To Donvan

Submitted by Michel (United States), Aug 2, 2007 at 19:35

Yep, friend, I admit it, that it is a form of blissfull paradise here. I also said, that it may well be that i am too naive or optimistic for lack of a better word.

I had not encountered you during my March exchanges with Noah, Dhimmi et al, so I may state here again that my travels have taken me often to Europe and also Muslim Countries. I further more worked for more than a year up in Silicon Valley for a Muslim owned company with me as the only non-muslim.

All the experience with Muslims based upon above are certainly not representative for an entire culture, but they prevent me personally from demonizing an entire people. It is a philosophical as well as moral dilemma, since, even if those people were in fact a tiny tiny minority, I could never "for the greater good' support radical means such as deportation or any form of domestic oppression. (often suggested here). Wouldn't that belay our ascension to a higher level of morale we so often claim we have risen to? Where would we base our moral justification upon, if we employed exactly those means of oppression, occupation, genozide or simply seeing a large minority as citizens of second class?

To be absolutely clear, I do promote strong self defense and clamping down on any form of terrorism by all means of our arsenal up to and not limited to outright warfare. But to use (domestically mainly)means which would strike many innocent people as form of "collateral damage", I will never support.

I am European by origin (Swiss), and can tell you that they have especially in Switzerland way more pressing issues than their Muslim Minority. The immigratiion wave for instance from former Jugoslawia has drastically changed the demographics ( to the worse) to name one example.

As much as we read about Muslim based Terrorism in Europe the actual cold hard facts of criminal statistics demonstrate clearly that other minorities than Muslims lead in terms of (increasing) criminality. The negative publicity in the media Muslims get nowadays makes for good newspaper sales, but seems to be well undeserved, if one considers actual law enforcement challenges in the various Western Countries.

Here in the US it is even more evident, that our rather large Muslim Minority makes for only a tiny precentage of currently imprisoned. Almost utterly inexistent, as far as domestic terrorism is concerned. Due to law enforcement or homeland security?? No way. This country has no Citizen Control, such as practised in Europe and overall the borders have more holes than a Swiss Emmentaler. So - how come we hardly see any muslim based terrorism?

Oh - now we'll hear about the sleeper cells and the long range plan to silently overwhelm us with a migratory attack.

To that I can only say that our hispanic minority outgrows the Muslims tenfold. In 50 years we may well be a hispanic catholic country. And for the rest , see my statement about us becoming a nation of paranoids. If you think about it, we further may well become over the next 50 years one of the larger Muslim countries, which will make is so much harder for those fundamentalists to justify attacks. They'll kill more and more of their own, eroding their own base, is my personal conclusion.

Anyhow, if you have a constructive and feasible idea, I sure love to hear about it.

If you personally encountered the evil Muslim, can report of experiences to that fact you made yourself and not second hand, I am willing to listen. As long as I only have my first hand experiences to base my opinion upon and the otherside only quotes media and reports, I can not weigh my own credibilty versus the one of the Islamophobes.

Please understand me correctly , Donovan. Most of the people I debated here with last spring, had no personal reports, but quoted the Quran and the Media as well as History books endlessly and expertly. It is only my own individual position that I take any book or especially the media with a ton of salt and appreciate the fact that - to make a point - a japanese history book still reads quite differently from one in Switzerland for example. I can tell you that The Neue Zuercher Zeitung reads utterly different from the Los Angeles Times. The "ultimate" truth as always lays somewhere in the greyzone between opinions and interpretations, is my strong feeling. Can one honestly argue that fact?

History is not an exact science, as much as we tend to see it as such, but subject to influences, cultures, geography and points of view. At least in the interpretation of actual events and dates.

Know your History, was often recommended in replys to me and all I could answer was" which one?"

In that sense it is my strong belief that a majority of Muslims may read the very same, at times cruel and inhuman sounding book as Dhimmi for example, but manage to draw utterly different conclusions and guidelines from it. How they (and I mean especially our domestic fellow citizens) do it, I just do not know. I am no theologist or expert, but when they quoted the Quran during my visit, it simply sounded so much more peaceful and mellow, as when Dhimmi or other Western Experts on Muslims quote their book. As with our bible, I assume, the letter of the word simply does not suffice anymore to envelope our complex 21st century.

But hell, all I know is that I do not know. Do you?

Regards

Mi

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