Quote Originally Posted by Bopa the Magyar View Post
This is one of the issues, people such as yourself who profess to have no problems with Islamic presidents are slitting your own throats.
I find it amusing someone who claims a love of socialism to be so scathing of your fellow taxpayers, where is the respect?

This lack of respect and elitist midset will do nothing but cause your beliefs to fail, if you constantly gaze down at people they will push you over.
I have no patience whatsoever for people who remain willfully stupid and uneducated, preferring to believe that just about everyone outside of the U.S. irrationally hates us and that none of the rules we apply to others seem to apply in quite the same way to ourselves.

I would wager, for instance, that the number of Americans most vehement in their condemnation of Islam includes many Americans who have never actually interacted with a Muslim in any direct fashion. These are people on message boards flaming away and "teaching" the silly naive people like me about how all Muslims want to kill me and Middle Easterners all hate America. I don't need to consult people on the internet to learn about Muslims or Middle Easterners. I have met, known, and worked with many in my real life. All of them have failed to kill me or "slit my throat."

That is not to say Islam doesn't have its issues and many Middle Eastern societies do not have problems. But I do have a problem with this pride we Americans take in how we accept difference and tolerate dissent and uphold respect for and freedom of religion and consider ourselves exceptional and the best nation in the world for it--- while tagging someone with the title of "Muslim" would disqualify them from President and a lot of people are happy to jump on a self-righteous horse that their religion is better and more moral and less violent than someone else's.

I also think that, while yes, some people in the Middle East hate the U.S. just because they've been taught to, and not for any personal or rational reason per se, I think that its counterpart in the U.S. of merely assuming that anyone who DOES hate us must necessarily be irrational and have no legitimate cause whatsoever is fully ignorant of our foreign policy, or doesn't care. They're just Arabs, if we blow them up or prop up dictators in their countries, well, they're no worse off than they'd be anyway right? They're just Arabs. I think that when America's foreign policy comes back to bite us we have a tendency to assume the role of the innocent victim and some of this is from ignorance and some of this is from a belief that their lives aren't worth as much as ours are.

And for the record, Strike, I never argued anyone got a pass for being a young religion. That was a perversion of my point by RVG and Panzer. But I did say, and still say, that anyone who believes there is something inherently written into the "code" of Islam which "makes it violent", which isn't present in Christianity and virtually every other religion, is just being ethnocentric and holding a double standard. The U.S. and every other country in North and South America only exist in their present forms precisely because Christians were willing to come over and kill people or deprive them of their land and basis for survival because they were non-Christian "savages."