Here's a pretty good article for this forum, to put things in a more balanced perspective on Muslims.
antiwar.com
I would be the first to admit that many countries in the world that are Muslim are pretty wretched places to live, but I don't think that this is necessarily a reflection of mainstream Islamic teachings and morals any more than IRA bombings done in the past by Catholics were any relection on Catholicism.
IMO the common root of backwardness and conflict is tribalism, and religions, ethnicities and such are just the dressings on problems centred around perceived injustices perpetrated by one faction against another. Some parts of the world, especially those with longer histories, suffer from this and we should step back from it and above all not allow ourselves to become part of it. When a group gets sucked into a cycle of ignorant tribal conflict -- Serbs vs. Croats, Kurds vs Turks, Sunnis vs Shias, Tutsis vs Hutus, Irish Catholics vs Irish Protestants, Israeli Jews vs Arabs, America vs the entire Muslim world (?!!)... the results are disasterous. Both sides lose. Our number one enemy is not terrorism, it is the tribalism on both sides that spawns terrorism, and we should not fall into the trap of this kind of thinking (or acting). All human beings have rights regardless of whether they are Muslim, Christian, Jew, athiest, or otherwise. |
