Khross wrote:
Diamondeye:
Right, because somehow studying the history of various parts of the world from non-Western viewpoints is invalid. Your opinions and understanding of the Middle East are offensive, misguided, and generally wrong. However, you won't consider the fact that whatever you've been told is horribly misguided. We've had this discussion before, particularly when you were using a racial slur as if it had no negative connotations and refused to accept that it was indeed racist.
No Khross, we never had this discussion before, because I didn't use a racial slur. You took a term I used, assigned a meaning of a racial slur to it, and then got all offended about it as if you knew precisely what it meant and anything to the contrary couldn't possibly be true because you said so.
You, more to the point, are the one with ideas about the Middle East that are misguided, offensive, and wrong, and you seem to have come by them due to some bizarre need to look at the situation with the presumtion that the Middle Eastern view of itself is inherently fair and equitable, while any Western view is "propaganda." I suggest you stop studying their literature not because it shouldn't be studied, but because you seem to take any idea that contradicts mainstram thought in
our society as necessarily more accurate simply because it is contradictory, even when that idea does not, in fact, square with actual events.
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Islam is not responsible for the fact that most of the post-colonial world never got the opportunity to establish its independence. Islam is NOT responsible for the fact that British Empire and the United States have both explicitly and inadvertently done some pretty heinous things over the last 150 years. And, most importantly, Islam is not responsible for Western cultural imperialism.
This is a pretty meaningless statement, since no one is claiming that a religion can directly act as a force to cause historical events. I stated already that Islam acts as a catalyst when combined with resentments from these events (and it does) not that it causes them directly and that we do not see the same aggression from non-muslim areas subject to similar conditions.
I should also point out that the fact of the matter is that no one in history has clean hands. Warlike behavior has been part and parcel of Islamic areas since Islam's inception and their "victimization" has been a result of them falling behind technologically, not as a result of them being especially victimized over anyone else. Moreover, U.S. presence in the Middle East was really pretty limited prior to WWII. You may want to look up the frequency of naval visits to the Persian Gulf, for example.
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We can debate the responses of certain groups, militant and otherwise, all day long. But your hasty generalizations and gross otherification of Islam (calling it a catalyst for violence and terrorism) are just patently incorrect.
I'm neither otherizing nor making a hasty generalization. Those are simply facts based on the
gross difference in violent religious activity between Islam and every other religion and based on the history of Islam tracing all the way back to Muhammed and his convenient revelation of passages justifying aggression when he found it convenient to attack certain people.You may want to familiarize yourself with the Battle of Badr, and Qu'ran 22:39-40.
You might also find it convenient to stop assuming I just get my ideas from whatever talking head comes on TV and says "Islam is baaad, mmmkay?" simply because they aren't sufficiently non-mainstream from yours. You might also want to think about how likely I am to give you anything other than short shrift when you claim my ideas are misguided and offensice with no reason whatsoever to think that's the case, and make spurious claims of racism.
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