Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Whether Muslim fear Islamic extremism in their own countries, do they feel the same way about others?

Rabid leftist Andrew Belonsky's been going about once more trying to resort to clever tactics for apologizing for Islam, this time resorting to the defense that Muslims are concerned too. He begins:
We know by now that Republican leaders have a habit of Islam-bashing, and that Herman Cain of course takes the cake.

The definitely-won’t-win presidential candidate called a potential Tennessee mosque “an abuse of our freedom of religion,” and said he wouldn’t hire a Muslim for his cabinet, though later changed that word to “terrorist,” as if terrorists and Muslim people are one and the same.
So first we have the classic separation of Islam and jihad (or maybe Belonsky doesn't think there's such a thing as jihad either). But while not all terrorists are Muslim, the Koran, which I doubt Belonsky has ever bothered to study, is just what teaches it, and there's at least 164 verses calling for jihad, including Sura 2:190-191, which is:
[2.190] ...fight in the way of Allah with those who fight with you...[2.191] And kill them wherever you find them, and drive them out from whence they drove you out, and persecution is severer than slaughter, and do not fight with them at the Sacred Mosque until they fight with you in it, but if they do fight you, then slay them; such is the recompense of the unbelievers.
More at the link. But still don't expect Belonsky or his ilk to ever recognize that there's cause for concern, nor that there is such a thing as a bad religion. This terrible pseudo-journalist goes on with:
The GOP’s other White House hopefuls aren’t much better: when he was Minnesota’s governor, Tim Pawlenty canceled a state-run mortgage program for Muslims, and a spokesperson later bragged, “As soon as Gov. Pawlenty became aware of the issue, he personally ordered it shut down.”

The issue, in case you couldn’t tell, is that the program specifically helped Muslims.
To the apologia dummy: we can tell, and it's that this was something - sharia banking - that would only help advance sharia law, more of which can be read about here and why it's dangerous. Why, what if it's a form of socialism, which in fact is pretty much what Islam began to advocate very early in its existence? Alas, people like Belonsky are doubtlessly hooked on socialism as bad as can be. Pawlenty and company were absolutely right to shut down the program, which could quite possibly have a disastrous effect on Minnesota's economy.
Elsewhere in the party, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum signed their John Hancocks to a social conservative “marriage pledge” that demanded candidates actively oppose Sharia law, a synonym for “terrorism,” while Newt Gingrich compared the “Ground Zero” Mosque’s organizers to Nazis and fretted that his grandchildren could grow up in a dystopia “dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”
Boy, is this Belonsky so stupid! As mentioned before, he clearly will not read the Koran.
These rote arguments, all of which rest on the assumption that all Muslims are terrorists, create barriers not only between non-Muslim Americans and Muslim Americans, but also between Americans and the Middle East, a land the GOP wants voters to believe is populated solely by suicide bombers looking to come here and blow us all to Kingdom Come.
And he wants everyone to believe that all conservatives literally hate all practitioners of Islam, when it's the religion itself and the monster who founded it whom we abhor. Of course, one has to ask whether someone who worships a religion founded by a monster like Muhammed is something sane to do, and whether this should be just overlooked. If the Koran teaches violence, and children and adults alike can be influenced the wrong way by it, that's why the practice must be opposed.
These right wing contentions want to create the illusion that Muslim-majority nations are so foreign, so backward, so inhuman that they must either be destroyed or avoided, depending on whether the political winds blow toward intervention or isolation.
Even if they don't officially govern by sharia via the government, there's still much violence committed in the streets of many Islamic-led countries, against both infidels and their own, courtesy of the Koran's indoctrine.
And the scary thing is that they work: about half of Americans “have an unfavorable view of Islam,” according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll, and “31 percent think mainstream Islam encourages violence against non-Muslims.”

A Pew Research poll put out today also reports that 69 percent of the United States, and majorities of Western nations as a whole, are worried about Islamic extremism. This fear and Republican messaging have a symbiotic relationship: they feed into and off of one another.
Again, Belonsky needs to read the Koran, but he won't, and won't present any of its most violent verses for the audience to study either. This is actually good news that many Americans are waking up and understand the threat posed by Islamofascism.

And here's where Belonsky then decides to try and use concern in Islamic countries as a defense:
Curiously, the same Pew poll shows that people living in Muslim-majority nations are also concerned about Islamic extremism:

More than seven-in-ten Palestinian and Lebanese Muslims are worried about Islamic extremists in their countries, as are most Muslims in Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey. For Muslims, the most common concern about extremism is that it is violent, although in both Egypt and the Palestinian territories the top fear is that extremism could divide the country.

Aside from getting to the core of why terrorism works — whether terrorism be religious or otherwise, it strikes widespread fear — the similarity of numbers between the Western and Muslim regions shows that our populations have more in common than politicians would like us to believe.
Some points: 1]they could be voicing what's called taqqiya, which is a word for deception, 2]there's no telling if they abhor Islamofascism in the US and Europe. In fact, according to the following from the Pew article:
...Muslims in predominantly Muslim nations are as inclined to say relations are generally bad as they were five years ago. And, as in the past, Muslims express more unfavorable opinions about Christians than Americans or Europeans express about Muslims.
In that case, one can only wonder just how concerned they are about attacks on non-Muslims.
The right wants Americans to cower in fear over Islamic extremism as if we’re the only people in the world who should be concerned. With the majority of terror attacks taking place in the Middle East, we should remember that all humans, rather than oppositional Western or Muslim “worlds,” have something in common: anxiety over the future.
Oh dear. And Belonsky wants everybody to be scared of conservatives and think they're nothing but one-dimensional warmongers and conspirators. And hasn't he heard about the horror caused by Malik Hasan in the name of jihad? Tsk tsk tsk. He concludes by saying:
And facing those collective fears together could be just the trick to overcoming the xenophobic rhetoric and policy we see every day, because first step in resolving today’s conflict isn’t aversion and bigotry, it’s seeing one’s supposed nemesis as, quite simply, human.
Including the xenophobia and violence against non-Muslims in Islamic countries? Sadly, I doubt he'll ever even bring it up. For someone as awful as him, it would be too un-PC.

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