| | I thought this was a remarkably poor and intellectually dishonest article. It's one long, round-about, obfuscating excuse for terrorism. That Civil War and Reagan/Botha stuff was particularly intellectually tricky, disengenuous, and PC.
The whole article reminds me of apologists for the police "blue wall of silence." It reminds me of Cornel West justifying black racism.The bottom line is: there's no excuse for any of this crap. And there's no excuse for the rest of us not morally condemning it. Indeed, the chief evil here lies with the good guys. By falling silent, we allow evil free run. In effect, we create it and are it.
What's the real reason moslems massively practice, and massively fail to condemn, terrorism? Because they're slime. That's basically it. That's really all you have to know
I think you're a remarkably poor reader and reasoner. And prima facie, I don't think your honesty is much to write home about, either.
You say that I "excuse" terrorism. Find me one place in the article that does so. Anywhere.
You say "that Civil War stuff is tricky." Yeah, prose is tricky, isn't it? Especially when you have to read and comprehend it before criticizing it. Since the whole article was about the Civil War, to say that you were "tricked" by that is to admit that you had no idea what the article was about. Some advice: when you're in a hole, stop digging.
The Reagan/Botha stuff was "disingenuous." Really? What was disingenuous about it? Do you think I didn't mean what I said? Or are you willing to defend the actual excuses that Reagan made for South African apartheid? Tempt me a little bit and I will give you actual verbatim quotes from Ronald Reagan on that subject. Unlike you, I'll be able to find the quotes--because they exist.
You've just accused me of "excusing" terrorism. In your next paragraph you say that the people responsible for terrorism are those who are silent about it. Stop and think for about three seconds and you will realize that that claim constitutes an actual excuse for the perpetrators of terrorism. You have literally said that people who are not responsible for terrorism are more responsible than the people who engage in it. If the "chief evil lies with the good guys," the bad guys should be let off the hook for the chief evil and be held responsible for less. So the good are to blame, not the evil. You said it, not me.
Now we reach your "explanation." Muslims don't condemn terrorism because they are "slime." What I had said was that they don't condemn it because, they choose to evade reality, engage in rationalization and self-deception, and indulge in "futile pretenses" of various sorts. Could you explain explain why your "slime" explanation is superior to mine?
Now you decide to talk about Islam:
Islam is a very different religion than judaism, christianity, mormonism, and moonyism. The first two, for instance, were created in order to destroy reason and philosophy. As such, they had to incorporate many elements of the hugely civilized, truly virtuous, highly RATIONAL culture of Greece and Rome. Otherwise they wouldn't have been plausible and competitive intellectually.
To repeat what someone else has already said, Judaism precedes the achievements of Greece and Rome by several thousand years, and precedes by several thousand years the rise of philosophy. So the founding of Judaism had nothing to do with "destroying philosophy." There was no philosophy to destroy in those days.
Second, generally when X is created to destroy Y, it makes no sense to say that X "incorporates elements of Y." Destruction is not incorporation. Destruction is destruction; incorporation is preservation. The two things are antonyms.
Third, there is no difference between Judaism, Christianity and Islam vis-a-vis Greek philosophy and culture. Islamic philosophy incorporates Greek philosophy just as the others do. Indeed, we wouldn't have very much Greek philosophy to read if it hadn't been for the Arab philosophers who preserved it.
Fourth, if you compare the Books of Exodus and Leviticus with the Quran, you'll find that they are more violent than the Quran, not less so. So I'm not sure why Islam is so much worse off than Judaism in that respect.
Fifth, in thinking more concretely about "the hugely civilized, truly virtuous, highly rational culture" of Greece and Rome, you may want to bear in mind such hugely civilized institutions as slavery, the virtual enslavement of women (as in the institution of the kurios), infanticide, the Roman Circus, perpetual political instability (coups, tyrannies, assassinations), and both cultures' predispositions for waging completely senseless but immensely bloody wars, e.g., the Peloponnesian wars, about a thousand years of Roman imperialism, etc. etc. Again, in several respects, the Islamic world was more enlightened or at least on par with Greece and Rome along these dimensions.
Moving on:
Islam, on the other hand, was created out of the Dark Age. It was a product of the horror and terror of church "doctors" Tertullian and Jerome. It was the raw evil of "saint" Augustine raised to a whole new level (heavily aided by fanatical jews).
But it's even worse than this. Moslems never had a Reformation in response to the Reasonist ascent of the Renaisssance and Enlightenment.
Just a few lines ago, you were saying that Christianity was different from Islam because it incorporated elements of Greek culture. Now you are telling us that Islam grew out of the Christianity via the Church Fathers. You need to make up your badly-confused mind. If Islam grew out of the Christian Church Fathers, and Christianity so powerfully influenced Islam, how can Christianity be so radically distinct from Islam? If Islam grew out of Christianity, but Christianity is highly Greek, how did Islam manage not to be Greek? And if Islam was "heavily aided by fanatical Jews," what happened to the thesis that Judaism was different from Islam? The more fanatical the Jew, the more Jewish he is; the more Jewish the Jew, and the more influencing of Islam, the more Jewish Islam was. If Islam was Jewish, and Judaism was Greek, Islam was Greek. So within just a few lines, your vaunted thesis has collapsed into a mess of contradictions. It's Greek, it isn't Greek; it's totally different from and unrelated to Judaism and Christianity, but it was influenced by them; it's more irrational than them, because they are uniquely rational religions (and they are rational because they were created to destroy rationality), and it is irrational because it grew out of Judeo-Christian irrationality. I don't think I could have created a caricature of incoherence better than the one you have offered as a serious argument.
Actually, anyone who has read the Quran would recall Surah Al-Rum--the verse about the Byzantine Romans, who are praised by good old Allah in contrast to the Persians, who are criticized. Wouldn't that indicate a Greco-Roman influence, and a preference for Greco-Roman culture? I'd think so.
While you're puzzling that through, you say that Muslims never had a Reformation. And you're saying that's a bad thing? That means they didn't have a Counter-Reformation, a Savanorola, a Cromwell, a Genevan Consistory, an English Civil War, a Luther or a Calvin. Are you saying they would have been better off if they had?
In short, a person who has written as confused a mess as your criticism of my article is not exactly (or at all) in a position to accuse me of "dishonesty" or poverty of argument. Try grasping what I actually wrote before trundling forth these large-scale claims of yours.
(Edited by Irfan Khawaja on 9/21, 8:02pm)
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