Welcome back.
I was trying to find some pictures on the internet to answer my friend Yehuda's post, but it looks like the net has been sanitized, and I could not find a single shot of Reginald Denny being beaten into a coma while people cheered on.
Did black American leaders demand that the black American community rise against these hoodlums? Or did they try to justify the actiions of the rioters?
In light of the obvious answer, do we now need a "final solution" for all blacks as well?
A small points: 1 billion, 2 billion - on your original point, the folly of going to war with [fill in the blank] billion people, it hardly makes much difference. Either way it's a whole bunch of people to be fighting.I am a Protestant Christian, and I don't believe that Islam is a path to salvation. That doesn't mean that I claim to know who will be saved in the end; but whoever turns up in the Kingdom of Heaven will be there, I believe, because of Jesus, not because of anything or anyone else.
However, I don't think that it follows from that belief that Islam is pure evil. There is such a thing as God's providence, and it can do all sorts of complicated stuff. Providence can do amazing things with the most flawed material; it can use the most unlikely instruments to provide earthly blessings.
Greek paganism wasn't the way of salvation either, but God blessed the world with beauty and insight through the Greeks. Do those who think that because Islam is not Christianity, it is necessarily demonic also want to burn all the works of the pagan demon-worshipers Plato and Homer and Aeschylus?
Is Islam the way of salvation? No. Is it better for the world, in this life, that people not be pagans but believe, even wrongly, in one God who will judge our deeds in the end? Possibly - depends on circumstances.
No system of belief and practice that was all Taliban, all the time, could have lasted this long and won the loyalty of so many people. Radical Islamists are fighting human nature, not trying to redeem it, and that simply doesn't work in the long run. If that were all there was to Islam, it would have been powerful for about the length of time Soviet Communism was powerful, another ideology that made war on human nature.
There is no question that Islamic theology justified war and conquest for Muslim leaders through the centuries. But what did military jihad mean to the average Muslim villager in the Middle East or India or Central Asia during that period? Very little. The vast majority of Muslims in history, especially after the first couple of centuries, were never near a jihad. Islam for them was a moral and social code, a way of living, that "worked" in the sense that it held together communities in which human beings could live and work and deal with one another. In other words, communities unlike Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
Furthermore, whatever some of our friends insist the Koran really says, it is indisputable that mainstream Muslims have had different views on all the present-day questions through the centuries. There are old Islamic communities in Central and East Asia that have been far from obsessed with the letter of sharia. Sufism has been extremely influential through centuries in shaping the piety of ordinary Muslims, and it clearly stresses the spirit over the letter.
So who exactly are we at war with? Are we at war, for example, with the US-based Sufi Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, who urges US Muslims to be patriotic Americans as a religious duty, and supports the separation of Church and state? Kabbani has been warning against Islamist extremism for years, and has been the object of a concerted smear campaign by CAIR and all the other lovely groups on which he blew the whistle. His organization has a whole section on their webpage denouncing and exposing Islamism.
Or are we at war with Khaled Abou El Fadl, the great Muslim legal scholar whose life has been threatened repeatedly by the Islamofascists and their sympathizers?
These men do not represent modernist or marginal streams of Islam. Sheikh Kabbani is the American leader of an old and venerable Sufi order. Abou El Fadl is not a "liberal" Muslim, as the New Republic headline read, but a representative of one of the major traditional schools of Islamic theology and legal interpretation.
Islam has enormous problems dealing with the modern world, but there is reason to think that the sheer quantity of Saudi oil money spent propagating the Wahhabi cult has played a big role in pushing those problems to crisis levels. Wahhabis hate Sufis and traditional Islamic scholarship; their idea of an interpreter of Islam is a power-hungry hater like Bin Laden, an engineer who knows squat about Islamic tradition, but writes manifestos and makes tapes and promotes the blind rage against reality which Wahhabism makes the essence of Islam.
The poster's FReeper name is Southern Federalist.