First of all, let me apologize on the behalf of the United States for the recent Koran incident, and the whole invasion of your lands thing. Trust me, if I were in charge, none of this would have happened in the first place, because we wouldn't be sticking our noses in your business to begin with. People in our country would be just as upset if there was a Muslim army here that burned a Bible. You'd have every fundamentalist Christian piled into their 15 passenger vans, headed for Washington, with gun stash in tow.
Secondly, if you read any of the comments on any of our local news sites, you'll probably think that the majority of the residents of our country who have access to computers hate anyone who isn't a white, Southern, heterosexual Christian that supports endless war. That, and despite English being a second language that you have had to learn in school, you still have the ability to read and write better than many of our native speakers. You'd be right on that, and slightly right on the first perception.
However not everyone in our country is a religious fanatic. They just tend to be more vocal, and gullible, and listen to a lot of AM talk radio. There's plenty of very well-educated people trying to balance out the national conversation and keep us from starting another war under the guise of "spreading democracy" which is really a code word for "getting more access to oil". Again, sorry about that.
We also have these creeps in common, people like Mullah Omar or James Dobson. Here we refer to them as "The American Taliban" since they both have this incredibly hypocritical, self-serving and fundamentalist interpretations of their respective religious texts. We both have fanatics who believe it is the will of God or Allah that their religion must be forcibly spread across the entire world, often at gunpoint. Speaking of "forcibly spreading", have you Googled "Santorum"? He's a national joke, so please don't think most of us take him seriously.
I will add that a lot of the support for the recent saber-rattling towards Iran is both from the religious fanatics who believe that this is the potential conflict that will initiate the end of the world as we know it, and the people who will make a lot of money off it. Trust me, it has little
to do with any support for Israel. Israel has nuclear weapons already, this is about more conflict and most Americans are tired of war. We really are. It is just the nutjobs and the military contractors.
I know that as a Jew, I am supposed to hate you and you are supposed to hate me but why? Since when did we have to participate in a deadly game created to divide people and then blindly defend the side we were placed on without our choice? Maybe one day people will wake up to understand that all of this hatred is propagated in order to keep us so bitterly divided that there is no chance of us ever uniting against the real enemy.
Until then, peace be unto you.
*applause*
ReplyDeleteShalom, Salaam, Pax.
Blessed Be my blogging friend.
Fantastic. Extremely well said.
ReplyDelete*applause*
very well said. I wish the number of people, thinking like you, multiply.
ReplyDeleteI wish they would multiply as well. :)
DeleteSalaam Minhas.
We are here & multiplying :) Silenced no longer!
DeleteAlso, Mullah Omar calls for killing infidels and slitting the throats of unbelievers...and hosted Bin Laden and his thugs in prepping for 9/11...comparing him to James Dobson is ludicrous.
ReplyDeleteOne evening I happened to see some friends in a procession to what was to be a Bible burning. It was a protest against theocratic fundamentalists. In agreement with their point, I still disapprove of burning books in general and associate the gesture with Nazism. Still I was chatting with friends in the procession when a Christian attacked the guy carrying the Bible, trying to strangle him with a chain. Fortunately a cop was nearby, put the attacker into a choke hold and dragged him off, the attacker screaming, "But they're fags!" The cop responded, "I'm a fag," inciting his prisoner to struggle harder against the choke hold.
ReplyDeleteSure, most Christians would shrug off a Bible burning as idiotic theatrics. Most Muslims would regard a Qur`an burning the same way. As a Muslim I regard the Qur`an as the Word of God, but Her word is perfect and inviolable. There are enough copies of that book that burning a few doesn't really hurt anything.
Burn a Bible, burn a Qur`an, a Torah, a Baghavad Gita, whatever... a few of the faithful will get supremely pissed off, even violent, but most won't care.
I'm far from a fan of the Taliban, and heaven knows Afghanistan desperately needs changes, but the kack-handed military occupation of Afghanistan, the frequent "collateral damage" killing of civilians on top of the many dislocations and disruptions forced by the US Army have all created a sense of oppression by and submission to the American invaders. It's very polarizing and feeds into a sense of the US being violently opposed to Islam. In the chaos and violence religion is the one solid reliable constant many Afghans depend on. Burning a Qur'an in this situation is insult on top of grave, constant injury -- truly incendiary.
I agree with you, as a Muslim I wouldn't immediately call for someone to be killed because they burned a Qur'an but it would definitely piss me off. So would burning a Bible or any other holy text. It is incredibly disrespectful and obnoxious to do something like that.
DeleteAlso Dobson calls anti-bullying laws anti-Christian and tacitly accepts homophobic violence. There are Christians like Fred Phelps and the Dominionist churches that call for the execution of homosexuals. Most Christians, like most Muslims, are pretty live-and-let-live, but there are murderous demagogues to be found on either side.
ReplyDelete*applause*
DeleteSalaam and blessed be
As a blogger who gives lots ofcoverage to Bosnia Hercegovina, who lived in Sarajevo, I guess I can say something about life in a Muslim majority area vs Yakima, a Fundamentast Christian majority area.
ReplyDelete1. A Muslim burning Torah or the Bible WITH THE INTENT to desecrate either is committing blasphemy.
2. A Muslim killing a Christian or Jew or Zoroastrian without a reason like self defense or war is committing a very grave sin.
Jesus, Moses, Abraham, and many others are considered as prophets who'se very names must be mentioned with special reverence, yet so many modern Chrisians feel free to insult Mohammed at every turn.
Thomas Jefferson and George Washington did not do this. Thomas Jefferson had a translation of the Koran.
I realize there was Sept 11, 2001, but It does not explain what went on before.
Sometimes the rhetoric here in the US is too much like pre-war rhetoric in Bosnia Hercegovina for my comfort.
Great post. I have been writing about the same things for quite some time. It is sad to see people take religion and turn it into literal or historical events when in reality the true message of any world religion is metaphorical in nature. To seek and find your higher power within....this is the true message. Heaven is here and now and Paradise/ The Garden is within your own heart....not up there or out there somewhere. I would have to say that the ultimate religious experience for me is to realize the mystery of the human and cosmic experience. To know that one does not know and be at peace with it would be a step in the right direction for all of humanity.
ReplyDeleteThere was no hatred in the Middle East against Westerners before Israel was carved out of lands which were settled and cultivated by Palestinian Arabs for more than a millennium. The native people to these lands were systematically driven from their ancient homes beginning in the 1920s and to this day. They were crammed into a tiny desert Ghetto, Gaza, living beneath any human dignity; Palestinian families divided by concrete walls on the West bank in order to grab ever more land for Jewish settlers.
ReplyDeleteThe solidarity of the Muslim world with the fate of their disfranchised Palestinian brethren, the West's taking sides with the intruders and the injustice done to the Palestinians, triggered hatred and religious fanaticism directed against the West; mainly against the USA, as main supporter of these atrocities against Palestinian people.
While the Afghanistan campaign was caused by the, then, Afghani Taliban regime harboring the terror network Al Qaida, which had attacked American soil and killed American people, and was thus justified, the attack on Iraq was strategically planned by and after the “Wolfowitz doctrine”, many years BEFORE Sep 11, 2001. Paul Wolfowitz, was Deputy Defense Secretary, and member of Richard Perle's Defense Policy Board in the Pentagon during the George W. Bush tenure. Both belong to what the University of Chicago and Harvard professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt call “the Israel Lobby” in the USA. Thus, the Iraq war was not waged “because of oil” or because of “WMD” (which didn’t exist), but because Israel ‘ordered’ it.
Since several months now, we read in international media: “Israel wants to Bomb Iran at US expense” or “Israel urges US attack on Iran to stop nuclear programme” or “AIPAC Wants War with Iran” (AIPAC is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee). The Israel Lobby in the U.S. Senate under the aegis of Sen. Joe Lieberman is demanding the United States should attack Iran . . . now, even though his rhetoric has shifted from “Iran building a nuclear weapon” to the vague notion of Iran having the "capability" to build one.
It’s not the U.S. “oil lobby” which is behind the warmongering against Iran, not even significantly the Christian fundamentalists . . . but Israel and its lobby in the USA.
Part of the reason why Israel has a support network here in the states is because of the Christians, especially the Dominionists and Right Wing Evangelicals who literally believe that Israel will play the central role in the second coming of Christ. It's quite sad the the rest of our country gets dragged into this because of them.
DeleteIt all comes down once again to a sliver of land for Palestine. If Israel gave that back, magically the Syrian gov't would stop killing their own people, suicide bombs would stop and women in Saudi Arabia would be allowed to drive.
ReplyDelete