<p>He doesnt hate Muslims, he just doesnt know them very well and thus makes crazy generalizations. In a way, he's arrogant.</p>
<p>JamesN doesn't hate me. S/he doesn't know me very well and thus makes gender generalizations. In a way, s/he is arrogant.</p>
<p>Hahahahaha....good stuff.</p>
<p>If anyone is taking this seriously, lighten up.</p>
<p>EDIT-As for Muslims hating the West as a whole, turn off CNN and FoxNews.</p>
<p>Yeah, I'm taking greatestyen as a joke.</p>
<p>woah, don't blow your horns, guys.</p>
<p>this thread makes me cry...the bigotry exhibited by greatestyen is unbelieveable...try visiting a mosque and you'll see that we're normal people. you create this image that we're unhuman.
it's no wonder we feel alienated because we're treated like we're unwelcome in america. let's just hope it doesn't get to the point where we are being sprayed down by firehouses a la the civil rights movement</p>
<p>No, venus121. It is you who create that image by reading things into my posts which are simply not there. </p>
<p>I explicitly said these are my opinions on Muslims, AS A WHOLE-meaning that there are countless instances in which my opinions aren't true. You speak of US Muslims. Well, that is one of the situations where my generalization does not apply. According this website (<a href="http://www.islam101.com/history/population2_usa.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.islam101.com/history/population2_usa.html</a>) less than 1% of the world's Muslim population lives in the United States. Clearly 1% is irrelevant to my "on the whole" argument. </p>
<p>As an answer to YOUR closeminded belief that I "hate" Muslims, I'll have you know that I have gone to numerous mosques as part of a cultural experience and have numerous Muslim friends. (I already said this...) But that is in the comparatively liberal Muslim communities of the U.S.'s West Coast. Muslim communities in the Middle East, Africa, Indonesia, etc. are much MUCH different than the communities my friends belong to.</p>
<p>I am not out to offend, only to inform and be informed right back. Why are you unable to do that? For example, I know that I get in an argument about religion, people always criticize me for being an atheist because they claim that atheists, on the whole, do not have any sort of "traditional" morals. Do I get upset at that? NO! It's totally true!</p>
<p>The heart of the matter is that there are REAL differences among people. That doesn't imply that one people is inherently superior to another-only that in a socioscientic sense, it is perfectly obvious that people around the world think, believe, and behave differently at different times. The first decade of the twenty-first century has so far been a decade centered on Muslim fundamentalism. It's on the rise and has gained sympathy with the majority of Muslims. Stop fooling yourself into thinking that it's hasn't and start thinking up a peaceful solution.</p>
<p>What? You think radicalism has "gained sympathy with the majority of Muslims"?</p>
<p>Outrageous. Who are you to characterize people whom you have never met? The very religion of Islam is peaceful, and there is no reason not to think most Muslims are not the same way. You are selectively noticing the vast minority who get the media attention, so it is very easy for you to generalize.</p>
<p>But it was frankly too ambitious of me to expect perspective from you.</p>
<p>I give up.</p>
<p>Good luck to all Stanford hopefuls.</p>
<p>Before I stop posting on this thread, though. I urge ALL to google pages from both sides of the argument because the previous poster's claim that Islam is a peaceful religion is, though not false to a certain extent, is by no means entirely true.</p>
<p>I thought that article was pretty funny, especially the random paragraph about Chinese pirates being amazing. </p>
<p>But you gotta admit Muslims as a whole don't take satire as lightly as the West does. Danish cartoons making fun of Allah were met with violence in the Muslim world. An Iranian newspaper creating a contest to see who could come up the best cartoons ridiculing Jews is met with Jewish people making up their own contest to make fun of themselves.</p>
<p>The Muslims took offense to the cartoons because Mohammed is not supposed to be depicted in the first place, and to make fun of him on top of that is even more offensive. However, I think those protests went a little too far. I can maybe understand burning cars, but I simply cannot understand killing people over a stupid cartoon.</p>
<p>I thought this article was AMAZING. </p>
<p>And most Muslims are not fundimentalists. I have MANY Muslim friends, and through their descriptions of the people they know, I'm going to have to stick by my statement.</p>
<p>
[quote]
The Muslims took offense to the cartoons because Mohammed is not supposed to be depicted in the first place, and to make fun of him on top of that is even more offensive. However, I think those protests went a little too far. I can maybe understand burning cars, but I simply cannot understand killing people over a stupid cartoon.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Maybe I could understand it if they went to Denmark and burned the car of the guy who drew this cartoon, but what sense does it make to burn cars in their own country? I doubt any of those destroyed cars belonged to Danes. I'm all for a peaceful flag-burning demonstration, but why burn the US flag? For once, the Americans are not at the center of a muslim world conflict and yet we're still blamed!</p>
<p>
[quote]
Maybe I could understand it if they went to Denmark and burned the car of the guy who drew this cartoon, but what sense does it make to burn cars in their own country? I doubt any of those destroyed cars belonged to Danes. I'm all for a peaceful flag-burning demonstration, but why burn the US flag? For once, the Americans are not at the center of a muslim world conflict and yet we're still blamed!
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I think that there was animosity towards the people who sided with the cartoonist. And the American flag is somewhat of a symbol of western culture, which is where the cartoon came from. That's my guess, anyway. I can't make sense of it otherwise.</p>
<p>What you have to understand, Andi0rz, is that there is no such thing as "going too far" in the name of the Prophet, Allah, or Islam. That's what you and your AMERICAN Muslims friends seem to have forgotten. Most Muslims, like most Americans, can't stand multiculturalism and are deeply fundamentalist. Get over it.</p>
<p>I promise you, the fundamentalists are a minority. My AMERICAN Muslim friends agree with me, and they frequent Pakistan and India.</p>
<p>And please don't patronize me.</p>
<p>I quote: "Islam is a religion whose practitioners have, on the whole, never had an experience with freedom of expression and instintively oppose it whenever they see it."
The problem with your argument is that you blame a religion for lack of freedom of expression. It is the oppressive regimes that these Muslims grow up in that don't allow them to express themselves. Any freedom of expression in these countries is squelched because the leaders of these countries (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Iran, and the list goes on) have such a tight grip on opposition groups and the media. Maybe you should inform yourself better on the underground movements going on within these countries, which by the way have large popular support (Iran is just one example). I think you need to familiarize yourself with the effect colonialism has had upon the psyche of its people, and how it still affects them to this day. The "muslim world", a term which i dislike, because all of these countries have distinct and separate national identies and shouldn't be grouped together just on the basis of religion, is large and diverse. There's 1.3 billion of us out there, we're Sunni, Shiite, Ismali, Sufi, and the list goes on. We're a diverse group with diverse opinions and this notion of group think is ridiculous.</p>
<p>"
Juan Cole, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, said in a commentary on his Web site that the current controversy "must be understood in historical context."</p>
<p>"Most Muslim societies have spent the past two centuries either under European rule or heavy European influence and most colonial masters and their helpmates among the missionaries were not shy about letting local people know exactly how barbaric they thought the Muslim faith was," he wrote.</p>
<p>COLONIAL SCARS</p>
<p>"Indeed, the same themes of Aryan superiority and Semitic backwardness in the European 'scientific racism' of the 19th and early 20th centuries ... led to the Holocaust against the Jews. ... A caricature of a Semitic prophet like Mohammad with a bomb in his turban replicates these racist themes ...</p>
<p>"Semites were depicted as violent and irrational and therefore as needing a firm white colonial master for their own good," Cole wrote.</p>
<p>John Esposito, a professor at Georgetown University and author of "What Everyone Needs to Know About Islam and Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam," agrees that there is nothing in the faith that makes its adherents prone to reacting differently to ridicule.</p>
<p>Martin Luther King Jr., he said, once called riots the voice of the voiceless. </p>
<p>"From my point of view this is a lot more about the context in which this is occurring than about the blasphemy," he said in an interview. </p>
<p>"It's a European context in which you have a growing right wing that is anti-immigrant and a global situation in which mainstream Muslims feel there is a war against Islam," Esposito said. </p>
<p>At the same time many Muslims around the world feel "a sense of powerlessness both within their own countries and, as well, in the international community that exacerbates the situation," he said." "</p>
<p>Hopefully I'll meet you at Stanford. I like someone who, even though I disagree with them, has a good deal of knowledge about what their talking about.</p>
<p>Well I'm glad at least a couple of people seem to be able to move beyond first impressions and come to understand that there may in fact be some truth, however slight, to what I'm saying. Perhaps I'm overstating the negatives, but it's not like they don't exist or are not becoming more mainstream-as the Michigan professor points out.</p>
<p>Greatestyen is funnier than O' Reilley.</p>
<p>How would you know that most Muslims are deeply fundamentalist?</p>
<p>This thread is an insult to anyone's intelligence.</p>
<p>well most of the muslims you see in america are from india and pakistan which are much less fundamentalist than some of the other countries (libya, etc). But i must admit from my visits to pakistan they pretty much love american entertainment and stuff and they don't really hate american people or christians, but they pretty much hate americas foreign policies... but then again so do the french, and so does half of america itself</p>