crimes (2 percent of all hate crimes) have been directed at Muslims, 60 percent have been directed at Jews. These numbers are all in your own articles. So it seems that if there is a problem to focus on here, it is Jew-hate, not Muslim-hate. But that wouldn't make any sense. Because one of the guiding points on your agenda is "blame the Jews". What good would it do you to point out antisemitism? By the way, who do you think is by far the most responsible for antisemitism in the world? Want to guess?

Then you highlight the next line of the article, desperately attempting to somehow prove a point. Muslims are stereotyped as far more untrustworthy and violent than whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians. Ok, interesting. You know who is regarded as even more untrustworthy as Muslims? Atheists. Atheists are a minority, they are negatively stereotyped, many people even claim they have no morality. Why don't you jump to the defense of atheists? Oh wait, most atheists in America are white. Why should you support them?
And let's not forget that we are all just humans. We all do stereotyping - in fact we have to do it to get through life. My opinion of people who follow an ideology which causes millions to commit violent acts will be different than my opinion of Jains. It may not always be fair, but it is understandable. Just as it is understandable that Israeli security focuses mainly on Muslims. This is simply a result of our past experiences with members of this religion.

And finally getting to the last part of your post where you highlight the police practise of monitoring mosques. I'll just ignore your nonsense that "virtually every" mosque is monitored, the rest is grotesque enough. The police did not randomly choose a group to discriminate against. Do you really think they don't have anything better to do? Many of the hate preachers I was refering to have been identified thanks to this control. Some have been expelled, but it is often a complicated legal process. Muslim terror is a real thing. Read a newspaper for God's sake. By monitoring some of the more radical Muslim communities the police are protecting society. They are protecting you. Show some thanks. Show some humility.

 

[~Corsair#01~]

Funky is right. And a simple look at the facts proves that he's right.

Islam is not simply a religion; its an affliction which is responsible for almost every conflict and abuse of human rights which happens in the world today.

If you look at the mass-deaths in the world during the last hundred years, you can clearly see that muslims are responsible for the majority of those deaths.

Lets look at the tally:
WW1: More than twenty million dead. All because of Islam.

WW2: More than fifty million people dead. Six million Jews slaughtered in the death camps: all because of Islam.

Soviet repression: More than twenty million people dead. But of course nobody can dare to criticize Islam.

Maoist China: Over thirty million Chinese murdered by muslims. But does anyone on the left dare to criticize Islam?

Pol "the Muslim" Pot was responsible for a tyrannical regime that killed more than a quarter of Cambodia's population. And yet the politically correct left refuses to speak out against Islam.

What about the crimes the muslims committed in Rwanda? What about Liberia? What about Siera Leone? What about the Congo?

What about the disintegration of Yugoslavia? Muslims were heavily involved in the events of Srebenica and in Kosovo and yet liberals want to give them a free pass.

I tell you, political correctness has gone mad.

 

[onejayhawk]

If you look at the mass-deaths in the world during the last hundred years, you can clearly see that muslims are responsible for the majority of those deaths.

Depending on how you define "mas Death" this could be a true statement. If you make it "last fifty years" then it is an obviously true statement.

J

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Depending on how you define "mas Death" this could be a true statement. If you make it "last fifty years" then it is an obviously true statement.

J

Like, for instance, if you look at the huge numbers of Muslims killed by random US invasions and say "clearly since the dead are Muslims Muslims are involved and therefore responsible" it gets really obvious.

 

[onejayhawk]

Like, for instance, if you look at the huge numbers of Muslims killed by random US invasions and say "clearly since the dead are Muslims Muslims are involved and therefore responsible" it gets really obvious.

Exactly, though declared wars are generally excluded from such counts. The exchange of attrocities between the old Soviet Union, Russia and various Islamic minorities comes to mind.

At what point does a mass murder become a mass death?

J

 

[~Corsair#01~]

Depending on how you define "mass Death" this could be a true statement. If you make it "last fifty years" then it is an obviously true statement.

If you count regimes like those of Saddam Hussein and Bashar Assad, I suppose you could move muslims into the same ballpark as non-muslims.

But Assad and Hussein were atheist/secular nationalists governing over muslim populations.

Saddam Hussein was actively supported by the US and Europe for the long years in which his regime was at war with Iran.

 

[Tahuti]

In the Netherlands, 80 percent of young Dutch Muslims don't see a problem in fighting Holy War against non-believers. In my own country of Germany, 47 percent consider Islamic rules more important than both German laws and democracy. These numbers are absolutely shocking. This is a huge problem. I don't know why you can't see this. And this is just in Europe. In Muslim countries we are talking about substantially higher numbers.

Democracy can no be all, end all goal to political life. Alternatives to democracy have always existed and may return. No, I wouldn't say Islam is much better than democracy, however, considering democracy provided a platform for various totalitarian regimes to be founded on and can also be an agent of unrestrained capitalism, it isn't much better than Islam either.

Besides, 'fighting holy war agaist unbelievers' is fundamentally misunderstood. It doesn't necessarily mean that as unbelievers, we are supposed to be targeted (although there undoubtedly Muslim who think this). Rather, it can also be taken to mean that holy wars are justified against people who happen to be unbelievers. If this isn't you, you don't have to care about to the degree that you do.

The problem of your argument is that the arguments are loaded by throwing around with terms like 'democracy' as qualifier of goodness without explaining why. All arguments have an a priori assumption about Islam and democracy.

 

[Funky]

@Corsair:

You started out so well! You diagnozed the problem correctly when you said,

Islam is not simply a religion; its an affliction which is responsible for almost every conflict and abuse of human rights which happens in the world today.

Emphasis is mine. Today! Yes, you got it, I thought. And then only one line later you make a long list of things that happened... in the last century. And my heart sank again.

This conversation is about today. You were right! It's not about the past, or about some historical death count competition. It's about adherents of a violent Iron Age ideology mistreating, torturing and killing people in the 21st century.

 

[JollyRoger]

Today, there are many that want non-Muslims to go into Iraq, Iran, and other places to kill Muslims. It was quite a thing in the past decade as well.

 

[Funky]

Today, there are many that want non-Muslims to go into Iraq, Iran, and other places to kill Muslims. It was quite a thing in the past decade as well.

Their intention is to kill Muslims?

 

[JollyRoger]

If the countries are 99% Muslim (based on your characterization in another thread), who else are they intending to kill?

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Their intention is to kill Muslims?

I think their actual intention is to make money, and the killing of Muslims is just a means to that end.

 

[Ajidica]

Funky is right. And a simple look at the facts proves that he's right.

Islam is not simply a religion; its an affliction which is responsible for almost every conflict and abuse of human rights which happens in the world today.

If you look at the mass-deaths in the world during the last hundred years, you can clearly see that muslims are responsible for the majority of those deaths.

Lets look at the tally:
WW1: More than twenty million dead. All because of Islam.

WW2: More than fifty million people dead. Six million Jews slaughtered in the death camps: all because of Islam.

Soviet repression: More than twenty million people dead. But of course nobody can dare to criticize Islam.

Maoist China: Over thirty million Chinese murdered by muslims. But does anyone on the left dare to criticize Islam?

Pol "the Muslim" Pot was responsible for a tyrannical regime that killed more than a quarter of Cambodia's population. And yet the politically correct left refuses to speak out against Islam.

What about the crimes the muslims committed in Rwanda? What about Liberia? What about Siera Leone? What about the Congo?

What about the disintegration of Yugoslavia? Muslims were heavily involved in the events of Srebenica and in Kosovo and yet liberals want to give them a free pass.

I tell you, political correctness has gone mad.

After reading this three times, I still can't tell if this is parody or belief.

 

[Tahuti]

After reading this three times, I still can't tell if this is parody or belief.

It's obviously parody.

 

[Borachio]

After reading this three times, I still can't tell if this is parody or belief.

After reading the above, I can't believe this isn't parody too.