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From: martillo@mit-athena.ARPA (Joaquim Martillo)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Re: Re: 3rd world savages
Message-ID: <52@mit-athena.ARPA>
Date: Sat, 15-Dec-84 00:00:00 EST
Article-I.D.: mit-athe.52
Posted: Sat Dec 15 00:00:00 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 15-Dec-84 20:25:17 EST
References: <566@asgb.UUCP>, <234@rlgvax.UUCP> <12@mit-athena.ARPA> <240@rlgvax.UUCP> <2231@mit-hermes.ARPA> <50Re: Re: Re: 3rd world savages
Organization: MIT, Project Athena, Cambridge, Ma.
Lines: 46


>> If  Wayne  read the articles, I said Islam would have to undergo a major
>> reform or the  religion  would  have  to  be  stamped  out  (not  Muslim
>> peoples).
>> 
>> Having  requirements  to  conquer  your non-Muslim neighbors (if you can
>> win) and then to degrade and humiliate  non-Muslim  subjects  definitely
>> makes Islam religio non grata.
>> 
>> One  could  argue  that  Christianity  had  to wait until the eighteenth
>> century to overcome many similar  prejudices.   But  even  though  Islam
>> became  a  state religion several centuries later than Christianity, the
>> sort of ethical development I would like to  see  is  a  fairly  obvious
>> reform even for a young religion.
>> 
>> By the way, my mother's family a few decades ago were troglodytes living
>> in Southern Libya.  None of us engage in or would try to  apologize  for
>> or  rationalize  the  type  of disgusting barbarism which takes place in
>> large parts of the third-world.

>You've been making a lot of statements to the effect that "Islam should
>be wiped out", but here you say that this means the religon, not the
>people. How do you propose to do it? The only way you will ever be able
>to bring this about is by eliminating the practicers of Islam. (At least
>within any reasonable time.) The Moslems who you are criticizing are
>certainly a minority -- there are lots of perfectly peaceful and reasonable
>people of every religon. Any way you look at it, what you are calling for
>is genocide.


Because  of  historical and current Muslim mistreat of nonMuslims, after
Khomeini's seizure of  power,  after  the  assassination  of  Sadat  and
because  of numerous other incidents in Muslim nations, I am not so sure
of the minority status of the crazies although I  will  concede  Wayne's
opinion  was the common wisdom as little as ten years ago.  I know there
are many peaceful and reasonable Muslims.   My  father  does  a  lot  of
business  in Muslim countries and we have many Muslim family friends.  I
simply suspect that peaceful and reasonable  Muslims  are  peaceful  and
reasonable despite Islam.  A popular turn of the century Ottoman opinion
blamed Islam for almost everything  that  was  wrong  with  the  Ottoman
Empire  and  with  the  Islamic  world  in  general.  Careful reading of
Al-Afghani and `Abdu suggest that neither would  have  been  particulary
opposed  to  a  thorough-going  reform  of  Islam  as  I have suggested.

In  the  19th  century  noone  was willing to pander the crazies the way
people do nowadays.