Letters to the Editor
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Bigot Math
According to GoldenBigots math, based on the 27% number from the poll, and the number of Christians in the world, there are 540 million Christians in the world that FAVOR KILLING CIVILIANS, which includes the elderly, women, children, and babies already born as well as the "unborn babies" if thats your inclination. Again this is based on GoldenBigots brilliantly bigoted and non-sensical mathmatical extrapolations.
I also wonder how GoldenBigot feels about Iranians seeming 2 1/2 times LESS PREDISPOSED TO KILLING CIVILIANS than Americans do. Let's do some bigot math on that too.
Which religion is the bigger danger to our asses, Muslims or Christians, is however irrelevant to Glenn's article which addresses the wildly lopsided anti-muslim interpretations of events and/or polls. Glenn did not explicitly state this as bigotry but I do. Those wildly lopsided anti-muslim interpretations is bigotry, dictionary definition being "strongly partial to one's own religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ". You can put lipstick on the pig in the form of polite conversation around "we are just looking at the religions and their dangers objectivly" but it still ends up being a pig.
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@L.W.M. Re: Some interesting further reading (and listening)
Very interesting. The Gurdjieff thing was quite weird. I can understand the effort to draw a distinction between real Sufism and the various others, as well as the effort to make sure that people realize that many of these mystical traditions come from definite roots and don't somehow coalesce into a primordial non-denominational oneness.
But some of it, like the drive to consolidate all the other into a great primordial Gnosticism is a bit strange. And my humble understanding was that Annie Besant had a lot more influence on Theosophy than Blatavsky. She "discovered" Krishnamurti and went off on multiple different strains. The piece also ignores other non-Abrahamic influences (especially contacts between the Jews (Essenes) and the religions of the East) and mislabels some of them, like Mithraism, which has early influence in the East (going the other way), both on Zoroastrianism and early (Vedic) Hinduism.
Qutb does often seem to have been more influenced by European social and economic thought than people usually credit. Perhaps Marx and Spencer are members of a secret Islamic cult?
Were you disgusted by the whole grab bag nature of things, or by underlying philosophy of a particular group?
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Zahed, from page 9-ish
This is my first chance to check back in, I saw your reply to my question from around page 9 of these letters.
If you're willing to admit that the 60% of American Muslims who don't believe Arab men were responsible for 9/11 are delusional, then that's good enough for me.
Of course, it means that my alarm at that statistic isn't misplaced. I'm alarmed by Americans who believed Saddam was responsible for 9/11 for so long, too. In neither case is my alarm misplaced.
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Scarlett was right
Golden Boy rises, and after an invigorating shower and a bowl of his favorite grits, steps into the walk-in closet. Now where, he asks himself, did I leave it?
Ah.... There it is, behind the camicie neri, and the biond buckskin and rhinestone Elvis impersonator costumes: the plain blue serge with two pairs of pants, one shiny in the seat, of the reasonable bigot.
A quick toss of the head, a little fiddling with the four-in-hand and he emerges to a round of applause. Eat your hearts out, Muslim-lovers, Les jeux son fait. (They go for French, these silly liberals.)
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@Iokannan in the Well
By my count, seven people have been killed by anti-abortion fanatics in the United States. Seven too many, to be sure, but for an alleged bloodthirsty terrorist movement to have a smaller bodycount than that produced during a slow Tuesday morning in Gaza is noteworthy, is it not?
When it comes to religious fanaticism, it matters which religion you're talking about. If a couple of super-hardcore Vajrayāna practitioners move in next door, I'm not too worried about it. The Jesuits wandering around Georgetown don't seem to cause much trouble. Hindus may sometimes raise hell in Ayodhya, but they aren't out the conquer the world. A Mormon may have hijacked something at some point in history (probably a Wells Fargo coach) but not in a good long while.
Try again after a Liberty U grad flies a jetliner into an office building.
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The bodycounter annonymous
When it comes to religious fanaticism, it matters which religion you're talking about.
Fanaticism is fanaticism, irregardless of what creed it espouses. You're counter-'examples' are neither compelling nor convincing. Christians are just as likely to blow each other up, here and overseas, as Hindus and Muslim are in Kasmir.
And like it or not, terrorism isn't about body counts, but about terror. The ongoning campaigns of bombing, assassination and intimidation here in the states against women's reproductive rights is, sadly, a case study where such terrorism is proving very effective.
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Stephen Pride
You write:
If you're willing to admit that the 60% of American Muslims who don't believe Arab men were responsible for 9/11 are delusional, then that's good enough for me.
You miscite the poll -- the poll results DO NOT SHOW that 60% of American Muslims do not believe that Arab men were responsible for 9/11. The poll shows that 28% of American Muslims do not believe that Arab men were responsible for 9/11. Only 28% responded that they did not believe that "groups of Arabs" carried out the 9/11 attacks. Of those 28%, 18% either did not know who carried out the attacks or did not believe in the question. Another 7% believed that the attacks were a US/Bush conspiracy (a belief held by many non-Muslim Americans as well). 1% believed Isreal/Jews carried out the attacks. 1% believed that others or non-Muslims carried out the attacks. And the final 1% believed that crazy people carried out the attacks.
What is it that you find troubling about these statistics, particularly given the fact that the term "Arabs" does not embrace most of the Muslims in the world. That is, you would need to know the country of origin of the perpetrators (that they were mostly from Saudi Arabia) to know that they were Arab.
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@Golden Boy
I see them as trying to obscure the disturbing picture that the poll paints.
Yeah, well you're just plain WRONG, for reasons I have reiterated many times already.