> To claim that the spate of Islamic-sponsored
> mayhem and upheaval has nothing to do with
> genuine Islam is not only counterfactual but
> wilfully astigmatic, if not perverse.

Oh, that's all "counterfactual" bunfart poppycock: Things always get weird when someone tries to tell others what the most authentic practice of their religion is... And Americans, whether twitchy atheists or anti-social loners, seem awfully eager to identify the most violent and disruptive expressions of faith as "genuine."

I do not understand this. I don't understand why you do it.

I don't understand why you're not similarly enthused about telling Christians that the most "genuine" expressions of their faith are based on warmaking and Crusades and indulgences and all the other mischief that peppers their history. Within a mile of your home and within ten hours of the typing of this sentence, hundreds of Christians will congregate for their weeklies, I am certain. You're unconcerned, and you ought to be.

That's what's going to happen to Islam, too.

The problem isn't Islam: There's nothing especially powerful about its texts or its practice. The problem is the disconnectedness and poverty of those who practice it.

The problem isn't Islam: There's nothing especially powerful about its texts or its practice. The problem is the disconnectedness and poverty of those who practice it. -- Crid [CridComment at gmail] at February 9, 2013 11:20 PM

That theory holds water in Afghanistan, Syria, and the other middle eastern countries.

If you take a look at most of the terrorists that are sent from where ever in the middle east to Europe or the U.S. it isn't a case of your huddled masses looking for a buck. They are generally intelligent people that have a cause. They would be upper middle class in their countries of origin.

The huddled masses that end up in Europe and are coming the states are a different story.

The second or third generation in countries that encourage assimilation may be okay. But if there is ghettoization or they are first generation they generally no tolerance. Examples abound from the Minnesota Muslim cabbies to the Arizona honor killing by Almaleki of his daughter.

I do not understand this.
Thats cause you are stupid, and intentionally go out of your way to avoid having ti THINK about it

I don't understand why you're not similarly enthused about telling Christians that the most "genuine" expressions of their faith are based on
Oh, but I do. As most christians feel it is their duty to 'save' me either thru direct proselytization, or ham-fisted 'moral' laws I figure the least I can do is reciprocate by explain how the asinine dogmas of their particular sects came to be.

I find it fucking hilarious how little people know about the faith they claim to have devoted their lives to

"The problem is the disconnectedness and poverty of those who practice it"

Drivel.

Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 9/11 hijackers came from a fabulously wealthy oil-welfare state. They all had satellite TVs and computers and cellphones.

Egypt is a very poor & backward country - 40% of Egyptians have to get by on $2 a day or less, and illiteracy is rampant. But Ayman al-Zawahiri is a doctor from a very prosperous family. Mohammed Atta was an architect from a well-off family who studied at Cairo University and the Technical University of Hamburg. So many poor & illiterate people to choose from, yet Egyptians involved in acts of terrorism against the West, like 9/11 or the Luxor Massacre in '97, are drawn almost exclusively from the ranks of the well-off & well-educated.

Afghanistan & Pakistan are terribly poor, but the commanders & mullahs in the Taliban are rich. They control the opium & heroin smuggling, they control the gem trade, they make millions in ransom from kidnappings. They ride around in big shiny SUVs while ordinary Afghans & Pakistanis are lucky if they can afford to ride donkeys. The brainwashed suicide bombers may be poor, but those who brainwash them aren't.

Poverty & backwardness don't cause terrorism and never have. Most of the poor & backward people on this planet are not Muslims, but it's Muslims who are blowing themselves up everywhere from Thailand to Timbuktu. If anything, poverty & backwardness prevent terrorism. People wandering around the desert with starving children & starving goats don't have time for terrorism. They're busy praying to Allah for their next meal. They don't have the luxury of lounging around all day dreaming up plans to hijack airliners & fly them into skyscrapers. Nobody was concerned about Muslims a hundred years ago because back then Muslims were so hopelessly poor & backward they couldn't terrorize the West even if they wanted to.

The problem isn't Islam: There's nothing especially powerful about its texts or its practice. The problem is the disconnectedness and poverty of those who practice it.

This certainly explains the spate of suicide attacks near Amish communities.

"expressions of their faith are based on warmaking and Crusades and indulgences"

Yeah, this reminds me of that just say no drug ad from the 80s. "Where did you learn this stuff? I learned it from watching you Dad!"

The Crusades I'm sure had nothing to do with Muslim raiders encroaching on Europe on its southern and eastern borders (and had been for 300 years by the first crusade). They lasted off and on for 200 years. Muslims were still attacking Europe 200 years later when they took Constantinople. 200+ years after that they were knocking on Vienna's door. The muslim "barbary pirates" in Tripoli were taking slaves from American ships in the 1800s. We sent the navy/marines.

Check out the book below:

Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy

> They all had satellite TVs and
> computers and cellphones.

Only a few were comfortable, and only Bin Laden was deeply wealthy; He was nonetheless an outcast from a family that had found its fortune in construction contracts with the West. More to the point, they were on the outside looking in. Whatever electronic trinkets they possessed didn't connect them to modernity in meaningful ways... Certainly not in social, sexual or career aspirations, which is where the action is for young men. They were being excluded from lives of dignity, and they knew it: The hillbilly preachers who'd clouded their minds with fantasies of violence had no better aspirations to offer. And even then, only the team leaders on each plane (the 'pilots') knew they were on a suicide mission. The grunts who'd been tormenting housewives & children in the rear of the aircraft were no less terrified of their impending impact than were their captives.

So, like, basically, your entire response affirms my argument:

> Egypt is a very poor & backward country

And an especially religious one.

> Poverty & backwardness don't cause terrorism
> and never have.

That's a stupid thing to say. Decency doesn't travel with wealth, but when primitives are shown lives of plenty to which they're given no entrée, they'll respond primitively. Backwardness is concisely the problem…

…Unless you're suggesting —

> People wandering around the desert with
> starving children & starving goats don't
> have time for terrorism.

…Unless you're suggesting that those who happen not to have tasted modernity's blessings should be prevented from doing so, because you don't want to pay the costs of enrolling them.

> Nobody was concerned about Muslims a hundred
> years ago because back then Muslims were so
> hopelessly poor & backward they couldn't
> terrorize the West even if they wanted to.

Christ, that is so fucking weird of you. Freakazoid wording, dude. What do you mean, "Nobody was concerned?" You're responding as if some ethereal agency from outer space were, in a new assignment, giving you responsibility for someone you don't like. Whaddayamean 'Mommy's going to have another baby'?

That's essentially racist. Harsh of me to say so, right? But you shouldn't be too hurt about it, because no other explanation for your (and Amy's) take on this is any more flattering.

Well, Kitten, we're now at a point where the disenfranchised poor can "terrorize the West whenever they [want] to".... You'll have noticed that their last effort brought out some of the worst in American character, deeply trimming our freedoms perhaps for the rest of the century.

And that's a shame, but bringing the last third of humanity into the larger global community must happen nonetheless. For their sake, the chore is both morally & practically inescapable. And for our own, we're not going to surrender our freedoms and blessed global opportunities merely to avoid pissing off the primitives. These things are true now in the Third World just as they were true "a hundred years ago"… Which, we should note, is a hardly the place on the dial to normalize your standards of human decency.

And BTW, my other theory about why you guys think about it in these terms... You prefer wordings in which you yourselves have special, personal insights into this totally novel threat in world affairs. It's self-aggrandizing. You want to be admired for your clever new ways to be afraid.

But the personalities causing these problems aren't exotic... They're mundane. They're what history's seen time and again, and certainly within the borders of the resplendent United States, which offers the exemplary solutions.

It's wrong for you to say that the Muslim is a special new (happens-to-be-swarthy!) Boogieman, with special books and special power in men's hearts.

No. Same shit, different century.

> This certainly explains the spate of suicide
> attacks near Amish communities.

Verily, modern Amish are centuries advanced over Islam in the deserts and islands; they branched hundreds of years later in human development, and are even now encircled by constabulary forces. Amos & Rebecca in Lancaster County, 2013, need not fear encroachment from marauding Mexicans.

The book Sio recommends (like Mark Steyn's) are fun and scary, but it remains the case that you can't run modern culture as you'd run a town of 300 in near starvation on the edge of some gawdawful desert. Modernity is going to win this thing.

Islam gets its freak on.

"That's essentially racist"

Islam is not a race. The Middle East is where civilization began. The first cities, the first writing, the first bronze & iron...the list is endless. Four thousand years ago, Egypt was #1, leading the way in every arena of human endeavor. Today, after 1300 years of Islam, it's not even #100 (113th on the Human Development Index). Whatever the reason for the wretched state of the Muslim world in general and the Arab world in particular, race is not it. Pulling out the race card is the last resort of losers.

Bunny, you're trying be superior to somebody, and it obviously can't be me. Given the parameters of the population under discussion, you can see how color might come to mind as an explanation for your spooked demeanor.

Furthermore, the "list" is anything but "endless." If you're trying to sell Islam as a distinct path in humanity's march toward progress — one with its own intimidating resources for discernment and correction, one deserving our respect and fear — you've got 500 years of splainin' to do. We can't name a single Islamic innovation in technology, medicine, transportation, agriculture, oceanography, astronomy, education, civic affairs, communications, or warfare in the last 5 centuries years. Factoid implications of this truth abound.

If we're going to fear primitive Islam, we'll fear its absorption of the West's command of powerful forces, whether seen in reckless airliners or in Tehran's corruption of nuclear tech... It's the verge of the primitive with our modernity that's upsetting to you.

So you speak as if you want to wipe away the verge. Now, we don't have to call that "racism" if you don't want to.

But there's nuthin' new under the sun.

Then why do you do it?

Crid,

Have you ever read any of the Stainless Steel Rat series?

If not, one of the stories of Jim Digriz's adventures included him being assigned to go help a corporation pacify the natives of a planet so the corporation could mine it for minerals without problems.

His first attempt was to arm the civilized and peaceful citizens that were on the corporation's side. When that didn't solve the problem he then armed the horde to the teeth that was trying to destroy the civilized side and let them overrun the civilized and peaceful citizens. The peaceful side was over run and killed or suppressed. The horde moved into the city and they were still acting as a horde. Then the horde leader realized that he now had to run things in a civilized manner for anything to work.

So Mohammed won the war so many years ago. He then moved his horde into the city. Then it devolved among him and his henchmen to create a civilized society. They obviously failed.

The rule of law does not really exist. If you are rich in a Muslim country it doesn't matter if you are gay, faithless to your spouses, a murderer (honor killings) and much else.

Yes, money can occasionally buy your freedom in the United States -- Simpson, Don King, and others. But that doesn't always work.

There is no excuse to let the barbarians take over and then try to fight for freedom. It is much better to tell the barbarians they have lost, and enforce it.

Who would dispute these points? Certainly not me.

Best case: Amy & co. are too eager to inspire enthusiasm for this fight with we've-never-faced-a-threat-like-this rhetoric.

Middle-case: Something less forgivable.

Worst-case: Something much less forgivable.

Thanks for being nice about the "last 5 centuries years" thing.

Keyboards, right?

Crid, if you can't make your case without screaming Racist! and piling on the ad hominem, you haven't got a case.

"We can't name a single Islamic innovation...in the last 5 centuries"

That's exactly the point I made, quite clearly. Muslims today are the descendants of the ancient people who invented civilization and led the way for all mankind for thousands of years. Mesopotamians were not an inferior race 5000 years ago, Iraqis are not an inferior race today. So why the terminal decline over the past several centuries? When the armies of Mohammed conquered the Middle East and North Africa, they inherited this fantastic legacy of civilization. Then Islam squandered and suffocated it till there was almost nothing left of it. Meanwhile, back in Christendom, the West slowly but surely rose from the Dark Ages to the Enlightenment, no matter how much the Church tried to stand in the way. That's where we're at. Primitive Islam has to die if Middle Easterners want to join the rest of us in the modern world. That's what I want.

> That's exactly the point I made

No, the point you made was…

> Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 9/11 hijackers
> came from a fabulously wealthy oil-welfare state

As if there were any such thing. As if a GDP half that of your own, and so preposterously clustered, could qualify as "fabulous." Mostly, you seem to long for the days when the dark ones enjoyed camaraderie at the rear of civilization's bus:

> People wandering around the desert with
> starving children & starving goats don't have
> time for terrorism. They're busy praying to
> Allah for their next meal. They don't have the
> luxury of lounging around all day dreaming up
> plans to hijack airliners & fly them into
> skyscrapers. Nobody was concerned about Muslims
> a hundred years ago because back then Muslims
> were so hopelessly poor & backward they
> couldn't terrorize the West even if they
> wanted to.

You said that shit... And I presume you meant it, in a way that only a Canadian — with his borders defended by the United States Navy — can mean something.

> That's what I want.

If only your nation was ready to offer something besides testicular rhetoric.

Martin, this has been going on for years. Why are you here? Why do you think you have something to share with people in the United States?

And for the rest of you (AHEM) who're so eager to spazz about Islam... I've been asking for years, and no one has even acknowledged the question, let alone answered it: What's so special about Islam compared to all the other hillbilly faiths civilization has had to overwhelm?

Read this book. It wasn't that long ago that Amy's beloved French countryside was covered with similarly illiterate and stubborn buffoons.

This is not new. It's ugly, it always is, but not new.

Or is your need to tut-tut too refined?

[Crid:] The problem is the disconnectedness and poverty of those who practice [Islam].

That sounds about right.

However, African-Americans faced, until within my memory, pervasive disconnectedness and widespread poverty. Yet vanishingly few became atavistic killers. For that matter, contemporary non-Islamic Africans, every bit as disconnected and impoverished as their Islamic counterparts, aren't found on terrorist watchlists anywhere.

So it seems disconnectedness and poverty can't be the whole answer.

In 1988, communism seemed like enslaving half the world until forever. Now it is nearly impossible to explain to my kids.

Maybe we just need to mark off time until Iran implodes.

In early 2012, we learned that there had been multiple mass-murderers working in South-Central Los Angeles in the 1980s. Some were targeting hookers, but some were not... And it didn't matter, because the statistics got lost on an LAPD desk. Somewhere. All eventually captured, and I'm not sure that's all of the total, were black, as were their victims. I'd say that was pretty freakin' atavistic, and also that it was pretty freakin' disconnected from the surrounding culture.

In global affairs, I agree with Barnett: Disconnectedness defines danger. When the Sars outbreak happened in the early part of the last decade, the world moved quickly to isolate China. China moved even faster to fix the problem, because they knew they couldn't afford to be isolated. Today's travelers through Hong Kong airport, I am told, have their temperature taken by remote detection as they walk through the terminal. If there are problems, you get, detained/slash treated, and God only knows the difference.

We do not want Iran to implode.

We do not want them to implode for their own sake: They gave us chess and shiraz.

We do not want them to implode for our sake: They will not go quietly, but with missiles (human and ordnance) flying in several directions, including into some of the most delicate and some of the most beloved cultures on our planet.

Today's travelers through Hong Kong airport, I am told, have their temperature taken by remote detection as they walk through the terminal.

That is true of every airport in Asia (or at least the dozen or so I go to).

We do not want [Iran] to implode for our sake ...

Bad word choice. When Iran is no longer a theocracy, a lot of things we (IMHO) now see as intractable problems will go away. The trick will be to reach that end without imploding.

Most people retain religious belief for communitarian reasons -- the pieties give them a reason. That those pieties don't stand up particularly well to rigorous analysis is beside the point (which Amy and other militant atheists should take on board).

However. That minority which sees their religion as a fact system -- and almost that entire minority is Islamic -- will have an increasingly difficult time reconciling material reality with Allah's will.

For fanaticism to continue, a continuing supply of fanatics is required.

That's why I choose to be optimistic.

And for the rest of you (AHEM) who're so eager to spazz about Islam... I've been asking for years, and no one has even acknowledged the question, let alone answered it: What's so special about Islam compared to all the other hillbilly faiths civilization has had to overwhelm?

Crid, dozens of people have answered this question, you just have a disturbing habit of ignoring that which you dont not which to see and then turning around and claiming not only that you never saw it, but that none ever even bothered to answer

Not one.

Why is it China is ignored whenever human civilization is discussed?

Mohammed was an illiterate, thieving, raping, murdering warlord from the Dark Ages who succeeded in inventing his own religion with himself as Prophet and spreading it across a big portion of the globe, where it endures to this day. Muslims are supposed to follow his example in everything they say and do. They did, and fell further & further behind the rest of civilization. The further behind the modern world they get, the more some of them want to go back in time to the glory days of Islam, when Muslims followed strict Islamic law, when they obeyed their Prophet's command to fight all men until they bow down to Islam, when Muslims were the winners and dreamed of ruling the world.

The conflicts between Christianity and modernity have been smoothed over by the fact that the West has been the world's leading civilization since the Renaissance. Because the Muslim world has been in decline for so long and is so far behind, the conflict between Islam & modernity looms much larger.