Get Real! wrote:Tim Drayton wrote:GR, if you want to find a racist comment, let me direct your attention to this:
http://www.cyprus-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=15876"none of the people i speak to at college could imagine living with turks and would love to see u all die"
It sends a shiver down my spine just to read this. What is your reaction?
By his own admission Paliometoxo is a college student so that would make him 18..21-ish right? How old are you and I though?
The problem Tim is that the three of you are hammering Quammi as if he is the end all and be all of Islam when the poor guy is even struggling with his English let alone tackle the complex debate at had.
I have Islam scholar friends from Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt, such as Dr Samir El-Khoury that would run circles around the lot of you in perfect English so quit patting yourselves on the back at Quammi’s expense. That’s all...
Well, excuse me.
Let's take a simple analogy. I am at home minding my own business. The doorbell rings. I answer the door and I am confronted by a salesmen. He is selling appliance X. Now, it just so happens that I was visiting my friend last week and he was using appliance X when it blew up and set his house on fire. Am I not entitled to ask this salesman to account for this incident?Can I not ask him to explain why this appliance burnt down my friend's house and to expect some kind of assurance that the same thing will not happen to me if I purchase this appliance? Am I to blindly buy the thing just because some guy is on my doorstep? If the salesman's English is not up to answwering me, does that make him the legitimate object of pity?
I am sorry, but this peddler of Sharia has turned up unannounced and uninvited on our doorstep. I have had previous experience of Sharia. I lived in the Gulf state of Qatar for two years. Whilst living there I accepted that this system represents the will of the citizens of that country, and the thought never occured to me to promote Western secularism or even to try and convert people to another faith. Believe me, if a Westerner living in Qatar entered a local Internet forum and started promoting Christianity the authorities would make it their business to track that person down and expel them from the country. I have heard of Westerners being deported from Saudi Arabia for merely mentioning Christianity. Sharia law, in my opinion, is based on the morality and way of life of bedouins living in the Arabian desert in the sixth century and can have no application in complex, modern societies. It may have been progressive when it was first promoted, but it now belongs in the dustbin of history. I met several Turks while living in the Gulf and have heard them express the view that one can only really understand the momentous achievements of Ataturk when you have first hand experience of what he saved Turkey from. I agree. Sharia law is based on institutional discrimination against non-Muslims and women, and permits the vilest of human rights abuses to take place. It incorporates institutions such as slavery which are unacceptable in the modern world. These are my opinions, but I have felt no compelling urge to stand on a soapbox and announce them to the world.
Here I am, peacefully minding my own business. This is the Cyprus forum, not the "eulogise Islam" forum. Somebody, out of the blue, no doubt genuinely believing Islam to be a creed of peace and brotherly love, comes along and insults my intelligence by starting a thread implying that the only reason I am not a Muslim is because I have never heard of the prophet Muhammad. As if there is not a single human being on the planet who does not know who the prophet Muhammad is! I did not even get involved at that stage, but when I started to see him defend Sharia and deny the fundamental abuses of human rights that Sharia law permits to take place, well I am sorry, but I have experience and knowledge of appliance X and if this peddler wants to sell me his appliance he had better account for it to me.
If his English is not good enough why did he chose to enter a forum where he could be expected to have to present his arguments to people with a high standard of English? There is a saying; "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen". Nobody is forcing him to remain here.
If you want to know my personal motive for engaging in this kind of discussion, it is not to try to pursuade Qamersland. It is because I believe that most Westerners are ignorant about Sharia law and the threat that it poses to the values that are cherished by Westerners if fundamentalists are able to start introducing it in Western countries. My entry into this thread predates the comments made by the Archbishop of Canterbury about Sharia law, and these comments show just how topical my arguments are. I had no wish to get on a soapbox and start harranguing the world with my views of Sharia, but when I heard about Rowan William's comments, I was farnkly very glad that Qamersland had provoked me into making my opinions public in this respect.
I am not patting myself on the back, and this is an open, public forum. Any champion of Sharia with the English to do so is welcome to come and address the points I have raised, all of which are supported by quates from the Quran and the hadith - how can that be showing disrespect? - or trusted news and human rights organisations.
May I conclude by saying that I condemn a couple of posts by Kuropetros in which he has shown us an image of a Quran in a toilet and a T-shirt bearing an anti-Islamic slogan. I would point out that I immediately expressed my cricism of the first such post. Let me relate an anecdote. I worked for a short time in the land which has the misfortune of being ruled by the disgusting tyrant named Qadaffi, Libya, and in my free time was visiting a nearby town in the company of another Briton and a Palestinian Muslim. There is a very ancient mosque in this town which is now in ruins and is no longer used for worship. We walked towards this mosque and were about to enter through the main door when I stopped to take off my shoes. My Palestinian colleague laughed and asked me what I was doing. I informed him that we were about to enter a mosque and as a sign of respect I was taking off my shoes. He then told me that this rule ony applied to a functioning mosque. Even so, I waited to see this Muslim enter without taking off his shoes before doing the same. My point is that you cannot accuse me of failing to respect religious values. I am an atheist but I accept that there are things which have special importance to religious people in a way that I cannot fully comprehend, but which I nevertheless respect. However, if a woman from South Asia comes to work as a housemaid in a Gulf country and is not serially raped throughout the course of her employment but is then herself subjected to a barbaric punishment if she through no fault of her own becomes pregnant and is thus deemed to be guilty of committing adultery while those who have raped her go unpunished - this is not the fate of most housemaids in the Gulf but it is not an infrequent occurence either - then this offends every sense of decency and natural jusatice that I have. If I express the sense of outrage that such abuses engender in me, this is not "religious racism" whatever that means.
Then the doorbell rings and I am confronted by a smiling Sharia law salesmen. My experience of Sharia law tells me that it stinks to high hell. I didn't ask this man to appear on my doorstep, but now that he has he can damn well listen to what I have got to say about the wares that he is peddling.
