How Does One Respond to Hate?
Thursday’s post “Torture Pros Visit SLC this Sunday” ignited an e-mail exchange which I have re-created here as between Cliff and MightyMan to protect his identity.
Mighty Man also copied me on one of those mean provocative e-mails (posted below) which travel the right-hand lane on the highway of religious extremist.
I don’t know how to respond to this kind of stuff. Maybe I shouldn’t even post it.
Please comment, take poll on side panel and another poll here.
The e-mail follows:
Muslims fly commercial airliners into buildings in New York City. No Muslim outrage.
Muslim officials block the exit where school girls are trying to escape a burning building because their faces were exposed. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims cut off the heads of three teenaged girls on their way to school in Indonesia. A Christian school. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims murder teachers trying to teach Muslim children in Iraq. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims murder over 80 tourists with car bombs outside cafes and hotels in Egypt. No Muslim outrage.
A Muslim attacks a missionary children’s school in India. Kills six. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims slaughter hundreds of children and teachers in Beslan, Russia. Muslims shoot children in the back. No Muslim outrage.
Let’s go way back.
Muslims kidnap and kill athletes at the Munich Summer Olympics. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims fire rocket-propelled grenades into schools full of children in Israel. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims murder more than 50 commuters in attacks on London subways and busses. Over 700 are injured. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims massacre dozens of innocents at a Passover Seder. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims murder innocent vacationers in Bali. No Muslim outrage.
Muslim newspapers publish anti-Semitic cartoons. No Muslim outrage
Muslims are involved, on one side or the other, in almost every one of the 125+ shooting wars around the world. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims beat the charred bodies of Western civilians with their shoes, then hang them from a bridge. No Muslim outrage.
Newspapers in Denmark and Norway publish cartoons depicting Mohammed. Muslims are outraged.
Dead children. Dead tourists. Dead teachers. Dead doctors and nurses. Death, destruction and mayhem around the world at the hands of Muslims .. no Muslim outrage … but publish a cartoon depicting Mohammed with a bomb in his turban and all hell breaks loose.
February 18th, 2006 at 3:31 pm
Cliff, the question concerns not whether you should post the e-mail; indeed, I found the e-mail rather interesting and thought-provoking. Rather, the question concerns whether you should waste your time debating someone like Mighty Man. Mighty Man’s e-mail summarizes remarkably the backward, uninformed positions that only “true patriots†from Utah can appreciate, and you are not going to change the “Man’s” viewpoint no matter how intelligent and compelling an argument you present. Direct your energies toward the main stream folks, both liberal and conservative, who still possess some ability to reason and rationalize. Mighty Man is hopeless and beyond repair.
February 18th, 2006 at 4:14 pm
I would generally like to believe that most Muslims are personally appalled, but considering most of us don’t have (un-Americanized if I may make up a word) Muslim friends, how are we to know????…because there certainly is no governmental, institutional, media-inspired or otherwise visible outrage shown at most of the below events.
February 18th, 2006 at 4:17 pm
I see validity in the original email. It strikingly compares the values and cultures of two groups that are at war.
I expect there would be an appropriate outcry if Americans or other westerners rioted and burned Muslim businesses in America and other western countries because of outrage over any of the incidents cited in the original email, or because of outrage over continued terrorist attacks on Iraqi civilians andAmerican and coallition forces.
Americans don’t riot and attack a group in the United States because some members of that group elsewhere in the world inflicted harm (and continue to inflict harm) on Americans.
However, radical Muslims in a number of countries are ignoring the deaths and injuries inflicted by other Muslims, against Westerners and against Muslims.
These radical Muslim groups seek salvation by killing Americans and Westerners - killing even those who have spent years and risked their lives providing aid in Muslim countries.
Muslims are outranged by cartoons, but not by death and destruction inflicted by other Muslims.
The radical Muslim world has a strikingly different culture and value system - one that seems focused on destruction of the Western and specifically American way of life.
We’d better recognize those differences and the threat they represent, before America and our way of life is destroyed by our inaction and indifference.
February 18th, 2006 at 4:22 pm
Right you are, Nephi. The “Mighty Man” is mighty uninformed! My guess is that Mighty Man adorns his Cristmas tree with little Gayle Ruzika and Chris Buttars ornaments.
February 18th, 2006 at 4:43 pm
Verily, I say, the flaw in your argument, Pete, is that you mistakenly equate all Muslims with a radical minority of Muslims. If all Muslims truly thought as you suggest, America would have been destroyed long ago.
February 18th, 2006 at 5:37 pm
I want very much to believe Muslims are not accurately portrayed or represented by the actions of extremist hate mongers.
However, the global Muslim community makes it extremely difficult to hold that belief.
I’m always left with the question “Where is the Muslim outrage?” for grievous situations other than ridiculous cartoons.
February 18th, 2006 at 5:52 pm
The west engages in wars without real cause on false pretenses, other than opportunity and adventurism, no effective citizen outrage,
…hell it’s a good time to buy bechtel/halliburton war tech stocks.
February 18th, 2006 at 6:43 pm
Glenn.
There was and remains significant outrage in this country over the Bush decision to invade Iraq over false pretenses. The outrage was, however, civil and expressed through peaceful means, rather than through burning buildings and killing folks.
“Mighty Man” didn’t help; rather, “Mighty Man” bought into the fear rhetoric from Washington and watched football on TV instead.
February 18th, 2006 at 6:52 pm
Who is this Prophet Mohammed anyway? I though Gordon B. Hinkley was the Prophet.
February 18th, 2006 at 7:45 pm
http://teen.wordpress.com/2006/02/18/oops-islam-does-it-again/
February 18th, 2006 at 10:10 pm
As the post says, effective outrage Farmdog,… down boy. Our false pretense war, a rather outrageous expression of protest, has been conducted with bomb laden aircraft and piles of armor, killing somewhat indescriminately. War planes carry a payload of 18,000 lbs of ordnance. An F-16 isn’t a bomb jacket.
February 19th, 2006 at 12:14 am
The idea that “However, the global Muslim community makes it extremely difficult to hold that belief.” while understandable from the perspective of a society which has a passive relationship to the acquisition of information, must also empathize with the inability of our media to report on all things evenly let alone fairly in this realm or any other.
For that reason we must be very cautious about drawing conclusions about “no Muslim outrage” in response to acts carried out in their name.
Just as we find the Christian sects generally reluctant to criticize one another, we should assume that Muslim sects behave similarly.
It would be as presumptuous to expect Sunni Muslims in Libya to condemn the acts of Shiite Muslims in Yemen as it would be to expect Protestants in South Africa to condemn the behavior of Baptists in Mississippi, let alone to expect the media to cover such events.
Western Christians do not speak as one voice any more than Muslims or Jews.
And as much as many of the acts recounted in the e-mail were motivated by political ambition under a corrupt association with religion, so to are many acts in the US conducted under the corrupt claim of Christian principles as has been the case in the murder of homosexuals, abortion doctors and the segregation of African Americans.
We must avoid the temptation to impugn an entire religion for acts committed under the fallacious association of religion. In fact, to do so is dangerously ineffective.
For example, while uncounted numbers of individual Christians have condemned the murder of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis by the US, I have not seen that reflected in the media as Christian self-condemnation despite the fact that the invasion of Iraq is represented in the very argument proposed by the e-mail as a response to Muslim ambitions.
So, are we to assume that all of Christendom condones the invasion of Iraq? Absolutely not. Do Muslims in Syria and Detroit know that? Absolutely not! They have as much reason to argue that Christians as a whole support atrocities conducted in the name of Christianity as we have reason to believe that all Muslims condone the acts of other Muslims.
It would be convenient to take the position suggested by the e-mail. But it would also be useless if not provocative, wrong or needlessly inflammatory.
Truth is rarely gained without effort, and is usually accompanied by discomfort.
February 19th, 2006 at 9:28 am
Really folks;
I lived in Canada for a while and it became blatantly obvious after living there, that Canadians do not have a media that crosses the border of it’s own country. The image people in the US have of Canadians as our benign northern cousin, is belied by how unable they are to impact the American mind, and as such the bullying and unfairness of our way of doing business with them goes unheard of by most Americans.
Ever heard of the softwood lumber dispute? It has been seriously protested in Canada and has very much contributed to the ruination of relations between our countries, as much as they not supporting us in the Iraq war. Search it for what “free trade” really means. http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/softwood_lumber/
We are about the only country that has a media that is seen effectively, worldwide. When is the last time anyone you know in America watched a broadcast from Europe, or anywhere in a foreign language?
What for all intents and purposes do most of us know about anyone from the middle east,… their true feelings at having chaos continually thrust upon them? I don’t expect our current governent to tell us how rational Muslims feel, anymore than IT respects the feelings of the “silent majoraty” in our Country whose voices are being trampled.
Examine our media, .. its propensity to promote lies in furthurance of madness, and ask if the true story of America has been told. We live in our own controlled environ. Blog on, it is the only place it is being told.
cheers glen
February 19th, 2006 at 1:40 pm
Further to the discussion… and yet there’s no expression of outrange from any part of the Muslim community.
I have seen no outcry for restraint from any Muslim country, organization or group anywhere in the world, radical or not.
Certainly the Grand Iman Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi had an opportunity to condemn violence and killings, and he did not.
The Grand Iman must see the violence to be an appropriate response to publication of the cartoons, and to find nothing wrong in burning churches, and killing children.
There could be outrange among Muslims around the world. But if there is, no media is reporting those expressions.
I don’t have a solution. But ignoring or minimizing the situation is not a solution.
>From CNN.com
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (AP) - Nigerian Muslims protesting caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad attacked Christians and burned churches on Saturday, killing at least 15 people in the deadliest confrontation yet in the whirlwind of Muslim anger over the drawings.
…
One group threw a tire around a man, poured gas on him and set him ablaze. …
Thousands of rioters burned 15 churches in Maiduguri in a three-hour rampage before troops and police reinforcements restored order, Nigerian police spokesman Haz Iwendi said. Iwendi said security forces arrested dozens of people in the city about 1,000 miles northeast of the capital, Lagos.
Chima Ezeoke, a Christian Maiduguri resident, said protesters attacked and looted shops owned by minority Christians, most of them with origins in the country’s south.
“Most of the dead were Christians beaten to death on the streets by the rioters,” Ezeoke said. Witnesses said three children and a priest were among those killed.
…
In Cairo, Bishop Karsten Nissen, of Denmark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, met with Grand Imam Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi of al-Azhar University, the world’s highest Sunni Muslim seat of learning.
Tantawi said the Danish prime minister must apologize for the drawings and further demanded that the world’s religious leaders meet to write a law that “condemns insulting any religion, including the Holy Scriptures and the prophets.” He said the United Nations should impose the law on all countries.