Islam is never at fault for anything. Non-Muslims create fear of Muslims. The blogosphere is against Islam. Muslims are peaceful, why can't you see that? Islam is misunderstood. Sharia is too complicated to figure out.
This is what we are to believe regarding those who use the texts and tenets of the worlds second-largest religion to murder innocents. This is the article below and what it purports.
This is Islam.
From The Times of Trenton March 12 by Dr. Fakhruddin Ahmed
This is what we are to believe regarding those who use the texts and tenets of the worlds second-largest religion to murder innocents. This is the article below and what it purports.
This is Islam.
From The Times of Trenton March 12 by Dr. Fakhruddin Ahmed
Examining a painful history fraught with transgressions
There are cogent reasons why roughly half of Americans, according to polls, harbor an unfavorable opinion of Islam. Besides perpetrating the most horrendous crime on American soil on 9/11, Muslims have been responsible for some pretty ugly incidents lately.
The Ayatollah Khomeini challenged one of the West's core values, freedom of speech, by issuing a "fatwa," or religious decree, in 1989, for the murder of Salman Rushdie over his controversial book, "The Satanic Verses."
The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were quickly followed by Muslim terror attacks in Bali, Indonesia (2002), Madrid (2004), London (2005) and Mumbai (2008). And when some Muslims went berserk, burning and boycotting in reaction to the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2006, the rest of the world held its collective breath in consternation.
Muslim terrorists' attempts to blow up planes, airports, tunnels and subways in America were thwarted. And if Qur'ans had actually been burned by Pastor Terry Jones in Florida last fall, as he threatened to do, some Muslims would have reacted by creating mayhem. Clearly, there is a less-enlightened, fanatically violent underbelly at work in the name of Islam. Understandably, the Judeo-Christian polemic against Islam centers on terrorism.
Submerged in an all-encompassing anti-Muslim hysteria, when non-Muslim Americans see signs of increasing Muslim presence around them, they feel besieged by an intimidating culture. That America's complexion is transforming from shades of white to brown is difficult for many Americans to stomach; when some of those brown faces belong to Muslims, the transformation becomes downright frightening.
With no prominent Muslim-American voice to assuage those apprehensions, fear begets fear, spawning more virulent anti-Muslim vitriol.
Are Muslims, their religion and their culture a mortal threat to America? Is this the vaunted "Clash of Civilizations" between the West and Islam, as Harvard's Samuel Huntington had predicted in 1993?
Civilizational narratives are rarely one-dimensional. Western democracies, especially Britain and France, exploited and repressed most Muslim nations as colonial powers over the centuries, souring Muslim taste for democracy. Conceivably, America's more recent interventions in the Islamic world are fueling Americaphobia. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, with the concomitant collateral death of thousands of civilians, have exacerbated Muslim-American relations, as have the al Qaeda-seeking drone attacks inside Pakistan that inadvertently kill civilians and whose legality stands on shaky grounds.
(.)The virus incubated by right-wing bloggers Pam Geller and Robert Spencer has been spread so far and wide by Fox News that all of America is now infected with an anti-Muslim epidemic. It hurts Muslim-Americans to see their patriotism questioned, their faith defined, distorted and defiled beyond recognition...
Read it all
The Ayatollah Khomeini challenged one of the West's core values, freedom of speech, by issuing a "fatwa," or religious decree, in 1989, for the murder of Salman Rushdie over his controversial book, "The Satanic Verses."
The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were quickly followed by Muslim terror attacks in Bali, Indonesia (2002), Madrid (2004), London (2005) and Mumbai (2008). And when some Muslims went berserk, burning and boycotting in reaction to the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2006, the rest of the world held its collective breath in consternation.
Muslim terrorists' attempts to blow up planes, airports, tunnels and subways in America were thwarted. And if Qur'ans had actually been burned by Pastor Terry Jones in Florida last fall, as he threatened to do, some Muslims would have reacted by creating mayhem. Clearly, there is a less-enlightened, fanatically violent underbelly at work in the name of Islam. Understandably, the Judeo-Christian polemic against Islam centers on terrorism.
Submerged in an all-encompassing anti-Muslim hysteria, when non-Muslim Americans see signs of increasing Muslim presence around them, they feel besieged by an intimidating culture. That America's complexion is transforming from shades of white to brown is difficult for many Americans to stomach; when some of those brown faces belong to Muslims, the transformation becomes downright frightening.
With no prominent Muslim-American voice to assuage those apprehensions, fear begets fear, spawning more virulent anti-Muslim vitriol.
Are Muslims, their religion and their culture a mortal threat to America? Is this the vaunted "Clash of Civilizations" between the West and Islam, as Harvard's Samuel Huntington had predicted in 1993?
Civilizational narratives are rarely one-dimensional. Western democracies, especially Britain and France, exploited and repressed most Muslim nations as colonial powers over the centuries, souring Muslim taste for democracy. Conceivably, America's more recent interventions in the Islamic world are fueling Americaphobia. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, with the concomitant collateral death of thousands of civilians, have exacerbated Muslim-American relations, as have the al Qaeda-seeking drone attacks inside Pakistan that inadvertently kill civilians and whose legality stands on shaky grounds.
(.)The virus incubated by right-wing bloggers Pam Geller and Robert Spencer has been spread so far and wide by Fox News that all of America is now infected with an anti-Muslim epidemic. It hurts Muslim-Americans to see their patriotism questioned, their faith defined, distorted and defiled beyond recognition...
Read it all
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