Double Standards?
I notice that when a catholic nurse was shot dead recently there were many comments about how this proved the Pope right and what a violent bunch those Muslims were, it’s interesting to note no comments when it is the other way around and Muslims see themselves being attacked as part of a wider campaign against them.
This from Aljazeera
A Muslim cleric is reported to have been shot dead by gunmen in Russia's southern spa town of Kislovodsk. The country's Interfax news agency quoted police as saying the assailants fled late on Monday after killing the imam of a mosque in the doorway of an apartment block where he lived. A police officer was also wounded when trying to stop two armed people in the street. Kislovodsk, like many parts of southern Russia, has a strong Russian nationalist Christian community which eyes with suspicion the growth of a Muslim population arriving from the impoverished Caucasus region. Ethnic tensions in many parts of Russia have become a cause of concern for authorities, alarmed by the increase in racist attacks. Analysts have said that by the year 2020, one in ten Russians could be Muslim.
Personally I think most religions have a lot to answer for in terms of creating misery – and I think the Pope pointing the finger at the Muslim religion with Christianity’s history of butchery is a bit rich. I think Jihadist Islam has simply replaced communism as the movement of choice to fight on behalf of the injustices of people with no end in sight of their circumstances. Remove the conditions and injustices that breed this level of fanaticism and you have a real chance to win over the hearts and minds. Bombs don’t achieve this, in fact they make things worse.
posted by Bomber @ 3:54 pm
5 comments
5 Comments:
Alas Russia has a long history of this sort of thing eg 'Fiddler on the Roof'.
10 points for the first person to post the meaning of the word 'Pogrom' and where it originated....
Anonymous:
All religions with a Deist base are by definition irrational. To believe in something for which there is no testable hypothesis is an act of faith not rationality.
Mark:
The military predations of the U.S. have been enabled by the Christian conservatives. They have resulted in more violence to Muslim civilians that the entire history of terrorism. There is a basic chauvinism in the Christian West which seems to allow that bombs dropped from planes are OK but strapped to the body is a no no. I do not accept this.
Similarly with Judaism and it's fundamental wing, Zionism.
He who is without sin etc.....
Point well taken, but it's a little unfair to put a picture of the Pope up, when the perpetrators of this crime were, more likely than not, Russian Orthodox.
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Mark, you make some very good points, but have you tried seeing this issue from their side of the fence? What do you think we as white people represent to them? They watch what 'the West' do to Muslims, they are outraged (just as we were on this site were when the Nun was shot dead right - and most of us here wouldn't even identify as Christian - that Nun 'represents us' in the same way Palestinians and Iraqis 'represent' all Muslims.)
Now that is in NO WAY a justification for blowing innocent civilians up right, but it is a reason why they are doing it - and if you don't understand the reason, how can you combat it? The actions committed by the West within the Middle East combined with intense poverty in their own countries that are often run by corrupt governments who are propped up by American military and economic aid, is Radicalizing Muslims throughout the world – if we want to combat them, we need to stop the injustices which fuel this fanaticism. This is the conclusion of the Intelligence report that Bush is desperately trying to hide now, what ‘we’ as the ‘west’ do in the Middle East echos around the world. If we refuse to treat their lives with the same respect we demand our lives to be treated, we can not expect them to respect us.
Now that is asking a hell of a lot of compassion and reasoned thinking from a population right now who are terrified by their media into thinking Muslims are some cancer that cannot be reasoned with or talked to because it is evil and wants to destroy all we in the West stand for. This viewpoint makes Muslims out to be unreasoned monsters, because non of our provocations against the Middle East are ever really critiqued in the mainstream media because many of those mainstream media have a vested interest in going along with aggressive American foreign policy (being owned by a company who makes military software is a good example). So we in the West don’t hear the full effects of our incursions and only see when Muslims strike back. Thus we get rightfully furious and the cycle of violence keeps spinning. And when we have loved ones threatened or hurt by these actions our anger gets turned up so that we won’t even consider the motivations of those who hurt us ands shut down all communication. Look how angry you are Mark over your friend hurt, and that was one bombing, imagine that bombing every week of the day in your country, or to a country whose faces and skin color and culture matched yours so that you felt connected to it. Multiply that fury by 3 decades, and you get where we are now.
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Agreed Mark - but you don't think the build up to the Iraq war and Americas aggressive posturing right after 9/11 didn't have any impact? Again I don't defend bombing innocent people, let's be very clear on that - but surely we have to have a deeper understanding of their motivations other than the nonesense 'they hate bdemocracy and feedom' - because I don't think the way we are fighting this 'war on terror' is actually working bro
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