Posted on 09/28/2001 2:01:52 PM PDT by VinnyTex
(It's a bear trying to wade through latest posts or latest articles, anymore. I'll just add you to my home page, then.)
Granted, there's plenty on which we disagree but the book is written in love and is very illuminating in many respects ... both as to Islam and as to those points at which "radical Islam" could be tapped by those with an agenda they can fulfill USING Muslims ... just as they are mighty good at USING Christians to fulfill same in places like Latin America or Catholic Universities.
I'll flag you when I post so you can weigh in. Way back in "Limbo" days, I always found you both thoughtful and thought-provoking.
Best regards.
FWIW, I printed the Atlantic piece out and have saved it as a reference work to compare against current and future events. I think one can make a case that the article posits, amongst other reasons, that "envy" is a driving factor in Muslim rage.
Barbarous folk, Vikings, as-yet-unChristianized Bulgars, Avars, Crusaders and Muslims all flocked to Constantinople as moths to a candle, until weakened by the Crusaders it fell to the Ottoman Turks. The City was a haven to Saxon exiles from the Norman conquest, had tolerant policies toward religious minorities more generous than the dhimmitude offered by Islam, had hospitals, a university, homes for the aged, the poor, and for reformed prostitutes. The arts flourished, for contrary to what Western art historian taught, classical knowledge of perspective and form were preserved in the secular art of the Empire. Indeed, the stylized forms of iconography could not exist without a knowledge of perspective, and the deliberate choice to send a spiritual message by reversing perspective so that the viewer is the vanishing point, and that which is beyond the icon, visually the background, but noetically the spiritual realm to which the icon points is larger. It is from the Empire that both the Muslims and the Western rennaisance derived their knowledge of classical antiquity. The Muslims did not preserve classical antiquity, rather they destroyed its last outpost.
The only significant contributions Islamic culture gave to the world are some poetry (mostly by authors whose sect of Islam was persecuted by the main body of Islam), some non-representational art and algebra. Even the latter is simply the result of having a very smart man who saw how to put the numeration system stolen from the Hindus together with the knowledge of Diophantine equations lifted from the Christian Roman Empire.
Yep.
We all thought that Brave New World and 1984 addressed western civilization, right?
I have never seen better examples of "doublespeak" than this...
And yes, I also am waiting for the Muslims to point out which part of those statements is not true.
No we are a stupid bunch.
Adding 20 million Afghanis to our welfare rolls will freeze terrorism in its tracks.
Yep, works for me.
Yes, it does. Russia has always been at war with Islam. Just because there happened to be Communists in the Kremlin does not alter the justice of Russia's cause. They also imprisoned murderers and rapists in the USSR. Should we have sided with common felons just because they were enemies of the Soviet government?
The West has been engaged in a life and death struggle with aggressive Islam since Mohammed's psychopathic homicidal vermin galloped out of their desert to destroy Christian civilisation in North Africa. Until now, America has been spared the tender mercies of Islam because we do not have a significant indigenous Islamic community, nor do we border any Islamic states. Now, after 9/11, we Americans have been fully initiated into The West. We have joined the same club as the Byzantine Empire, Russia, Hungary, Austria, Serbia, Greece, Spain, Italy, and France. They have all, at some time, been targeted by Jihad. Their lands were invaded, their citizens massacred, their churches desecrated, and their children sold into slavery.
Russia has know this at first hand. The U.S., blinded by ideological and geo-political categories, simply assumed that the war in Afganistan and the rebellion in Chechnya were purely political struggles. They are not; they are part of an ongoing agenda of world domination that will not end until the last Jihadist is safely planted.
No doubt you'd rather nuke 'em.
I'm all for an all-out assault on bin Laden and sympathetic groups and nations.
But, preventing mass starvation is simply the right thing to do. These Afghanis won't be so amenable to helping the Taliban, either.
A list of discoveries whose utitility was not exploited due to social conditions of the civilization in which they were made does not put a civilization at the forefront of culture or social development. The most humane and cultured society of the middle ages was the Christian Roman Empire, which Islam destroyed and pillaged for the basis on which what you have cited was built.
For the record, the author of this piece is Jonah Goldberg.
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