Reply With QuoteJeez, CindySue is such a bleeding heart liberal! :lol:
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"Below is an editorial from Sunday's edition of a Florida newspaper located in Florida's panhandle. Someone who reads this paper thought that the editorial was worth a wider distribution and retyped it to send out over the Internet.
Phil Lucas, the paper's Executive Editor, wrote this article published in The News Herald, Panama City, Florida, Sunday April 4, 2004. His email address is [email protected]. The News Herald web site is found at http://www.newsherald.com/
Up Against Fanaticism
By Phil Lucas, Executive Editor, Panama City New Herald
If straight talk of savagery offends you, if you believe in ethnic and gender diversity but not diversity of thought, or if you think there is an acceptable gray area between good and evil, then turn to the funny pages, and take the children, too. This piece is not for you.
We published pictures Thursday of burnt American corpses hanging from an Iraqi bridge behind a mob of grinning Muslims. Some readers didn't like it.
Mothers said it frightened their children. A woman who works with Muslim physicians thought it might offend or endanger them.
Well, we sure don't want to frighten, offend or endanger anybody, do we? That's just too much diversity to handle. I mean, somebody might get hurt.
We could fill the newspaper every morning with mobs of fanatical Muslims. They can't get along with their neighbors on much of the planet: France, Chechnya, Bosnia, Indonesia, Spain, Morocco, India, Tunisia, Somalia, etc. etc. etc. Can anybody name three ongoing world conflicts in which Muslims are not involved? Today, where there is war, there are fanatical Muslims.
We might quibble about who started what conflicts, but look at the sheer number of them. One thing is sure. Muslim killers started the one we are in now when they slaughtered more that 3,000 people, including fellow Muslims, in New York City.
Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state and feckless appeaser who helped get us into this mess, said last week Muslims still resent the Crusades. Well, Madam Albright, if Westerners were not such a forgiving people, we might resent them too.
Let's recap the Crusades. Muslims invaded Europe, and when they reached sufficient numbers, they imposed their intolerant religion upon Westerners by force. Christian monarchs drove them back and took the battle to their homeland. The fight lasted a couple of centuries, and we bottled them up for 1,000 years.
Now, a millennium later, Muslims have expanded forth again. Ask France. Ask England. Ask Manhattan. Two-and-a-half years ago fanatical Muslims laid siege to us. We woke up to the obvious. Our president announced it would be a very long war, then took the battle to the Islamic homeland. Sound Familiar?
Let's consider the concept of a "long war." Last time it was 200 years, give or take. Anybody catch Lord of the Rings? You know, the good part, the part that wasn't fiction, the part that drew us to the books and movies because it was the truest part: the titanic struggle between good and evil, between freedom and enslavement, between the individual and the state, between the celebration of life and the worshipping of death.
That's the fight we are in, and it never ends. It just has peaks and valleys.
There may be a silent majority of peaceful Muslims - some live here - but that did not save 3,000 people in the World Trade Center, the million gassed and butchered in the Middle East, the tens of thousands slain in Eastern Europe and Asia, the hundreds blown to bits in the West Bank and Spain, or the four Americans shot, burned and hung like sausage over the Euphrates as a fanatical minority of Muslims did the joyful dance of death.
Maybe we are so tolerant, we are so bent on "diversity," we are so nonjudgmental, we are so wrapped up in our six-packs and ballgames that our brains have drained to our bulbous behinds. Maybe we're so addled on Ritalin we wouldn't know which end of a gun to hold. Maybe we need a new drug advertised on TV every three minutes, one that would help us grow a backbone.
It doesn't take a Darwin to figure out that in this world the smartest, the fastest, the strongest, and the most committed always win. No exceptions.
Look at your spouse and children. Look at yourself in the mirror. Then look at the pictures from the paper last Thursday. You better look at them. Those are the people out to kill you.
Who do you think will win? You? Or them? Think you can take your ball and go home and they will leave you alone? Read a little history. Start with last week, last month, last year, and every other year back for half a century. Then go back a thousand years. Nobody hides from this fight.
Like it or not, that's the way it was and that's the way it is. But many Americans don't get it. That's why we published those pictures.
If they jarred you off the sofa, if they offend! ed you, if they scared your children and sent you into a rage at mass murderers or heartless editors, then I say, it's a start."
Jeez, CindySue is such a bleeding heart liberal! :lol:
I realize that ignorance is rampant is stupidity is common... but even so, I'm still amazed that anyone would write such an ill-informed piece of trash. And I have a sinking feeling that the incorrect "facts" expressed (both about history and about Muslim culture) are widely believed.
Does anyone really believe Cindy's actually a woman?
Wow. Phil Lucas is a retard.
Number of 11/9 hijackers from Iraq: 0One thing is sure. Muslim killers started the one we are in now when they slaughtered more that 3,000 people, including fellow Muslims, in New York City.
What's with the crazy canuk date format? I bet you put lines in your "z"s and "7"s don't ya? :wink:Originally Posted by MarchHare
I'm not sure.
How do you tell if a troll is female?
Runs around with a guy named Shrek and a donkey?
Umm, why wouldn't she be?
Standard Internet protocol. Assume male unless given evidence otherwise. Note that a name is not evidence.
But what is the purpose of bringing it up in this thread in the first place?
The mind boggles at the inaccuracy of this. The Muslims at the time of the Crusades didn't invade Europe --- before the First Crusade, there was general agitation by the Pope and others to drive Muslims from the Biblical Holy Land, and to get a whole lot of land and loot in the process. That Crusade succeeded, but after a hundred years or so Saladin took the land back for the Muslims; all subsequent Crusades failed dismally to uproot them. The 11th Crusade (IIRC) soon gave up all pretense of being a holy mission; the Crusader army never even reached the Holy Land, and sacked Christian Byzantium instead, looting freely and setting up one of their commanders as the new Emperor. I'm glad to see that the author considers modern Israel to be the Muslims' homeland, though. Quite enlightened of him.
(edit: it was the 4th Crusade, not the 11th)
This author seems to be conflating the Crusades with the European wars against the Ottoman Empire during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. But the Ottomans weren't "driven back to their homeland" --- far from it; they kicked ass for hundreds of years, and only fell at the end of World War I. And they weren't intolerant, either; they never forced conversion, and they allowed the practice of all religions within their borders. They far outshone contemporary Christians in this regard (and many modern Christians too, if the truth be told).
21st-century American flag-wavers just don't seem to be willing to see Muslims as anything other than a single malevolent, swarthy mass. Al Qaeda, Palestinians, Baathists, medieval Saracens, and the Great Turk? Same thing. By that logic, David Khoresh, the IRA, the Third Reich, Charlemagne, and Napoleon are all the same thing. Fucking stupid.
Tough call exactly, but it seems McCullough was looking at the post as basically proposing a global war against Muslims, and speculating that a woman would be unlikely to propose such a war.
There has been implied speculation in the past about the same thing for related reasons, I assume McCullough made it explicit in this thread due to the ratcheting up of the rhetoric. I see your Muslim Paranoia and raise you one Gender Challenge!
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Being a woman gets you special treatment here (albeit not a huge amount), so its far from inconceivable that someone would take on a woman's persona in order to assist their arguments, especially if those arguments are otherwise difficult to present.
Whatever grains of truth might be buried in there are overwhelmed by slant. Islam -did- believe in spreading it's faith by force in the early days and -did- practice forced conversion. Well, you had a choice. Convert or become a slave. At the same time it's also true that in different places and different eras Islam was demonstrably more tolerant and openminded that Christianity was in general. Lumping it all together, as this author does, to make an incredibly warped representation is just substituting testosterone for brains. I think he's pretty much counting on shaming six-pack and ballgame mentalities to back him up and pick up some guns. I doubt he'd get much of anybody else.
That's an awesome point. I didn't even realize I was guilty of that mentality until you pointed out the absurdity of it. While I don't agree in any way with the crap in that article, I realized I was guilty of often lumping all Muslims past/present/future together when I think about this kind of issue. Dammit, now I'm going to have to go get more educated.
Yes --- the medieval age was medieval all around, and your description is more complete than mine. I only meant to attack the author's implication that the Muslims invaded a peaceable and tolerant Europe in order to convert by the sword, and to point out that the Crusaders' motives and practices (like sewing prisoners of war into pigskins) hardly entitle modern Christians to feel outraged or superior.
Last fall I read an interesting history of the Great Siege of Malta in 1565 --- the Ottoman fleet at the height of its power, repelled by the Knights of Malta from their rocky stronghold. The author (British, writing in the 1950s or 60s) played up the exciting aspects of the story, but it was abundantly clear how similar the two sides were. Both funded themselves by piracy (practiced mostly on civilians) and manned their galleys with slaves from the other side. The Turks beheaded some Knights and floated their bodies past the main Maltese fortress, and later the Knights responded to a demand of surrender by beheading their prisoners and firing the heads out of cannon into the Turkish camp. The occasional speeches about Christ, love, and brotherhood all rang a little hollow.
(Note: All three questions are honest questions, I'm not trying to be a snarky bastard and score points.)
Caveat: I need to do a hell of a lot more reading up on era of history.
However, didn't "the Muslims" invade the Iberian Peninsula and threaten to push in Gaul ~715AD? Or is that not considered part of Europe?
Can you name the nations where modern Christians forbid practicing other religions?
That's significantly pre-Crusades (the First Crusade was A.D. 1095-1099).However, didn't "the Muslims" invade the Iberian Peninsula and threaten to push in Gaul ~715AD? Or is that not considered part of Europe?
I don't really know if the Moors forced conversion in Spain...but I do know that when the Catholics reasserted control they banned the practice of Islam, Judaism, and the Albigensian heresy, and tortured and killed anyone who refused to convert or who was suspected of continuing to practice in secret.
I see that that is what my sentence says, and you're right, there's no such nation. (The Vatican? Never mind.) When I added that parenthetical thought to my sentence, I was thinking of some people I know and some editorials I read who were calling for Christian conquest after 9/11, who insist that the US is "a Christian nation" and therefore must have Christian laws, etc. But all that's way off point, so I retract it. Thanks.Can you name the nations where modern Christians forbid practicing other religions?
Please don't get me wrong: I'm no friend of Islam and no gratuitous basher of the West. I'm just frustrated with the sloppy or fabricated history that gets dragged into political arguments these days, and with the unshakeable faith in the good guy/bad guy roles that many people have despite all evidence to the contrary.
The war that needs to be fought is a war between modernity/liberalism and tribalism/fundamentalism. The beauty of democracy is that extremist views tend to have to tone down the rhetoric to get any chance at swaying the majority. This is something the neocons have right - a democratic middle east is less likely to spawn radical Islamicism. As it is Muslim fundamentalists are either tolerated or encouraged by many states as tools for channelling popular outrage against government excesses. Something Marx had sorta right, religion is the opiate of the masses. Of course it can also be the PCP of the masses too. That's what you see happening with Saudi Arabian Wahabism - many sects and groups have just gone off the reservation and stopped taking orders from the House of Saud.
In America, we have the same kind of folks in the guise of the Christian Conservative movement. The main difference being the leadership of these groups has to get its people elected rather than appointed (in most cases) and elections require a base outside the following. They aren't bombthrowers like radical Islamic fundamentalists only because the right stimulae aren't there - a sense of hopelessness, repression, persecution and resentment. We've got a healthy political and economic system that short-circuits most violent behavior. Even so radicals do bomb clinics and stage vitriolic and violent demonstrations against gays and women's rights movements. They're a distinct minority that even the Christian Conservative movement is divided about but that self-righteous outrage and a sense of purpose that supercedes the laws and science of mankind is part and parcel of the package.
If there were only more moderate rationalist leaders in the Muslim world that aren't corrupt and self-interested, and if America's reputation wasn't so badly damage by decades of neglect and abuse in the middle east, the natural alliance should be between Arab and Middle Eastern reformers, including moderate Israelis, and American moderates and liberals. The water is so poisoned right now that what's really taking shape is a war between fundamentalist camps (Zionist-Likud, Christian Conservatives and Saudi funded Wahabi fundamentalists) , publically chaffed by PR and disingenous political pronouncements, and encouraged out of political opportunism or cultural chavinism by others.
Bush has to go and take his Ashcrofts and Rumsfelds and Cheneys with him. Rationality has never been more necessary in our history as a nation than it is right now.
Are you sure about the forced conversion, because I'm quite sure that it's against some fundamental principle of Islam. I think that they actually have to respect the "people of the book" or something (i.e Christians and Jews). That's why they only added a tax for the Christians in most territories, but I suppose there might have been some who didn't care about this and threatened with slavery.
Like the fundamental principles of any religion has ever kept all of it's practictioners from violating them.
Of course, but it's a strange kind of principle to violate. To violate a principle that says that you shouldn't kill or steal could be to the advantage of the one doing it. To violate a principle of forced conversion is not obviously beneficial, especially if you could collect more taxes from them if they didn't.
Erik is right... the Muslims rarely practiced "Convert or die." Usually, it was "Convert, die, or pay higher taxes." To directly answer Squirrel Killer's question, I know that this was the policy throughout the Iberian peninsula wherever (and whenever) the Muslims ruled.
I think "Convert, die, or pay higher taxes" only applied to people of the book. (Christians and Jews.) If I remember correctly, the Muslims were right bastards to Hindus in India during the Mughal Empire. But my Indian history is pretty shaky, so I don't know the details.
To some in the U.S., paying higher taxes would be the worst atrocity of all. :wink:
Slavery was a lucrative trade in many Islamic states, even the most enlightened ones, since there was Islam. That's just how things were. You get slaves from fighting wars. Unlike, say, the Romans the Muslims were forced by religion to offer an out - conversion. Slavery is still effectively practiced in some African Muslim states if without official sanctions. And as been previously noted, the battles between the Knights of Malta and the Corsairs were as much or more about trade than there were religion. Both sides practiced forms of slavery. The Barbary pirates the U.S. went to war with were also accustomed to selling captives into slavery. It goes way back.
You're completely right, Brian. I forgot about slavery. (Even though you specifically mentioned it in one of your earlier posts.) During conquest, some Muslim nations enslaved non-Muslims. This policy created a lot of false converts to Muslim (you couldn't enslave your fellow Muslim) who re-converted to Christianity after they escaped to Christiandom.
However, as far as I know, slavery was only allowed during (or immediately after) conquest. I'm pretty sure that Christians & Jews living within Islamic countries didn't have to fear being randomly enslaved.
edit- by "conquest" I mean any kind of warfare
Oddly the majority of Muslims today come from a somewhat more peaceful method of conquest. The Sultanates of Brunei and Indonesia seemed to have propigated Islam after conversion by contact through Mugal or Arab traders - although surely some of this came by conquering the lingering Hindu kingdoms of the area.
The great irony of the world today is that Islamic dialog is being driven by an incredibly small population of purists when the vast majority of Muslims practise in a kind of hybrid culture.
It sort of beckons the principle of 'divide and conquer'. Prop up South East Asian Islam as a counter weight to Wahhabi Saudi Islam.
I am now, want a date?
Does anyone believe that Jason is not a latent homo? ("Not that there is anything wrong with that.")
Attack my thinking and beliefs, if you will, but personal attacks don't bring much to the discussion, IMHO.
Right. You're the one super right-wing flight sim fan who posts this ridiculous little girl icon who *isn't* a sock puppet.
http://www.layover.com/lounge/Layover's+Lounge/88296.html
Oh, and a trucker too, apparently.
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