Re: You know...some irony
 

Well, you have to admit that when you say something like, "Islam reacts to problems with the sword instead of the pen. That is all the comparison I need," it certainly sounds like reductionism taken to an ignorant degree. I understand your position a lot better now even if I still don't agree with it, and I appreciate that you took the time to clarify instead of just flaming (that much I have come to normally expect from you).

Given our discussion, I have the feeling that 10-15 years from now we will see something rather in between extremes. Not an apocalyptic outbreak of violence engulfing a continent but not exactly a movement that would do Gandhi proud either.

Well, the riots were condemned in Lebanon by religious leaders although I agree that other countries were more quiet about it.

By the way, what do you make of this? I'm not asking rhetorically. I really want to know whether you think Forbes and Oxford Analytica have any idea what they're talking about (I've been leery of Forbes ever since they made asses of themselves multiple times talking about the videogame industry).

Certainly there are peaceful and modern Muslims out in the world, but I think calling the majority "good" is a bit too simple. I mean this in the same sense that people usually mean when they say calling someone "evil" is simplistic. On the one hand, the majority of Muslims all over the world and even in the Middle East don't support blowing up innocent children. On the other hand, life sucks for a lot of them and thanks to failures in education and public discourse, they don't see that the root of their misery has just as much to do with the corrupt people in positions of power and influence in their society as it does with any (real or perceived) abuses by the West. Just as an example, school textbooks in Palestine don't acknowledge Israel's existence as a state. It's not too much of a stretch that they elected a terrorist group into Parliament, then.

I guess what I'm saying is that rather than fault a silent majority, I fault a system that's been built to perpetuate violence in order to keep the ruling class in power. It's well and good to say that Muslims need to reclaim their religion from the extremists, but what if they don't even know they've been taken hostage by corrupt leaders? Unfortunately, what Mahmoud Abbas and Ariel Sharon have demonstrated to me is that the best (and perhaps only) hope for peace is to have two courageous leaders meeting in the middle. A grass roots kind of movement won't do it.

P.S. Are we really that scary? Seems like everybody else suddenly stops having an opinion as soon as you and I have a conversation.

P.P.S. Swarthmore's swim team defeated Ursinus. So nyah and stuff.

Re: You know...some irony
 

That was the intention of the cartoons from the start, according to the Danish editor who allowed the cartoons. The cartoons, he said, were not a hate message saying that all Muslims are violent. They were meant to point out that the peaceful religion of Islam has been seemingly taken over by the violent minority and the peaceful majority needs to step up and take their religion back.

If you can find the interview with that Danish editor, obviously he says his opinion much better than I can repeat it. He did quite a few interviews back during the heat of the riots. I'd provide a link but I can't find it.

For example take the most cited cartoon -- Mohammad wearing a bomb for a turban. The face of Mohammad should be a peaceful symbol, but instead the perception is that Islam is blood-stained and violent, so the symbol is distorted and is no longer peaceful. The message is that the face of Islam has been pillaged and ransacked and stolen and it needs to taken back by peaceful Muslims themselves.

For any of you who haven't seen the cartoons, I think seeing them for yourself truly shows how much they have been blown out of proportion. Google them or here are the cartoons. Should I be careful about posting this link? The funny thing is, I did think twice about it, and I'm still not sure if one of you moderators will decide to remove it. I can't imagine any reason why it matters anywhere and especially at a forum like this, but with riots over such a little thing as a cartoon I'm not sure anymore...

The feeling is similar to one of the cartoons. There is a cartoon of a newspaper cartoonist sweating in fear as he draws a simple picture of Mohammad -- with no bombs or anything, just a drawing of his face. The perception of a violent Islam is so pervasive that we can't even draw a non-opinionated drawing of Mohammad and publish it without thinking twice about it.