JCC Canadian Parliament shooting

Er, Israel is a Jewish state but it has never been an Orthodox Jewish state.

 

Okay, if you'd like to pretend that the Rabinnate acknowledges Reform and Conservative Judaism as "okay" then sure, you're correct. (Spoiler alert: they don't!)

 

I agree, but as I mentioned earlier in the post, these texts are not infinitely elastic. Words have meanings. With respect specifically to the Qu'ran, I've invited everyone in the thread to read it (and notice I've not "cherry-picked" a tissue of passages to read. I'm simply saying: Get yourself a copy, open the front cover, and read it to the back cover) and try to say with a straight face that it's obvious that groups like ISIS are "distorting" what it conveys. By no means is such an interpretation the only possible interpretation, as centuries of scholarship revising our understanding of the composition of the Bible shows, and as I also said earlier in the thread, I think the oppression writ large of the Arab world over the past century has a lot to do with such utopian, triumphalist formulations attaining such a wide adherence. I hardly think that further military misadventures to "spread freedom" are the solution to this problem, but lying about precisely what the problem is isn't either.

 

abraham foxman isnt a mass murderer in the traditional sense, so far as im aware. baruch goldstein, however...

 

Oh, I thought you were pretend-chastising me on my condemnation of the illegal settlements. Also, I'll note that literally every major Jewish organization publicly denounced Goldstein, as did the officials in the government, which is what Ender's point was about learned institutions and lobby / education groups not doing the same in the case of radicals on the Islamic side. And the settlers who wanted to behave that way. AND the group was marked as a terrorist group.

I mean, yes -- it's really, really bad -- but everyone came out against it.

 

muslim groups come out against terror all the time. this idea that they dont is an impressive display of auto-analingus

 

I'm too old, I can't reach. Sorry.

 

No I'm not trying to compare Isreal with ISIL in any way. I support Israel and acknowledge its progressiveness. My issues with Israel are for another thread. What I meant was that radical Islams are carrying out violent/illegal political action and wrapping it up in the false cloak of religion, which is precisely what the settlers are doing with respect to illegal land grabs.

 

Okay, but then who are you speaking of, LOH? ISIS is clearly looking to set-up a sharia state. So is Hamas.

I mean, the Canadian scenarios over the past week -- probably not fully-religious in nature, no. But to whom are we then referring in general or specific? (maybe I missed this from you earlier; apologies if I did)

 

I'm speaking of ISIL and other "radicals". I'm saying that they are doing more than just following religious dictates. They are a political group trying to establish a political state and deploying means to achieve that end which is completely antithetical to the dictates of the religion they seek to serve.

That is the wider context I am trying to discuss. It is ridiculous to just condemn Islam because of what the radical element is doing as there are political and cultural factors at play. It is similarly ridiculous to condemn Judaism based upon the exploits of the settler movement.

 

IS ISIL antithetical to the dictates of their religion though, even if a strict and non-modern interpretation? Which I think was Ender's point earlier about not having gone through a Reformation period...

 

well that depends who you ask. if you ask pretty much any muslim who isnt a member of ISIS, then yes. certainly the non-sunnis

 

Well to the extent they refer to themselves as being "Muslim" then I think yes, given that the overwhelming majority of Muslims worldwide are not out and about beheading their opponents and generally murdering non-Muslims. Again look at Indonesia. The likes of ISIL and HAMAS are political entities with a resistance agenda who are able to support their activities scripturally because that is the fundamental nature of scripture.

 

Absolutely. Most of the Sunnis as well, particularly those that dispute that Salafi-Wahabism is even a recognised "sect" of Sunni Islam.

 

Oh there are other radicals, the Sikh picture shows another one, another poster mentioned some ultra Jews, and within Christianity there are some too.
But when you hear of citizens leaving the comforts of western countries to go fight in basically a religious civil war to create an Islamic theocracy, it's a serious issue.
My perspective on this is different than most, because I don't believe radical Islam was behind 9/11. But radical Islam is behind these crazy small one man suicide missions.
The guy who stormed parliament just had his passport revoked, because he was seen to be radical, he was mad because he was on his way to fight in the middle east.
Here is another Canadian that went just a little bonkers and burned his passport


On a side note the Sargent at Arms who killed the gunman, did it James Bond style, he dives to the ground shooting, on his back emptied the clip into the guy he is not a young guy either.

There will be a movie on this I am sure.

 

All of our TV shows and movies are filmed in Canada in any case...

 

Hoth, you are not a Muslim, correct? Implicit in that is that you don't think that ANY interpretation of Islam is "true" in the way we normally use the word. So what do we mean by use of the word "true" or "authentic" in this context? There are a few possibilities. One, in which I would agree with you, is whether the the segments of the faith community that adhere to/practice a form of Islam that can fairly said to be representative of the entire IslamIc community. I'm that respect, groups like ISIS/Hamas clearly aren't. Another metric, however, and the one I am consistently addressing, is whether or not a given interpretation can fairly be said to be a reasonable exegesis of the Quran/Hadith. You yourself admit that such interpretations are possible. Given that you don't actually believe more benign interpretations are True in a larger sense, by what metric, then, are they "truer" than violent ones?

 

you mean like baruch goldstein, who was born and raised in new york city before moving to israel and murdering 29 palestinians at the cave of the patriarchs, and whose tombstone, calling him a martyr with "clean hands and a pure heart" has been allowed to stand up to the present day by the Israeli state, which claims to have a policy against such monuments to mass murder? or the two sikhs (officers in the indian secret service, btw) who killed indira gandhi in the name of setting up a sikh theocratic state, khalistan, and have been periodically honored by the sikh establishment as martyrs? "crazy one man suicide missions", setting up a theocratic state, and leaving the "comforts" (i imagine it was the alienation they were trying to escape, not the comforts) of your home is not unique to islamic radicals, although i imagine not being part of the majority probably helps with the level of alienation required.

 

I am an atheist. All interpretations are possible, the good, the bad and the ugly. Whether you choose to follow a good, bad or ugly path depends on factors outside of the scripture. There is no objective religious "truth". When I suggest that ISIS is not "truly Islamic" I am not being scientific. I am basing that opinion on the opinions of those who do subscribe to Islam and the behaviour of the overwhelming majority of Muslims in the world. If the behaviour of ISIS was a commonly held religious instruction then you would expect to see the world awash in the blood of infidels. For there are billions of infidels. Clearly ISIS is a product of what has being going on in Iraq in a geo-political sense rather than just a purely religious phenomena.

 

Jonah Goldberg came out and said he thought the one man attacks were more sociopaths latching onto an religion and then attacking in its name as an excuse for their nutty behavior rather than a deeply religious person who went crazy because of the religion. In other words, these were people who would likely use something else as a cover for their nutty behavior if not Islam. Grand Admiral Jello and others have put that idea forward too.

 

well thank god now we know what jonah goldberg thinks. how about pee wee herman? has pee wee herman commented yet?

 

Interesting in that he did not join the chorus of hysterics many neocons did.

 

i just aggressively dont care what he thinks, sorry

 

That's a bumper sticker summary of a highly politicized issue. I have actual videotape of a number of sitting Republican officials actively suggesting that they think Barack Obama is the centerpiece of an African Muslim vengeance plot conceived over half a century ago to get revenge against the British empire by faking the birth certificate of a Manchurian candidate for the American Presidency.

Do you think all of them seriously believed this? Is it at all possible they were just parroting something they knew wasn't true to be in solidarity with some of their more radical allies? What about polls that questioned, at the time, whether the Lewinsky scandal should be seen as a big deal or not? Or the Patriot Act? Are opinions on those issues completely untouched by their political context at any given moment? Every single response is always deeply felt, genuine, and would be unchanged no matter when it was asked or by whom?

These questions are part of a battery that measure A)the worth of Islamism and B)the role of religion in the public sphere. People are going to respond with that in mind. It would be bizarre if they didn't, seeing as they do with everything else.

Your analysis presumes there's some sort of Platonic form of Islam--or any religion--out there for people to attain. Except that there isn't. Even if there was, it certainly would not fall to non-adherents like the two of us to define what is and is not "real" in the religion. If you can find direct textual support for a practice that is nonetheless not actually employed, suddenly doing so would still count as an innovation/reinterpretation. For instance, I would qualify a sudden outburst of Christian pacifism in the US in the same way, despite the fact that there's pretty strong textual support for it in the US, and it was once very prominent in this country. In the present, many of the more religiously conservative denominations don't subscribe to this, and haven't for decades. If they suddenly did, it would be new. I don't see why this confuses or troubles you.

Focus ought to be on the actual practice and teaching of religions as a lived experience, not what it's messages once were or could be.

 

Wocky, let us be extremely generous and say that, say, one third of people who responded that apostates should be killed only did so to be "party-line", as you say. (And what exactly does that say about the party-line, by the way?). Why, that leaves only 2 million people in Iraq who thinks apostates should be killed, 1 million in Jordan, 15 million in Egypt, and 30 million in Pakistan. Surely, these numbers are low enough that anybody who naively thought, like me, that illiberal attitudes toward freethinking are alarmingly prevalent should be utterly ashamed of themselves.

Just so we're clear, are you claiming, then, as a matter of actual fact, that apostasy is more or less fully accepted in the Muslim world? What about the testimonials from Muslims who have received death threats from members of their own families for leaving Islam? What about the exquisitely crafted opinions of Muslim jurists at Al-Azhar? (strange, isn't it, how scholars who devote a lifetime of study to Islam consistently "misunderstand" their own religion in the exact same way?) What about the link I posted where a lynch mob, 100,000 deep, demands the execution of "atheist bloggers"? What about when a freethinking Muslim essayist says he receives messages of support from freethinkers cowed into silence in Muslim countries? How about the death threats Majid Nawaz has received for having the audacity to support free expression? And on and on and on. All of this merely "Platonic"?