David says:
“What is wrong with you people?
1.3 billion people did not attack the United States on 9/11. Muhammed did not attack America on 9/11…The religion of Islam did not attack America on 9/11.”
I am not aware of anyone else claiming this in the discussion. This would seem to me to be a classic straw-man argument. The President of the United States made this very clear in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks by his visits to Islamic centers, and his outreach to Islamic scholars, imams, and social workers.
David would seem, here, to wish to convince us that we THINK that Islam attacked us, but no one here seems to think so: because it is a preposterous projection that intelligent people here — in a thread of discussion and critique which is almost unprecedented in my experience for showing so much intelligence! — do not hold.
What we do hold, however, in some cases is that we understand the ideology of the actual persons who carried out the attack. This is well understood.
Furthermore, as our Islamic adversaries have been so considerate as to provide in exhaustive detail in order to educate us, all that they believe and think, we understand (a) their motives; (b) their belief system; (c) their criticism of Western values, society, and politics; and (d) their long term goals.
The “lament over the corruption of the world” is an abject anxiety mechanism often exhibited by disaffected youth, intellectuals, and cynics. It’s unanswerable, as no end of evidence is available from thousands of years of recorded history, mankind having taken so much effort to document its weaknesses, sociopathies, and pathologies.
Moving away from this all too common “release” of certain despairing types, who see themselves (perhaps rightly!) as the inheritors of the ugliness of human history, I’d suggest that the rational, balanced, and practical people who don’t cave in to this self-defeat and misery are the ones most likely to get us out of it, and to improve the situation. (That includes Muslims, too.)
