Islam?

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The Muslim Brotherhood--at least the Egyptian part--has renounced violence. So I don't think we really need to be concerned with them.

Especially given that they don't want Sharia to be law per se; as the Brotherhood rep interviewed in the full text of the Harper's article (not available online yet, unfortunately) said: "we want women to be encouraged to wear a veil, but they should not be forced"

 

Equester,
forget about the beerhouse rambler. It is that you come to your insights, which are only partially correct, in a sweeping way that, sadly, seems not to be carried by an understanding of what we're up against.

As AMaster has lined out, not everything that is Islamist is 'bad', or violent. To think that is to repeat the US folly from the cold war to go after everything that looks remotely 'communist'. Right now they display a clear tendency to repeat that with everything remotely 'Islamist'. Like it or not, but Islamism, just like the Christian right in the US, represents a legitimate conservative point of view in the Muslim world. It does represent a large number of Muslims, and larger parts of the populations, and as such cannot be simply ignored. You have to separate conservative, maybe reactionary groups from the actual terrorists and their sympatisers.

Just deeming them all dismissively to be 'bad guys' who are driven by pure hate and nihilism leads nowhere, not only because it is incorrect. It leads to a dangerous misunderstanding of the enemy's worthiness, dedication, skill and tenacity.

 

And it actually aids the enemy. If the moderate types are being told by the extremists that democracy doesn't work, isn't compatible with Islam and so on, that's one thing. If the moderates are being told that by the extremists and the west, well, which way are they gonna turn?

If we want a fully fledged world war against Islam, complete with genocide and the like, we can probably arrange one. If we want low-intensity conflicts, even in Europe, we can have those too. If we want to maintain the status quo, with the bulk of the Muslim world oppressed and tension with/hatred toward the west simmering under the surface, periodically erupting in such festivities as Madrid, London, NYC, the Pentagon, well, we can keep things going this way for a few decades at least. But it would be just as easy to avoid such things, and I rather think we should.

The first step to avoiding the doomsday scenarios is to understand Islam. Pigeon-holing the religion, and its 1.4 billion adherents, as vile cannot possibly have positive consequences.

 

@AMaster: Although I don't agree with everything posted by you in this thread, I must say I fully agree with your last post. Good one!

 

trust me i know this, the main problem I see, is that people give them to much leash and over defends them, because its not political correct to disagree or to critisise Islam in any way.

secondly i see a scary tendensy to make special rules for muslims to try not to offend them and i honestly think its wrong. any form of special threatment, be that negative or possitive, of any group is wrong in my eyes and i honestly think it hinders integration when we do so.

i see womens right organisation say its okay that muslim women are forced to wear veils, because its part of thier culture.
honorkillings are on the rise, yet the womens rights organisations out of fear of sounding racist defends the muslims, who by being pasive allows this to happend

currently we have a seriuse surgestion making it a law, that all companies have prayer rooms for muslims.

i see people defending muslims who reacts violently when islam is critizised because its thier culture.

None of it is okay in my eyes, it might be thier culture and in the countries where thier believes is dominant, i cant and wont do anything to change it, that is up to the people who lives there. but i can not and will not tolerate any of it here or in any way defend it, out of fear of being called a racist.

 

Oh, I wholeheartedly agree that those poster wielders are bad guests. I once, only once, met a guy who was ranting with how degenerate we in the West all are. I told him that he in that case, if everything is so bad here, should seriously consider going home to his Islamic country where everything is so much better. Then I asked him how again his asylum request is going. He left angry.

And don't get me wrong, I'm not defending these folks. I try to line out why they act they way they do because I think it is important because it leads to a differentiated understanding. As I said, not everything Islamist is 'evil'. However, there are some 'evil' Islamists, who may be so irreconcilable that there is no choice but to deport or even arrest or kill them, depending on how dangerous they are.
But that is not the fate of the West's relationship to the entire Islamic world. To accept that nonsense of the clash of the cultures or the global threat by 'Islamo-facism' leads into escalation and excess.

And I'm all for prayer rooms for Muslims, if folks build a catholic and protestant, and just to be safe, an othodox chapel and a synagogue, too. It always ticks me off when folks make crude jokes about christianity, my religion. They wouldn't dare to make the same sort of jokes in the face of a Muslim or Jew for reasons of political correctness. It should never be an excuse to privilege minorities over the majority -- that is just silly and stupid -- anticipatory obedience to the demands of political correctness so to say, to escape at all costs the accusation to discriminate. We ought to not forget what and who we are and where we are from. I do not trust in the blessings of multiculturalism, except maybe in foreign policy (I'm against 'transforming' foreign cultures 'over there').