"You can argue that it is no longer relevant and has fallen into abeyance. ISIS would argue that these institutions need to be revived, because that is what the Prophet and his companions did."
Said Cole Bunzel, a scholar of Islamic theology at Princeton University, quoted in "ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape/Claiming the Quran’s support, the Islamic State codifies sex slavery in conquered regions of Iraq and Syria and uses the practice as a recruiting tool."
Also: "They laughed and jeered at us, saying ‘You are our sabaya [slave]'... He told us that Taus Malik [one of seven angels to whom the Yazidis pray] is not God. He said that Taus Malik is the devil and that because you worship the devil, you belong to us. We can sell you and use you as we see fit."
August 18, 2015
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Finally someone willing to be honest about Islam.
For any reader who wants the lowdown, the truth, on Islam, Robert Spencer and his jihadwatch.org website will give the lessons.
Trump is shedding a great deal on truth on the immigration issues, and these truths are resonating with the people. The truth about Islam should likewise be broadcast far and wide.
"Taking on political correctness as it applies to Islam"
Love him or hate him, Trump is a phenomenon because of his straight-forward - politically incorrect - approach. Perhaps others (including me) should take a cue from the politically correct political backlash we're seeing on display right now. I pride myself on analytical thought and a pragmatic approach. I also haven't held back in the name of political correctness... That is except for the topic of Islam. Sure I've expressed concerns over the years but generally I've gone along with the narrative that "it's a religion of peace" despite having read otherwise. Partly because it's easier, partly because I've known Muslims who live their lives as good people. Here's a little background...
I supported the Iraq War (largely because of my general support of the Bush administration and the post 9-11 emotion). As a result I bought into the notion that we'd be treated as liberators and thought that we really could positively alter the culture in the region through freedom. When that didn't happen I began to open my eyes. I wanted to better understand what drove the terrorists to do what they did and were doing but also why the people wouldn't grasp the culture change when given the opportunity. So I began to read the Quran. It wasn't a comfortable read.
When you hear terrorists say that they are following their religion... Well they're right as it's in the Quran. What's it? It is anything they deem acceptable to those who don't convert. While a majority of the world's population may not be taking physical action in the name of their religion, have you wondered why the overwhelming majority hasn't stopped the terrorist movement from perpetuating? Take a look at every Islamic ruled country in the world. Is there freedom and prosperity? Are women treated as equals. How about the disabled or homosexuals? The Islamic led countries range from extremely intolerant to terrorist sponsors. So what am I saying?
I'm saying that the terrorists are right when they're saying that they're following their religion. If you disagree you haven't read the Quran - so I'd encourage you to do so. And we had better understand that we can be a dismissive as we want to be but the terrorists won't be. They'd have all of us dead right now if they could.
I was just having this conversation with myself yesterday, instead of just repeating over and over that "real Muslims" don't engage in atrocities that are occurring everyday in Africa and the middle east, how about if we examine the actual Muslim scriptures.
That is, the Koran, and the Hadith, the most trusted commentaries on Mohammed and his life. It's possible that the true Muslims aren't who we think they are.
Ha, real slavery. Trump will kill them all. Jindal might would too. Obama is doing less about ISIS than Roosevelt did with Germany. What a loser.
www.thereligionofpeace.com reports 903 dead bodies last week.
Islam's violence, death and destruction reported daily and in great detail on that site.
What I have read is that the Koran is basic to Islam; it is the Word of God as transmitted to Mohammed, His greatest and last prophet (d. 632 A.D.) and there will be no further revelations until the Day of Judgment.
Any questioning of any word or line in the Koran is blasphemy, punishable by death.
The article is very clear that Daish is, thus far, applying this abhorrent practice almost exclusively to the Yazid. For those familiar with Yazidi history, this is yet another example of the cruelty they have endured and helps to explain why they are such a secretive culture.
"All cultures are equal. America is a diverse place and we need to be inclusive of all cultures and religions... It makes sense to incorporate Sharia law into our codes for domestic relations."
/Sarc
I really wonder how this sort of news plays in the UK where they really have started down that Sharia courts path for marriage and divorce. Which is one or two steps from the Sharia sections on slavery...
PS: Napier looks better and better.
I think that George W. Bush was wrong; ISIS and Boko Haram and Wahhabism are the true face of Islam. There's nothing peaceful about any of it. The entire religion is out of step with the 21st century, and can either fix itself from within or it can be fixed at gunpoint.
Though, in fact, Mohammed was as illiterate as Christ, the Koran was assembled from hearsay after his death, and it took a century or two before the text became "cast in stone."
Early texts that differ from the "accepted" version have come to light, though Moslems tend to refuse to admit that this is so.
Islam in short is a system for god's approval of a caravan raiding operation that works like piracy on the high seas works. (Barbary Pirates too) The goal is always sneaking up on and capturing isolated groups of peaceful rich people, raping the women, dividing the loot, and beheading the men that do not join the raiding team.
That's all it is. That's all it does... Over and over and over. God speech is a way to make any conscience felt by the soldiers go away so the looting and murders can go on and on and on at a high level.
Western feminists, cue your crickets!
For any reader who wants the lowdown, the truth, on Islam, Robert Spencer and his jihadwatch.org website will give the lessons.
For all the heat Geller and Spencer receive --- their views on Islam are not usually disproven.
It's hard to understand why anyone would be surprised that a religion founded by a warlord would be warlike. Yet instead of honest discussions of the implications of this, practically all we hear is semi-pious blather telling us that the Koran really does not mean what its text all too plainly says.
It's sort of the flip side of SCOTUS interpreting the U.S. Constitution: SCOTUS insists the Constitution contains meanings which are not actually in the text, while apologists for Islamic supremacism insist that that text does not contain meanings which actually are in the text.
That, and (thus far) only one of these is law in this part of the world.
Bush bought the argument that there are a billion Muslims and we don't want to piss them off. The other argument is that, aside from western manufactured cellphones and computers, they can't even fly airplanes straight (Straight into hills, maybe) and they are best left to their own devices in the 7th century.
I am in the latter group. I see peaceful Muslims but every once in a while a guy like the Irvine limousine driver decides to go jihadi and people get killed. It's getting more frequent. I don't; want any more Muslims here.
A friend of mine in Britain, a professor of surgery, tells me British girls are converting to Islam and going to medical school where they refuse to scrub their arms in surgery. Infection rates in NHS hospitals are going up, way up.
"It's sort of the flip side of SCOTUS interpreting the U.S. Constitution: SCOTUS insists the Constitution contains meanings which are not actually in the text, while apologists for Islamic supremacism insist that that text does not contain meanings which actually are in the text."
And, lo and behold, living constitutionalists and Islam apologists are often the same people!
Progs are stuck: respect the third-worldish Other or oppose their really existing rape culture? Front-page NYT coverage a bit more inflammatory than anything Hirsi Ali said may signal a turn. Bring Back Our Girls is nice and all, but what are they gonna do for real? Anything?
The American Constitution sanctioned slavery too. It took a very bloody war to overcome that. I doubt ISIS and other murderous and repressive groups will go any less easily.
That is, the Koran, and the Hadith, the most trusted commentaries on Mohammed and his life. It's possible that the true Muslims aren't who we think they are.
The Koran explicitly directs Muslims to lie to unbelievers.
Slavery made economic sense. It's better to enslave a defeated enemy than kill him.
That no longer made sense economically with Western economic advancement, where you're better off letting a slave work in the free market in his own interest.
So slavery ended when it no longer made sense.
The final racist arguments for it were doomed attempts at another justification.
Islam is not exactly advanced, so the institution lives on.
Koran and Korean. Coincidence?
The American Constitution sanctioned slavery too.
No it didn't. It tolerated slavery, and laid the groundwork for it's end.
Enoch Powell had it so very right. For which he paid the price.
It always matters how you define your terms, but if by saying this is the "true face of Islam" or that Daish, Boko Haram, et. al., represent "true Muslims," then one has to wonder why, in a global community of more than 1.6-billion Muslims, these incidents are nonetheless statistically as rare as they are. Like why aren't there widespread accounts of Muslim Indians (of whom there 300 million) raping and enslaving the polytheistic Hindu Indians in the next village? Why aren't the Indonesian Muslim majority (200 million) conducting the widespread slaughter of the 25 million Christians, 4 million Hindus and 2 million Buddhists amongst them -- for that matter, why are they allowing Catholic and Lutheran missionaries to co-opt their numbers? Shouldn't they be massacring the missionaries on sight? There are 75 million Muslims in Nigeria-- why is Boko Haram limited to asymmetric warfare against the state? Why aren't they destroying the Christians in a mass conflict? Forget about Daish, why aren't the Sunni Kurds massacring the Assyrians and Chaldeans- I mean, if that's "true Islam," why aren't they doing it themselves? Are all these not "real" Muslims, and only the Daish and Boko Haram types are. Is that where we're at- the extremist super-minority now represent the community at-large?
Yes, "barbaric" practices are far more rampant amongst the Muslims than virtually any other major religion on Earth (and, frankly, that's only the case because the Marxist-Leninists have been defeated -- thus far, Islam can't hold a candle to the violence the Communists brought to humanity). But there's something a bit more complicated at work here.
Just stand aside and let them destroy one another.
"The American Constitution sanctioned slavery too."
It evaded it in a compromise to get the country united. That worked for 60 years.
"That no longer made sense economically with Western economic advancement, where you're better off letting a slave work in the free market in his own interest."
Better off for whom? The slave? Why would the slaveholders care in the least about that?
"So slavery ended when it no longer made sense."
Who says it no longer makes sense? Why do you think companies outsource their jobs overseas, or contract it out to prisons? So they can pay as little as possible to have work done that would otherwise be done at higher wages by free American workers.
Slavery is still profitable...so slavery makes sense!
But, not Jews: They kill them.
"So they can pay as little as possible to have work done that would otherwise be done at higher wages by free American workers."
Thee intelligence of Bernie Sanders at work. Have you ever run anything in your life ?
"Mohammed as illiterate as Christ"-- But Jesus, as a Jewish boy who frequented the synagogue, would NOT have been illiterate. In fact, the Gospels record him reading in the Synagogue. And writing in the sand.
Jews expect their boys to read, because study of the Torah is so important to their faith.
The more interesting thing is that the Bible fails to provide anywhere in its text a description or model of the standard Amerikan marriage "between one man and one woman," whereas there are perfectly good models (Jesus and St Paul) of single non-breeders who spoke out against marriage.
"...all we hear is semi-pious blather telling us that the Koran really does not mean what its text all too plainly says."
Kind of like how we are to ignore the Iranians chant of, "Death to America" or the charter of certain neighbors of Israel that calls for the destruction of Israel.
Astounding.
Robert,
But if that's "slavery"... Well, the problem is that this also existed in the antebellum North (post-bellum, too, come to think of it), where American industry took advantage of cheap immigrant labor in their factories, worked them overly long hours at deplorable conditions for a pittance in wages. If we're going to call that "slavery," now we no longer have a term that is useful to describing the phenomena of involuntary servitude that existed in the South. Language is supposed to be descriptive- by simply using the same terms to describe two different dynamics, things can become rather confused.
It always matters how you define your terms, but if by saying this is the "true face of Islam" or that Daish, Boko Haram, et. al., represent "true Muslims," then one has to wonder why, in a global community of more than 1.6-billion Muslims, these incidents are nonetheless statistically as rare as they are. Like why aren't there widespread accounts of Muslim Indians (of whom there 300 million) raping and enslaving the polytheistic Hindu Indians in the next village?
But how many are silenced due to fears of retribution?
Who knows just how bad the child molestation problem in Rotherham was? Who knows if OTHER European cities have identical problems covered up for identical reasons? Why did Jesus in a jar of urine not lead to riots but drawing Mohammad does do that?
Why don't other faiths have these, specific, issues?
"That no longer made sense economically with Western economic advancement, where you're better off letting a slave work in the free market in his own interest."
Better off for whom? The slave? Why would the slaveholders care in the least about that?
Because it is more profitable to hire a free man than buy a slave? Slaves need to be sheltered and fed and they have this bad habit of running away which requires a security apparatus. They are also not especially motivated to work. The free man just needs wages and after the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution labor was cheap. For that matter the machines that started taking on labor intensive tasks did not complain.
Of course, if the slaveholder spent good money to buy those slaves, he probably was not all that enthused to lose that investment without compensation. Then again, he can simply let his slaves work outside jobs and buy their own freedom to make back his investment that way.
"American industry took advantage of cheap immigrant labor in their factories,"
I think there was a great deal of abusive practice in the transition period of the Industrial Revolution. There are good arguments about how Progressives and labor unions were needed to ameliorate the abuses then but, like "The March of Dimes" when Polio was cured, they found other "causes" to keep them in business.
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time
Justify it as war related all you want but Slavery has always been a peacetime punishment designed by rulers to make the rest of the population behave they rule over fear them. It works very similar to imprisonment as a punishment. And without a pardon it always was until death from overwork and starvation just like Stalin's gulag worked on Russia.
The redemption price to buy a pardon for a kidnapped slave is the slave's only hope other than early death under the Sword and the Whip.
The Slave ships of the Navy were seldom used in battle and were actually floating Prisons that were 99% tied up at a dock whilethe men being punished were dying.
And for several centuries the Catholic Kings and Popes of Europe used this punishment threat to exterminate Protestant believers and loot their estates and possessions as real Christians died slowly in slave ship prisons.
“[The US Constitution] tolerated slavery, and laid the groundwork for its end.” Gahrie (9:43 am); also Michael K., 10:21 am).
Not quite. Art. 4, Section 2, required that escaped slaves in free States be returned to their owners. Also, the Supreme Court, in Dred Scott, held that a Negro, even one who was not enslaved, could never be a citizen. This was more than mere “toleration” of slavery. It’s true that the principles underlying the Constitution and in particular the Declaration were inconsistent with the institution of slavery, but intellectual consistency didn’t end slavery. The Minie ball did.
Not quite. Art. 4, Section 2, required that escaped slaves in free States be returned to their owners. Also, the Supreme Court, in Dred Scott, held that a Negro, even one who was not enslaved, could never be a citizen
Article 4, like the rest of the Constitution, does not refer to slaves, or use the word "slave" on purpose. It refers to "person held to labor". This was done precisely to not provide legitimacy to the institution of slavery.
Dred Scott was not part of the Constitution until the Supreme Court decision in the case. This case is widely considered to be one of the worst decisions of the Supreme Court because it tried to provide Constitutional legitimacy to slavery.
Jefferson changed "property" to "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration for the same reason.
Yeah, not to go all Bill Clinton, but it's going to depend on what the definition of "sanction" is. In any case, it's not much of a comparison, because the Constitution's Article Five specifically provides for a process and methodology by which the Constitution can change that which it sanctions/tolerates/etc. The Arabic Koran, being the literal Word of Allah, doesn't and really can't provide for such a process.
However, note that Article 5 isn't the only way that the Constitution's meaning can be changed- the Supreme Court has repeatedly demonstrated, consistent with common law jurisprudence, that a majority of Justices can re-interpret (with or without popular support) what certain provisions now mean, even if it departs radically from previous practices and/or interpretations. It's here that one could argue that the Koran can be (and, frankly in many cases, already is) "changed." Much like, perhaps, we have Christians whose souls are not tainted by breaking Old Testament rules like eating pork.
"But if that's 'slavery'... Well, the problem is that this also existed in the antebellum North (post-bellum, too, come to think of it), where American industry took advantage of cheap immigrant labor in their factories, worked them overly long hours at deplorable conditions for a pittance in wages. If we're going to call that 'slavery,' now we no longer have a term that is useful to describing the phenomena of involuntary servitude that existed in the South. Language is supposed to be descriptive- by simply using the same terms to describe two different dynamics, things can become rather confused."
Don't be obtuse.
There are no atrocities committed in the Muslim world that have not been matched by Christendom.
"Because it is more profitable to hire a free man than buy a slave? Slaves need to be sheltered and fed and they have this bad habit of running away which requires a security apparatus."
Yes, I'm sure the plantation owners in the South were quite thankful to the war waged on them by the North, as it relieved them of the terrible burden of having to use slaves to do their manual labor.
"They are also not especially motivated to work."
The whip and other punishments were effective motivations, I'm sure.
There are no atrocities committed in the Muslim world that have not been matched by Christendom.
So you're saying that Islam has all the negatives of Christianity, with none of the positives?
Christianity has also evolved and reformed, Islam is by its very nature incapable of doing so.
Don't be obtuse.
Don't be Marxist.
And for several centuries the Catholic Kings and Popes of Europe used this punishment threat to exterminate Protestant believers and loot their estates and possessions as real Christians died slowly in slave ship prisons.
The Protestant kings did the same things to Catholics.
without having to conclude that "all Muslims believe it is their religious duty to kill infidels"
All Muslims may not believe it, but Islam does demand that all unbelievers be converted, subjugated or killed.
if by saying this is the "true face of Islam" or that Daish, Boko Haram, et. al., represent "true Muslims," then one has to wonder why, in a global community of more than 1.6-billion Muslims, these incidents are nonetheless statistically as rare as they are. Like why aren't there widespread accounts of Muslim Indians (of whom there 300 million) raping and enslaving the polytheistic Hindu Indians in the next village? Why aren't the Indonesian Muslim majority (200 million) conducting the widespread slaughter of the 25 million Christians, 4 million Hindus and 2 million Buddhists amongst them -- for that matter, why are they allowing Catholic and Lutheran missionaries to co-opt their numbers? Shouldn't they be massacring the missionaries on sight? There are 75 million Muslims in Nigeria-- why is Boko Haram limited to asymmetric warfare against the state? Why aren't they destroying the Christians in a mass conflict? Forget about Daish, why aren't the Sunni Kurds massacring the Assyrians and Chaldeans- I mean, if that's "true Islam," why aren't they doing it themselves? Are all these not "real" Muslims, and only the Daish and Boko Haram types are.
That's exactly, what, in fact, is being claimed (when they remember that fact)
The truth is, all the people doing this are "botn-again Muslims" and what has not bene done in previous generations cannot be the true (or inevitable) Islam. It's more of an Islamic heresy than anything else. Somewhat similar things, but not quite like this, have cropped up in the past.
There are no atrocities committed in the Muslim world that have not been matched by Christendom.
It's possible that you would be correct if you were referring to the period before the Treaty of Westphalia, which established the nation states of Europe.
I suspect you are trying to imply that they are equivalent today with is horse shit.
Hitler and Stalin were not acting in the Christian world. They were atheist although Hitler had a weird mystic Gothic belief in Teutonic myths.
ISIS is mainstream Islam.
Slavery does not make economic sense any more, and the Muslims do not keep slaves for economic reasons. ISIS uses captured women as sexual rewards for their fighters. They do not attempt to enslave the men they capture, they kill them. And the Saudis do not use the slaves they still keep to run plantations. They use them as domestic help, and also as sex slaves. They value slaves, not because they are cheaper than employees, but because they have no rights.
Prattle about Indonesia all you like, it is not the Indonesian Muslims that Obama is importing in droves. It is not widely understood, but under American law regarding asylum, the determination as to who will be offered asylum in the US is mostly in the hands of various UN agencies. Which is to say, in the hands of those who hate America, and everything we stand for.
Gahrie,
Yeah, the Koran says a lot of stupid sh*t. But, to be brutally honest, most Muslims can't actually read it in its unadulterated form (Arabic) since they can't read Arabic (and I'm not even talking about those who are illiterate in any language). Because of this, they are more dependent on their clerics telling them what's in there than, say, American Protestants who can and do read their Holy Word for themselves.
It's a problem I have witnessed first-hand many, many times. I've listened to Pashtos and Tajiks recite a passage in the Koran in Arabic-- words that he didn't even understand-- and then afterward explain to a small audience what it meant... And it would be like if you heard someone recite the story of Job in Latin and then tell everyone the story of Jonah in English... It was the definition of "Wow."
Cook: "There are no atrocities committed in the Muslim world that have not been matched by Christendom."
Oh, please, you silly man. Atrocities are prescribed by the Muslim Prophet and their holy books. Atrocities contradict the teaching of Jesus and the New Testament.
Be a caricature of the old lefty if you want, but make an effort not to be stupid.
Jupiter,
Correct- if by "droves" you actually mean a small minority. According to DHS's Yearbook of Immigration Statistics: 2013 Refugees and Asylees, a high plurality of the 115,477 individuals granted asylum in the US from 2004-13 are from China (40,361). Second is Colombia with 5,655. Third is Ethiopia with 3,719, followed by Haiti (3,609) and Albania rounds out the top five with 3,242. Indonesia (2,108) is actually 11th, the only non-Albanian Muslim country ahead of it being #7 Egypt (2,397). Iraq (1,885) is 17th. But note that many of the Egyptians and Iraqi asylees are probably Coptic, Assyrian and Chaldean Christians. In any case, your understanding is very wrong and easily refuted by just a cursory glance at the statistics.
Also, while, yes, UNHCR conferrence of refugee status is generally a necessity to anyone taking you in as an asylee, UNHCR does not tell countries whom they must accept. That's firmly in the hands of the state apparatus whether or not and how many asylees they want to accept, and which ones for any reason they want-- not the UN. And that's why most asylees from conflict countries sit in refugees for very long times and few from countries with Islamist violent extremists ever make it to the US.
"There are no atrocities committed in the Muslim world that have not been matched by Christendom."
I think this is true, but it is not the same thing as saying the teachings of Christianity and Islam are therefore the same. I don't believe in supernatural origins of any book. It's probably true that Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher expecting the return of god in his lifetime, and the actual source of the tenets of a universalist church probably came from Paul. But that's neither here nor there for the purposes of this discussion.
Atrocities are committed by human beings, who are quite good at justifying themselves even in the face of holy scriptures. And if you want to look at what people actually did, as opposed to simply what they purportedly believe, there are periods of relative peace and periods of relative upheaval. Post-Roman Europe was a time of nearly endless war, culminating with two wars from 1914 to 1945 that were among the most destructive events in all of human history.
Tradchick,
The usual babble. Whose Navy were you slandering in the below?
The Slave ships of the Navy were seldom used in battle and were actually floating Prisons that were 99% tied up at a dock whilethe men being punished were dying.
Your free thinking or whatever is all very well and good but you need to edit it so that it does not so closely resemble garbage. What did that even mean? I bet you think it was a pearl of wisdom. WTF?
Robert Cook: Yes, I'm sure the plantation owners in the South were quite thankful to the war waged on them by the North, as it relieved them of the terrible burden of having to use slaves to do their manual labor.
The parts about burning the plantation house to the ground and taking all their chickens probably were not well received.
Just because it no longer makes sense to do something does not mean that people cease to do so. History is replete with examples. Slavery at the time of the American Civil War was on its way out because it no longer made economic sense. While more agriculturally dependent than the North, the South did not really need slavery anymore, but after you have enslaved a large portion of your population and proclaimed repeatedly that said slaves are inferiors that really did deserve it, their is some hesitancy to free them given they are probably not going to be pleased with their prior occupation. The South had more or less put itself in a no win situation. Unsurprisingly, they lost.
As Jupiter states quite eloquently, there are other reasons to have slaves beyond economics.
There are no atrocities committed in the Muslim world that have not been matched by Christendom.
And both were beaten 100 fold by collectivism in the 20th century alone. So you may want to look at your fellow political travelers before you start casting aspersions.
Just because it no longer makes sense to do something does not mean that people cease to do so.
Ironically, look at Cook's lefty political leanings. It's a complete failure every time it's tried, yet he still seems to think it should be tried yet again...
Just for some context, here is the finding of the Walk Free Foundation's 2013 Global Slavery Index:
The countries with the highest numbers of enslaved people are India, China, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia,
Russia, Thailand, Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar and Bangladesh. Taken together, these
countries account for 76% of the total estimate of 29.8 million in modern slavery."
http://www.ungift.org/doc/knowledgehub/resource-centre/2013/GlobalSlaveryIndex_2013_Download_WEB1.pdf
"There are no atrocities committed in the Muslim world that have not been matched by Christendom."
In the Christian world there was a huge and ultimately successful drive to abolish slavery worldwide. I don't see any signs of a huge or medium size or even a small drive to abolish slavery in Islam - just an abolition imposed from the outside followed by a resumption of the practice as soon as practicable. Slavery resumed in Darfur - without objection from CAIR, without boycotts from Saudi Arabia. Slavery resumed in ISIS - same indifference.
"I think this is true, but it is not the same thing as saying the teachings of Christianity and Islam are therefore the same."
I didn't say they were.
If I must make an explicit point, it is that human beings have primitive intellects, with enough just enough smarts and capacity to think abstractly to make us dangerous to ourselves. We come to believe our own abstractions and imaginings are actually real: concrete and inviolable truths of the cosmos, and we are willing to commit savage brutality to impose those imaginings and abstractions on others. Any culture is foolish to imagine itself superior to any other cultures or creeds, as all can be and have been as brutal as any.
"I suspect you are trying to imply that they are equivalent today...."
You suspect wrong.
@Robert Cook:
"I think this is true, but it is not the same thing as saying the teachings of Christianity and Islam are therefore the same.
I didn't say they were."
I did not mean to imply that you said it, which is why I did not address you by name in my reply. If you just ignore the relative scriptures and look at the actual histories of these places, it is pretty undoubted that over the last thousand years or so, Europe was generally a much more violent and destructive place than the middle east.
" Slavery at the time of the American Civil War was on its way out because it no longer made economic sense. "
There is a school of thought that says slavery would have survived if tolerated by the North. I am not sure this is true but there are some interesting arguments about it.
"over the last thousand years or so, Europe was generally a much more violent and destructive place than the middle east."
I think this opinion is a product of insufficient knowledge of middle east history. Certainly the Nazis and the Communists did a good job of killing millions but the middle east did the best it could with what it had. The Mongols did a lot with what they had.
@Michael K:
What were some of the Middle East wars of the last millennia (even leaving out the 20th century) that bested Europe in level of violence and deatructiveness?
"You can argue that it is no longer relevant and has fallen into abeyance. ISIS would argue that these institutions need to be revived, because that is what the Prophet and his companions did."
Similar arguments to those used by the Confederates.
"God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system and wrong and iniquity. Perhaps the rest of the world is as bad—this only I see. Like the patriarchs of old our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children—and every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody's household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds, or pretends so to think."
Mary Boykin Chesnut
I think Islamists stand a much better chance of bettering the death tolls of communists like Stalin and Mao than any extant Christian populace or leader.
That said, if Islamists continue down that path in a determined manner, nominal Christians might just surprise them by failing to turn the other cheek, and failing in a way the Islamists might regret.
Back shortly after 9/11 there were pundits excoriated for pointing out that the last violent assault against Western Civilization was stopped not by ideas but by firebombing and nuking cities. Yet that happened. It could happen again, and I don't think it would be Western cities taking the brunt of the damage. Hope it does not come to that. But it can.
"I think Islamists stand a much better chance of bettering the death tolls of communists like Stalin and Mao than any extant Christian populace or leader. "
Lol. Unlike the Christian leaders of old, who did much, much better!
I always thought American intellectuals would circle back, and dip their foot in the pool of "virtuous slavery"....so long as it didn't benefit what they claim are Capitalists
Eventually, the only thing leftists find repulsive are inherent, human virtues.
After Sherman ended the Civil War, the southern overseers simply arrested men for vagrancy and sentenced them to Chain Gang Camps to build the roads. They were starved because the Camp Officials stole half of the food and money to feed them.
Slave owners LOVE slavery. It is civilization basis of all Empires. The northern third of the USA is a City Set on a Hill to signal it is possible to free men . The French Revolution came next.
That is Trumps winning message. Americans will not become enslaved to please the billionaires like Zuckerman who like slavery. And the migration of slavery culture here to please them is not legal.
Which Christian leaders of old did "so much better" Ritmo?
Charles Martell? El Cid? Richard III? None of them.
Stalin is attributed with 20 million deaths (not including another 20 million who died fighting WW2). Who can beat that? Bismarck? Napoleon? Nope.
Who??
What were some of the Middle East wars of the last millennia (even leaving out the 20th century) that bested Europe in level of violence and deatructiveness?
The Mongols, as I said, did the best with what they had.
the artisans were sent back to Mongolia, young women and children were given to the Mongol soldiers as slaves, and the rest of the population was massacred. The Persian scholar Juvayni states that 50,000 Mongol soldiers were given the task of executing twenty-four Urgench citizens each, which would mean that 1.2 million people were killed. While this is almost certainly an exaggeration, the sacking of Urgench is considered one of the bloodiest massacres in human history.
No bad given the 13 th century technology.
The Muslims did a pretty good job with 8th century technology. They managed to kill the Byzantines that did not convert.
When I was in Hagia Sophia, the Turks were converting it to a museum and when removing the huge panels of Arabic calligraphy, the workmen uncovered the old mosaics which had been carefully preserved by the Byzantine workmen who put up the panels.
the Arabs launched a new assault by sea and land, forcing the Byzantines and their allies to evacuate Carthage. The Arabs slaughtered the civilians, totally destroyed the city and burned it to the ground, leaving the area desolate for the next two centuries. After the departure of the main force of the Byzantines and their allies, another battle was fought near Utica and the Arabs were again victorious, forcing the Byzantines to leave that part of North Africa for good.
By 1830, when the French came as conquerors to Algeria and Tunis, local Catholicism had been extinguished.
It is being extinguished again by ISIS. Not bad with 8th and 13th century technology.
Livermoron,
Mao scoffs at Stalin and his 20 million. Why, his Great Leap Forward alone may very well have doubled that-- and that was just the three year period from 1958-1961!
I was trying to go easy on R&B. He's not too smart. I also suspect, like Robert Cook, once he is backed into a 'prove it' corner he will run away.
Any culture is foolish to imagine itself superior to any other cultures
Our culture is demonstrably better than most, if not all, other cultures. When it comes to standard of living, personal freedom and economic opportunity we have everyone else beat hands down. Throw in our behavior internationally and it only becomes more obvious.
As always with our resident lefties, the greater the murder/rape/mayhem caused just yesterday and today by muslims the guiltier all Christians everywhere at all times become.
Does the history of violence by non-Muslims excuse the conduct of ISIS? Of course not. So why are we discussing it?
My guess is that we Americans, here in the most powerful, most free, most prosperous society on Earth are ashamed that we sit back on our fat asses and do nothing to stem the tide of barbarism in western Asia and the middle east. We should be ashamed. And within the lifetimes of people commenting on this thread, fanatics no more civilized than ISIS will have nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles. With any luck, I'll be dead by then.
I think trying to assign a death toll to a Stalin or Mao-like figure can muddy the waters a bit, which is why I usually try to stick to acts of war or other acts of organized violence. Stalin and Mao both come out pretty unfavorably in this regard, too, but a lot of the really big casualty figures attributed to them are distorted by the fact that a good portion of those deaths were the result of agricultural reforms and resulting starvations. This is grisly enough, but I think the difference in intentionality puts them on a slightly different moral plane than outright murder or planned destruction.
I don't know about Mao, he may have just been incompetent. but Stalin deliberately starved the Ukrainians.
J. Farmer said...
"I think trying to assign a death toll to a Stalin or Mao-like figure can muddy the waters a bit, which is why I usually try to stick to acts of war or other acts of organized violence."
For statists like them the deaths were a feature not a bug. For example Stalin starved out the Ukrainians. Mao's repression fell on groups of people that were self sufficient before he took over and the people that died during his purges were the ones that did not fall in line. In the end they just took the Marxist impulses to control to the extreme. But it is beyond any reasonable doubt or argument that atheist controlled government sponsored killing is responsible for the most total death over history by an order of magnitude just on Stalin's, Hitler's, and Mao's work alone. Add in the dozen's of lesser killers like Mugabe, Pol Pot, Castro etc. and Marxist theology is easily the bloodiest historical force.
Gahrie said...
I don't know about Mao, he may have just been incompetent. but Stalin deliberately starved the Ukrainians.
He-Mao-was totally indifferent to it. He would lay on his pallet reading as he was carried through the blasted countryside.
Stalin and Mao both come out pretty unfavorably in this regard, too, but a lot of the really big casualty figures attributed to them are distorted by the fact that a good portion of those deaths were the result of agricultural reforms and resulting starvations. This is grisly enough, but I think the difference in intentionality puts them on a slightly different moral plane than outright murder or planned destruction.
Except that the agricultural reforms and resulting starvations were planned. It's much easier to get your Kulaks off the land when you simply have to bury them rather than transport them. The left looks at starvation as an asset. Those that are left can be relied upon to be rabidly in support of the state.
I think the difference in intentionality puts them on a slightly different moral plane than outright murder or planned destruction.
I think the difference would be hard to appreciate if it was happening to you!
Oh it's you Farmer. Since you don't like your homosexuality to be brought into discussions of politics I have refrained, but part of your problem is that you are alone in the universe, you will never have a family of your own, so the idea of watching your children suffer and die doesn't take hold.
I wonder if ritmo and cookie go to the same place to hide whenever their bullshit is exposed to the light?
Maybe up garage's ass?
Nichevo,
"Part of your problem is that ... the idea of watching your children suffer and die doesn't take hold."
Well, so what are you doing about it? And more importantly, what do you suggest others do about it- besides just voting for a Presidential candidate who pledges to make some other Americans sacrifice and take care of the problem for you? Is there a way for all the Americans who see the existential threat that Islamism (or just Islam, for many of you) poses to Western Civilization to contribute to reducing the problem? Or is the answer to just send other Americans downrange while you all go about your lives shopping at the mall, taking your kids to baseball practice and attending each other's backyard BBQs while you decry the apocalyptic threat Islam poses to all of us?
P.S. If that came off mean, my apologies, because that wasn't really my intent -- I'd truly like to have a suggestive reply to the constant "Thank you for your service!" instead of just feeling super awkward, breaking eye contact and needing to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible.
P.P.S. And please don't ask me to direct people to the Wounded Warrior Fund or the Central Asia Institute, because all that did was quadruple my pessimism/cynicism.
I watched the second plane hit the tower on 9/11 from the Brooklyn waterfront. I felt the heat on my face from miles away and I saw colors that don't exist in nature. Ex girlfriend and I drove all around downtown Brooklyn trying to find a place to give blood. We saw the refugees flocking over the Brooklyn Bridge powdered white like dummies in a silent movie. I do believe that if you had handed each of them a rifle or a flamethrower and flown them to Afghanistan they would have taken care of things very quickly.
I tried to enlist variously. I don't know what the home front can do other than support the war. You want rationing? It would be kind of cosmetic don't you think? We're not short of food.
What do you think would be a good idea? Absent a suitable tribute, I still expect to use the nation's military to achieve its goals. I'm sorry if that's hard on young American boys. I assume they're not doing it for pats on the back.
Also you may have misread me on the Farmer/children comment. Not sure how that provoked you.
Also, as for skin in the game, my family fled Russia in the winter of 1920-21, so it's not entirely theoretical for me.
The feeling the heat may be subjective or a colorful impression, but I saw blues in the explosion that are apparently not reproducible on television.
I would say that I'm happy to pursue a no boots on ground strategy and just bomb, which would hopefully make GIs safer. But the SLOCs must be protected, there is no alternative.
@Nichevo:
"Since you don't like your homosexuality to be brought into discussions of politics I have refrained, but part of your problem is that you are alone in the universe, you will never have a family of your own, so the idea of watching your children suffer and die doesn't take hold."
I never said I do not like it. If it's something other people want to bring up, they are perfectly welcome to. And I have brought up before when discussing same-sex marriage. The typical accusation is that I support SSM simply as a byproduct of my sexual orientation, though even if it were true, it would make no difference to the validity of any of the arguments I make. A straight person could make the identical argument I make, so I don't see my particular sexual orientation as being relevant to the argument. For what it's worth, I am opposed to employment non-discrimination laws for homosexuals or hate crime legislation, so I would say that is at least some evidence for the fact that my political ideas are not simply a natural extension of my own self-interest. I make no effort to avoid the topic of my sexuality; it is simply a topic that is often irrelevant to whatever I happen to be discussing at any given time.
Now as for this nonsense about "you will never have a family of your own, so the idea of watching your children suffer and die doesn't take hold." First, that is irrelevant as to the validity of any argument I make. A married man with 10 children could make the same case I do. Second, there is more to a family than simply one's direct offspring. I have young nieces and nephews whose lives I am significantly involved in and whose futures I care about deeply. Also, human empathy is not limited to ones immediate blood relations. There are a great deal of people in my life that I have known for 10+ years and are very intimate friends. So while it is true that I neither have nor desire any children of my own, it is quite a stretch to say that I am "alone in the universe." Are infertile or sterile men in a similar state of perpetual solitude in your mind?
Of course, all of this response to your statement puts aside the fact that it is entirely a red herring. It is predictable that when you advocate a non-interventionist position, you will be accused of being callous or indifferent to the suffering of others. By the way, how do conservatives usually feel when they are attacked on similar grounds for opposing social welfare programs? The predictability of the accusation is surpassed only by its cynicism. About 3 million children under 5 die of starvation every year. Just take a moment and try to imagine the physical, emotional, and psychological torment of a single child starving to death. And then multiply that by 3,000,000. It's suffering on a scale the human mind simply cannot comprehend.
How much energy in your life do you devote to alleviating child starvation? How much of the US federal budget would you like to devote to eradicating global poverty? Should we assume that your answers are in any way a result of your indifference to the suffering of children? Hundreds of innocent children in Afghanistan and Pakistan have been blown to smithereens for the unfortunately crime of being too geographically proximate to someone accused of terrorism. How heavily does their death and suffering (and the enduring trauma their families live with) weigh on your consciousness?
By the way, how do conservatives usually feel when they are attacked on similar grounds for opposing social welfare programs?
Every dollar you take from me for your social programs is a dollar I can't charitably give to relieve someone elses suffering.
That good enough?
You and the other guy, you can't read. My specific remark was not pointed to the question of foreign intervention. My specific point was that when you talk about letting the communists off the hook for the quote unquote unintentional deaths, I spit upon you. But then I remember that you are not human in the same way as other people, & I understand. And yes, I think that in the main, non breeders are extremely unfortunate.
rhhardin said...
Slavery made economic sense. It's better to enslave a defeated enemy than kill him.
That no longer made sense economically with Western economic advancement, where you're better off letting a slave work in the free market in his own interest.
So slavery ended when it no longer made sense.
Slavery in America was on its way out even before the civil war. Plantation owners were being faced with several variables that was making their way of life untenable. The land for growing cotton and tobacco had to be constantly changed. It was becoming more and more labor intensive to just keep up. Other european colonies on other continents were offering the same commodities for less. Eventually, even without the civil war, slavery in the south would have devolved into a sharecropper system with the responsibility for taking care of slaves falling on the shoulders of the sharecroppers.
How's this for blowing your mind? Total up the cost of the Civil War. Then figure out what would have been the cost for the US government to buy all the slaves and send them home.
Rusty:
"Every dollar you take from me for your social programs is a dollar I can't charitably give to relieve someone elses suffering.
That good enough?"
You're pushing on an open door with me. I am largely against social welfare spending, particularly at the federal level.
@Nichevo:
"My specific point was that when you talk about letting the communists off the hook for the quote unquote unintentional deaths, I spit upon you."
Of course, I never said that they should be left off the hook. Let me make an analogy closer to home. The destructive chaos that engulfed Iraq following the 2003 invasion resulted in the death of at least 100,000 Iraqi non-combatants. Now the vast majority of these people were not killed by coalition forces but were killed by other Iraqis in various sectarian conflicts and reprisals. While I believe that the US bears the responsibility for these deaths, I would still there is a distinction to be drawn between that kind of responsibility and the kind of responsibility for setting out to kill 100,000 people. But of course, as you said, that does not matter much to the people killed.
While I believe that the US bears the responsibility for these deaths,
Stuff and nonsense.
there is a distinction to be drawn between that kind of responsibility and the kind of responsibility for setting out to kill 100,000 people.
Mighty white of you. I just don't know if you have any background in the crimes of communism, because you literally seem to have no conception of what was done. None whatsoever. It's like pieces on a board to you.
@Nichevo:
"Mighty white of you. I just don't know if you have any background in the crimes of communism, because you literally seem to have no conception of what was done. None whatsoever. It's like pieces on a board to you."
The Chinese famine of the late 1950s and early 1960s cost millions of lives. There is broad historical consensus that it was the result primarily of agricultural reform and mismanagement thanks to the idiocy of collectivist, centrally planned economics. It was a catastrophic loss of human life. Nonetheless, there is still a distinction to be made between that and, say, a Nazi policy of rounding up entire communities and marching them into gas chambers.
Okay, let me try to work with you.
On the one hand, people may be suffering and dying because of the limits on medical treatment under the FDA and DEA. On the other hand, the Holodomor can better be compared to the FBI shooting up any lab where cures for AIDS were being researched, and seizing all the AZT (or whatever it is now) to sell abroad.
Again I plead fatigue and headache, this is pretty spotty, but I can't ignore or stop emphasizing that regarding them as "collateral" deaths is viciously preposterous. Nothing unintentional about those deaths. Nothing at all. Damn them.
Limits obvi referring to legit uses of medical marijuana, narcotics for pain, unapproved treatments, etc; and, also obvi, this can be controverted
@Nichevo:
You are making my point for me. The Ukrainian example is widely considered to have been a forced effort at mass murder and therefore distinct from what I was talking about. Reread the first sentence I wrote in my original comment: "I think trying to assign a death toll to a Stalin or Mao-like figure can muddy the waters a bit, which is why I usually try to stick to acts of war or other acts of organized violence."
There are plenty of examples of political violence from Communist regimes to cast the entire lot into thorough disrepute, whether its the Red Terror, the great purge, Chinese suppression of counterrevolutionaries, the Cultural Revolution, or the Cambodian killing fields.
We may be agreeing at this point, my head hurts too much to parse it all. I still say that the United States is a global power, must be a global power, and has the responsibilities of a global power. Please read Alfred Thayer Mahan. That doesn't mean that we have to be everywhere and do everything.
If you wind back through my chain of comments, they originated from my effort to make a simple argument:
1) You can easily grant that Islam is an objectively more violent religion than Christianity
2) Nonetheless, looking at the actual history of the world, you can conclude that from the time of about the early middle ages, Europe has generally been a more violent and destructive place than the middle east.
3) If you want to throw China into the mix, go right ahead. The internecine dynastic warfare in China was some of the most destructive in world history
4) This is all a long way of saying that human beings can find all sorts of way to be cruel, violent, and destructive to one other regardless of whatever religious beliefs they profess
@Nichevo:
"I still say that the United States is a global power, must be a global power, and has the responsibilities of a global power."
That's all fine and good, but I imagine you and I would find a world of difference in defining "responsibilities."
"Please read Alfred Thayer Mahan."
That you found Mahan persuasive probably helps explain the immense gulf between us in our basic assumptions about the world. Personally, there are few men as dangerous and destructive as so called grand strategists. The naval buildup among the great powers in the late 19th century helped push them to the First World War, which in my opinion, was the most catastrophic event of the 20th century. I also consider Wilson's dragging of the US into that war an epochal blunder.
I really am lost...On your #2, why would you say that? Granting plenty of violence in Europe, which we know about because we are largely of a European culture, what makes you think that the Middle East/the Ummah was peace and love back then? Again, have you made a study of it? I'm skeptical.
. Speaking of China, I believe the Taiping Rebellion is alleged to have taken 100 million lives. This without firearms, or at least without modern ones.
You may attack the messenger but another treatment of the question:
http://www1.cbn.com/churchandministry/1400-years-of-christian-islamic-struggle
Nichevo:
"...what makes you think that the Middle East/the Ummah was peace and love back then?"
To say that one place was more violent than another is not to say that the other was "peace and love." There was plenty of violence and war in the middle east (e.g. Mehmed II, Timur, etc.). The difference was that these places experienced long periods of relative calm, whereas Europe saw near constant warfare.
There is a certain line of historical argument that says the relative stability of places like China and the Islamic Empire around 1500 helped engender a kind of complacency and ultimately atrophy, whereas the near constant conflict among the various principalities of Europe provided a certain kind of strategic competition that propelled Europe to a position of global supremacy.
Encapsulated neatly in Orson Welles' ad lib in The Third Man:
In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
@Nichevo:
It is encapsulated even more elegantly in the English proverb: "necessity is the mother of invention."
Little generic, but yes, shorter. I'm still not clear on your vision of Islam as peaceful. Even without a war of clashing armies, the steady state of government by terrorism makes a mockery of the very idea of peace. A hundred killings a year in 10000 subjugated villages is presumably just as bad as a million deaths in a main conflict. Then there's slavery, in which the East greatly excelled the West.
@Nichevo:
"I'm still not clear on your vision of Islam as peaceful."
I never made such a claim. In fact, I am making just the opposite. I said that you can grant that Islam is a more violent religion than Christianity in terms of scripture or theology, but in the real world, that distinction is not terribly important. The appetite for domination and conquest is a part of the human condition. Christian Europe was a very violent place, and it later visited that violence on large swathes of the American and African continent. Confucian China had periods of tremendous violence. Buddhist Japan was exceptionally cruel and brutal in its creation of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Mongol Empire was multiconfessional, though Genghis Khan himself was pretty much an animist.
Nichevo,
Yeah, again, no deliberate intention of being mean, but clearly I do get frustrated and it seeps out. My apologies if it fel tpersonal. It's just that after spending seven+ years in Iraq and Afghanistan and burying dozens of friends- good men, all much better than I'll ever be- I've developed an irritation for people telling me that "I support the troops" or "I believe that the jihadists are the greatest threat to the US," but whose support is actualized by... well, doing absolutely nothing at all, really. I feel like support would be manifested in something more than just putting a yellow ribbon on a car and that if people really believed that X was the greatest threat to their existence, they'd respond by behaving at least slightly differently than exactly how they were before X emerged as such a threat. It's frustrating for me. Like if someone says they think smoking is the biggest threat to their long-term health, then I'd wonder how much they really believed it if they had a two-pack a day habit. Or if someone tells me that global climate change is the greatest threat to the planet and then bleeds out electricity, drives a Suburban, flies around the world routinely and refuses to accept nuclear power as a clean substitute, then how much of a threat do they really think global warming is? Like that.
I do, however, take issue with the comment to J. Farmer about not having kids, so therefore not being invested in the future. Although I'm not gay, I'm a career bachelor and- owing to a whole host of social anxiety type disorders- have long ago realized that I would never be able to be in a healthy long-term relationship, get married and have kids. And yet I feel like I have invested way more of my energy and my best years than the average American in trying to reduce the Islamist threat to the future (and I actually do see it as an apocalyptic threat, but not for the same reasons as most other commenters here). So, combined with everything else above, it struck a nerve that somehow being childless makes someone care less about the future.
I was not offended. I understand the feeling that "the armed forces are at war, America is at the mall."
May I say that I feel very badly for you. That seems like serious trouble and I see life as holding very little for you, but that's my values. I'm glad that you have found a cause greater than yourself, namely, the defense of Western Civilization, in which to subsume yourself. I nonetheless encourage you to seek help. I beg pardon if you take offense to the above, I mean it sincerely. And as kindly as is in my nature.
And that wasn't quite exactly what I said to farmer. It's interesting, isn't it, that his response to the world is so diametrically opposed to yours.
I'd be interested to hear you explain your appreciation of the Islamofascist threat.
Farmer, ok, please then explain your number 2 point in as much detail as you see fit. I keep stabbing at it and you keep telling me wrong hole. You agreed that Islam is a worst religion on paper than Christianity. But then you said that Christianity had more deaths, or more conflict-I'm paraphrasing. So please explain.
@Nichevo:
"But then you said that Christianity had more deaths, or more conflict-I'm paraphrasing. So please explain."
No, I never said "Christianity" had more deaths. I said that Europe had generally been a more violent place than the middle east over the past millenia or so. The history of civilization is practically the history of violence and bloodshed. I don't see religion being an exceptionally important variable there. Nearly all religions seem malleable enough to allow their adherences to justify cruel, callous treatment of other humans.
Let me give an example from the article you linked to. The author lists what he considers to be examples of "Muslim imperialism" in the 20th century. Among some very absurd entries, he includes the following:
"10. Muslim Iraq, in an imperialist act of aggression, invaded Muslim Iran with a resulting (some estimates say) death of 2 million people."
I don't think prefacing Iraq and Iran with "Muslim" says nearly as much as the author believes it does. Let's take the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century. If you look at the Wikipedia entry, the first sentence says, "The Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) were a series of major conflicts pitting the French Empire led by Emperor Napoleon I against an array of European powers formed into various coalitions."
Now, we could just as easily rewrite that sentence as, "The Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) were a series of major conflicts pitting the Christian French Empire led by Emperor Napoleon I against an array of Christian European powers formed into various coalitions."
Mmm...Ok. I wouldn't be surprised if the author wasn't talking down to his audience. Obviously the interesting thing about the Iraq-Iran conflict was the Shia-Sunni issue, which has been at the heart of much pain and bloodshed in the Umma. I would say that the question of which flavor of Christianity was pretty irrelevant to the Napoleonic Wars.
If you wish to say that Iran Iraq was political, one tyranny against another, I guess you could, but Christianity has had no doctrine for a very long time if ever which would allow the solution to minefields to include the use of 10 year olds with plastic keys to paradise. But you may regard that as emotionalism.
In any case, I-I is pretty modern and long after Islam's pretensions to global superpowerdom. I would have let you off the hook there.
Anyway Christianity equals Europe and Islam equals the Middle East, primarily. Islam would like to equal Europe but of course that was settled in 1683, though not before. I don't think that you can contend that the scope of violence in Europe exceeded the scope of violence in Southwest Asia or wherever you would like to set the bounds. Maybe in the hinterlands like Indonesia or Malaysia, but not so sure about that. India has not known paradise at the hands of Muslims.
...I dunno. I give up. I still don't understand your point and my sinuses forbid me to care anymore. Recule pour mieux sauter, eh? I yield the balance of my time.
@Nichevo:
Let me try to put this as simply as I can. If you look at any world history survey, you will say war, conquest, and killing all over the globe in pretty much every civilization. This would lead me to suggest that the causes of these things have very little to do with religion. I don't think France conquering the continent had much to do with Catholicism; I don't think the Iraqi invasion of Iran had much to do with Islam; and I don't think that the Japanese invasion of Manchuria had much to do with Buddhism.
In short: pagans conquer, Christians conquer, Muslims conquer, Hindus conquer, Buddhists conquer, atheists conquer. My conclusion: humans conqueror and are quite good at being hypocrites about it.
Nichevo:
"I don't think that you can contend that the scope of violence in Europe exceeded the scope of violence in Southwest Asia or wherever you would like to set the bounds."
The two most violent campaigns in the middle east, under Timur and Mehmed II, which combined covered a period of roughly 60 years were less violent than just what happened in the 6 years of the Second World War. That does not even begin to include the nearly 20 million killed in the First World War or the millions that were killed in either the Thirty Years War or the Napoleonic Wars.
Hmm.
As I mentioned regarding the Taiping Rebellion, Farmer, you have to make allowances for the fact that e.g. the Khans didn't have machine guns or nerve gas.
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