News+and+politics religion philosophy the cynic librarian: What Are U Doing Here?!

Friday, August 01, 2008

What Are U Doing Here?!

Originally published two years ago. I wanted to update it with the following video from ABC News.



Update: This is one the most found of my posts that people find via Google and/or link. Regrettably, I do not think it is just an interest in the discussion that attracts most people. Indeed, the most used words to find this post are "kill all muslims." In fact, the 14,000th hit on the site used the search terms, "I want to kill all muslims." My advice for this person is to seek help. U others, please consider the import of the post if you really are asking the question about whether killing all Muslims is a live alternative.

The question of whether the US or its proxies or even western nations as a whole should kill all Muslims has been gaining wide support around the darker corners of the blogosphere lately. I say darker, since you'd expect it to be limited to what used to be called racist sites run by the Aryan Nation or KKK. However, you can even hear such sentiments expressed on daily talk-shows.

A recent unscientific poll at the Spengler Forum asked the members outright whether all Muslims should be killed. ....

The poll at Spengler's forum is ambiguous. Before it was locked and shut down due to the acrimonious accusations passing back and forth between the commenters, enough people voted to show that yes, 23% believed all Muslims should be killed outright; 61% did not think this; and 14% charitably believed that "killing the majority of them should be sufficient to break their will."

Perhaps these are the same people--or at least close relatives--of those who sent out a mass email that is counseling readers to “Kill ‘Em All. Let Allah Sort ‘Em Out.” According to ThinkProgress, the email contains the following statements:

A disproportionate response is the best kind. … What would a proportionate Israeli response be? Snatching two Hezbollah fighters, torturing them to death, cutting off their genitals and stuffing them in their mouths?

Lebanon used to be a nice little country, before the Sons of Allah got their blood-smeared hands on it. Believe it or not, Beirut was once…the most advanced and prosperous country in the Arab world — because a majority of Lebanese were Christians.

Israel needs to step-up its air strikes and send in the troops (can you say “massive deployment, baby?”) to do the job only ground forces can do. … To resurrect and reconfigure one of my favorite Vietnam-era slogans — Kill ‘em all. Let Allah sort ‘em out.
Again, such extreme views have always been present in modern western societies. They are usually controlled by various venting processes that occur during socialization. Although they may form a part of even everyday speech, as they are in various ethnic slurs and nicknames, they are usually stigmatized so that people do not act on them.

Unfortunately, what is happening in response to the War in Iraq is that such views and sentiments are not only on the rise but are also becoming part of the mainstream dialog and everyday speech. That is, while ethnic slurs are to be expected, the open discussion of exterminating entire groups of people is something new in the US--at least since the end of the 1930s, after the decline of the KKK as a national movement.

But this is changing, obviously. During his talk-show, Michael Savage, for example, can be heard expressing such views (via Media Matter) as the following:
In the long term, the only thing that can make a difference is a devastating, catastrophic, overwhelming victory for the Israelis, where nothing is left living in southern Lebanon, south of the Litani River.
While these comments do not express the genocide of all Moslems and Arabs, they certainly reflect a terrible indifference to the pain and suffering--whether of the innocent or the guilty--with the implication being that because they are ethnically Muslim, they should be treated in this way.

As Islamophobia Watch is reporting, traditionally anti-Semitic groups are now exploiting the anger generated by extremist Moslem attacks in the US, England, and Spain. Quoting the British Nationalist Party's (BNP) newspaper, IW posts:
"The BNP has moved on in recent years, casting off the leg-irons of conspiracy theories and the thinly veiled anti-Semitism which has held this party back for two decades. The real enemies of the British people are home grown Anglo-Saxon Celtic liberal-leftists who seek to ... impose multiculturalism on a reluctant indigenous population, and the Crescent Horde – the endless wave of Islamics who are flocking to our shores to bring our island nations into the embrace of their barbaric desert religion."
Notice how these anti-Islamic statements are combined with the issues or liberals, immigration, and what is called "Eurabia."

This last view has various associated concepts, including the view that Europe is vanishing because of low birth-rates, and along with it something called Christendom; that is, the supposed Judeo-Christian tradition that has given birth, these proponents suggest, to the freedoms and liberties we all benefit from. What the influx of Moslems and Arabs supposedly threatens are these very freedoms and liberties, as well as the vast cultural heritage from Greece to modern secularism.

Dare one even say that these views are not just historically idiotic--it was, after all, the Muslems who maintained the very Greek tradition and its culture that these people suppose is their own--they also reflect a dangerous attachment to something that simply does not exist. That is, a homogeneous culture that has somehow statically existed in a hermetically sealed environment where influences--cultural and otherwise--have not affected it.

But these peremptory remarks will not stop those who want to eradicate a threat that seems not only to be directed at a "civilization" but perhaps even more importantly threatens them individually, personally--as though their very existence is in question when they look at the world around them.

How else explain the following view, which introduces that unscientific poll I linked to at the beginning of this post?
Why don't we kill all Muslims? All of them. As Geotima would say, we are already in a World War, let's fight like we mean it. So why don't we start to plan for their complete extermination? They are hateful and will not stop until they force everyone in the world to submit to Islam. There is no reasoning with them, we must fight them with all we have. As we all know Muslims are at their best when they are being defeated, so we cannot afford to keep them in a constant state nominal defeat lest they rise and do greater damage to the rest of us. They attack all nations that are not Muslim, every western nation, China, India, Russia all suffer from Islamic terrorism.

Since overwhelming force will not defeat the Muslims unless we kill the overwhelming majority, let's talk about how we would go about killing every last one? You know that genocide is on the top of the tongue of many of the posters here, you know that this is the only way that such overwhelming force can possibly defeat such an irrational force.
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12 comments:

Anonymous said...

If we could kill all muslims with the push of a button.. it would be better for America.

However, we can't. We are probably going to pull a WWII relocation center situation after the next big attack. Maybe nucleur.

The world is getting too small. America will pull up the draw bridge and isolate somewhere down the road. It is too bad, but the rest of the world hates us, and we will either have to kill enough to make them fear us. i.e. the Roman Empire, or we will have to just isolate and let the rest of the world fight it all out. They will miss our support and money, but oh well.

Anonymous said...

America makes the Roman empire look like a girl scout troup.

Unknown said...

I will kill any muslim who tries to kill me. If the next attack comes, I will take out my wrath on all muslims and illegal immigrants in this country. If you were born here, then get the hell out. Close the border, lay mine fields with electrocution fences. Stop all travel. And kill anything that tries to scurry across our border. Kill anyone who is in this country illegally. That should cutdown on the hero factor of people wanting to come here. English is the only language and Christ is the only God. And if you speak Allah your tongue should be cut out and your balls shoved down your throat.

You would say "My balls taste and smell funny, but without a tongue you would only mrmur something unintelligible, but we know what your thinking, we know.

Jon said...

Muslims are a cancer in this world which will only lead to more death & destruction unless they are removed. The chronically naive in this nation refuse to face facts. How many 911s or dead soldiers will it take before we stop wasting time, energy and lives with surgical strikes. Only their complete extermination will yield peace in our time.

Anonymous said...

You know what? Why don't you keep your bloody opinions to yourself? Maybe that would be better for the world?

Anonymous said...

indeed, muslims are a plague and the cure is the atom bomb. go home and stay home, quit destroying the country by any means and stop the gawsh-darn 'kill all non-belivers' rallies... we will see it in the west like we see it in their home nations

Anonymous said...

What happens in Muslim countries is abominable. My peaceful religion is outlawed. If I try to convert a Muslim he will be beaten or killed if he even listens to me. It makes me sick.

Anonymous said...

You are calling people "ethnically" muslim, yet being a muslim isn't a matter of ethnicity, which is something one cannot help, but it is a choice, the choice of a violent, barbaric ideology. Many ethnicities are majority muslim, Turks and Arabs and Persians and Pashtuns and Malays and Uighurs, but Muslim is not an ethnicity.

james Escher said...

I love it when half-educated individuals assert that the Western heritage of Greece and Rome only exists today because ity was kept alive by Muslims who then past it back to the very West that had supposedly lost its historical threead. it is true that there was a break but it was not as thorough as these Islamophiles would have you believe A great deal of the Western Classical tradition was kept alive by none other that that repowsitory of Western and Christian tradition, the Catholic Church.

In addition, it is a fact that the "{supposed" Christian traditioin that is assigned the respoinsility for the development of the now, commonly accepted traditions of freedom and tolerance, are, in fact, the heritage of the Judeo_Christian tradition. Those ill-informed and/or deliberately misleading individuals, who have a vested interesty in denigrating the true importance and true part that Judaism and Christianity has played in the development of the great Western tradition and nations is not a chimera It is a fact.

Islam has a great tradition and has spawned a great civilization, which, unfortunately, has been in deep decline for many centuries.When a civilization is in deep decline, as has been Islam, it is not surprising that there will be many who will try to bolster the delinibng cultrue by trying to diminish the greatness of another. Yes, it is true that a great deal of Western tradition was brought back to the West via the Crusaders who got it from the Muslims who inherited it from the West, ande that the West did have a kind of culturazl amnisia for many centuries. But, it is also as equally correct that these recovered Greek and Roman traditions weere never cojmpletely eradicated from the west and that in any case, these were, after all, Western cultural traditions and knowledge. Western civilization and cutlure are not wome off-shoot of the Islamic tradition, as some who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that there is something that is true and honewst that is known as the Western tradition; and that this tradition is separate and apart from the Muslim and East4ern tradition. I am afraid, that it is very common for those who fell that their culture is in decline to try to find ways to bolster theirs by dishonestly denigrating others, in this case the Christian Western tradition, whhich is not a phantom but which is a real tradition, that is the source of such things as freedom of indivdual thought and of free intellectual inquiry.

Islam has a great tradition of scholasitcism but it was allowed to decline, and in most areas, to die, as the result of political disintegration and the narrowing of religious and intellectual inquiry. Do not look to the West as the cause of Islam's decline. Also, do not try to revise history so that it would appear as if there were no a strong and vibrant Western, Judeo-Christian tradition.

There was a great deline in the West that followed the loss of power by the Western Roman Empire. Those who hate the West, for whatever be their petty grievances, like to point a finger at the centuries that history has largely referred to as the Dark Ages.In fact, these centuries were not so "dark" as some would have you believe, but there was a deline in sholarship and commerce over some centuries. However, for someone to avfver that the void in Western culture was filled only by the infusion of the Islamic tradition and by the reintroduction of classicval thought by those same Muslims, is playing the revisionist game that placve its answer top the question before the question is even asked. In short, those who make such an assertion, have a vested interest today! in proving that the "so-called"Judeo-Christian tradition is something that some Western hacks made up and that the truth is that all culture that is considered Western is in actuality, a knock-off of the Muslim and Eastern tradition. This view is what is known as ther zero sum game,where-in, to whatever degree Western culture is consideered great and a success, to that same degree, the eastern and Islamic one must be seen as being wanting and as having no greatness. Clearly, this is a myopic view of thingws and equally as false. The only ones' who could seriously support such a hypothesis has to be someone with a great grudge or a great sense of inferitority. What better way for omeone to feel betteer about himself than to knock down the perceived opponent down a few pegs?

It was said of Eleanor Roosevelt that she would rather light a candle than curse the darkness. What is to be gained by trying to distort the hostorical record about the relative strengths and weaknesses of given societies, when the truth is that they all have their good andf bad parts?

In regard to the relative values of a given culture or religion, I am reminded of a small group of African-American men in Brooklyn, who base their entire brief on the terms,"The True Jews Are Black". After one gets beyond the absudity of thier dress and demeanor, you find the concept to be not only offensive, but ultimately an unsupportable lie and a complete twisting of what Judaism or any religion stands for or means. In yelling and haranging the mean spirited and racialist lunacies, these men only continue to prove that their message is not one of religion but of hate and race identity. Whatever references they make to the Bible are only used to "support" the idiotic view that white people stole the Jewish heritage of black people. There is never any discussion of the moral teachings of the Torah or any other scholarly references. The truth is that they might as well have picked any work or religion out the hat to use as a starting point for their endless rage against white people for the supposed crimes against these benighted men.

For the longest time, I have said that if blacks in America had been the slaves of Muslims, then the mass conversions of African-American inmates in today's prisons would be to Christianity instead of to Islam. For most black inmates, the conversion is not so much an action as it is a reaction to the conditions of their lives. This, of course, is not a surprise. When one feels himself to be oppressed, there is a logic to drifting towards that which is different, even completely opposite.

Anonymous said...

I used to believe that most people were inherently good, that everyone has a good side. But then I kept seeing all these suicide bombings, all these irrational acts by manipulated desperate extremists conned by other extremists in the name of Allah that it makes me sick. How can I respect a religion that makes women into slaves, that allows their own followers to lie about who they are to save their own skin, that uses hatred and lies to manipulate other muslims to fight in cowardly attacks. A suicide bomber to me is a coward, one who doesnt have the balls to just attack proper. He's a cheater, giving no one the right of retaliation, a dirty fighter. It's funny, the muslims take over Jerusalem waaaay back when, then the Jews take it back and now the Muslims are pissed and claim the jews are the most evil enemy of the world spending money and time creating lies and perpetuating anti-semite information. All of this coz they don't own some area that was never theirs to begin with. Let me ask you something Islamists, would anyone deny you Mecca? Wouldnt you feel if someone took over Mecca that it was always your place and no one should be on it but yourself? This is what the Jews believe about Israel. It's so sad that cousins would fight like this about themselves, Jew and Muslim. And Palestinians, find another peace of worthless desert to live in and calm down. All of you are babies who feel that only YOUR opinion is the only opinion that matters. After these last attacks in India, you've only created more hatred for your religion than ever before. And you supposed Muslims that believe in peace and condemn the violence, we see you doing absolutely nothing to calm these whackos down, but we do find out later that you send money to the whackos secretly, cheering in closed doors,high fiving yourselves. You come to our western countries for peace and opportunity, then start suicide bombing when the news isn't favourable to you. How would you not expect us, Judeo-christians to not begin to hate you? You want us to embrace your hatred as love? How stupid do you think we are?

Anonymous said...

"A suicide bomber to me is a coward, one who doesnt have the balls to just attack proper. He's a cheater, giving no one the right of retaliation, a dirty fighter."

-Anonymous

Not that I am defending those lunatics or their abhorrent acts, but do you have the same opinions of the people who dropped the atomic bombs on Japan in WWII? They had no "right of retaliation", because such a thing cannot possibly exist. To believe in such a thing is a fundamental rejection of Natural Selection. That which does not present a weakness is that much stronger, more able to survive.

Would you suggest that the army should stop using guns and instead use IEDs to level the playing field? Would you suggest that your opponent should not use atomic weapons because you can't stop them? Would you argue that war should be "fair"? Such a concept is absurd. There is no fairness in war, there is only killing the enemy before they can kill you.

Anonymous said...

What horrible hatred. I'm an American Muslim and frankly I can't believe my eyes at what has been written here.