Posted on 08/03/2003 4:39:02 AM PDT by sarcasm
ogging on to www.Bayridge.com, a neighborhood Web site with about 4,000 members, you can learn about Bay Ridge's forthcoming 150th anniversary. You can find tinted postcards of the South Brooklyn neighborhood when it was virtually car-free. And you can find a message board where, for the past month, a battle has raged over postings that criticize, sometimes with violent overtones, the presence of Arabs in the community.
Although similar debates have hit the site before, the current fighting started on July 8, when a 17-year-old Ridgeite with the screen name "brooklynmayhem" posted a message asking, "Is it me or are there too many Arabs in Bay Ridge?
"If I had my way, instead of making Fifth a one-way street I would just firebomb the entire thing because of its grotesque nature,'' the posting read, referring to an area with many Arabs.
The message has generated over 4,500 Web hits and over 200 replies. Some people added their own complaints about Arabs, but others denounced such attitudes as racist, noting that Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans, who make up a large part of Bay Ridge, were once unwanted immigrants themselves.
The Arab community in Bay Ridge is one of the city's largest and oldest. Last week, a local Arab-American newspaper, Aramica, published an article asking why the site permitted such postings.
"If an Arab-American were to post a comment on a Web site suggesting violence of any sort, is it safe to say (s)he'd be investigated in a heartbeat?" wrote Antoine Faisal, a Lebanese immigrant who lives in Bay Ridge and started Aramica last year. In an interview, Mr. Faisal said that although the site is privately administered, it carries weight. "It's sort of unofficially representative of the community," he said. "I do not want to see the Web site closed. I want to see it hate-free."
On Wednesday, the Arab American Institute, based in Washington, wrote to the site, warning that it could become "an organizing tool for violence."
The site administrator, a lifelong Bay Ridge resident who did not want his name used, said he did not want to censor the message board, though he acknowledged that he had occasionally banned members, including a man who used the site to promote his business. But in this case, he said, "It's an exchange of opinions among residents, and not everyone is going to like everyone else." If he were to censor the site, he said, "Where would you start, where would you end?"
Dave Stewart, a user who has criticized the anti-Arab sentiments, said he wished the administrator would control the site more. "You take any of those statements and replace them with 'Jewish' or 'black,' and it would read like something out of 'Mein Kampf,' " he said.
But some people see the anti-Arab postings as a minority view. "I see it as a few individuals who have expressed some vile thoughts," said Steve Harrison, chairman of Community Board 10. "We can stop it by writing better stuff."
Why has the NYT not quoted an ACLU lawyer saying that Web blogs are free speech, and calls for censorship are a violation of civil rights?
I have always admired what I knew of Arabian culture. I have traveled in Middle Eastern and North African countries. I've know about Shaherazade and Omar Kayyham since I was a child, and I used to sing about "The Queen of Arabia Unginee... There never was a lady lovlier than she."
I respected Islam, what I knew about it, before September 11, 2001. I no longer do. This is the problem.
Everywhere Islam goes, violence, war, terrorism, and intolerance also go.
I'm sorry. I must have missed the big news event of the 20th Century.
What large skyscraper with 10,000 people inside did the Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans have a hand in destroying?
You are way off the mark.
Islam is a political system first and foremost....The religious part is simply a mask which for the past 13 centuries has facilitated control, by a few, over a largely ignorant mass. Now the rest you have right...i.e. a political system which has been based on terror, torture, and murder.
History underscores the truth in my opinion....What ( in these past centuries) has Islam contributed to the world's advances in medicine... technology...farming...humanity... freedom....etc.......
Answer: Nothing but self serving horror and mayhem
And if it has...where and what?
Meanwhile back at the Oasis Islamic Center.......
I would have to agree. Of course, most religious systems are political at the core as Church and State are almost always found to be intertwined through out history. Oddly, Christianity is one of the few that is not, most scriptures in the New Testament that have to do with government tend to be along the lines of; "Pray that your rulers be wise, just and honest so that they will leave you in peace." Which makes it very odd that when most people think of a theocracy they think of Christianity and Rome and not, say Rome and Emperor Worship, or Egypt and the Pharaoh or Japan and Shinto. But I am getting off on a tangent.
Some religions you can remove the political side and the purely spiritual side will still be enough to stand alone.
Others are interwoven so closely that they can not be separated.
If you remove the politics from Islam can it become a purely religious movement? If so it can be allowed to survive and flourish. If not then something will have to be done about it.
ISLAM'S WAR
AGAINST
THE WEST
by
Howard Bloom
"Man's greatest good fortune is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize his total possessions, leave his married women weeping and wailing, ride his gelding (and) use the bodies of his women as a nightshirt and support." Genghis Khan
"He butchered three of them with an ax and decapitated them. In other words, instead of using a gun to kill them he took a hatchet to chop their heads off. He struggled face to face with one of them, and throwing down his ax managed to break his neck and devour his flesh in front of his comrades. ...I ...award him the Medal of the Republic." General Mustafa Tlas, Syria's Minister of Defense praising a hero of the 1973 war with Israel before the Syrian National Assembly
"Appeasing of governments which revel in slaughter is an invitation to worldwide catastrophe." Fang Lizhi
for news on the Islamic world
from the Islamic point of view
click the site above
Two thousand three hundred years ago a Greek who even his fellow Greeks called a barbarian conquered the entire Persian Empire. His name was Alexander the Great.
The whole thing was as unlikely as the Vietnamese turning around and conquering the U.S. But it happened. In fact, in history it happens over and over again.
It happened in 1870 when the French were forced to fight a country which just a few years earlier had been a disorganized clutter of rag-tag mini-states ruled by comic opera princes. The land of Napoleon was rated by every armchair general as the mightiest military force on the Continent. But France lost. Its army was chopped up like ground round. Its glorious capital, Paris, faced the humiliation of a foreign army marching down its streets. The upstart nation that had brought France to its knees was... Germany.
An equally surprising fate occurred to England when it trained its guns on the superpowers of its day in two world wars. When the smoke had cleared, two backward nations of Johnny-come-latelies ended up dominating the world. These countries, whose inhabitants had usually been regarded as just one small step above the primitive, were The United States and Russia.
The moral is simple. Never forget the pecking order's surprises. Today's superpower is tomorrow's conquered state. Yesterday's overlooked mob is often the ruler of tomorrow. Never underestimate the third world. Never be complacent about barbarians.
Around the turn of the previous millennium---chemistry and math. Algebra (al-jabr), alcohol (al-kuhul), alkali (al-qili), alchemy (al-kimiya) all come from Arabic.
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