Americans on Islam and violence

Reflecting on the results of a survey on American attitudes towards Islam, Jonathan Wright writes:

Maybe it’s time that educational curricula made a deliberate effort to explain the diversity of opinion within such communities, emphasizing the way that believers, as individuals and as groups, emphasize the doctrines that suit their worldly interests and political dispositions. Any religion that has existed for so many centuries across such a vast geographical expanse offers a wide range of alternative doctines, many of them incompatible or contradictory. ‘Islam’ as a stable unitary construct hardly exists, except in the most banal sense, however much both Muslims and their enemies might claim that it does. Only individual Muslims can endow the label with meaning, and each Muslim does so in a way that is never identical to the way other individual Muslims do so. This is widely accepted among theoreticians (Aziz al-Azmeh comes to mind – “There are as many Islams as there are situations which contain it”), but it’s clearly taking quite a while for this to sink in among the general public. One day, the Pew Research Center might offer people who respond to such surveys an option reflecting this insight.

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3 thoughts on “Americans on Islam and violence

  1. DE Teodoru

    KING’S LOOKING & ACTING A LOT LIKE BREZHNEV…SEMITES BEWARE!!!

    It’s amazing how Congressman King, as he gains weight, looks like Brezhnev, top rat in USSR who also suspected Soviet Muslims. Soviets treated Muslims as an ETHNIC group; gave them their own republics. Yet they were ungrateful, considering themselves a religion instead. For Commies, God is a “ClassEnemy,” so Muslims were persecuted, just like Catholic ClassEnemies.Since Brezhnev was an anti-Semite he also persecuted religious Jews as ClassEnemies, though also considered a nationality, and paid Nasser to persecute Arab Muslims considering themselves a religion rather than nationality. Throughout Western history Jewish&Muslim Semites met the same fate. Zionists funding King know this but want Jews to feel persecuted so they stampede to Israel. AntiSemitism’s OK by them.

    Congressman King tells us Islam’s a dangerous religion– that’s same King who cheered IRA’s terrorism in England and excused it saying: if civilians gotta die to kill British soldiers, bravo bombs!

    I hope Jews realize that an America that can accept Congressman King looking and acting like Brezhnev will soon be doing this to Jews– the other Semites– even to the very Zionist Jews who fund King’s anti-Islam campaign.

  2. Norman

    Today, there are too many demagogues in the U.S. who are driven by the Oligarchs or their sycophants. I suppose that’s always been the case with many religions or cults. But what’s taking place today is in the words of the religious, the work of the devil. It certainly doesn’t come from the love of any GOD that I’ve ever read about or heard of. Perhaps the profits who wrote of the end of human kind as we know it were right. When so called religious peoples turn on each other, well, let others be the judge, either they are crazy or say your prayers.

  3. scott

    “It certainly doesn’t come from the love of any GOD that I’ve ever read about or heard of.” Norman, you should read the Old Testament, read Joshua 10 and go from there. You will see Israel’s modus operandi in black and white. Whole cities annihilated, all the inhabitants murdered.

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