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Originally Posted by blankall
All that being said, I really don't see the point in singling out Islam every time there's one of these attacks. We all know that fundamentalist Islam is producing a lot of radicals. However, we also need to take into account that the vast majority of the victims of fundamentalist Islam are Muslims themselves. I'm not sure what people want the average Muslim to do about it? Abandon their religion? Go on a Rambo style crusade to weed out the bad guys? What exactly?
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The average Muslim in the world is extremely religiously conservative by Western standards. Most Canadian Muslims are quite secular in comparison, but don't kid yourself that they represent more than a small fraction of Muslims globally. Even in a relatively secular Muslim country like Turkey, the bulk of the population outside an educated minority in the major cities is closer to a rural Spaniard 200 years ago in terms of religiosity and conservatism.
Of course, just because people are extremely religious and conservative doesn't mean they are radicals who want to go around blowing people. But it presents two problems:
1) It's extremely difficult to reconcile your traditions with many realities of the modern world. The scientific method. Capitalism and commerce. The liberation of women from the yoke of husband and family. And most problematically, the primacy of secular law over religious law.
2) The liberal, Western world looks depraved to them. Stinking with sin. Full of people under the influence of devils. Fornicators. Pigs driven by base appetites. It isn't just radicals who think this, but average people in whole swathes of the Muslim world.
The Muslim world is undergoing a traumatic exposure to modernism. It cannot see a way forward, a way to integrate modernity and faith. A way to harness new skills and technologies the way former colonies in Asia have. Instead, it retreats into the past and into the solace of an idealized faith. As others have pointed out, the Muslim world needs an Enlightenment. An opening up of their culture to skepticism and empiricism and innovation. Israel alone files five times the number of patents every year as the entire Arab world.
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Originally Posted by burn_this_city
We've lied to them, partitioned their countries, stole their resources or land, backed despots, overthrew their governments, bombed their civilians accidentally or otherwise, starved them out via sanctions. I find it ridiculous to distill it down to their religion, when it simply tells them to fight oppression. This has always been about politics, and religion provides an excellent recruitment tool.
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Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latina American also suffered under decades of colonialism, foreign meddling, and civil wars. Look at Vietnam. Oppressed first by France, then by the U.S., then by China. Between Vietname, Cambodia, and Laos, 1.5 million people were killed and many more horrifically injured in proxy wars. Why aren't Vietnamese terrorists going on shooting sprees in American malls and blowing up Cafes in Paris? Why aren't all the people screwed over puppet regimes in Latin America calling for a cleansing war of extermination against the Gringo? Why aren't alienated immigrants from Jamaica cutting off heads in London?