The Search for Moderate Islam

Good for Sam Harris. Bill Maher too. It is some relief to hear the occasional liberal voice dissent from out of the sea of political correctness, but of course it's nowhere near enough.As this conservative source says, Islam will take over the world because of political correctness. There's a big protest in France and more elsewhere because of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, but there is also protest of the protests, accusations of "Islamophobia" and other PC expressions.

Do you have any figures on where most of today's terrorism comes from, or do you just collect news stories about Muslim terrorists as an exercise in confirmation bias?In the European Union, it's fairly easy to track the ideologoical basis of terrorist attacks, since Europol publishes statistics on the issue every year. Figures for 2014 aren't out yet, but in 2013 only 7 people died in terrorist attacks in the EU (2015 has sadly topped this already). 1 was due to Islamic extremism, one to a far-right extremist, two to far-left extremists, and three to nationalist seperatists. I'd hazard a guess you all know about the Islamic one - the soldier murdered in Woolwich - but would be surprised in any of you have any memory of the other six deaths, which is something you should bear in mind when using 'stories I notice in the news' as your metric for estimating the relative rates of terrorism.This is just looking at deaths, of course. The vast majority of terrorist attacks fail or, if carried out, don't kill anyone. Looking at the full statistics for number of attempted and successful attacks; Europol in 2013 reported 84 by seperatist groups, 24 by leftists, and 2 by Islamists. This wasn't an odd outlier of a year either. Every year since they started published statistics, separatists have been responsible for by far the largest number of attacks.Now, if we're looking globally you may be correct that the majority of terrorist attacks are by Muslims at the moment, but this is not a timeless fact. Statistics are much harder to find here, but if I remember rightly it's only in the last 20 years that the number of suicide bombings by Muslims globally became larger than that committed by the Tamil Tigers, a nationalist or leftist organisation depending on how you want to look at it, but whose members are primarily Hindu or atheist.An important thing to note globally is that terrorist attacks are not distibuted evenly across the Muslim world; they cluster in specific places - currently Iraq and Syria, Pakistan, Yemen and Nigeria. Other majority Muslim countries like Djibouti, Azerbaijan and some of the gulf states, for example, have little to no problems with terrorism. This suggests, to me at least, that these terrorist hotspots are not some inevitable consequence of the local religion, but due to specific local political and social factors - just as the fact that most terrorism in the EU today happens in France, Spain, Greece and the UK is not due to anything inherent in the nature of these four countries.Hello everyone, by the way,

Also see Are Christians more violent than Muslims? | AbagondNow start waving away those statistics ...Enjoy.

Islam: The Politically Incorrect Truth

Let me know if you have any interest in reponding to anything I wrote.

This show is about the definition of terrorist. Definitely worth watching.Glenn Greenwald on How to Be a Terror Expert: Ignore Facts, Blame Muslims, Trumpet U.S. Propaganda | Democracy Now!

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Who are the so-called terrorism experts? In the wake of the Paris attacks, the corporate media has once again flooded its news programs with pundits claiming authority on terrorism, foreign policy and world events. We discuss the growing and questionable field of "terrorism experts" with three guests: Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and co-founder of The Intercept; Lisa Stampnitzky, social studies lecturer at Harvard University and author of "Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented 'Terrorism'"; and Luc Mathieu, foreign affairs reporter for the French newspaper Libration.

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Some interesting facts, and rational evaluation of the issue of what "terrorism" means, what is the propaganda and what is the actuality.Not just STEVE EMERSON but ALL the pundit pretend experts ...From the transcript:

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GLENN GREENWALD: The concept of terrorism is a very widely debated concept all over the world, and there are incredibly divergent opinions, even about what terrorism is, about who it is who’s perpetrating it, about how it is that you define it and understand it, and whether or not there’s even a meaningful definition of the term at all. ...

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It’s an incredibly propagandized term. It’s an incredibly propagandistic set of theories that they have. And that’s really what these media outlets are doing, is they’re masquerading pro-U.S. propaganda, pro-U.S. government propaganda, as expertise, when it’s really anything but. These are incredibly ideological people. They’re very loyal to the view of the U.S. government about very controversial questions. ...

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LISA STAMPNITZKY: I mean, one of the conclusions I draw is that it’s a very peculiar field in terms of fields of expertise, because there is no strict boundary around it, there is no control according to who can be an expert. There’s no credentialing. And so, you have people coming on TV who are just sort of spouting hysteria and not drawing on any real expert knowledge. And even those who are more serious in the field have no ability to regulate who gets called an expert.

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GLENN GREENWALD: And there are so many of them like that. I mean, he’s one of the people called by the U.S. government in these prosecutions, these really dubious prosecutions, of American Muslims for really remote charges of material support for terrorism. ...

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There’s not even agreement about what the word "terrorism" means, which is why the old clich that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist is, though clichd, is so resoundingly true. You can have debates about what terrorism is, about who perpetrates it, and yet all of these so-called experts simply assume the answers to those questions, because if they were, for example, to say that the U.S. government is a state sponsor of terrorism by virtue of its support for death squads in El Salvador or the Contras in Nicaragua or any of the other groups across the United Statesacross the world that the United States continues to support that engages in violence against civilians for political ends, you would immediately have them eliminated. No major network like CNN or MSNBC or NBC would ever call somebody like that a terrorism expert, even though that’s a very plausible claim to make. It’s an extremely ideological and politicized view that gets called expertise. And they don’t even have the basic attributes of what we generally consider that makes somebody an expert.

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Interesting stuff that should make people question deeply where they are getting their information and the purposes behind that information.Enjoy

You seem to "like" Islamic violence by the sound of it.

Did you watch\listen to the whole show? It is now about whether the violence in the middle east is good\bad or about where it is happening, it is about using terminology that reflects reality rather than propaganda.Curiously I could say that you seem to "like" violence by the sound of it. It has no preference for sects religions or cults, just people that condone it and accept it. And you think violence is an appropriate response to any number of situations (your discussions re guns for example), so you have a much more documented affinity for violence than I do.What I don't like is drumming up wars with false information and fomenting fear of ALL muslims for the actions of a few.The US is responsible for a lot of the "terrorism" in this world in many ways. Not least of which is the "terrorist" drone program that kills innocent civilians.Did you listen to the whole show?What the show says is that you can't define "terrorism" in a way that excludes US actions in many places in the world without it devolving into "violence we don't like" ... US foreign policy is the US's worst enemy.Enjoy

Of course true or not, none of that has anything to do with the search for moderate Islam.

I didn't read through the whole thread, but did you not find it yet? I read somewhere at the beginning the dubious qualifier that you weren't interested in 'moderate Muslims', but in 'moderate Islam', but which I presume you mean some clearly defined doctrinasl branch of the religion. So how about the Ahmadiyya sect? Their founder had this to say about how to treat non-Muslims.

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Islam teaches us to live with mutual love and affection and with humility. It teaches us no distinction between a Muslim or a non-Muslim. My message to everyone is that you must have ‘Love for all, Hatred for none!’

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Of course, Salafists would tell you that Ahmadis aren't really Muslims, but then Faith says Catholics aren't really Christians, and we don't listen to her.

I hadn't heard it before, no, I surmised it from your presentation, but now I've listened up to about the 18 mark and find this guy Greenwald to be such a disgusting PC propagandist I don't know if I can stand listening to any more. Of course I knew when I saw the title that's what it would be: Glenn Greenwald on How to Be a Terror "Expert": Ignore Facts, Blame Muslims, Trumpet U.S. Propaganda . All you guys who think you want evidence evidence evidence really don't mind a whole lot if somebody who shares your point of view comes on making wild accusations without evidence, such as this guy is doing, basically accusing all the people who are called terrorism experts of lying to please the government, and the government of treating them as experts because they like their point of view. Blech.What's the point of all this dithering over the definition of "terrorism" anyway? I'll tell you the point: it's to let Muslims off the hook and find a way to blame the US instead -- or Jews or Christians or whoever is the enemy du jour. Otherwise there is no reason to split hairs about the definition because the only point that really matters is that Islam is the biggest perpetrator, in the present for sure but a biggie throughout history as well, of acts there is no reason to call anything other than terrorism. If you really need a definition, which I know you don't, I'd say it's the barbarous targeting of civilians who merely happen to be nonMuslims, or putatively nonMuslim anyway since the terrorists are often not terribly careful to identify their targets. Everybody in a magazine office, everybody in a caf in Israel, all the inhabitants of a town in Africa etc etc etc.There is no problem defining these things except for the politically correct who don't like the correct definition and have a vested interest in confusing the issue.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

What's that supposed to show? The belief that everyone is a Muslim is pretty common in Islam. Maybe worth investigating. These folks don't seem to be well-regarded by the Muslim community at large. Perhaps that's to their benefit.I'll definitely look into these folks further.

When Islamic Radicals Turn ModerateWhen Islamic Radicals Turn Moderate : Parallels : NPR

After last week's Paris shootings that targeted an irreverent political magazine and Jews in a kosher grocery store, there's been a flood of stories about the dangers of Muslim radicalization and how it happens.

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What about people who go the other way, from extremist to moderate? These people exist; the U-turn happens.

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His transformation from jihadi to moderate came after he got out of jail and went through what he calls a long and painful spiritual journey. He began to question religious teachings, "the rote manner in which we Muslims are fed our religion."
World leaders march in Paris on Sunday to honor victims of the attacks in France. Some of those who have been critical of the attacks have a mixed record on press freedom and human rights at home.

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Now, he's a harsh critic of any interpretation of Islam, including Saudi Arabia's ultraconservative creed. He calls for an Islamic reformation, especially in Saudi Arabia, where he's been denounced as an infidel and he gets regular death threats by email and on his phone.

Here's your moderate. I really hope he survives and spreads his ideas.But if I were a life insurance agent I'd tell him to come back in a decade or two and then, maybe, I'd consider writing him a policy.

Hi Faith.Would it surprise you to know that some people see Christianity as just as backwards and villainous as Islam?If a Muslim blows up a building he is a terrorist. If a Christian blows up an abortion clinic he also a terrorist.Aside from the body count, what is the difference, I wonder.All the best.

Couldn't possibly surprise me because that's the way things have been going over the last few years: it's perfect PC to hate Christianity and love Catholicism and Islam and in fact anything that isn't Christianity, and your little collection of Cheers shows just how popular the idea is. The true murdering cults are petted and promoted while the religion that inspired civilization and all our freedoms is treated as the enemy. I nevertheless keep hoping for a return to sanity but if it doesn't happen at least I tried. I do always continue to be surprised when otherwise intelligent people make such ridiculous moral equivalences, but it's become so common I really should be used to it by now. I shouldn't even have to say it and it will be denied anyway, but a Muslim blows up a building because it's the majority view of his religion that it's a good thing to blow up "infidels," but someone who blows up an abortion clinic is condemned by Christianity.But you just glossed over the huge number of ongoing murders by Islam I referred to while making this lone bomber of abortion clinics equal to those enormities, and I guess you think that's a fair comparison? I'm trying not to call people names but really Larni that's absurd.Oh well, I know there's no cure for this folly, but I do keep trying. You shouldn't wonder but of course you do, and now I've answered you and you'll continue to wonder what you wonder and that's that. And to you.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.