Posted by Sinister Burt
Re: Sorry, but the Daily Mail didn't stab two people to death and wound others Archived Message
on December 2, 2019, 8:07 pm, in reply to "Sorry, but the Daily Mail didn't stab two people to death and wound others"
@Sue: I'm all for examining the ideology of the tiny subset of muslims who do stuff like that bloke did - but i don't like the implication that it's something inherent to islam (forgive me if this is not what you were implying and ignore the rest if you like). That would be like saying westboro baptists or the phalange in lebanon represent something inherent to christianity, or burmese muslim persecuters are inherently representative of buddhism - ie simplistic and facile imv. In my limited experience there's a whole spectrum of beliefs in islam that are not easily lumped together in such a way - this diversity, which was surprising to me, is obscured by the dominance of the preferred beliefs of the most powerful muslim states (saudi's wahabism in particular, as outlined above).
Can i use the muslim people i know who are kind decent people who care about others as an example of the results of being muslim instead, rather than the nutjob who stabs people? There are certainly a huge amount more of the first type than the latter in the world, so it seems much fairer to me.
When talking about terrorism being associated with islam, it's often forgotten that the idea of terrorism and guerilla type tactics were adopted into 'islamism' by people who were influenced by western intellectuals/radicals like sartre (according to my vague memory of an adam curtis doc anyway - probably got the details wrong). So in this case, is the evil 'western'? (of course not, that would be as simplistic as saying it was islamic).