Red
Well-Known Member
I would hope that if madmen were perverting a belief that was important to me into a reason for mass murder that I would recognize the importance of identifying and ending that situation. I would hope I would direct any anger that the situation caused me at the people who were creating the problem rather than the people who were trying to solve the problem. I think describing the problem as Islamic terrorism, clearly and loudly, ought to give ISIS the dissatisfaction of knowing that we see them as a radicalized and cancerous segment of the whole that we and the world are committed to removing.
I agree with you that Trump ought and others who are describing the problem as Islamic or Muslim ought to get educated on the issue and pay more attention to their words. I wish we saw Islamic leaders leading the charge against these extremists. If Christian terrorists were going on a modern day crusade in the name of God I hope that the Pope and the President of the Mormon Church, and the leaders of all the various sects would be screaming from the rooftops for the madness to end. I hope their anger would be directed at the bad guys. If Buddhists went nuts I hope the Dahli Lama would order them to get their act together. If Jews went off the deep end I'd hope that Rabbi's would demand that they stop. In the current situation the moderate leaders of Islam seem way more concerned with how the world is reacting to their religion than how the fringe elements of their religion are reacting toward the world. Why aren't they screaming at the terrorists to knock it the **** off?
When my mom had cancer it did not make me hate her, even though I despised that part of her which was cancerous. If anything it made me love her more because she wanted it gone too, and she was going to have to pay the price for the battles that needed to be fought. We took aggressive action and did everything we could to remove it. As far as I know, nobody recovers from cancer via any other course. Showing love and kindness to cancer would be ineffective. Yesterday Loretta Lynch said that our best strategy against the terrorists is love and kindness. Statements like that make me lose what little faith I had left in the Obama administration.
Yes, the overall silence on the part of sane Muslims has always seemed troubling to me. I was surprised, in fact, when I read about all that cooperation in NJ, as one example. I was encouraged that American authorities are depending on American Muslim tips, and that that is the opposite of the situation in Europe. We integrate, whereas it seems in Europe Muslim enclaves are set up as if they were independent Muslim communities with no interest in integrating into the European culture where they have settled.
In the area where the conflict is the hottest, the Middle East, it seems like one of the biggest problem is the animosity between Sunni and Shia. Radicals of either persuasion are anti-Western, and at the same time fighting each other. Over a breach between them dating back to Mohammed himself and the nature of the succession after his death. I can't keep track of who's who. But I think it seems like at the state level, the states support whatever branch dominates their own nations and governments, so they avoid criticizing their own, regardless of any blood shed by their own. I think this must very much help create the failure of a unified response by sane Muslims to the madness being unleashed. In other words, there is no unified Islam. The same can be said of Christianity with it's many branches, but at least the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic, while competing in control of sites holy to the faith in Israel, are not actually hateful of each other. Whereas this Sunni/Shia split, which, again, makes my head spin in trying to understand it, must play a role in preventing a more unified stand in which the leaders of Islam condemn radicalism in a way that leaves no doubt there is an uppermost level of the faith that speaks out in a way that the world actually hears them and leaves no doubt that they oppose this highjacking of their faith by psychopaths. That response does seem relatively invisible to me.