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Originally Posted by vsp
Noodle's rants kept returning to a central argument of "9 out of 10 Muslims hate us and wish we were dead." That is not only a fallacy, but a dangerous one, because what would I wager that a hell of a lot of those Muslims believe in return?
"9 out of 10 Westerners hate us and wish we were dead." (Would've said "Americans" until yesterday's attacks broadened the target circle significantly.)
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Are there extremists on both sides? Obviously. But the rank-and-file on both sides are seemingly caught up in this I Hate Them Because They Hate Us Because We Hate Them Because They Hate Us Because We Hate Them Because They Hate Us propaganda loop that collapses when a bit of critical thinking is applied.
That's why I twigged on the phrase "these people" in the first place, because it was an obvious euphemism for a demonization of a hell of a lot more people than the terrorists themselves, and I can't say that my instincts were wrong about that.
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The average Muslim doesn't believe the "Allah wants America dead" bullshit any more than the average Christian believes that "God's word must dominate the world" bullshit. But they don't make the news. Osama and Dobson do.
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You're applying "critical thinking" but completely disregarding the realities that are occurring on your doorstep. How nice that ALL 1.3 billion muslims don't want us dead. I'm sure ALL Germans didn't want us dead in WWII. Yet they all suffered as a result of war. A war, interestingly enough, that we had no stake in -- what the hell do we care about Poland, anyway? So I suppose, using you and Radar's interpretation of things, we were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents, and the fact that Nazism was eliminated as a world power doesn't come close to justifying our actions.
Of course, 60 years later we find ourselves again standing between the Jews and another bunch of wackos, which I must admit gives me a bit of a gagging feeling in my throat. However, they have fired upon us, and we should be concentrating on eliminating the muslim extremism that caused them to do so. We don't need to swat at the individual ants that bite us on the feet, we need to get rid of the nest before we're eaten alive (it would be comforting to think that we're not in danger of that, wouldn't it?)
Oddly, that sounds alot like what the muslims say about us. Guess what? We have diametrically opposing values and goals. Of COURSE one side wants the other to fail, because the existence of one threatens the existence of the other. The shop owner in America has no reason to hate the shop owner in Afghanistan. But that has nothing to do with the price of tea in China. We have been publicly identified by the leadership of these supposedly "small" groups of extremists as Allah-approved targets of violence. Maybe that's okay with you, but it's not okay with me.
Still, you are very right -- not all muslims want to continue the cycle of violence. They are the ones lining up to work and fight with us in Baghdad, and they're the ones to whom the country of Iraq will be turned over. The "insurgents" (a misnomer, as insurgency is carried out by local citizenry, not by foreign terrorists) won't ever go away, but their efforts can be muted, and the job of keeping them at bay can be turned over to the country of Iraq, once a certain level of training has been achieved.
But now, the liberals are in a quandary. At first, they tried to marginalize the muslims fighting with us and building the new Iraqi govt. as pawns of Bushco, operating a puppet regime for Republican oil-grabbers. Of course, as the number of Iraqis willing to fight for their freedom swelled, that started to look kind of silly, even for the left. So they had to fall back on the second line of defense: "Yeah, well we should've never been there in the first place. It's still all Bush's fault, and no matter what the outcome of the war (a non-extremist government in the heart of the middle east, hopefully), we have to remember to demonize America's presence there.
From that perspective comes the notion that we must never fight muslims, because Not All Muslims Are Bad. Instead, we need to find individual warlords and bring them on Judge Judy to let them know that they've been very naughty and must never do "it" again. That's a fabulous way to lose wars, and I'm really glad that the cut-and-run Democrats are not in charge of this effort.
edit: I interned in the civil engineering department at my college for 3 or 4 years. I saw more muslims in a day than you're likely to see in a year. Most didn't use deodorant, considering it to be unmanly. I'm not saying they're "wrong", but they certainly smelled manly.