Pakistan: Benazir Bhutto's motorcade bombed
Blogger Hasan Mubarak of Metroblogging Lahore in Pakistan says:
There have been two bomb blasts in a motorcade that was carrying ex-PM Benazir Bhutto as she returned to Pakistan after 8 years.Related blog posts on the metroblogging sites for Karachi and Lahore: 1, 2, 3, 4. (thanks, Sean Bonner)
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Gosh, what a shock.
The religion of peace, love, and fluffy bunnies strikes again!
Bad news.
I think bad things are going to happen in 08. I wouldn't be surprised if we invade Iran, Pakistan ends up in a civil war, and I bet that the Kosovo/Serbia issue will come to some sort of a nasty conclusion. Things are not going to be peaceful. But everyone crowing about "clash of civilizations" will be happy, because they can say they were right all along... Bah.
Mindysan
But everyone crowing about "clash of civilizations" will be happy
Um, no.
phasor3000 says: "The religion of peace, love, and fluffy bunnies strikes again!"
are you intending this to be coarse, flip and over-simplistic? if so, stop reading here.
1: you don't know this was done by muslims, which i assume you are referring to.
2: even if it was, muslims are hardly a homogeneous group. some are into peace and love, some are into violent coercion of others. kind of like christians.
3: it is just as likely that the bombs were accomplished by the I.S.I. (the pakistani military secret service) or their cronies in our government or any other powerful group that would benefit from the assassination of a popular leader in an important nation.
also i must issue a caveat here to anyone unfamiliar with my alliances: i do not hold islam to be particularly less culpable for the violence gripping our planet at this time. i've been to the vatican and seen all the gold that blood can buy. almost every wisdom tradition has it's "followers" who have polluted the original teachings for personal gain. islam is no exception. however, i have enough respect for some muslims to defend it from bigots as i have done here.
muhammad said to search far and wide for wisdom, even as far as china, which at his time would be pretty fucking far. if muslims attacked benazir bhutto, they had probably only recieved very local and very distorted "wisdom", if you can call it that.
Not very knowledgeable about that side of the world myself, but when I first read that the arrival of the ex-PM had been announced, or that she had announced it, that the human climate there would be very questionable. And so its turned out for the worse. Couldn't she have slipped in quietly and broke the news after the fact? *shrug
muslims are hardly a homogeneous group. some are into peace and love, some are into violent coercion of others.
True.
kind of like christians.
I guess I missed the reports of Christian priests giving sermons exhorting their flocks to "slay the infidels if they do not accept Christ" and monks suicide-bombing women and children. And the list of repressive Christian theocratic governments that don't let women drive a car or even appear in public without their husband or a male relative accompanying them, and which impose the death penalty, sometimes by stoning, for adultery or homosexuality. And I don't recall violent Christian mobs rioting in the streets, enraged by Piss Christ or the dung-covered Virgin Mary painting.
#7 posted by phasor3000
Um, not to get this into a religious debate (because I hate those), but think really hard about the Ku-Klux-Klan...think about Hitler and the Nazis...think about the face of mid-west Christianity that is teaching the same fundamentals of division and "us/them" as their Muslim counterparts.
To point a finger at one religion is not only ignorant, but also a practice of the same mentality you deem villain.
There are definitely some Christians who are intolerant, e.g. homophobic, racist, etc. But (a) unlike their Muslim equivalents, violence and intimidation committed by groups like the KKK is totally condemned by all official Christian bodies and (b) the percentage of Christians who belong to groups like the KKK or who bomb abortion clinics (a rarity nowadays anyway) is somewhere far below 1%.
It's pretty clear from both public behavior and from polling of Muslims that there is a very significant percentage of Muslims who approve of suicide bombings, forced conversion of non-Muslims, are anti-Semitic, riot at symbolic offenses like cartoons, think that suicide bombers get 72 virgins in heaven, etc. Go watch some of the Friday sermons on Palestinian Authority TV at memritv.org and then compare that to a US televangelist. There's no comparison.
I'm not talking about things like the Inquisition or supporting slavery -- no one argues that Christianity has done some very evil things in the past -- but in recent times, to say that Islam and Christianity are roughly equivalent, or that there is not a large segment of Islam that is barbaric and violently intolerant, is itself either self-deluding, pathologically polite, or ignorant.
@phasor3000
rossifumi has already touched on a bunch examples of what i was talking about (in regards to the non-homogeny of christian interests in violent coercion), but missed four crucial examples.
1: the crusades!
2: the inquisition!
3: the annihilation of "latin" "america"!
4: our current pseudo-theocratic administration's wars which have some very strong religious influence, and cause a lot more death of civilians than any suicide bomber ever has!
while i am appalled at, say, the saudi government, or the iranian government's treatment of people, they do not represent the people of those countries or islam well at all. at best they represent the most facist aspects of each. the bible has plenty of passages that are just as horrific when followed literally in the way that some of the koran has. in fact, some of the bibles most hideous passages are justification for atrocities carried out right now in our name.
most religions have a violent history and some elements of violence today by at least some group within them... so why go after islam itself? how about attacking the repressive elements in it that have brought it to this place where it can be so easily maligned?
a quote i find relevant from rumi, a persian people's hero (stress on the people's!) -
"What is justice? Giving water to trees.
What is injustice? Giving water to thorns.
Justice consists in bestowing bounty in its proper place,
not on every root that will absorb water."
@phasor
i didn't read your #9 post before writing my last entry, but i have only one additional response:
you say, "but in recent times, to say that Islam and Christianity are roughly equivalent, or that there is not a large segment of Islam that is barbaric and violently intolerant, is itself either self-deluding, pathologically polite, or ignorant."
i agree there are large amounts of barbarism in islam. however, it does not matter which amounts of individual muslims (or christians) would appall you, but the effect that those groups have worldwide. arguably christianity is a BIGGER threat, considering the specific guns that back it. (think the u.s. military!) in that sense i agree that they are NOT roughly equivalent. islam is FAR less powerful...
and on a more nit-picky note, there are plenty of christian preachers in this country that give equivalent sermons, and even if they aren't on t.v. some of them are in mega-churches. i believe it's as much of a holy war for them as for jihadists. if it's not, the reason is that the jihadists are also reacting against western imperialism, for which there is no eastern equivalent.
jamesgyre, please give examples of Christian preachers who preach the equivalent of "kill all the Jews" or "if you blow yourself up in a marketplace, you will get 72 virgins in heaven."
One major difference between Christians and Muslims is that Christians who are violent and intolerant are going against the teachings of Jesus and the New Testament, which is widely held to supercede the more barbaric, eye-for-an-eye mentality of the Old Testament. Whereas in the Koran, the later passages are more violent and anti-Semitic, and mainstream Islamic scholars hold that the later passages are held to abrogate, or supercede, the more peaceful earlier sections. So in fact, the radical Muslims are actually "more observant" than the peaceful ones. This is one of the reasons that it's so difficult for the more secular, peaceful Muslims to pull their religion into the modern era -- pure Islam believes that all other religions ("the polytheists") must be conquered or destroyed. Christianity says that if you don't believe in Jesus, really terrible things will happen to you in the afterlife; Islam says that if you don't believe in their religion, really terrible things will happen to you in this life.
PHASOR3000:
Tim LaHaye, author of the "Left Behind" novels.
Fred Phelps, the domestic terror(ist) of Topeka, Kansas.
Pat Robertson.
Anyone preaching Rapture theology, or literal Second-Coming-of-Jesus theology; They support the state of Israel specifically because it is part of prophecy - a prophecy that includes the death and torture of any and all Jews who do not convert to Christianity.
Christians are less violent in America because violence is not tied to the peacefulness preached by a religion; Violence is tied to economic poverty, frustrated post-adolescent men and lack of education. Even Buddhists in Japan committed suicide bombings when they were denied economic freedom, prosperity, family life and relative autonomy (or so they believed) - in WWII.
Preaching end-times rapture theology may be weird and disturbing, but they're just making wacky predictions -- they're not inciting anyone to go out and start the apocalypse now. Pat Robertson may say some really strange stuff, and he's quite critical of Muslims, but he's never to my knowledge asked his listeners to kill them and he doesn't curse them as "the sons of apes and pigs" the way many Muslim imams routinely refer to Jews in Saudi Arabia, Gaza, Iran, etc.
As for the whole "root causes" poverty argument, most poor and/or undereducated people do not resort to violence. When the US went through the Great Depression, poor people didn't turn into suicide bombers. When you think about it, it's rather insulting to the poor to imply that poverty leads to violence.
The "American imperialism" argument (or for that matter, the "Zionist oppressor" argument) ignores the many violent conflicts involving Muslims which have little or no involvement by America or Israel, e.g. in Indonesia, the Maldives, Darfur, etc. Many Muslim conflicts involve one sect attacking another, usually for sectarian reasons, and have nothing to do with the US; some of these conflicts, e.g. Sunni vs Shia have been going on since long before the US existed. The last analogous Christian conflict was in Northern Ireland, and it's over. Islam probably has a long way to go before it reaches that point.
Many Muslim conflicts involve one sect attacking another, usually for sectarian reasons
Ooops!
Phasor3000:
They can't incite people to go out and start 'the apocalypse' - their prophecies revolve specifically around the Second Coming. They /do/ witness, proselytise, convert, steeplejack, lobby, and advocate the overthrow of the U.S. Government - it's Dominionism. They also go on mission to Asian Muslim states and South America.
You asked for one. I gave you three. Phelps has a tiny following, but the other two have widespread following and influence.
I said, and the research backs the fact, that violence is tied to economic poverty, frustrated post-adolescent males, and lack of education - all three together. You have made a strawman by eisegesising what I've written. What the US lacked in that equation during the Great Depression was a lot of frustrated post-adolescent males and a lack of education. Work could be had, families could be started, men could train in trades, children got educations - all because of the New Deal. We had also a sense of collective nationality due to the Great War before - leading into WWII ahead of it. World War Two, brought to you by the post-Weimar Germans: Economically frustrated by the Treaty of Versailles and the effects of the Great Depression, with a surfeit of nationalistic frustrated post-adolescent males who were poorly educated and actively miseducated through propaganda.