Hi CobaltBlue; Re: "The point of the discussion, in my opinion, isn't broad generalities about war and peace, religion and atheism, but whether there is something irreduceable about Islam that promotes religiously motivated violent conflict."
Of course there is not. If there were, the US would be in deep trouble because there are lots of Moslems living here, and serving in our military.
The installation of Israel and the shipment of the locals elsewhere is the cause of a lot of the problem. Similarly, Russia decided that certain territories on her border should belong to her rather than the locals who had lived there for many years and now Russia is paying for that land with blood.
But places where there are no fights over land and laws are fairly peaceful, even if they are Moslem. Part of the problem is that the Moslems were out of power when the lines were decided between those countries and some of the lines were drawn a bit out of whack. And it's not just in Israel where the best land was taken by foreigners, but also in India. Any time you divide up a territory so that it will have majority ethnic populations in two states you can expect some ethnic population movement, but India took a very bullheaded attitude towards Kashmir that has caused them no end of trouble since then.
Re: "The PC-ness gets so fatuous that recently I heard an Islamic scholar sputtering that "only one tenth of one percent" of Muslims believe in jihad as conquest by the sword."
What's the point? I bet 10% of the US population is in favor of making the Moslem world democratic (and Israel loving) by force. How the hell do you think we got mired in Iraq? The basic difference between us and the Moslems is that we've got the weapons, by and large, they do not.
Where Moslems have obtained very modern weapons they haven't used them any more than anyone else. Pakistan has had nukes for years and yet the monuments to the use of nuclear weapons against civilians are in Japan. Every major Moslem nation in the Middle East (other than Iraq, LOL) has chemical weapons but as far as I know no one has lobbed any into Israel. Their primary use was between Iran and Iraq, but that was a pretty serious war and the Western powers are not immune to that sort of use.
-- Carl |
