Why the West must ban Muslim immigration

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David Cooper
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Re: Why the West must ban Muslim immigration

Post by David Cooper »

Steve3007 wrote: August 8th, 2018, 4:29 pm So what's your take on this? In a society like the US or UK how do we go about fostering an environment in which hate is not tolerated?
We need to play absolutely fair by banning all the primary sources of hate without favouring any religion or ideology over any other. If our own religion contains hate (I personally ditched the one I grew up in, but I'm not asking anyone else to go that far), we need to condemn and eliminate that hate and thereby stop propagating it. All people who are locked into communities with a belief system based on texts that contain hate are in a difficult position where they will likely be rejected by the rest of their community if they are the only ones who speak out against that hate, so they are in serious need of help - they need a universal push to eliminate the hate systematically with anyone who holds back from doing so being named and shamed so that all the social pressure falls on them instead. We can break this cycle of hate, but it isn't going to possible so long as people focus on one group that needs to do this work while failing to address all the many other harbourers of hate. Every time someone dies because someone else acts on holy hate or the hate in the manifesto of an ideology of any kind, all those who identify themselves with that ideology or religion need to realise that they are accessories to that murder because they have failed to condemn and eradicate that primary hate.

The people who single out Islam do so because they see Islam as the worst offender, but they end up looking like haters themselves because of this bias of failing to name the other offenders. This then drives the ignorant mainstream to defend Islam's hate (by convincing themselves that it doesn't exist) and to condemn the person who condemned Islam instead, so the situation gets more dangerous over time instead of safer as people drive society in directions that historically have repeatedly led to genocide. There are also some people who are actively trying to drive things in that direction precisely to trigger genocide - the worst of the right-wingers are not the ones with shaved heads who spit at Muslims, but the ones who pose as pacifists and encourage integration in the full knowledge that they are mixing a lot of hydrogen and oxygen gas together and that when the quantities are right, it will only take one spark to set the whole thing off. They hope that this will lead to worldwide elimination of all the people they hate. There are four big powers, two of which will happily join in with the eradication of Muslims. The other two are democratic, and one of these regularly falls into the hands of the right. The other is the EU, and as it becomes more tightly tied together as a single power, it too will become susceptible to sudden lurches to the right where everyone has to go along for the ride. A few sparks here and there, and lo and behold: there will be worldwide genocide. How can we stop this? Just go on mixing everyone together and hope they'll choose love over hate? No - they've already failed to reject hate (all sides). They're all dragging hate along for the ride while pretending they don't do hate, and it's going to end badly, unless something systematic is done to separate them all from that hate which they insist on defending and propagating. This is a task for all of us - do clean up our own side and stop focusing the blame solely on the other.
David Cooper
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Re: Why the West must ban Muslim immigration

Post by David Cooper »

Steve3007 wrote: August 8th, 2018, 4:42 pm What other religions and ideologies have this capacity, would you say?
I have yet to identify the limit to it. Take Hinduism, for example. The idea of the Holy cow seems benign, but then you have people being killed for eating beef. The lack of a rule to protect people who eat beef is in hateful if the thrust of the narrative is likely to generate hate of such people.
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Sy Borg
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Re: Why the West must ban Muslim immigration

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Steve3007 wrote: August 8th, 2018, 4:42 pm
David Cooper wrote:And it's not just Islam - the hate in many other religions and ideologies has the same capability to generate atrocities, so none of it should be tolerated. Tolerating hate will never eliminate hate.
What other religions and ideologies have this capacity, would you say?
Christianity, especially the evangelist branches. Also, surprisingly, Buddhism, which is very much less cuddly these days. Meanwhile the Hindus of India and Moslems of Pakistan have built up a decent amount of hate for each other, as residents of Karachi would attest. I agree with David - the whole lot of them have a growing feral edge.

The entire point of religion is to create a group separate from the rest. This point cannot be overstated and is too often understated. In the most mild cases, the theists separating themselves from the hoi polloi might indulgently think of outsiders as lost little sheep in need of guidance.

More often today, however, the nonreligious and rival religions are seen as blasphemers and infidels - enemies to be annihilated to pave way for God's/Allah's/Quetzalcoatl's new glorious age of peace under an absolute theocracy.
Fooloso4
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Re: Why the West must ban Muslim immigration

Post by Fooloso4 »

Some here have buried their heads in a book they do not understand in order to find passages that will confirm their fear, hatred, and mistrust. What they fail to consider is that if the Koran is to blame then we would expect to see overwhelming historical evidence of this. But history tells a different story. A story that cannot be summed in a few words, but one in which there have been periods of peace, religious tolerance, and Christian as well as Muslim aggression. What is often overlooked is the role of economic and political conditions.

In the interest of keeping this short I have omitted a great deal that can be found in the source links.


In 2011, a major study by University of California, Berkeley, political scientist M. Steven Fish presented cross-national statistical data showing that between 1994 and 2007, annual homicide rates in the Muslim world averaged just 2.4 per 100,000 of the population. That was approximately a third of the rate for the non-Muslim world and less than the average rate in Europe. It is also approximately half the homicide rate in the United States.

In comparing individual countries, the difference is even greater. The latest homicide statistics from the U.N.’s Office on Drugs and Crime reveal that for every murder perpetrated in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim state, seven people are murdered in the United States. This reality should give American Islamophobes pause.

When it comes to war, Fish found no statistical evidence to support Samuel Huntington’s controversial “clash of civilizations” thesis that Muslim societies are inherently more war-prone than non-Muslim states.

Moreover, a lot depends on what type of war is being counted. A 2011 analysis by the Human Security Report looked at which states had fought most international wars—including colonial wars—since the end of World War II. The top four were France, Britain, Russia/Soviet Union, and the United States—in that order. No Muslim-majority country was in the top eight.

Yet another metric for determining the violence-proneness of countries is the “conflict year,” the number of armed conflicts—civil as well as international—that a country experiences in a calendar year. Some particularly conflict-prone countries—Burma is the prime example—have frequently found themselves fighting several different wars in a single calendar year for decades. Here the Human Security Report found that the countries that had experienced most “conflict years” since the World War II were—in this order—Burma, India, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Britain, France, Israel, and Vietnam. Again no Muslim-majority country was in the top eight.

Fish does not, however, claim that Muslim societies are less violent than those in the non-Muslim world with respect to all forms of deadly violence. Indeed, he points out that when it comes to terrorism, Islamist radicals were responsible for 70 percent of deaths from “high-casualty terrorist bombings” around the world between 1994 and 2008. This means, he suggests, that while terrorism is very far from being a uniquely Muslim phenomenon, “… its perpetrators in recent times are disproportionately Islamists.” Since 2010, the incidence of Islamist terrorism has increased sharply.

But in this context it is instructive to note that approximately 600 million of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims live in Southeast Asia and China, while a little more than half that number—317 million—live in the Middle East and North Africa. Yet the rate of deadly political violence associated with radical Islamist groups in Southeast Asian and China today is only a tiny fraction of that of the less populous Muslim states of the Middle East and North Africa region.

Why should the level of political violence in the populations of these two regions differ so dramatically even though they share the same allegedly violence-prone religion? One possible answer is that religion is not the primary driver of conflict in these regions. In Southeast Asia, national governments in Muslim-majority countries have what political scientists call “performance legitimacy”—meaning they deliver the goods and services that their citizens want. With few exceptions, the governments of their co-religionists in the Middle East and North Africa do not.

In the radical Islamist conflicts that are tearing apart Syria, Iraq, and other parts of the region, the exclusionary politics, state repression, rights abuses, corruption, and incompetence of the regimes that the radicals have sought to overthrow provide more compelling insights into what drives the abhorrent violence of ISIS than does the extreme Islamist ideology that seeks to legitimize the killing. (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... ceful.html emphasis added)
I think one factor that should be considered is that for many of us in the West, war occurs elsewhere. We send our men and women but remain safely at home. Terrorism strikes us where we live.
Throughout the nearly fifteen centuries of Muslim-Christian encounter, individual adherents of both traditions often have lived peaceably with each other. At the same time, Muslim expansion into Christian territories and Christian imperialism in Muslims lands have fostered fear and ill-will on both sides. Repercussions from the Crusades continue to resound in the contemporary rhetoric employed by defenders of both faiths. In recent years relations between Muslims and Christians across the globe have become increasingly polarized, fanned by anti-Islamic rhetoric and fearmongering. While a number of verses in the Qur’an call for treating Christians and Jews with respect as recipients of God’s divine message, in reality many Muslims have found it difficult not to see Christians as polytheists because of their doctrine of the Trinity. Christians, for their part, traditionally have viewed the Qur’an as fraudulent and Muhammad as an imposter. Old sectarian rivalries play out with serious consequences for minority groups, both Christian and Muslim. Conflicts in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere for much of the 20th century were often labeled as ethnic, political, or ideological perpetuations of long-standing struggles over land, power, and influence. These conflicts now tend to be labeled in accord with the specifically religious affiliation of their participants. Understanding the history of Muslim-Christian relations, as well as current political realities such as the dismantling of the political order created by European colonialism, helps give context to current “hot spots” of Muslim-Christian conflict in the world.

With the inception of Islam in the 7th century ce the earliest community of Muslims saw itself in continuity with Jews and Christians. The Qur’an refers to many of the prophets detailed in the Hebrew Bible and clarifies that Muhammad is to be the last in the long prophetic line. Next in importance to Muhammad in this lineage is Jesus, who in the Qur’an is specifically not the son of God and not in any way divine. Political resistance to the Prophet Muhammad created a series of conflicts resulting in the crystallization of Islam into its own separate religion and identity. Theological differences were articulated early and have continued throughout history to present major challenges to interfaith relationships.

A combination of factors led to the rapid spread of Islam after the Prophet’s death in 732 ce. The Persian Sassanian and the Greek Byzantine Empires were exhausted after many years of struggle, and Islam was able to occupy what amounted to a power vacuum in many of the areas to which it spread. Military expeditions were political in nature and not undertaken for the purpose of forcing conversion to Islam. Christians and Jews were given “dhimmi” status, paying a poll tax for their protection. Dhimmis had the right to practice their religion in private and to govern their own communities. Special dress was required and new church buildings could not be constructed. The Christian church as a whole was divided into five apostolic sects at the beginning of Islam, located in Rome, Antioch, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Alexandria. The resulting sectarian divisions had significant consequences for the spread of Islam. Many oriental Christians actually welcomed Muslim political authority as a relief from Byzantine oversight, and they cooperated with their new Muslim rulers.

Within the Islamic community early attitudes of seeming tolerance and even appreciation of Christians and Jews soon gave way to more narrow interpretations of the Qur’an and Islamic law, resulting in growing intolerance. From the beginning Christians were nervous about the growth of a new religion that they saw as a Christian heresy and which invaded and took over many of their lands.

Certain periods in world history reflected harmonious interactions among the three Abrahamic faiths. Medieval Andalusia, for example, provided a venue for Muslims and Christians, along with Jews, to live in proximity and even mutual appreciation. It was a time of great opulence and achievement, and social intercourse at the upper levels was easy. It was also a period during which a number of Christians chose to convert to Islam. Medieval Andalusia has often been cited as an ideal place and time of interfaith harmony. To some extent that claim may be justified. If so, however, it was fairly short and was soon supplanted by the tensions, prejudices, and ill treatment of minorities by both Muslims and Christians that more often have characterized relationships between the communities. By the 10th century the Iberian Peninsula was characterized by hostilities between the Christian kingdom of León in the north and the considerably larger Muslim al-Andalus in the south.

Before leaving the historical context it is important to note some of the nonmilitary, cultural, and intellectual ways in which East and West encountered each other. Much has been made of the interchange between the Crusaders and the Arabs. In some cases each side found in the other chivalry and respect worthy of admiration and even emulation. For the most part, however, European thinking had little influence on Arab culture. Conversely, the West found great benefit from early Islamic thought in the fields of culture and science. In fact, it discovered that in the Islamic world the concept of divine unity led to an understanding that the arts and sciences, as we would call them today, are but different dimensions of the unified study of God’s many-faceted world. Westerners learned from their encounters with Islamic civilizations in all major scholarly and scientific fields, including philosophy, astronomy, chemistry, medicine, and mathematics as well as the arts and music. It is well known that ancient Greek philosophy and science came to the West through the medium of Arab translation. Arab-Islamic medical science had a great influence on the development of the disciplines of medicine in Europe.

Unfortunately, since the Middle Ages it has been politics that has dominated thinking on both sides, and a legacy of confrontation, distrust, and misunderstanding has prevailed until the present day. Anti-Islamic stereotypes in both Europe and America today reflect early vitriolic sentiments expressed by ignorant and uninformed Christians aghast at the rise of Islam and by their descendants who suffered defeat by Muslims in the Crusades and beyond. (http://religion.oxfordre.com/view/10.10 ... 40378-e-11 Emphasis added)
David Cooper
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Re: Why the West must ban Muslim immigration

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Nazism has only caused one genocide, but for the rest of the time it's existed it has failed to produce another one? What is it about Nazism today that leads to groups of yobbos with shaved heads singing the English national anthem and spitting at foreigners in the streets rather than indulging in genocide? Clearly it isn't the hateful ideology that causes genocide because most Nazis are peaceful and live amongst us without us even noticing most of them. We should therefore allow them to propagate hate unless we can prove that their ideology produces genocide after genocide without interruption. The slow-motion genocide of West Papuans is also a single genocide which can therefore be ignored on the basis that it's a single genocide (still ongoing) rather than a series of them. The genocide of one to two million Armenians (primarily Christians) by the Turks and Kurds was also a one-off, so it can be ignored on the basis that it hasn't been repeated there (and not because there are none left there to kill, even though there are none left there to kill).

But maybe it isn't that simple. Maybe the genocide only comes to the surface rarely, like the ones that repeatedly visit the Yazidis and kill them in the thousands. Maybe we shouldn't play games with maths to try to hide the viciousness that's being generated by the hate in holy texts and other ideologies. Maybe we shouldn't try to hide them by comparing them with conflicts driven by other ideologies and showing them to be the minority of those conflicts (or contriving to do so by misrepresenting the causes of many conflicts). Why does anyone seek to defend hate which we know has killed millions? Those who have found hate in holy texts have quite genuinely found hate there, and that hate drives conflict - it doesn't matter if some of them have been biased by only focusing on one religion, because there are plenty of people of that targeted religion who are more than capable of doing the same job for other religions and ideologies to call out the hate they find there, and when they do that, we should look and see if they're right, and confirm their findings whenever they stand up. We should then stamp out all the hate and get rid of all the conflicts instead of blinding ourselves to reality. All conflicts are driven by hate, and the sources of that hate can be found in ideologies of one kind or another.
Fooloso4
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Re: Why the West must ban Muslim immigration

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David Cooper:
Clearly it isn't the hateful ideology that causes genocide because most Nazis are peaceful and live amongst us without us even noticing most of them. We should therefore allow them to propagate hate unless we can prove that their ideology produces genocide after genocide without interruption.
It is not the ideology itself that poses a problem, however represensible it may be, but how one chooses to act on that ideology. If they are, as you say, peaceful and live amongst us without incidence then we need to decide what we are willing to trade off on. In the United States it has long been the policy that we value free speech and the right to peaceful assembly.
But maybe it isn't that simple.
Right, for one you left out the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas at the hands of Christians. Is this because their book teaches hatred and murder or is it in spite of whatever it is their book teaches? Hitler advocated “positive Christianity” and before him Nazi theologians sought to “de-Judaize” Jesus (https://www.academia.edu/1175072/_The_N ... 2004_56_90)
Why does anyone seek to defend hate which we know has killed millions?
You have misunderstood. To attempt to understand is not to defend hate, quite the opposite, it is to defend against hate.
Those who have found hate in holy texts have quite genuinely found hate there, and that hate drives conflict …
That is the claim I am questioning. And that is why we need to look at the evidence. It is not a matter of playing games with maths, but looking for evidence of a causal relation. And that is why comparisons are helpful. If we find the same kind of hatred and violence in other religions and holy books then one religion rather than others is not the cause. If we find hatred and violence in the absence of religion then no religion is the cause. How different is this from the claim that violence in video games causes children to be violent?
We should then stamp out all the hate and get rid of all the conflicts instead of blinding ourselves to reality.
That would be nice but to think it possible is to be blinded by your own ideology, and depending on how you go about trying to do it may result in more hatred and violence. History makes clear the danger of all ideological programs however well intentioned.
David Cooper
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Re: Why the West must ban Muslim immigration

Post by David Cooper »

Fooloso4 wrote: August 8th, 2018, 8:10 pm It is not the ideology itself that poses a problem, however represensible it may be, but how one chooses to act on that ideology. If they are, as you say, peaceful and live amongst us without incidence then we need to decide what we are willing to trade off on. In the United States it has long been the policy that we value free speech and the right to peaceful assembly.
In my previous post, I made a number of sarcastic statements in the top which were deliberately copying the kind of statements that apologists for hate make, presenting dangerous people as harmless by drawing attention to their peaceful side while completely ignoring their vicious nature. Most Nazis live peacefully amongst us most of the time. I don't consider Nazis to be peaceful people though even when they're keeping quiet and not showing themselves - they are propagating hate, and every now and then it will erupt out. It's the same with Muslims, except for one significant difference - most Muslims genuinely don't understand that they are propagators of hate and that terrorism will keep emerging from that hate so long as they go on tolerating it. Most of the non-Muslims defending Islam don't understand that either, and the result is that the hate is never eradicated, but is continually boosted through the endorsement of Islam. Free speech should not include the right to possess, propagate or endorse hate, or fail to condemn it if it is contained within an ideology which you have signed up to. No one should be signing up to any ideology that contains such hate in the first place, of course, but if they insist on doing so, they should at the very least be required to condemn and separate themselves from the holy hate and not just pretend that the people who act on it are going against the ideology.
But maybe it isn't that simple.
And when I said that bit, what you should have understood it to say is, "Of course it isn't that simple, because all this stuff making excuses for people who've signed up to vicious, hate-filled ideologies is misguided in the extreme."
Right, for one you left out the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas at the hands of Christians. Is this because their book teaches hatred and murder or is it in spite of whatever it is their book teaches?
I left out plenty - I certainly don't defend Christianity because it has been responsible for astronomical amounts of killings too. I mentioned earlier the apparently benign idea of the holy cow leading to people being killed for eating beef, in a similar way, any religion that makes its followers feel more moral than other groups is likely to lead them to look on others as savages and to feel that they can do no wrong because God is on their side. If lots of "primitive" people die, it all happens with God's permission. This is a danger inherent to religion whenever an imagined moral superiority is part of the package.
You have misunderstood. To attempt to understand is not to defend hate, quite the opposite, it is to defend against hate.
I haven't understood anything - it's easy to understand how people behave when you look at the ideologies they've bought into and see the hate which they're acting upon. Defending those ideologies without condemning the hate within them and demanding that it be removed serves as an endorsement of that hate.
Those who have found hate in holy texts have quite genuinely found hate there, and that hate drives conflict …
That is the claim I am questioning. And that is why we need to look at the evidence.
Ten thousand Yazidis being killed by people acting directly on a command in the Qur'an is a clear illustration of holy hate in a holy text translating directly into genocide.
It is not a matter of playing games with maths, but looking for evidence of a causal relation. And that is why comparisons are helpful. If we find the same kind of hatred and violence in other religions and holy books then one religion rather than others is not the cause. If we find hatred and violence in the absence of religion then no religion is the cause. How different is this from the claim that violence in video games causes children to be violent?
If you find hate speech in holy texts which causes genocides, then that hate speech causes genocides. If you find hate speech in a different religion's holy texts which also causes genocides, then that hate speech causes genocides. If you find hate speech in a political ideology which causes genocides, then that hate speech too causes genocides. The fact that non-religious hate causes genocide does not let religious hate off the hook when it causes genocide, and the fact that the hate of religion A causes genocide doesn't let religion B's hate off the hook when it causes genocide. Religions are not the cause, and nor are ideologies. The cause is the hate, and it doesn't matter what the container of that hate is. Violence in video games is an entirely different issue unless there is some kind of moral teaching involved where children are taking values from it which lead to them wanting to abuse others.
We should then stamp out all the hate and get rid of all the conflicts instead of blinding ourselves to reality.
That would be nice but to think it possible is to be blinded by your own ideology, and depending on how you go about trying to do it may result in more hatred and violence. History makes clear the danger of all ideological programs however well intentioned.
You give up far too easily if you think the hate can't be stamped out. All it needs is for all good people to make a stand against the hate and to throw the bally lot in the bin, and anyone who wants to go on defending that hate (which is the only way the hatred and violence would be maintained) would then have to choose which side they're on and stop pretending to be benign. A civilised world cannot go on tolerating hate that generates genocides, wars and terrorism - anyone who isn't prepared to eradicate the hate on their side is simply not fit to be allowed to wander about freely amongst civilised people.
David Cooper
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Re: Why the West must ban Muslim immigration

Post by David Cooper »

* I haven't understood anything --> I haven't misunderstood anything.

I was writing at speed. If you want to make hay with that though, feel free to try. You need all the help you can get if you want to score any points in this argument.
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ThomasHobbes
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Re: Why the West must ban Muslim immigration

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I was hoping to find some sort of argument which attempted to set out how banning immigration would be a good idea; workable: practical; or valuable.
Fooloso4
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Re: Why the West must ban Muslim immigration

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David Cooper:
I made a number of sarcastic statements …
Yes, I realized that but the fact is that although they seem to have gotten a lot of attention in the last few years they have been around a long time. I make a distinction between speech acts physical acts. As I said, I find what they say to be reprehensible, but it is the lesser of two evils. If they say such things here I will delete their posts and bring it to Greta’s attention in order to ban them, but that is very different than government censorship. They, like everyone else, are protected. Government limitations on free speech can have dire consequences for us all. For example, Trump claims that the media is the enemy of the people. If he were not constrained from acting on that by first amendment there would be no free speech. This site and thousands of others would also be outlawed.
… most Muslims genuinely don't understand that they are propagators of hate …
It seems to me that you don’t understand that you are a propagator of hate and fear. I do not yet know if that failure to understand is genuine of simply a rhetorical device - hatred in the guise of a desire to stamp out hatred.
Free speech should not include the right to possess ... hate ...
The right to possess hate? Are you going to clean the souls of those who by your lights are not pure? Who’s next? How are you going to bring about your ideological purity?
I left out plenty - I certainly don't defend Christianity because it has been responsible for astronomical amounts of killings too.
Is this your answer to the question of who is next?
… any religion that makes its followers feel more moral than other groups is likely to lead them to look on others as savages …
Do you not see that this is exactly what you are doing but without the religious justification? You are claiming that you are more moral and can see see that Islam is immoral but they, those savages, cannot.
Ten thousand Yazidis being killed by people acting directly on a command in the Qur'an …
The equivocation "by people" has not escaped my notice. These acts were done by ISIL, the self-professed Islamic State, in the name of Allah. The Islamic State is a fringe group. Islam can no more be blamed for their actions than any large group can be blamed for the actions of a fringe group that identifies itself with the larger group. Their acts have been condemned by Muslim clerics:
Almost 70,000 Muslim clerics have come together to pass a fatwa against global terrorist organizations, including the Taliban, al Qaeda and the militant group that calls itself the Islamic State. (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mu ... 377b249dea)
If you find hate speech in holy texts which causes genocides, , then that hate speech causes genocides.
Do you know what it mean to beg the question? Or what establishing a causal relation means? Or what a tautology is?
Religions are not the cause, and nor are ideologies.
Do you know what it means to contradict yourself?
The cause is the hate …
And what causes the hate?
Violence in video games is an entirely different issue unless there is some kind of moral teaching involved where children are taking values from it which lead to them wanting to abuse others.
What is the same is the claim of a causal relationship, as well as the claim that it does present a kind or moral or rather immoral teaching.
You give up far too easily if you think the hate can't be stamped out. All it needs is for all good people to make a stand against the hate and to throw the bally lot in the bin, and anyone who wants to go on defending that hate (which is the only way the hatred and violence would be maintained) would then have to choose which side they're on and stop pretending to be benign.

This is staggeringly naive. Do you not see the repercussions? “All good people” are not all good. No good person is all good. They are not free of hate or fear or zealousness under the right circumstances. For a non-religious person you sure do have a Manichean view of reality. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I haven't understood anything ...
I agree, You are a naive idealist, and history shows us just how dangerous they can be.
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Sy Borg
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Re: Why the West must ban Muslim immigration

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ThomasHobbes wrote: August 9th, 2018, 6:48 pm I was hoping to find some sort of argument which attempted to set out how banning immigration would be a good idea; workable: practical; or valuable.
Not banning but stopping for a while to allow infrastructure to catch up - to see if infrastructure can catch up in a changing climate that will potentially impact on carrying capacity. My entire state is in drought that shows no signs of easing. Our food bowls are rapidly being rezoned and converted into housing estates, mines or desert. Our dams are running ever lower. Yet migration numbers are still very high - driven by corporations.

It wouldn't be less galling if the damned corporations driving the record high immigration numbers actually paid tax; they do not deserve to have any influence until they pay their fair share. The board is tilted ...
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Re: Why the West must ban Muslim immigration

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Greta wrote:My entire state is in drought that shows no signs of easing.
There's a story on the radio news about this as I type. Also: I hadn't previously realized, until I looked it up just now, how much the population has increased in the last 50 years. Doubled to 24 million. On the face of it, looking at the vast size of Australia, and living in a country with about 2.5 times the population and less than a 30th of the land area, this still seems tiny. But as we've noted before, this is like pointing to the vast volume of the Earth. Most of it is molten lava! We can only live on the surface. And I don't suppose climate change is going to be making the interior of Australia any more habitable for large numbers of people in the future. But I wonder if, in the long term, in theory at least, technology could change that?
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Sy Borg
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Re: Why the West must ban Muslim immigration

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Yes Steve, climate change is simply expanding our already-ample deserts. Well back last century I remember some Japanese investors were tossing up the idea of buying some remote desertland in Australia and greening it. Not sure what happened - at best it can at least be thought of as a tad less ambitious than terraforming Mars, but each is well beyond our technological capacity.
Maybe we really need to reach that magical Kardachev 1.0 level - to be able to control the planet's processes? I personally think the scale is rather wacky and it wildly underestimates the complexity of the Earth's feedback mechanisms and unintended consequences of everything we try to do on a global scale. We are probably at around the same stage with the planet's health as the leech providers were in medicine.

Certainly all liveable areas are already occupied in Australia unless we treat the place like Hong Kong or Singapore and simply cram people into every liveable cranny with no supporting wildlife, huddled around the coastlines, even as that liveable area shrinks. I'm also not much looking forward to the now-inevitable 45+C heatwave days in summer in what has always been one of our more liveable cities.
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Re: Why the West must ban Muslim immigration

Post by Dachshund »

Steve3007 wrote: August 8th, 2018, 3:55 pm I think the sad and tragic thing here is that the very same sense of alienation and collective blaming that allows some young men to do stupid and beyond-horrific things is loudly and persistently declared by Dachshund himself.

How could a 22 year old man stand in the middle of a group of teenagers who have just come out of a pop concert and deliberately rip them to shreds, without the monumental scale of the heartbreak that he is causing stopping him? And why is it that the murder of innocent children like this is the kind of crime against innocents that always grieves us the most?

Many reasons. But among them are alienation and empathy.
Steve,


I put it to you that there are many young men in England - literally millions - who feel alienated from society. You will typically find them living in England's most economically and socially deprived neighbourhoods, in local authority districts like: Middlesborough; Knowlesly, Liverpool; Bradford; Burnley; Birmingham and Great Yarmouth to name but a handful of the many severely disadvantaged and underprivileged regions that exist in England today. In these places there are no shortage of young men who have grown up living in dire poverty and all of of the harsh privations that it brings to bear; and it is not surprising that they might hold a perception they have been the victims of unjust discrimination; not surprising that they might feel an acute sense of being politically marginalised, of being culturally forsaken/ isolated and otherwise profoundly alienated from life in the mainstream of British society. I have no doubt whatsoever that many of them DO - and I cannot blame them ! The point I wish to make is that despite the profound sense of alienation that afflicts millions of young men in England, the overwhelming majority of them DO NOT, in consequence, ultimately decide that they must strap a belt of high-explosives to themselves, walk into the foyer of a concert hall full of innocent teenagers and detonate the bomb they are carrying with the express intention of murdering as many of them as possible in the name of Allah.


True to your usual form you have been cautious and non-committal in stating that social "alienation and (lack of) empathy" are merely one of the "many reasons" that a British youth may become an jihadist and perpetrate an atrocity such that which occurred in Manchester. While it is technically true that the experience of social alienation arising from factors like socio-economic disadvantage and cultural/racial discrimination may play a role in propelling a vulnerable young man along a trajectory that ends in his becoming an Islamic extremist, the notion that social alienation is, in any sense, a root cause of tragedies like the suicide-bombing in Manchester totally misunderstands the true locus of radical/extremist Islamic terrorism. If you are ever to fully understand the FUNDAMENTAL, PRIMARY CAUSE of terrorist outrages like the one in Manchester you must first understand that the ideology of radical/extremist Islam is ROOTED IN ISLAMIC SACRED SCRIPTURE

As I have recently referred you to speech on the topic of Islamic extremism that David Cameron made while he was Prime Minister, let me use him again as an example of the point I am trying to make. For most of the time that he was in office, Cameron's view, i.e. the "official" view of policymakers in the British government was that Islam was no different to any other religion, that Islam, to quote Cameron was "a religion of peace". Whenever terrorist attacks committed in the name of Islam occurred anywhere around the world, Cameron's government, you might recall, was always quick to declare that those responsible absolutely did not represent true Islam, rather that they had "hijacked" or "perverted "the true meaning of Islam in order to justify their warped, violent, political extremism. It was the same with Obama's administration in the US, the official line from the White House was that acts of violent terrorism committed in the name of Islam were nothing to do do with true Islam because, as Obama (like Cameron) repeatedly assured his increasingly anxious( and angry) public in America, "Islam is a religion of peace".

There is no doubt that Cameron and Obama's views were strongly influenced by that school of thought formerly promulgated by popular academics like John Esposito and Karen Armstrong whose basic argument was that when it came to deciphering the real underlying cause/s of Islamic extremism, the RELIGION of Islam should be understood as merely a "circumstantial" bit ( and a "red herring"), because, they claimed, the true, root causes of radical Islamic violence were socio-economic in nature, i.e. poverty, political marginalisation, racial prejudice, social alienation, the experience of real or perceived anti-Muslim cultural discrimination and so on.

But it turned out that these apologists for Islam ( i.e. the RELIGION of Islam) had seriously misread the problem, because their position, when it was adopted, proved to be a complete policy failure for governments in the West who had swallowed the line Esposito and Co were hawking . Why did it fail ? It failed simply because it sought to deny that which simply cannot be denied, namely THAT Islamic sacred scripture does indeed provide a religious justification - DOES INDEED PROVIDE A CLEAR AND UNEQUIVOCAL, INCONTROVERTIBLE THEOLOGICAL WARRANT for violence, hatred and intolerance that Islamic extremist groups claim it does. When an ISIS butcher beheads a Western hostage and claims that his actions are justified by the religion of Islam, what he says is absolutely correct.

Do you at all understand what I have been saying over and over again on this thread, Steve? I have been saying that until this problem with the scriptural foundation of Islam is sorted out there will NEVER be an end to the cycle of violent Islamic extremism. I am saying that until the moral poison that is suffused throughout the body of Islamic sacred scripture is neutralised PERMANENTLY there will always be another ISIS, another Manchester, another Ayatollah Khomeini, another 9/11. Do you GEDDIT, old sport, or do I have to start drawing pictures for you, because I simply cannot explain it for you in any more basic terms. I'm sorry, it's the very best I can do !!!



Regards


Dachshund
Dachshund
Posts: 513
Joined: October 11th, 2017, 5:30 pm

Re: Why the West must ban Muslim immigration

Post by Dachshund »

Steve,

If you want to understand the basic point I am trying to make in this debate, read the following extract from one of David Cooper's recent posts on this thread
David Cooper wrote: August 9th, 2018, 6:09 pm n my previous post, I made a number of sarcastic statements in the top which were deliberately copying the kind of statements that apologists for hate make, presenting dangerous people as harmless by drawing attention to their peaceful side while completely ignoring their vicious nature. Most Nazis live peacefully amongst us most of the time. I don't consider Nazis to be peaceful people though even when they're keeping quiet and not showing themselves - they are propagating hate, and every now and then it will erupt out. It's the same with Muslims, except for one significant difference - most Muslims genuinely don't understand that they are propagators of hate and that terrorism will keep emerging from that hate so long as they go on tolerating it. Most of the non-Muslims defending Islam don't understand that either, and the result is that the hate is never eradicated, but is continually boosted through the endorsement of Islam. Free speech should not include the right to possess, propagate or endorse hate, or fail to condemn it if it is contained within an ideology which you have signed up to. No one should be signing up to any ideology that contains such hate in the first place, of course, but if they insist on doing so, they should at the very least be required to condemn and separate themselves from the holy hate and not just pretend that the people who act on it are going against the ideology.
What he is says is dead right. With respect to Islam , in particular, the bottom line is this...

Islamic sacred scripture contains a considerable amount of what DC and I would call "hate speech"; that is it contains many exhortations to Muslims to perpetrate acts of indiscriminate violence , intolerance, and discrimination against all other religions. moreover, Muslim's are indoctrinated from the time they are children to believe that the "hate speech" in the Koran and Sunnah is literally the word/will of God (Allah) as revealed to the prophet Mohammad ( whom they are taught to regard as being "the perfect man"). Until this hate speech is purged - completely and permanently from Islamic holy scripture there will never be an end to violent Islamic extremism nor any of the other antisocial, non-violent immoral behaviours that infuse the social manners and mores that shape life in Muslim communities/enclaves in the West, such as the perfunctory preaching of hate by imams in Mosques, the emotional/moral brutalisation and degradation of women and girls and so on.

Do you GEDDIT Steve, old man? Has the "penny dropped" yet, mate ? (! :roll: ) I mean , it's really not "rocket science", Stevo !!



Regards

Dachshund
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