Muslim Madrassas Not As Dangerous to the West as Implied

by EvilForce 28 Replies latest members politics

• 

  stevenyc

  Jula71

  At the Madrassas they learn they should “kill the infidel. At the camps they learn how to.

  Where is your source for this?

  steve
• 

  EvilForce

  Sorry Scully but you are using an inappropriate analogy.
  
  The Dub's teach that the worldy people are going to die....Fine. The Dub's do not teach JW's how to make pipe bombs to kill worldly people. That's a better analogy.
  
  Similarly....whack jobs going to places like Bob Jones University in South Carolina learn that God is going to destroy all non-uber-christians. But does BJU teach bomb making? Airplane hijacking? Etc... So the nut jobs from places like BJU don't become suicide bombers....they become neo-cons and drop bombs from 40,000 feet by pulling the strings of government. The BJU have more effective weaspons than the poor, down-trodden, Muslims. ;)
• 

  jula71

  
  Steve, here is a study done by PBS.

  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saudi/analyses/madrassas.html

  And you and I know calling PBS "conservative" is pretty far from the truth.

  The Dub's teach that the worldy people are going to die....

  And again, they teach all infidels should be killed. What's the difference?
• 

  John Doe

  
  
  

  Normally I’m not one for conspiracy theories. But, why was McVeigh put to death so fast? Why is there a bunch of people that have testified under oath they saw him with a Middle Eastern man?

  Umm, could it be because he wanted to die and didn't use all his defense tactics? Is it so hard to believe American terrorists exist? What about the guy and his cousin going around shooting people randomly through a hole in the back of his car a couple of years ago? As far as middle eastern men, I'm around a couple every day. That doesn't prove connections.
• 

  EscapedLifer1

  
  ef,

  The idea that madrassas are incubating the next generation of terrorists offers the soothing illusion that desperate, ignorant automatons are attacking us rather than college graduates, as is often the case. It's easy to pigeonhole Muslims as stupid religious fanatics trying to bring down the West's way of live.

  I haven't pigeon hole'd them as stupid, but they are religious fanatics. And they do hate our Western way of life. I don't think anyone but the most ignorant mouth-breathing dunderhead thinks about this conflict in the simplistic terms you describe.

  One of your, and the "left's" tactics is to insult the intelligence of the "right". Now, I am neither left nor right, I both agree and disagree with both "sides" on various issues. But I see this all the time, both in the media and in conversations with real people. You assume that because we don't agree with your assessment of the situation, we must have an overly simplistic (ie uneducated and stupid) view of it, and you, who is more intelligent and insightful, must correct our simple minded view.

  Very insulting!

  By the way, why is this such a big deal for you to start this thread? Who is proposing attacking the madrassas? Whether or not they are an actual terrorist training facility (which they aren't), has nothing to do with the fact that they instill in their students a hatred for the West and the notion that if they do fight the "infidel" and die, its straight to paradise and 70 virgins to have fun with.

  So, no, they are not the training camps where terrorists learn the technical side of their trade, but they are an institution that pumps out fundamentalists into the muslim societies that by extension support the terrorists and their agenda.

  Brandon
• 

  Midget-Sasquatch

  Well, most of the madrassas being funded by rich saudis teach only the wahabbi sect of Islam. I'm sure you know that it is the least tolerant Islamic sect out there. They narrowly define the boundaries of the house of islam and lump all the rest in the house of war, even calling some other muslim sects apostate. Why do recruiters focus on the mosques if they weren't a productive area to search for recuits?
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  greendawn

  The problem with Islam is that it teaches its followers to think of themselves as superior to everyone else and to impose their religion everywhere, even though some moslem clerics try to play this down.
  
  Given this mentality I dare not think what would have happened if the Moslems had been predominant in the world, financially and militarily, instead of the Christians.
• 

  Abaddon

  For god's sake, let's think of this from a historical perspective.
  

  Look at Christianity in the 19th Century. Suppression of women and support of racist policies including extermination are just two doctrines that were strongly supported by Christian doctrine; 'divine mandate' was the justification given for the ethnic cleansing of the West (as in the American West) for Christ's sake.

  Superficially there has been massive development in the Islamic world since WWII.

  But Nike's and mobile phones do not make anyone you give them to members of 21st Century society.

  Do you think an Englishman brought up with 19th Century values would suddenly become a modern man if you gave him an iPod?

  Many Muslims have been raised with their equivalent of 19th Century values.

  Christianity is vastly changed if one looks at the the practices of most professed Christians today compared to how it was practiced 150 years ago. Christianity has changed slowly over that period. Women got some equal rights (i.e. voting) in the first quarter of the 20th Century, and both gender equality and racial equality were legally established in the last third of that Century, even if those ideals are not fully established in day-to-day life yet.

  In the Muslim world, we are frequently dealing with people whose grandfathers lived the same way as their great-great-great-grandfathers. Their fathers were born in a rapidly changing world, and they themselves are basically still lagging behind in their cultural adaptation. What took decades in the West is happening within a generation in many Islamic countries.

  And people are surprised it causes problems in and with those cultures! It's culture shock dudes and dudettes, plain and simple.

  You can walk into a shop and buy modern technology. You can't walk into a shop and buy a modern world-view and enculturation; you are saddled with what you were brought up with.

  Just as Roman Catholicism main faults (in terms of unfairness or harm to practisioners) are all about women - contraception, abortion, celebacy and an all-male Preisthood - so too are the main faults with Islamic society in their treatment of women.

  In fact, one could say that to a fundamentalist Mullah, the idea of their women becoming liberated is a greater fear than that caused by any other aspect of Westernisation. An independant business woman in a suit with a short skirt and a push-up bra is Shaitan to them.

  This brings in another important point.

  Ignore the religion.

  Religions are endlessly reinterprtated and changed as the culture they are expressed by changes. It really doesn't matter that much what religion someone is, as all religions (as well as no religion) are capable of the same harmful actions both in theory and in historcal practice. By all means present some rebuttal to this fact, as it is a key one. It will be hard though.

  Thinking of the violent portion of the Islamic world is a lot easier and more logical if one views it as a conflict with misogynistic men with out-moded ideas who are running scared and desperately trying to maintain the only world that makes sense to them. It carries more useful information than the more obvious course of action, that of pointing out their religion as the differentiating factor.

  Just as Christianity has changed into a vauger and less harmful and restrictive belief system as the cultures in the West matured and evolved (the culture changing the expression of the religion to suit new cultural ideas) so too will Islam. And it will probably not take as long as Christian society took to change, but it certainly won't happen over night.

  That is a good half of the problem. The other half is Western governments and companies working together to exploit the developing world. Even just looking at behaviour since WWII gives grounds for a lot of antipathy towards American and the European powers. I know from previous discussions that most people are essentially clueless about the number of democratic governments in the Arab world and Latin America that have been 'taken down' by deliberate policy of Western powers, normally because they are getting in the way of a nice big profit. Likewise most people are unaware of the number of human-right violating dictators that have and still receive Western support for the strategic or financial worth of their country. Most people buy the bullshit about protecting democracy and defending human rights, LOL. Other people fantasize about fantastical conspiracies when there are very factual ones staring them in the face.

  As private citizens we have to vote the right way and stop this happening, as behaviour like this just makes the situation worse.

  For example, Iran could quite probably have remained under it's democratic government and be the most advanced Islamic country in the world today with peaceful ties to the West and the Islamic world. Instead, because the democratic government wanted to reduce the profit of the oil Western companies were taking from their country (from 80%), Western powers conspired to destabalise the democracy and insert the Shah. His human-right abusing reigeme was supported by the West until the people overthrew it (due to it's suppression of human rights). Unfortunately religion was the rallying cry and now we have a theocratic Republic we need to deal with ALL BECAUSE THE WEST WERE GREEDY.

  The violent people in the Islamic world are fighting a losing battle to keep a defunct culture. If they were Hindus with the same cultural development, they'd be doing the same, if they were Christians with the same cultural development, they would be doing the same.

  We can fight this most effectively by NOT polarising it by ignorantly making it out to be a religous war (which will only piss-off peaceful Muslims and maybe lose us allies), and by observing Interbational Law and respecting Human Rights in our dealing with developing world governments.
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  jula71

  Is it so hard to believe American terrorists exist?

  I didn’t say they don’t exist, I said they had help.

  What about the guy and his cousin going around shooting people randomly through a hole in the back of his car a couple of years ago?

  Ah yes, the "DC Sniper", who is John Allen Muhammad. Hmmm….Muhammad? Is that French? Italian?
• 

  Abaddon

  
  
  jula71
  

  
  He was a black American who adopted an Islamic name and was a member of the Nation of Islam, which is itself repudiated by many Muslims as an un-Islamic organisation due to its racist philosophy.

  But if you are determined to make this an issue you can stir up religious bigotry over, the fact Nation of Islam is as Muslim as the Christian Identity Movement is Christian is besides the point. Unless of course you were making a statement without adequately informing yourself of the facts and now find you are in error?

  And what is your response to the state-sponsored terrorism backed by the US (for example) in South American and the Middle Eastern countries to supplant democratic governments with puppet rulers who allow Western companies to exploit natural respources freely?

  greendawn

  The problem with Islam is that it teaches its followers to think of themselves as superior to everyone else

  Oh, that makes it SO different from the practice and private opinion of most non-Muslim religionists LOL.

  and to impose their religion everywhere,

  ... yeah, unlike caring sharing Christianity and it's non-forceful missionary work throughout Middle and South America, Africa and Asia? Muslims allowed and legislated for peaceful coexistance with Jews and Christians hundreds of years ago whilst Christian were basically quite happy to kill anyone who wasn't Christian.

  Why? Because at that point the culture that Islam sprang from was the most enlightened and sophisticated in the world at the time. A large part of the Renascence was built upon the developments of Arabic scientists who had surpassed the Greek-level of science that Europe had stagnated around for centuries.

  This is pretty good validation of my contention; that the actual type religion is largely IRRELEVENT. A society's behaviour is determined by it's culture, the religion is expressed BY the culture according to a culture's values. This is why Christian's don't burn witches or kill Jews anymore. The religon is the SAME, the culture is DIFFERENT. How much more frickin' obvious does it need to be.

  Challenging the future with a profound lack of history (a great Suzanne Vega lyric) is stupid and probably the most damaging thing for the human race in the next fifty years or so.

  If we don't learn from history we are condemned to repeat it. Fear is largely caused by ignorance of the thing feared.

  Seriously people, there's nothing you can do that can't be done, nothing you can sing that can't be sung, nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game - it's easy. There's nothing you can make that can't be made, no one you can save that can't be saved, nothing you can do but you can learn how to be in time - it's easy. All you need is love, .. oh bugger, sorry, did that happen again... ?