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My plea is to understand that Islamic condition. It is not to denigrate the Christian or Jewish position in the world. But, I think that Mormons and Evangelicals tend to think and say vicious things against People of the Book without understanding them.

Think first of recent history. The British Empire, which has previously seized Palestine by force, issued the Balfour Declaration declaring a homeland for the Jews is Palestine. The State of Israel was born in 1948 and, instantly, 700,000 Muslims living in Palestine became homeless. Eventually, the State of Israel granted suffrage rights to those Palestinians, but not to any Palestinian who entered to country thereafter. If Palestinians and Jews were all allowed to vote in Israel, guess which body would prevail?

Orthodox Jews usually denounce the Zionist state. They believe that God has exiled them from Israel and that the Messiah, not the arm of man, will restore them. The Zionist state is a secular state.

The State of Israel receives more U.S. foreign aid than any other country in the world. Their defense industry is almost entirely propped up by the U.S. Department of Defense, with technology transfers, plans for fighter planes and other conventional weapons. Yet, the state of Israel sends spies to the U.S. to steal defense secrets. One of the most vigorous foreign lobbies is the one to free Daniel Pollard, tried and convicted for espionage against the United States.

When Great Britain assumed control by force of the Palestine in the 20th Century, Muslims or their predecessor Arabs or other Semitic peoples had been living there since the fall of Jerusalem around 70 A.D. when the Romans sent punitive forces into Palestine. Before that time, Jews and the nation of Israel occupied Palestine for 1,300 years. In terms of total recent occupation of the region, who has the better claims?

Although Mohamed seized Palestine and all of North Africa by force in the eight century, Christians retaliated with force with multiple unsuccessful crusades. Frustrated by their lack of success in the Levant, the crusaders turned against Jews and dissident Christians, as well as Byzantium. In terms of who has the higher moral ground for occupation of Palestine, it is impossible to say, but certainly Muslim occupation for 1200 of the most recent years, Arab occupation of the most recent 2000 years, should say something about the moral right to occupy.

Muslims are said to be the mortal enemies of the United States. But, who is propping up the occupier of their homeland?

The destruction of Iraq was probably the worst thing that could happen to the security of the United States. Iraq and Iran kept each other at bay for years in a bitter feud; Muslim against Muslim, but Arab and Iranians. With Saddam gone, and when the United States leaves, the Iranians will simply fill the vacuum. Israel will be forced to strike against nuclear facilities (it has done so in the past), and where are we?

Before the crusades, Christians could come and go in relative peace to Jerusalem to make pilgrimages. Yes, they were subject to banditry, but so were Muslim pilgrims.

Yes, Christian residents were discriminated against in Palestine in terms of taxation, and had difficulty building churches as freely as desired, and saw their sacred places appropriated, but they could still come and go. And, it was Arab learning the preserved classical literature when the Catholic church suppressed all pagan thought. We wouldn't have most of classical thought without Arab libraries.

So, you Mormon and Mormon-bashers who love to hate Muslims, you do so ignorantly. Christians have no higher moral ground.

rcrocket

I agree, except that it's not so much a defense of Islam as it is a condemnation of Cristianity, but I'd rather not even use words like defense and condemnation and just point out that both Moslems and Christians claimed to have God on their sides but they were acting purely out of human nature and God had nothing to do with any of it.

I think we can agree that Christianity has blood-stained hands. I won't mount any defense of Christianity over the ages, as I believe much of its (collective its) dogma and resulting behavior have been reprehensible. Which has been historically worse, Christianity or Islam? I'll leave this debate for others.

On the other hand, radical Islam today presents, IMHO, the greatest threat to world peace and prosperity and to our cherished Western Liberal traditions. Islamacists would drag us kicking and screaming back to the Middle Ages, and many are actively working to do just that, or if they fail, to take as many down with them as they can.

Radical Christians may or may not be worse, but they are largely constrained by some modicum of respect for the rule of law (at least those in the West). The threat of radical Christianity is simmering on the back burner but has not remotely reached the status of radical Islam as a threat to peace, prosperity, and freedom today.

Historically I'd say Christianity has been the worst.....right now radical Islam poses the biggest risk of all radical religious sects.

guy sajer wrote:I think we can agree that Christianity has blood-stained hands. I won't mount any defense of Christianity over the ages, as I believe much of its (collective its) dogma and resulting behavior have been reprehensible. Which has been historically worse, Christianity or Islam? I'll leave this debate for others.

On the other hand, radical Islam today presents, IMHO, the greatest threat to world peace and prosperity and to our cherished Western Liberal traditions. Islamacists would drag us kicking and screaming back to the Middle Ages, and many are actively working to do just that, or if they fail, to take as many down with them as they can.

Radical Christians may or may not be worse, but they are largely constrained by some modicum of respect for the rule of law (at least those in the West). The threat of radical Christianity is simmering on the back burner but has not remotely reached the status of radical Islam as a threat to peace, prosperity, and freedom today.

Amen! I just said the same thing, almost verbatim, on another board and had my hand slapped for painting Islam with a "broad brush". A man who consistently lambastes Mormonism took umbrage with my critical assessment of Islam. Which poses the greater threat to society? Mormonism or Islam? Hands down, it's Islam. All of Islam is radical compared to most other religions. The call to kill infidels has never been rescinded. Personally I am acquainted with several Muslims who would be considered mainstream, yet they support, in certain instances, suicide bombing, Hamas, Sharia law and other things offensive to our Western traditions. The way it treats females is reason enough to declare Islam a danger to society.

If I could choose only one religion to eradicate it would be Islam.

KA

As Bernard Lewis has written, Israel is a convenient excuse for Muslim leaders. They can rouse the people against Israel and avoid having to deal with their own problems. Not all Muslims are terrorists, but almost all terrorists are Muslims. Sharia is the problem. There is no religious freedom in a system where Muslims receive the death penalty for leaving Islam and those of other faiths are second class citizens or worse.

I think Sam Huntington was right in The Clash of Civilizations. Militant Islam is the problem not Israel. We give Israel up and they will move on their next terrorist victims. The Arabs respect strength not weakness.

Wow, what ahistorical bunk. This opening post is full of half-truths and the usual anti-Israel platitudes. So much so that I am surprised to see such a reputable LDS scholar like rcrocket (who fancies himself a historian) propagate this nonsense.

I wouldn't even know where to begin responding, but I will get around to it in the next day or two.

My plea is to understand that Islamic condition. It is not to denigrate the Christian or Jewish position in the world. But, I think that Mormons and Evangelicals tend to think and say vicious things against People of the Book without understanding them.

Think first of recent history. The British Empire, which has previously seized Palestine by force, issued the Balfour Declaration declaring a homeland for the Jews is Palestine. The State of Israel was born in 1948 and, instantly, 700,000 Muslims living in Palestine became homeless. Eventually, the State of Israel granted suffrage rights to those Palestinians, but not to any Palestinian who entered to country thereafter. If Palestinians and Jews were all allowed to vote in Israel, guess which body would prevail?

Orthodox Jews usually denounce the Zionist state. They believe that God has exiled them from Israel and that the Messiah, not the arm of man, will restore them. The Zionist state is a secular state.

The State of Israel receives more U.S. foreign aid than any other country in the world. Their defense industry is almost entirely propped up by the U.S. Department of Defense, with technology transfers, plans for fighter planes and other conventional weapons. Yet, the state of Israel sends spies to the U.S. to steal defense secrets. One of the most vigorous foreign lobbies is the one to free Daniel Pollard, tried and convicted for espionage against the United States.

When Great Britain assumed control by force of the Palestine in the 20th Century, Muslims or their predecessor Arabs or other Semitic peoples had been living there since the fall of Jerusalem around 70 A.D. when the Romans sent punitive forces into Palestine. Before that time, Jews and the nation of Israel occupied Palestine for 1,300 years. In terms of total recent occupation of the region, who has the better claims?

Although Mohamed seized Palestine and all of North Africa by force in the eight century, Christians retaliated with force with multiple unsuccessful crusades. Frustrated by their lack of success in the Levant, the crusaders turned against Jews and dissident Christians, as well as Byzantium. In terms of who has the higher moral ground for occupation of Palestine, it is impossible to say, but certainly Muslim occupation for 1200 of the most recent years, Arab occupation of the most recent 2000 years, should say something about the moral right to occupy.

Muslims are said to be the mortal enemies of the United States. But, who is propping up the occupier of their homeland?

The destruction of Iraq was probably the worst thing that could happen to the security of the United States. Iraq and Iran kept each other at bay for years in a bitter feud; Muslim against Muslim, but Arab and Iranians. With Saddam gone, and when the United States leaves, the Iranians will simply fill the vacuum. Israel will be forced to strike against nuclear facilities (it has done so in the past), and where are we?

Before the crusades, Christians could come and go in relative peace to Jerusalem to make pilgrimages. Yes, they were subject to banditry, but so were Muslim pilgrims.

Yes, Christian residents were discriminated against in Palestine in terms of taxation, and had difficulty building churches as freely as desired, and saw their sacred places appropriated, but they could still come and go. And, it was Arab learning the preserved classical literature when the Catholic church suppressed all pagan thought. We wouldn't have most of classical thought without Arab libraries.

So, you Mormon and Mormon-bashers who love to hate Muslims, you do so ignorantly. Christians have no higher moral

This is lovely revisionist history, and dispiriting and depressing, not only for its historical blindness, but for the relative ease with which it can be argued against.

First of all, there is no "occupation" of Palestine by Israel in the sense of outright theft or expropriation. The occupation was necessitated by the incessant attacks of genocidal barbarians that begin as soon as the state of Israel was created and proceeded continuously until the Yom Kipper War and the Six Day War, at which point the Golan Heights and other captured territories (the spoils of endless wars of annihilation began, in each case, by the Islamic states) were retained as a buffer between Israel and there implacable enemies.

Second, there is no such thing as any definable people known as "The Palestinians" who ever occupied this land in historic times. The Jews, as an identifiable people, have a continuous presence in this region for upwards of 3,000 years. Alongside them have been a number of Arab groups, subgroups, and tribes that have existed here alongside the Jews for much of that time, but there was never a distinct Palestinian nationality. The concept of "the Palestinian people" was a creation of the U.N. and the international Left just within my own life time and maintained later by the western media. Much of the post 1949 growth in the Arab population was through immigration, not natural population growth, and the Israelis didn't displace the Arabs out of some "homeland" (a fiction in any case). Many of the Arabs came to Israel looking for work that was not to be found in there own actual homelands.

Arabs only began identifying themselves as a distinct "Palestinian people" in 1967, two decades after the creation of the state of Israel. This was a political ploy by the other Arab states who knew very well they were creating an angry, poor, and resentful people that would be very useful as an open ended foil against Israel in the international press and media, as well as among that generation of Palestinians themselves.

The estimated exodus from Israeli lands in 1948 is somewhere between 400,000 and 630.000, far less than the "Palestinian" population today, and many of these were allowed to return after the Israeli War of Independence. Why are all those poor, dispossessed, hopeless Arabs sitting in those refugee camps and shanty towns? That's very simple: The Arab states around Israel could have very easily absorbed the vast majority of these Arabs into their own countries, but didn't. Why didn't they? Because there was no point in doing so as long as they could be turned into oppressed refugees and remained useful as propaganda tools until the utter destruction of the Jewish state could be achieved.

The Israelis have never "oppressed" the "Palestinians". It is the Arab states around them, since 1948, and the PLO who have brutalized, impoverished, and kept the Palestinian Arabs in abject squalor for the political purposes.

The fact of the matter is, had there been no genocidal Arab aggression from the creation of Israel through the Six Day War, there would never have been any Arab refugees, any Golan Heights, and Gaza Strip, and occupied territories, and any need to rigorously separate the Palestinian Arabs, who cannot live in peace with anybody, even themselves, from Israel.

The Arabs in question fled their homes because of a war of aggression the Arab states began after the creation of the Israeli state. Israel offered peace and cooperation with the Arab world, but this was refused, at which point a war of annihilation was launched against Israel. Had there been no Arab war, there would have been no refugees, and, indeed, very probably would have been a Palestinian state in existence in the West Bank and Gaza since that time.

What's incredible about his whole thing is that the original U.N.action (resolution #181, November 29, 1947) indeed created two states (the longed for "two state solution" that Arafat once and for all rebuffed, after being offered 90% of the land he wanted (even though no such thing as a definable Palestinian nation had ever extisted) before he launched the Second Intifada), one for Israel, and one for the Palestinians. The Arabs responded to this with their first war of genocide against the Jews, culminating in their defeat.

At the Rhodes Armistice talks and Lausanne conference in 1949, the Jews offered the Arabs land they had acquired during that war in exchange for a formal agreement of peace. The Arabs refused, and thus gave birth to virtually the entire historical refugee crises. The concept of a identifiable "Palestinian People" came much later, and has been probably one of the most successful propaganda successes in modern history, beloved as much by much of the Western leftist intelligentsia and media as by the Arabs themselves (who, unlike said intelligentsia, know very well its a crock).

The Arab refugees could have settled into there own lands and homes (and, indeed, more than 150,000 refugees took advantage of an Israeli resettlement law that allowed them to return and settle if they would swear allegiance to Israel, renounce violence, and become productive, peaceful citizens) within any number of Arab states, but the Arab states that could have taken them in and assimilated them (as Israel did with countless thousands of Arabs) would have none of it.

So what we have here is a massive refugee problem comprising a number of disparate yet related Arab groups and tribes, the refusal of the aggressors that created that refugee problem in the first place to sign a treaty of peace after being defeated, and then their failure to take care of the refugees their genocidal aggression had created.

What on earth is rc talking about here? Unlike the 800,000 Jews forced out of lands they had inhabited for hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of years (he forgot about this it seems) by Jordon, Iraq, Iran, Tunisia, and Morocco, between 1949 and 1954, which Israel absorbed into its own state and body politic, the Arabs volitionally kept the Palestinian Arabs in a state of utter debasement. The Palestinians in Gaza were forced there in 1948 at literal gunpoint, kept under guard and shot if attempt was made to leave. They were never absorbed and resettled into Egypt, Jordon, Iraq, Iran, or any of the other Gulf States.

Here is what Senior Fatah Central Committee member Sakher Habash said at a lecture in 1998 at Shechem’s An-Najah University: “To us, the refugee issue is the winning card which means the end of the Israeli state.”

The creation of the oppressed, brutalized Palestinian refugees and later, the "Palestinian people" complete with a mythical "Palestinian homeland" to which they have a "right of return" (code for "utter extermination of the Jews) was a program of propaganda and ideological warfare the ultimate end of which is the destruction of the Jewish state and certainly, if possible, the completion of what Hitler started but never finished.

It is dispiriting to see the degree to which the foul rot of Multiculturalism has even penetrated into the precincts of the Church and influenced the thinking of LDS scholars and intellectuals, who should know better than most not to get their history from CNN.

I frankly find rc's oversimplifications and omissions here to be alarming. Indeed, some of rc's comments here sound a little too much like what you get from Buchanan and his pitchfork brigades at the American Conservative.

Just so you know rc, this is not a personal attack, but a vigorous attack on your ideas only. I hope you take it in that vein.

dartagnan wrote:Wow, what ahistorical bunk. This opening post is full of half-truths and the usual anti-Israel platitudes. So much so that I am surprised to see such a reputable LDS scholar like rcrocket (who fancies himself a historian) propagate this nonsense.

I wouldn't even know where to begin responding, but I will get around to it in the next day or two.

Are you unable to respond without ad hominems?

rcrocket