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| Alternative Christmas Messages -Ahmadinejad and Others | |
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Guest Guest
| Subject: Re: Alternative Christmas Messages -Ahmadinejad and Others Fri Dec 26, 2008 12:34 pm | |
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| | | Guest Guest
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| Subject: Re: Alternative Christmas Messages -Ahmadinejad and Others Fri Dec 26, 2008 6:24 pm | |
| - cactus flower wrote:
- Found it hard to keep focused on what he was saying: I'll give it a read if I can find it on the net. Easier for Moslems to address Christians than the other way around, given that they see JC as a holy prophet, and Christians historically don't have anything too good to say about Mohammed.
I was watching a tv documentary on the 6 day war recently and all that footage of optimistic, modern looking arab people, the women in the streets with their hair uncovered in Eygypt and Syria, back in the 1960s, was a bit of a jolt. The people who stoked up a medieval and very reactionary form of Islam - imo in the main the US government - have a lot to answer for. Indeed. Arabs are a devout people but they are not animals, nor is Islam an animal religion. To think that Islamic peoples would have preserved their barbaric reactionary tendencies from feudal times into the present day if left alone is absurd, especially when you look at Christian nations, many of which had equally barbaric tendencies but have modernized. The perception of Islam is worse than the reality no doubt, but even the reality is a product of perpetual conflict, isolation and resentment of the West which has fucked the middle east over for so long. I do not doubt that without the West's (in particular, the US's) constant interventionism and bully-boy tactics in the middle east for decades (if not centuries), a proper liberal movement would have formed and the Arab states today would be more liberal now than they were in the 60s. That said, it must be remembered that none of these states are as bad as they are portrayed by the US and Israel. |
| | | Guest Guest
| Subject: Re: Alternative Christmas Messages -Ahmadinejad and Others Fri Dec 26, 2008 7:16 pm | |
| I think one of the problems that the Islamic states face is that there is no incentive to change their way of life - Islam is a revealed religion - there is no judgement day to come, no saviour to return to rescue us all - Mohammed was the last prophet and he revealed the whole plan -this is it and always will be it for the devout which if you follow it will lead to heaven and on earth - the main problem is that the plan was dreamed up in the wilds of hejaz and Arabia and comes with all the social paraphanalia of the 7th century desert world too - if Mohammed had been born in Constantinople,Xian,Cairo or any of the other great diverse tolerant metropolitian centres - Islam could have been much different. |
| | | Guest Guest
| Subject: Re: Alternative Christmas Messages -Ahmadinejad and Others Fri Dec 26, 2008 8:50 pm | |
| - Edo wrote:
- I think one of the problems that the Islamic states face is that there is no incentive to change their way of life - Islam is a revealed religion - there is no judgement day to come, no saviour to return to rescue us all - Mohammed was the last prophet and he revealed the whole plan -this is it and always will be it for the devout which if you follow it will lead to heaven and on earth - the main problem is that the plan was dreamed up in the wilds of hejaz and Arabia and comes with all the social paraphanalia of the 7th century desert world too - if Mohammed had been born in Constantinople,Xian,Cairo or any of the other great diverse tolerant metropolitian centres - Islam could have been much different.
Tis a bit more complex than that, although you're hitting a very interesting point. Formal doctrine for some, the Sunni, suggests that the revelation is complete. The Shia and Sufi sects however believe in the Mahdi, who will come to unite mankind and prepare for judgement. Though the advent of the Mahdi is not addressed by the Koran it is a powerful tenet of belief nonetheless and is the central core of dissent between the sects. The Mahdi.In 1848, the Báb (leader of the Bábís, forerunners of the Bahá'i faith) almost started a civil war by displaying the Black Standard, the traditionally accepted signal of the advent of the Mahdi. LINK. |
| | | Guest Guest
| Subject: Re: Alternative Christmas Messages -Ahmadinejad and Others Fri Dec 26, 2008 9:52 pm | |
| - evercloserunion wrote:
- cactus flower wrote:
- Found it hard to keep focused on what he was saying: I'll give it a read if I can find it on the net. Easier for Moslems to address Christians than the other way around, given that they see JC as a holy prophet, and Christians historically don't have anything too good to say about Mohammed.
I was watching a tv documentary on the 6 day war recently and all that footage of optimistic, modern looking arab people, the women in the streets with their hair uncovered in Eygypt and Syria, back in the 1960s, was a bit of a jolt. The people who stoked up a medieval and very reactionary form of Islam - imo in the main the US government - have a lot to answer for. Indeed. Arabs are a devout people but they are not animals, nor is Islam an animal religion. To think that Islamic peoples would have preserved their barbaric reactionary tendencies from feudal times into the present day if left alone is absurd, especially when you look at Christian nations, many of which had equally barbaric tendencies but have modernized. The perception of Islam is worse than the reality no doubt, but even the reality is a product of perpetual conflict, isolation and resentment of the West which has fucked the middle east over for so long. I do not doubt that without the West's (in particular, the US's) constant interventionism and bully-boy tactics in the middle east for decades (if not centuries), a proper liberal movement would have formed and the Arab states today would be more liberal now than they were in the 60s.
That said, it must be remembered that none of these states are as bad as they are portrayed by the US and Israel. I think the fundamentalist governments are reactionary. Sympathy for people of countries that have been destabilised by western interests used to make me ignore how backward-looking and oppressive the fundamentalist islamic governments were. The Pan-Arab movement wasn't able to deal with the opposition to Arab development coming from Zionism and the west. Its undertandable that people turned to radical Islam, but that doesn't make it a good thing. It is so unusual to come across any politicians with principles, and prepared to be honest about the relation between militant radical Islam and the west, that it was a real shock to come across this by Robin Cook - I didn't read it at the time it was published, immediately after the London Underground bombings: - Quote :
- At the time of writing, no group has surfaced even to explain why they launched the assault. Sometime over the next few days we may be offered a website entry or a video message attempting to justify the impossible, but there is no language that can supply a rational basis for such arbitrary slaughter. The explanation, when it is offered, is likely to rely not on reason but on the declaration of an obsessive fundamentalist identity that leaves no room for pity for victims who do not share that identity.
Yesterday the prime minister described the bombings as an attack on our values as a society. In the next few days we should remember that among those values are tolerance and mutual respect for those from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Only the day before, London was celebrating its coup in winning the Olympic Games, partly through demonstrating to the world the success of our multicultural credentials. Nothing would please better those who planted yesterday's bombs than for the atrocity to breed suspicion and hostility to minorities in our own community. Defeating the terrorists also means defeating their poisonous belief that peoples of different faiths and ethnic origins cannot coexist.
In the absence of anyone else owning up to yesterday's crimes, we will be subjected to a spate of articles analysing the threat of militant Islam. Ironically they will fall in the same week that we recall the tenth anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica, when the powerful nations of Europe failed to protect 8,000 Muslims from being annihilated in the worst terrorist act in Europe of the past generation.
Osama bin Laden is no more a true representative of Islam than General Mladic, who commanded the Serbian forces, could be held up as an example of Christianity. After all, it is written in the Qur'an that we were made into different peoples not that we might despise each other, but that we might understand each other.
Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally "the database", was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians. Inexplicably, and with disastrous consequences, it never appears to have occurred to Washington that once Russia was out of the way, Bin Laden's organisation would turn its attention to the west. Although highly principled, I think Cook was wrong to think that there was a hope of a peaceful solution between the G8 governments and the Moslem world and even more so now the economic crisis makes the west ready to pursue a "War on Terror" that is in reality a war to wrest control of natural resources and economies beyond their own territory, no matter what the human cost. http://shaphan.typepad.com/blog/2006/05/robin_cook_the_.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Cook |
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