1) You ignored most points or didn’t engage them directly. 2) You repeatedly brought in examples that attempt to be inflammatory and are completely irrelevant to the point you are allegedly trying to refute. 3) You couldn’t admit when you’re wrong. 4) When someone repeatedly answered your questions, you made no acknowledgement of the same. 5) When someone refuted your arguments, you made no acknowledgement. 6) You were biased against Muslims. 7) You were biased against people who are not biased against Muslims, attributing the worst sorts of beliefs to them without any logical basis for doing so.

I will leave it to someone else to try to help you understand why being biased against Muslims is A Bad Thing. Congratulations, you win–you get the last word! Enjoy!

Care to be a little less cryptic ? What exactly is it you know so well ? Do you work in the area of defending the people discussed in this thread ?

Well, I thought we had agreed we were talking about the last five years

Perhaps your “meticulous research” into the oppression of Muslims somehow missed this little ongoing situation:

Arab, Muslim silence on Darfur conflict is deafening Monday, April 10, 2006 First person Fatema Abdul Rasul For the entire Muslim and Arab world to remain silent when thousands of people in Darfur continue to be killed is shameful and hypocritical. On March 28, 2006, the Arab League held its annual summit in Khartoum but failed to effectively address the crisis in Darfur. … Yet, the Arab and Muslim world has failed to condemn the violence in Darfur or assist any efforts by the international community to protect the innocent civilians – most of whom are Muslim. Arab and Muslim leaders have never hesitated to condemn the killing of innocent civilians in Iraq or the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Yet, none of them have spoken out against Khartoum’s policies in Darfur even though the number of Darfurians killed surpasses those in the other two conflicts. During the past two and a half years, over 400,000 people have been killed in Darfur while more than two million people have been uprooted from their homes. The Sudanese-backed Janjaweed militia has routinely raided villages, executed adult males, raped adult women and girl children, burned homes and crops, stolen livestock, and kidnapped children into slavery. Link

To repeat your question from post #64:

One final question for you to ponder: Has the one sectarian group you identified or the combined total of all the sectarian groups you could possibly list which –Islamic Thinkers’ Society–killed, tortured, detained, deported, and otherwise mistreated more Christians or Shi’ite Muslims around the world–or has the Bush Administration killed, tortured, investigated without cause, detained, deported, and otherwise mistreated more Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and other locales?

Do you want me to answer that question now ? Or is the Darfur situation somehow “different” in your eyes because it is a case of “Muslims killing Muslims” and since Bush and Co. are not involved, it doesn’t count ? Or do you think this question is “distracting” from your question ?

I assume you will be spending the rest of this weekend packing for Darfur to now defend the vast numbers of oppressed Muslims there ? You might be still able to get some good ticket deals…

Oh come on now, Al Mujahid. I expect better from you. Unless you were just trying to separate your argument about the logic from the argument about content.

1. Because I know this well.
2. Because my part in this conversation began with my statement that government apologists for abuses like you, Pearl Jam Fan, and Moornam are more worrisome to me than political violence. Not that support for the two are mutually exclusive–in fact, I think they mutually reinforce each other. Congratulations!

If you have so little faith in the government then what is your yard stick for accepting any case presented by federal prosecutors?

If I’m presented with all the evidence in the case or am reading the writings of people who have been but are good journalists (like Seymore Hersh). To the extent that I’m not exposed to those things, to that extent I severely doubt the credibility of the government. I also have particular doubts here because the government and this administration in particular has established a patterns like: abuse; cover up; and deception (e.g. Abu Ghraib).

Or as I said before is your measure of accepting the government’s cases of prosecution only extend to those where the defendants are non-Muslim ? You quite readily accept McVeigh’s guilt, even though there are quite a few inconsistencies in that case too.

Go read what I actually said: who most likely actually committed violent attacks on people in the U.S.. Notice the qualifications.

In any case, I had forgotten about the issues that you raised about McVeigh’s guilt and I’m glad that you raised them. Now the government has slightly less credibility in criminal prosecutions of ideological extremists in my eyes (at least as applied to this case and to “terrorism” cases as a whole). Yet for some reason, you find this as an argument for supporting the government?

On the contrary, almost any high profile case you can think of has had government foul ups

Locking someone up, denying them the right to a trial or a lawyer, not charging them wtih anything for years, and saying that neither the laws of the U.S. Constitution nor the Geneva convention apply to them are not “foul ups.” They’re deliberate choices by the Bush Administration that tie into larger patterns. To understate that is inappropriate.

And how far back in history do you want to take this idea of “totaling”? India’s own bloody history under Muslim rule would show you some genocidal totals. The Bush administration would have to be working around the clock for a couple of hundred years to come anywhere close to that number. Or do Hindu deaths not really count in your equation of “totals”. You need to read your history a bit more before you venture down this path…

Well, I thought we had agreed we were talking about the last five years and it seemed pretty clear that we were talking about U.S. Government / Muslim civilian relations (And others who are not Muslims who were caught up in it, including Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and others–though largely to lesser degrees). But this was a nice effort on your part to distract from that conversation

Cry me a river… Yeah, all this sympathy for a terrorist sympathizer and collaborator… Yes, I’m sure he’s unbalanced considering what he believes in. So what would you suggest be done ? That he be given a free ticket back to France and couseling with a therapist?

That he be evaluated for how much of a danger he poses to other people; that if he poses a danger to other people, he be removed from society; that he be allowed to live with his rights restricted as little as possible (though enough to protect other people); and that he be given access to adequate health care(as we all should be), including, but not limited to mental health treatment. Anything less would be, well, inhuman. But I recognize that reasonable people can disagree about the severity of punshment/rehabilitation someone like Moussaoui ought to receive if corresponding to the extent that he’s done anything wrong. And then there are the unreasonable people that think this person getting killed would accomplish anything except making a few people feel better about the fact that someone’s getting killed.

Just wanna say thank you for your words of wisdom, my friend, its so nice to see informed, politically aware debate on important issues. You’ve even inspired me to type all proper and not say ‘cos instead of because. Wow.

I am really sick of people using the ‘we’re all flawed’ argument to justify unjust situations.

Vikram, your argument tactic could even be extended to say that because black people fought and killed each other when they were in traditional African tribes, their experience of slavery is less tragic and unjust because they weren’t perfect anyway.

And of course people always bring it up when looking at South Asians too. Does our own bloody history, our caste system and internal discrimination make the experiences of those who suffer racial discrimination in western countries less valid?

Ask anyone who has been stared at,questioned, verbally abused, searched, detained or unjustly held in an airport/elsewhere because they’re brown and they will tell you that no, you cannot make up a scale of discrimination and pit one type of cruel behaviour against another.

Violence in the Bible and the Quran. by Jack Nelson Pallmeyer.

Add to your reading list..

As you know the United States government is a sovereign entity. If the United States government committed atrocities (lets say they did for the sake of this argument) in conducting the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States government can be held accountable because the United States government today (in 2006) is the same sovereign entity that allegedly perpetrated the atrocities in Afghanistan (2002) and Iraq (2003-)

Extrapolating from that and inferring that the current Muslims in India should be held accountable for the sins of Ghazni (born in Afghanistan and buried in Lahore) or Aurangzeb makes no sense. If the Mughals were still in power, then your analogy would hold some merit.

Nobody is absolving Hitler and Stalin of their crimes. As we all know, both Germany and Japan have paid repatriations to the Jews and South East Asian ‘comfort women’ respectively. The United States government itself paid repatriations to the Japanese Americans for their interment during WW2. When soveriegn entities survive, they can sometimes develop a conscience and redress some past crimes.

The sovereign entity which perpetrated the crimes against Hindus in the 12th or the 16th century does not exist anymore, so attributing the blame to some random Muslim dude living in India is quite silly.

Huh ? Do you use that same analogy to absolve Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot of the atrocities they committed as they are no longer around today ? I suppose there should be no Holocaust compensations either, as the guilty parties are long gone.

Thats a poor analogy.

United States government is a sovereign entity. The sovereign entity (United States government) which allegedly committed the atrocities still exists and in fact is still controlled and led by the same people.

The ‘Muslim’ kings/rulers who committed the atrocities do not exist anymore at any level in India. So I am not sure whom will you attribute the blame to.

Disclaimer: Not asserting that the US Government did in fact commit any atrocities.

On the contrary, almost any high profile case you can think of has had government foul ups:

In a dramatic last-minute turnaround, the Justice Department announced Friday it would postpone the execution of Timothy McVeigh. After confirming the existence of approximately 3,100 pages of previously undisclosed FBI evidence, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that the department would give McVeigh’s defense team time to review the material and take whatever action it deemed appropriate. Ashcroft said the Justice Department does not believe the new evidence will raise any doubt about McVeigh’s guilt.Link

So are you now going to review the Zapruder film and find the fabled second shooter to prove Lee Harvey Oswald was innocent ? Why is your fixation only directed at these cases in the past five years ? If you have so little faith in the government then what is your yard stick for accepting any case presented by federal prosecutors ? Or as I said before is your measure of accepting the government’s cases of prosecution only extend to those where the defendants are non-Muslim ? You quite readily accept McVeigh’s guilt, even though there are quite a few inconsistencies in that case too.

And, as an aside, I do in fact believe that Moussaoui wasn’t treated fairly. He seems pretty unbalanced to me in addition to all the claims presented in the linked article.

Cry me a river… Yeah, all this sympathy for a terrorist sympathizer and collaborator… Yes, I’m sure he’s unbalanced considering what he believes in. So what would you suggest be done ? That he be given a free ticket back to France and couseling with a therapist?

Has the one sectarian group you identified or the combined total of all the sectarian groups you could possibly list which –Islamic Thinkers’ Society–killed, tortured, detained, deported, and otherwise mistreated more Christians or Shi’ite Muslims around the world–or has the Bush Administration killed, tortured, investigated without cause, detained, deported, and otherwise mistreated more Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and other locales?

And how far back in history do you want to take this idea of “totaling”? India’s own bloody history under Muslim rule would show you some genocidal totals. The Bush administration would have to be working around the clock for a couple of hundred years to come anywhere close to that number. Or do Hindu deaths not really count in your equation of “totals”. You need to read your history a bit more before you venture down this path…

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