I couldn’t sleep tonight thinking of Mr. Doodslag’s inability to understand my position. My son hasn’t slept well as he has flu the last two days and my sore throat is accompanied by sneezing so I might have caught his bug. I’m concerned that I’ll be as listless as my son for the next few days and will be unable to convey the contempt due to Mr. Doodslag.
During war one must pick a side. Being ambivalent is deadly. This danger is felt most strongly when war is of the civil variety. Brothers or neighbors each think themselves to understand the truth and in truth most of us are quite too dumb to not be led by rumors. War tends to stifle logic. We are convinced by urban myths that even those sharing our paradigm will view as absurdity in better times. There was a time when the Enlightened Left of France praised Thomas Paine and yet he later spent a number of months imprisoned by this Enlightened Left and was nearly executed merely for hinting they had taken their revolution past the boundaries of reason. Tell a beast not to eat that rotten meat and he might dine on you before returning to the putrid corpse. Mr. Doodslag is such an animal.
At no time have I apologized for Islam. To call me an apologist requires either a lack of caring for the meaning of the word or the inability to use words precisely. A lawyer for a defendant is not an apologist; he is simply stating a case using evidence. If he so happens to make his case against a prosecutor whose use of words is a monkeying of the sounds commonly associated with rhetoric, a jury who cannot differentiate between babble and meaning will bring judgment down as if it were a coin toss. There are enough readers on this site who understand English and give me hope for mutual understanding. I make no excuses for Jihadis at any time. I simply disagree that Islam cannot produce civilized people. There are a number of very devout Muslims, who studied Islam to a degree reserved for true scholars and somehow managed to be god fearing and decent human beings. That is not an apology. This is what one commonly refers to as a good point.
Mr. Doodslag has very many errors of logic in his arguments against my points. He first directs us to understand that since Mohamed was a vile human being, and he is the template by which Muslims measure themselves, ergo Islam is vile. That is fine as an idea and we have much understanding to gain from this insight into the enemy yet, there have been various instances, some very dramatic ones, when those who used Mohamed as their template were more tolerant then those who used Jesus. I discussed just a few in previous comments in this thread. I wish there were more examples of human decency in all cultures and some have fewer examples then others. I accept that we today find it difficult to call to duty enough decent Muslims who have the talent to combat their Jihadi brothers in Allah.
Mr. Doodslag continues his argument by extolling the fine culture that, in using Jesus as a template, produced our modern world. This comment is long enough so I won’t delve too deeply into the thinkers who disseminated the ideas of the Reformation. It is suffice to say that belief in G-d being One, coupled with an ability to have personal communion with G-d has produced a intellectual environment in which enough of the right people value individual rights and personal initiative. The following line is where Mr. Doodslag slips the tracks of reason. On one hand Mohamed is vile, so his religion is unredeemable in spite of the many examples where this conclusion is proven false. On the other hand, the template of Jesus is acceptable even though we find plenty of folk who used that model to do great evil. His proof, the current material supremacy of the West. I suppose Uncle Mao must be a fantastic example of man, as the Chinese seem to be gaining on us.
It is possible that someone reading this will wonder why I hate Western Culture. The most likely such person will continue to think that way as they have made up their mind on this subject and refuse to understand the actual words before them. They cannot understand the English language, as tradition has passed it to us, and refuse to confront their intellectual dishonesty. I want to dispel the idea that I abhor the West or wish it harmed. I consider Western Culture to have been the height of much of what humans have achieved. There is no science and little art that can compare to what the West achieved. That is not to say that science and art are the end all, be all of culture but they are what we often judge societies by. Yes, the West has done plenty of killing and conquering but who hasn’t? The issue we began discussing was whether Muslims could be decent human beings. It is absurd that we have to have this conversation. It is not unlike continuing the discussion of whether Rome was the capital of an Empire. It has been proven, time and again, that Muslims can be good and sometimes better then Christians. The writer of the above letter makes it clear that he abhors the ideology and actions of the Jihadis. He stands on the side of civilized people. So long as his behavior and words remains thus then this should be enough for us. I think it reasonable that we be skeptical of Muslims as current events and the history of their mortal primer, Mohamed, does indicate a wellspring of deception. Yet, Mr. Doorslag is more like the Jihadis then Mr. Mansur, as he binds Muslims to his limited reading of their culture just as they put all non-Jihadis in the boat with us. He goes so far as to call me an apologist and I dare him to use reason, not predisposed conjecture, to throw me into the pit he would throw Muslims into. Mr. Doorslag is a weak thinker and his ideas are the bastard children of greater brains then his stifling cranium could hold. Literacy is wasted on such fools. This reproach comes from a mind less great then what his stupid arrogance assumes his own mind to measure. One hopes his failings are obvious to all but himself and that my response has been superfluous. If the evil day came when men such as he held the sort of sway that he could do away with me, I may joyfully pray a last time and die with the knowledge that G-d is One. This would not be the first or last crime a tyrant committed against beings better then they.
