Posted on 10/11/2001 10:52:36 AM PDT by Chuckmorse
Is Islam Violent?
As Americans we are steeped in republican values such as limited government, individual rights, and a separation of church and state.
We traditionally view our neighbor with a live and let live attitude and, while we may not always approve, more often than not we tolerate our differences.
This is why, with all our imperfections, and God knows we have many, we somehow hold together as the most genuinely diverse society ever known to man.
As a result, we seem to have this almost myopic view of the rest of the world.
We assume that all faiths, political as well as religious, are like ours, which tends to involve a personal relationship with a God whom we look to as the creator of our natural sovereign rights.
We have trouble imagining a nation under the direct rule of clerics, or commissars, who interpret the will of God, or science, and use the muscular force of the state to carry out their interpretations.
Our nation was born after a bloody revolution against a tyrannical British monarch, King George III.
This experience imbued our founding generation with a respect for the sovereign rights of nations.
America has often championed the cause of independence from Latin America in the nineteenth century to Europe during the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and Kuwait.
We instinctively loathed European colonialism with its attempt to physically dominate the world.
Likewise, we as a people rejected the maniacal new world order visions of both Nazism and Communism.
While we’ve certainly had our share of imperialists operating in the inner reaches of our government and amongst a small segment of our most wealthy establishment, the American people have been notoriously opposed to world dominating schemes.
It has never been an element of our religious or political faith.
Our idea of utopia has always been to live in peace, under our proverbial fig tree, and leave our neighbor alone to peruse the same.
Jefferson expressed this best when he noted in the Declaration of Independence that the truths we hold to be self-evident are “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The vast majority of Muslims who have settled in America have, thank God, adopted the same peaceful American faith that most of the rest of us have regardless of individual means of worshiping God or not worshiping as the case may be.
The same cannot be said of the nations of the world which are presently dominated by religious Muslims.
The religious Muslim movement, like Nazism and left-wing Communism before it, has seized the reigns of power in several sovereign states.
Like the Nazi’s and Communists, they are using that power to spread terror across the planet.
The citizens of these Islamic states chafe under the same type of brutal authoritarianism and one party religious dictatorship as Europeans suffered under Nazism or that Chinese, Cubans or North Koreans suffer under the brutal jackboot of left-wing Communism.
The mobs coursing through the streets of Islamic cities chanting anti-American slogans are the same as the Nazi brown shirts looting Jewish businesses during Kristalnacht or Communists burning and looting American inner cities during the summer of love.
Even though we may be loath to admit it, religious Islam clearly does contain seeds of violence of a type similar to that of its Nazi and Communist counterparts.
Like their counterparts, Islam advocates war, or Jihad, as a means of conquering the non-Islamic world.
Moderate Muslims have westernized the meaning of Jihad to mean peaceful personal struggle and this is a genuinely progressive development.
Like the Nazis and Communists, however, the religious Muslims believe that world peace and happiness will be obtained under what they maintain is the only true faith.
Like the Nazis and Communists, they believe that anything is permissible in the pursuit of this glorious goal including total subjugation of peoples and mass murder.
Chuck Morse Is the author of “Why I’m a Right-Wing Extremist” www.chuckmorse.com
What a remarkably stupid statement!.
Let's see if I understand the concept correctly...
If I start a major religion today, I will get lots of attaboys from you and presumably from everyone else if in the year 3101 that religion has reached the level of ignorance, misery, filth, disease and savagery that existed in the 11th Century?
It's history. The Crusades lasted from the 11th through 13th centuries AD. The reason was to wrest back Christian territory conquered by the [Muslim] Turks. Post #77
You seem to be disoriented and confused...
Which is it?
In the last 300 years? Only one.
Ask a 100 people at random to name the one and you're likely to get 97 correct answers: ISLAM.
Comparing Neanderthals with civilized man is a bit disingenuous.
Even in our oun country within the past 150 years many indigenous Americans got to experience the ignominy of forced conversion to Christianianity.
Go read the Mormon history if you want to see more about how peaceful Christianity is.
And then there is the labeling of people as witches and subsequent burning in Mass.
Read the history of the Lewis and Clark expedition sponsored by Thomas Jefferson. They did some rather nasty things to some of the NorthWest hethans.
Read the crap on this web site about Harry Potter and tell me there are not people today who would not put "heathens" in jail or worse.
Your attempt to catagorize anything done with force in the name of Christianity as done by "Neanderthals" is just spin. It is also a lie.
I guess you would consider the founding fathers Neanderthals.
Mr. 10% -- the government was a tad bit corrupt.
Please quote your source for this remarkable statement. The expedition managed to maintain peaceful relations with all the tribes they ran into. Otherwise, they could hardly have managed the remarkable feat of making it across the continent and back without losing a single man.
Now, lots of other traders and explorers did do some very nasty things to all the Indian tribes. Which most of the tribes reciprocated as best they could. But not Lewis and Clark.
Nobody was ever burned in MA or anywhere else in America as a witch. They were hanged or pressed (don't ask) to death.
Well, not at the time of the Crusades they weren't. Muslims did not get a significant foothold in Eastern Europe till the 1400s. And a big reason they did was because the Crusaders had fatally weakened the Eastern Roman Empire during the Fourth Crusade.
For the most part, wildly divergent religions co-existed peacefully in 19th century America. The violent opposition to Mormonism was due a lot more to various social and political conflicts than it was to differences of religious opinion. For instance, at Nauvoo Joseph Smith organized a uniformed military force that was larger than the US Army. Combined with rhetoric that the Mormons would dispossess their neighbors after God destroyed them, you can understand the neighbors' nervousness, although perhaps not agree with their reaction.
Also, the violence against the Mormons has been exaggerated in LDS propaganda. I've yet to find a definitive source stating the number actually killed during the "persecution," but it is almost certain that more "Gentiles" (including women and children) were killed by Mormons at the Mountain Meadows Massacre than Mormons were killed by Gentiles (for specifically religious reasons) during the entire decades-long period of conflict.
No, atheists\communist and fascist dictators have killed far, far more people than any "religion" ever has!
That's probably the saddest fact of the Twentieth Century. There are so many candidates for the award of top monster that we can't decide between them. Whether it's Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong or Iosif Stalin is, quite frankly, anybody's guess.
For now, let's just skip over the whole margin of error thing -- reasonable people have studied the evidence and come up with wildly differing numbers. You're free to check my sources, but for now, trust me. I've studied the matter at great length and decided that the most likely death toll for these three are:
| TYRANT | DEATHS |
| Mao | 45Million |
| Hitler | 34M |
| Stalin | 20M |
Well, that certainly looks like Mao is our man, but wait. Mao's largest crime is the Great Leap Forward, a bungled attempt to restructure the economy of China which created a famine that killed some 30M. If we confine our indictment to deliberate killings, we get this:
| TYRANT | KILLINGS |
| Hitler | 34M |
| Stalin | 20M |
| Mao | 15M |
So it's Hitler, right? Except that most of the deaths on his head were caused by the Second World War. Sure, he started it, but our society does not blanketly condemn the starting of wars (after all, we reserve the right to do it ourselves in a just cause), and we certainly don't consider killing armed enemy soldiers in a fair fight to be a crime against humanity. If we therefore confine ourselves to the cold-blooded murder of unarmed non-combatants, our table rearranges itself again:
| TYRANT | MURDERS |
| Stalin | 20M |
| Hitler | 15M |
| Mao | 15M |
This brings Stalin floating to the top. So it look like once you reduce their crimes to the unjustifiably lowest common denominator, then Stalin is worst; however, you might want to argue that dead is dead so it really doesn't matter if you give your victims a chance to fight back. Fighting an unjust or reckless war is certainly a crime against humanity, so our numbers should go back to:
| TYRANT | KILLINGS |
| Hitler | 34M |
| Stalin | 20M |
| Mao | 15M |
... and these are just the problems we'll encounter if we accept my numbers without debate. If we want to use the estimates of other scholars, we can pin up to 50 million murders on Stalin, enough to push him to the top of the list regardless of definition. Or we can whittle him down to 10 million murders if we use the low end of the margin of error, and scrounge several more tens of millions for Mao, or away from him.
So, the answer to the question of "Who is roasting on the hottest fires in Hell?" is "Well, that depends..."
Obviously, we're going to run into the same vagueries and uncertainties when we try to rank numbers 4 through 10 on the list of the 20th Century's worst killers, but at least we can nominate the candidates. A pretty good case could be made that each of the following rulers (listed alphabetically) were responsible for over a million unjust, unnecessary or unnatural deaths by initiating or intensifying war, famine, democide or resettlement, or by allowing people under their control to do so:
Here are a few of the century's rulers who could easily be indicted for causing hundreds of thousands of unnatural deaths. Although some might be acquitted due to inadequite evidence or mitigating circumstances, it might be a good idea to not build statues to them.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.