[quote]RBlue wrote:
<<< Tiribulus, perhaps these clients you attempted to speak to were uncomfortable speaking openly and honestly with you, since they don’t really know you. Maybe you phrased the question in such a way that it made them uncomfortable.
Speaking from my own personal experience, I have several Muslim friends, some living here in Canada, some from the UAE who I met while at university. They all denounce religious extremism of any sort.
On Canadian radio programs (for instance on CBC radio one), over the past several years, I have heard numerous interviews with Muslim scholars who denounce the violence. Forgive me for not recalling their names.
I am pretty sure there are a ton of people in the hot zones who denounce the violence. However, they’re a little busy dealing with poverty, murdered loved ones, etc, so they’re not jumping to speak with the media.
I just did a quick google search:
-Here is a group of Muslims condemning terrorism:
http://www.cair.com/AmericanMuslims/AntiTerrorism.aspx
-Anti-terrorism fatwa:
Not so silent.
[/quote]
See, now you make my point which Chushin has pretty much correctly conveyed.
When a group is reported as a violent “Christian” terror outfit only the most rigid God haters like FightingIrish actually attempt to connect that with anything resembling Christianity and I suspect even he knows better. It goes in one ear and out the other as they watch their TV while they instinctively write these clowns off as following some screwball painfully forced interpretation of some passage or other. Why?
Because people claiming Christianity are everywhere. Churches are everywhere. Orthodox Christian denominations while varying widely on the less essentials ALL agree on the central defining doctrines which overtly condemn any attempt at converting an individual or society by force and in fact if they are Christian at all know this is an impossibility. They can bury you in Bible and accepted tradition pushing all the way back to the councils of the first 3 centuries where this is unmistakably the case. They will further unhesitatingly denounce any and all historical examples to the contrary as by definition anti Christian regardless of who or what church was perpetrating them. Loud public denunciations of groups like this by Christians are not even required because people already know better.
In the case of Islam you need to search to find “OK, here’s a couple Muslim groups denouncing terrorism”. Even the fact that violent jihad is in dispute anywhere should be very telling. My studies taught me that Islam at it’s roots IS theocracy by conquest and modern versions attempting to redefine that are apostate impurities at best and would not have been owned by Muhammad himself
Yes, there are “Muslim” groups who denounce violent jihad and attempt to live peacefully, but they are rewritten distortions of the foundation of the religion they claim. I cannot find the detnews.com article now, but there was a guy (I cannot remember his name either) who visited Dearborn a few years ago for the purpose of researching the state of Islam in America for a book if I remember right. What better place? He spent a week here. This guy also reported much to his dismay that he found exactly one person with Islamic credentials that would denounce terror and it was a woman who would only do it under strict anonymity. Everybody pointed him to one or other of several clerics here, but they wouldn’t see him. I am not making this up.
It requires willful self deception to escape the conclusion that the absence of an established global voice rejecting terrorism as an accepted method in Islam is explained by tacit acceptance at least if not active participation.
It took everything I had to restrain myself from your first post, but I just knew “university” was going to come into play here. The very last place on Earth I would go to learn history anymore is most North American universities. Or at least let’s say many of their departments.
Oh yeah, I assure you I can be very disarming and innocuously tactful if need be. In every case I simply invited them as friends to join me in rejecting “extremism”. Christians would do it with a group like this thread was started about without a moments hesitation and may even be offended that it be so much as considered possible they would do otherwise.
I promise you I do not go out of my way to find things to persecute religions I disagree with over. Quite the contrary, but whatever your cuddly feelings about your friends, proponents of this religion want to kill us, they ARE killing us and until I see a very loud comprehensive rejection of everything related to this alleged extremism and a very public concerted effort to eliminate it, I’d much prefer they practice elsewhere.