to AS

Submitted by Chris G. (United States), Jun 25, 2007 at 10:29

If you, for a moment, stop trying to pigeonhole me as a flaming liberal apologist and listen to what I am saying, I will try to appeal to your logic. if the Muslims who don't kill and oppress non-believers are not following their religion, then most Muslims have been practicing incorrectly for a large part of their history. You do realize that you are making the Wahhabi argument about what "true" Islamic is right? Do you not understand what I am advocating? I am advocating understanding and then channeling the development of Islam into a modern peaceful religion using traditional Islamic theology.

I agree that people who believe in killing innocent women and children to deserve to die. However, there is not a single aya or hadith that says for Muslims to kill women and children. That is a huge argument against extremists who try to stretch hadiths concerning revenge in order to justify killing any and all civilian. I am not here to argue whether or not Mohammed's actions were right or wrong. What I care about is how they are interpreted. If there are long lineage's of traditional scholars who follow an interpretation of tolerance and peace (according to you and Al-Qaeda, incorrect practice of Islam) then I will work to promote that interpretation to combat Al-Qaeda type propaganda on the internet.

What makes my job MUCH harder is that people like yourself... are promoting the extremist interpretation of Islam, thus justifying labeling all Muslims as potential terrorists and lumping them all together as one common enemy.

The logical conclusion to such logic is GENOCIDE. If its not, please explain to me who we use violence to make all Muslims reject their religion?

Finally you say I have no idea what I am talking about. Sir, I have lived all over the Middle East, I am a former soldier, I have lived in Indonesia (the biggest Muslim country in the world), I have talked to dozens of Islamic scholars from all four Sunni madhhabs (Islamic schools of thought), I have spent a huge amount of time in my local Islamic communities and their mosques (both Shi'a and Sunni), I have gone to Islamic seminars, and finally I have spent a huge chunk of my research having dialog with Islamic extremists over the internet on public forums where I have tested my theories and found them to work. I have also studied programs in Yemen and Indonesia to "deprogram" captured terrorists in order to get them to accept more peaceful and tolerant interpretations of Islam and to turn on their former comrades and provide us with highly useful intelligence so that they could be hunted down, killed, or arrested.

In Yemen, the program is not perfect, but still has had many successes and with some changes that program will improve. In Indonesia however they have had excellent success rates. These are Muslims fighting against terrorism by destroying it at the roots: Those roots being the believe system of the terrorists.

THIS is why I want to encourage rather then ending up just discouraging such efforts and instead fueling Islamic extremism.
If we just laugh at them and call these people who are doing the right thing, terrorists (when they are working hard to stop real terrorists) we remove any interest in promoting such programs all around the world. It is a cost effective and extremely effective way of stopping terrorism.

But... if you truly believe that violence is the only option, then you must be prepared for the logical repercussions of such methods, the most likely being genocide of Muslims, arrest or killing of all American Muslims, and removing freedom of religion from our constitution.
If you really believe violence would work, I would like to understand how you predict that fighting Islam violently will end the war on terror. I have yet to hear a single advocate of war against Islam explain this to me in a realistic, rational, and logical manner.
My mind is open if you have strong ideas for how this will work short of genocide.

Chris G.

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