[Dean's World] Dean: Important Updates

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Posted by Dean:
Important Updates
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1159730862.shtml


   David Bernstein [1]note some idiot lunatic fringe muslim whackjobs'
   latest threats, and then issues a series of brilliant updates: UPDATE:
   By the way, I don't think that Islam, as such, is necessarily more
   prone to violence and intolerance than other religions; my own
   European Jewish ancestors overall likely suffered far more under
   Christian regimes than my wife's Iraqi Jewish ancestors suffered under
   Muslim regimes. But the radical, fascistic Islamist movement is to
   Islam as the radical fascistic "Christian Identity" movement is to
   Christianity--a perversion of the religion in the name of a
   supremacist, violent ideology. [Of course, modern Christianity is much
   more cuddly than modern Islam, but that's a result of secular
   ideologies, such as separation of church and state, taking hold, thus
   privatizing religion, not because politicized Christianity is
   inherently cuddly. For example, it was only one hundred or so years
   ago that the Tsars stopped kidnapping ten year-old Jewish boys and
   sending them to the army for twenty years in order to Christianize
   them, 150 or so years ago that the Pope enthusiastically endorsed
   taking an Italian Jewish child away from his parents because his
   Catholic nanny had secretly converted him, and only a couple hundred
   years earlier that the Thirty Years War fought in the name of
   sectarian Christianity slaughtered a good percentage of the European
   population.]

   FURTHER UPDATE: My understanding is that modern Islamism, at least its
   Sunni variation, descends from Muslim Brotherhood ideology, and that
   the Brotherhood was itself modeled on European fascist movements, thus
   "fascistic" is an appropriate moniker.

   There was a time in world history when Islamic societies were
   relatively advanced and tolerant, and Christian societies relatively
   backward, violent, and intolerant. Religions with long written and
   oral traditions can be used and misused in any number of ways by those
   who seek to use them for political ends. One commenter mentioned the
   late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose movement in Israel was indeed an
   analogue to Christian Identity. I suppose it's wrong to say that
   fascistic Islamism is a "perversion" of Islam, because there is no
   such thing as "official" Islam. Rather, it's one way of interpreting
   Islam for those who seek to use it to political ends, but, as a
   practical matter, it's no more an inherent element of Islam than the
   Inquisition was an inherent element of Christianity. And I get
   impatient with those who quote the Koran. You can quote the Torah and
   discover that Judaism is a genocidal religion (at least with regard to
   the inhabitants of the Land of Israel) that also demands, among other
   things, executing anyone who violates the Sabbath. And indeed you can
   find a lunatic fringe that still believes in such things, but the
   mainstream of the religion has evolved well beyond this. Oral
   tradition (which itself eventually gets written) has thousands of way
   to accommodate ancient religious dictate to modern liberal society, if
   one is inclined to do it. One is left to hope that fascistic versions
   of Islamic interpretation will lose out largely through internal
   rejection, and not, as may seem more likely today, through military
   confrontation with the West.
   Gee, maybe Bernstein understands the simple notion that you can find
   justifications for horrible behavior in most religious texts if you
   try hard enough. This appears to be beyond the Islamophobes out there,
   who call such logic "tu quoque" rather than simply acknowledging its
   simple truth.

   You do not "debate" with what their own faith teaches. You ask them
   what their faith teaches and how they interpret it. And you don't call
   them liars by quoting obscure medieval doctrines like "taqqiya" as if
   that makes you a brilliant scholar (as opposed to what it really makes
   you: a slander artist).

References

   1. http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_09_24-2006_09_30.shtml#1159668954