[GenuineRisk]

Originally Posted by Rupert Pupkin

In Yugoslavia(Bosnia, Croatia, etc.),that was a totally different situation. You had a situation there with three different groups that had been historic rivals and bitter enemies for years. You had the Serbs(Orthodox Christians), the Croats(Catholics), and the ethnic Albanians(Muslims).

In World War II, Serbs had been massacred by the tens of thousands in concentration camps. Then in 1991, the new Croat government was reviving fascism and enacting discriminatory laws targeting Orthodox Serbs. There was a civil war and the minority Serbs ended up fighting back and outgunning the Croats and the Albanians. There ended up being mass executions of Croats and Albanians at the hands of the Serbs.

I'm not excusing what happened there. You had a civil war there with a history of each side massacaring the other side. If there was no outside intereference, I think that whichever side had the most firepower would have massacred the other side. That is often times the case in wars. You have atrocities committed by both sides. In Vietnam, there were plenty of atrocities committed by our troops. There's no excuse for it, but it continuously seems to happen in wars.

Anyway, I don't think part of the theology of the Christians there was that all non-Christians in the world should be killed. It was just a case of bitter enemies who had a history of killing each other that wanted to continue to kill each other.

I want to make sure you understand that I'm not condoning what happened in Bosnia. It was murder. Murder is murder. I'm simply saying that I don't think theology was the reason for the murders. It was just a case of enemies killing each other. I think that is different from someone saying that you will be beheaded if you don't follow their religion.

And Rupert, a lot of the angry feuds waged by Moslems today also go back generations-- Osama turned anti-American as a result of how we handled the Soviets and Afghanistan. We trained him, for heaven's sake.

I agree with you that the tensions in Bosnia were ethnically based, but you still had Christians killing, which implies that they feel they have a right to kill "other." Which of course, is not very Christian as we understand Christianity. My point was, I felt you were grossly generalizing Islam as a "We kill nonbelievers" faith, when in fact members of all faiths do terrible things, many of those things allegedly in the name of the faith (though I tend to think, at its essence, most war is about who has the stuff. I'm with George Carlin on that). This law in Somalia is barbaric, to those of us looking from the outside. But barbarism happens in many faiths and to say basically, "What do you expect from Islam?" is not helpful nor fair.

But here's the thing-- your posts really started me mulling over the "They're attacking us because their faith is crazy and they hate our freedom" mentality that is not all that uncommon here in the US (i'm not saying you have that mentality, though you may; I don't know). And I thought, it's obvious to anyone with a modicum of common sense that that's a ridiculous position. Most nations with a majority population of Moslems live pretty peacefully, and what in the world is, "hate our freedom?" And here's the thing I started mulling, and I thought of it in part thanks to Cajun's smart observation about people wanting to do what's easy-- if one can convince oneself that we were attacked on 9/11, and before (the USS Cole, etc) because a religion is "crazy" then we can absolve ourselves of any responsibility and be the innocent victim (as a nation-- the people killed on 9/11 were certainly innocent victims themselves). We can retaliate in any we want because hey, they're crazy out there and we didn't do anything wrong. BUT-- if we take away the "crazy" position, we have to ask ourselves why in that case we were attacked, and that starts to open up an uncomfortable can of worms about US foreign policy over the last 50 years in regards to the Middle East and oil. Where maybe we aren't always the stellar perfect good guy we imagine the US to be. Because most of us don't pay much attention to the rest of the world. We have our cheap food, our cheap oil, our prosperity and what the costs of that are to the rest of the world, we don't really know or care. Until we get attacked, and then we stand, amazed. How could anyone want to attack us? We're nice! We're the good guys!

The good guys, that is, who are less than 5 percent of the world's population, yet consume 25 percent of the world's energy. The good guys who pushed for NAFTA, touting it as a chance to open up free trade, then continued to subsidize our own farmers, condemnng farmers from other countries bound by the agreement to poverty. The good guys who turn a blind eye to Saudi Arabia's human rights violations, as long as we get a supply of oil. In fact, Bush elder once ranted to Queen Noor about Hussein that he thought it completely unfair that "that madman" controlled a quarter of the "civilized world's" supply of oil. Huh? Madman or not, that's not "the civilized world's" oil, it's Iraq's oil. You want it, pay for it. But we don't want to. We want it cheap or free and we're big and rich and powerful and we can bully our way into lots of things. And you and I, the average citizen, happily ignore the rest of the world until the results of our policies hit our shores, killing people who also had nothing to do with the hatred aimed at our government.

Al Franken said something about differences between conservatives and liberals-- amusing (to a liberal), but there's a nugget there, though maybe not in the way he put it. He said conservatives tend to love their country the way a four-year-old loves his mommy-- mommy is perfect and anyone who would say anything against mommy is bad. Liberals love their country the way an adult loves his mom-- the love is just as strong, but tempered by an awareness that his mom is not infallible. Now, I think he's not right-- I know plenty of conservatives with a very clear-eyed view of the US, but I think there is something to how you love your country-- it's not fun to think we do some sh*tty things to the rest of the world, because we want to think we're always the good, nice guy. But to really grasp what starts things like these attacks, we have to be willing to look at our own actions, as well as the other nation(s)' and decide was our government, in any way, culpable? And we have to be willing to look back 50 years or more to things that happened then and see what the outcome has been. Because it's only then we can really start to find solutions that will, in the end, keep the innocent men and women just trying to go to work safe. It's funny-- dissenters get branded as terrorist-lovers and traitors, yet, by trying to really understand WHY a human being would take up arms and bombs against other nation, by being willing to step into a jihadist's shoes for a moment, and try to see things from his perspective, they maybe are the only ones who will find the root causes and so help find solutions.

As Danzig said, I'm grateful to live here, with at least more chances as a female than I'd have in Islamic nations. But that freedom is not due to the Christianity; it's due to secularism. A secularism that says that I'm my own person, not a creation from a man's rib, that I'm an equal partner in a marriage, not the junior one, and that the male of the species is perfectly capable of controlling his sexual urges without my having to cover my ankles (one of the reasons I'm against the Islamic head-scarf-- whatever else women insist it symbolizes, it also symbolizes an attitude that women have to cover themselves because men can't be held responsible for their actions otherwise and that's insulting to men and demeaning to women. In my opinion, anyway). And that means freedom for me and my fellow women. But again, that's due to people being willing to say religion should be off the table when it comes to governing. Any religion.

Apologies, Rupert-- I'm sure I've bored you to tears by now. If you're even still reading at this point.