A Response to Misunderstanding

My response to a Tulsa World article, Roger D. Williams: Questions For Muslim World:

I'm not Muslim, but I take issue with his arguments. Not being Muslim, hopefully my answers will carry a bit more weight to those people who think all Muslims lie (and you can Google me and find my blog on that subject).

"Having never read the Quran," - first mistake. You cannot debate an ideology without understanding it, and you cannot understand Islam without reading the Qu'ran. At least read quotes related to the statements you're about to make.

"this is a classic example actions speaking louder than words." You perceive that all Muslims are violent because ISIS and Al-Qaeda are/were violent. There are over a billion Muslims in the world, and the vast majority of them are not psychopathic killers.

"Why was there rejoicing and dancing in the streets in some Muslim-dominated nations when the twin towers went down with the attending loss of thousands of innocent lives?" I submit a few possible answers:

1. some people are jerks.
2. some news agencies are jerks who want to milk the story by showing a few dozen protesters and pretending it's the entire country.
3. all humans are inclined to make "us v. others" judgments that are necessarily reductive. There are certainly people in the world - and not just in the Muslim world - that believe that America and its policies are subjugative; that is, that we intentionally meddle into other countries' affairs and build up massive corporate institutions with unregulated power that are able to go into those countries and buy up the police and military and get away with literal murder. In "us v. others" beliefs, we see the entire nation as being collaborators in those policies, and the result may be a belief that bringing down massive icons of those policies would be a joyous occasion.
   Remember with that that just two years prior to 9/11, a movie came out in which the heroes brought down those very same buildings for the very same reasons, and we all cheered and still cheer, because we feel the oppression of those corporate regimes ourselves. (I'm talking, of course, about Fight Club).

"Can so-called 'honor killings' be defended?" Nope. We've had them in Christianity, too, though. In fact, India has a ton of them, and they're not Muslim.

"Also, explain fatwas from Muslim clerics..." Ok. We have jerks for Christian priests, too. Remember Terry Jones? Some people take attacks against their religion to unbelievable extremes, and Muslims are not the only ones who do that.

"Why are there death sentences, often by stoning, for such 'crimes' as adultery and abandoning Islam for a different religion?" You do know Christianity tells us we are to take adulterers into the middle of the city and drive a spear through both of them, right?

"Why do some Muslim schools and mosques teach that Jews are descendants of apes and pigs and should be killed at every opportunity and such humanitarian arts as suicide bombing?" Some. Not all. Not most. Few. Racism is everywhere, and as I noted above in the comment about "innocent lives," some people take that to extremes.
And should you think we're better, considering Jews in Christian history. I'm not even talking about the Nazis, here. Christians literally believed that Jews stole babies in order to drink their blood. The Shakespearean comedy "The Merchant of Venice" rigorously compared Jews to dogs (again, you can Google me to find out more about that topic).

"What is the Islamic justification for the general degradation, subjugation and virtual enslavement of women?" What is the Christian justification for the same? Women are still paid only 77 cents on every dollar that men are paid, so...

"It is my understanding that these things are not the exclusive domain of terrorists and radicals, but are fairly routine in many Muslim-dominated nations." You should have stopped with that first point. They are fairly routine all over the world. They are more famous in Muslim-dominated nations because we know more about those nations, but if you actually looked into other nations, you'd find some shocking realizations. Many Muslim-dominated nations are third-world countries that have large oil and mineral reserves, and as a result we have a vested interest in them. Third-world countries often have violent regimes, who use physical power over the body to reinforce their power. Consider how Christians behaved in the middle ages and renaissance - we committed capital punishment in ridiculously violent ways in the middle of town squares, in the hopes that people would see that violence committed on other bodies and internalize it and avoid violating the laws in the same ways. We *STILL* do that, calling capital punishment a method by which we might show potential murderers that they shouldn't commit murder, and I see comments on Facebook all the time that we should behave more violently and more publicly to other offenders in order to prevent more crime. Third-world regimes control women in the same way - because that control helps them maintain their control over the rest of the population.

"in today’s world almost all terrorists are Muslims." Now, see, the problem is in the definition of the word "terrorist." We seem to apply that word only to Muslims. A terrorist is someone who attempts to use fear to achieve political change or to hold onto power they already have, apparently, but using only that definition, everyone at Fox News would be a terrorist. It's not enough that they use fear, but that they must also be someone we're already afraid of; that is, there must be a chance for their use of fear to succeed in our own world. That can only happen with people we're irrationally afraid of. It is necessarily bound up in racism.

If we didn't have that racist filter on the word, we'd see that terrorism is part of all military actions in the world, regardless of who commits them. By bombing key ISIS locations and portraying those victories across the TV, the US itself is engaging in terrorism - striking terror into the hearts of the people in ISIS-held regions.

"Don’t use the standard dodge of justifying the misdeeds of the Muslim world today by pointing to the sins and misdeeds, of which there are many, of other cultures and religions in this or by-gone ages..." Why not? There's literally no reason not to be. History is the filter by which we understand the present.