What I'd really find valuable, would be knowing one or a few Muslims well enough to get their honest take on this stuff. But the chance of that happening seems vanishingly remote. I feel the lack of that.
I know a few middle-of-the-road Muslims. They’re fine. Normal American types. Happy to be friends with them, have them as neighbors, etc.
The problem is that world-wide, a large minority of Muslims believe they should kill me upon meeting me (I’m Jewish). These radicals run the religion. They are in the leadership positions. They steer their communities. They interpret their faith strictly, and strictly speaking, thier faith obligates them to kill me.
So, like Nazis being a minority of Germans, it’s kinda hard to have good friends who are German, knowing that the Nazis want you all dead.
Here’s a Muslim’s friendly reply to some of my points about the First Amendment rights of the Pastor to burn a Koran:
(Uncle Miltie) “needs his fingers chopped off u keep ur dirty opinions 2 urself this dum piece of horse shit. Dnt realise wat he chattin eat shit and die!!!”
Just quoting.
Having read your posts, I don't find that odd; I rather expected it, with all respect.
What I'd really find valuable, would be knowing one or a few Muslims well enough to get their honest take on this stuff. But the chance of that happening seems vanishingly remote ....
Not so remote if you were willing to make some temporary changes to embark on an adventure. Come rent an apartment in Glendale, California, and live there for a few months. Walk the streets of the city (it's mostly a pretty nice place), patronize the local stores, observe your neighbors, a huge percentage of whom will be Middle Easterners, and while many will be Christians, others will be Muslims. You will know right away which is which. The Christians are respectful, friendly, and hospitable.
Stand in line at a liquor/produce store that is eight or nine people long, and watch as a sullen young Middle Eastern man who is Muslim brazenly cuts in front of the elderly woman in front of you. He stays there until I and a few others get "uncivil" in our attitudes and force him to the back of the line.
Watch two ME Muslim men with a little boy of about six in a mall store, where the little boy picks up and blows on a half dozen toy horns with no attempt of the men to stop him; when the storekeeper (an Anglo woman, clearly American) tells the men that their little boy is acting out of line and getting his germs all over the horns, the Muslim men, immigrants to MY America, the America my father fought for and might have died for, NEVER look her in the eye. Women are beneath that (as I learned as a resident of Glendale for five years). Instead the two men look away, brush off her complaints as so much bullsh*t, and rudely ignore her (great example they're setting for the little boy).
Walk down a sidewalk on an overpass over the freeway, the overpass being on a busy street; you are a lone woman walking one direction dressed as if you're out for exercise, and coming the other way are two men dressed in business attire, deep in converstation. As an woman raised in a civil Judeo-Christian society, you assume that, as the sidewalk is not wide enough to accommodate three abreast, one of the gentleman will very briefly pause in his stride and step aside to let you pass, and that will be that.
But if they're Muslims, they will make no eye contact, nor make any moves to accommodate you. If if means forcing you out onto the busy street (as it did in my case), tough luck.
Yes, you should know some Muslims. Go move into a neighborhood they've taken over.
And again, tell me which is more civil: burning a mere symbol, paper, as a warning now, or to engage in bloodshed later because your enemy mistook your civility of NOT burning mere paper for cowardice?