Winston Smith
Well-known member
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- Jun 24, 2010
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Go ahead. Show us where we are wrong.
Show us all the religous freedom that Muslim dominated countries dish out.
Then explain how America deserved 9.11
I'll wait.
Muslim countries have a mix of freedom and discrimination. What you need to understand is that the discrimination isn't just against non-Muslims. It's also against Muslims who believe the Koran but don't interpret it a certain way. See this article for example:
It finds that members of all religions in Iraq are “victims of harassment, intimidation, kidnapping, and killings” and that “frequent sectarian violence included attacks on places of worship.”
Muslims who practice less-strict versions of their faith suffer because “conservative and extremist Islamic elements exert tremendous pressure on society to conform to their interpretations of Islam’s precepts,” the report says.
Afghanistan: “Decades of war, years of Taliban rule, and weak democratic institutions, including a developing judiciary, have contributed to intolerance manifested in acts of harassment and violence against reform-minded Muslims and religious minorities,” it says.
Saudi Arabia: “While overall government policies continue to place severe restrictions on religious freedom, there were some improvements in specific areas during the period covered by this report,” it says, noting nascent moves that “could lead to important improvements in the future.” Still, it says “non-Muslims and Muslims who do not adhere to the government’s interpretation of Islam continued to face significant political, economic, legal, social, and religious discrimination.”
There are different interpretations of Islam, and as I said before, Muslims who don't interpret it the way you and Bin Laden do have suffered greatly from terrorist attacks in their own countries. Those are our potential allies, but they won't be allies if we demonize them and ignorantly smear them together with Al Qaeda and the like.
No one has said the US deserved 9/11. We did invite it, however, with our military presence in the Middle East, our lopsided support of Israel, and our decimation of Iraq's civilian population. Bin Laden has stated this pretty clearly. Of course, he knew our reaction in the short term would be more of the same. He cynically escalated the conflict in the hope of uniting Muslims against a common enemy and reviving his unpopular, failing ideology. Unfortunately, there were plenty of extremists in our own government who were more than happy to give him his "war of civilizations." Osama couldn't have hoped for better allies than Dick Cheney and company.