The Religion of Peace
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Short piece, and worth a read.
The Crusades are a perfect example. If you speak to any Western person and ask them when did conflicts begin between Muslims and Europeans, they will invariably say the Crusades. In so doing, they expose their ignorance that, in fact, the Crusades were really a drop in the bucket of the totality of warfare between Islam and the West over the course of more than one millennium; and during all of those wars—including the United States of America’s first war as a nation, with “Barbary”—it was the Muslims who were the aggressors. Why else was Islam in Spain, or the Balkans, or Russia, for centuries? Finally, when the “mainstream” talks about the historical interaction between the West and Islam, they invariably begin with the colonial era, that is to say, they begin during that brief time span when the West finally became militarily superior to Islam, and therefore can be positioned as the aggressor. Ironically, and in reality, even the early European colonizers were operating within the context of the nonstop, long war between Islam and themselves; in other words, they were trying to reform or at the very least defang the Muslim world.
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**The recent stabbing of Salman Rushdie shows that Islam has a “long memory”regarding the “offenses” of which it considers itself a victim; in contrast, Westerners quickly forget terrorist attacks and Islamic violence. To what do we owe this difference in memory?
Good question. I think much of it revolves around how Muslims and Westerners have been conditioned. Muslims, I would say, have a natural or normal kind of memory, one that places and interprets events in the context of their history. Western people, on the other hand, are habituated by the so-called “news,” to think and care only about what is “new”—even though, of course, nothing is really ever new—before passing onto the next thing that the “news” is abuzz with and forgetting the former.**
This guy's clearly never been to Northern Ireland. Those eejits still celebrate the Battle of the Boyne, 1690, and talk about King Billy (William of Orange) as if he's still around.
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**The recent stabbing of Salman Rushdie shows that Islam has a “long memory”regarding the “offenses” of which it considers itself a victim; in contrast, Westerners quickly forget terrorist attacks and Islamic violence. To what do we owe this difference in memory?
Good question. I think much of it revolves around how Muslims and Westerners have been conditioned. Muslims, I would say, have a natural or normal kind of memory, one that places and interprets events in the context of their history. Western people, on the other hand, are habituated by the so-called “news,” to think and care only about what is “new”—even though, of course, nothing is really ever new—before passing onto the next thing that the “news” is abuzz with and forgetting the former.**
This guy's clearly never been to Northern Ireland. Those eejits still celebrate the Battle of the Boyne, 1690, and talk about King Billy (William of Orange) as if he's still around.
@Doctor-Phibes said in The Religion of Peace:
Those eejits still celebrate the Battle of the Boyne, 1690, and talk about King Billy (William of Orange) as if he's still around.
Yeah, but the Mohammedans have a thousand years' head start.
