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CAIR: Islam 100 times more likely to be associated with terrorism
 Reporters are 100 times more likely to associate Islam with terrorism or militancy than all other faiths combined, an article quoted a word search on news stories published in major newspapers over the past decade as concluding. Such lopsided portrayal is indicative of deep-seated misunderstandings about Islam, and sometimes just plain prejudice, said Parvez Ahmed, chairman of the board of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in an article on Monday. Surely, all terrorists are not Muslim. Neither are all Muslims terrorists.
| All terrorists are not Muslim, but most are nowadays. There are still a few non-Islamists terror orgs around, but they're mostly in decline. They're vastly outnumbered in scale, if not always in viciousness, by the Muslims. |
| If I were to engage in some scienterrific analysis, might I find that the ratio of Islamic to non-Islamic terrorist acts with resulting blood, gore and mayhem is on the order of (just guessing here) 100:1 or so? |
The European Union had noticed resentment among Muslims to the objectionable juxtaposition of Islam and terrorism, and was distributing new guidelines to its 25 members that recommended using non-emotive lexicon for discussing radicalisation, Ahmed said in his article titled A sensible way to describe terrorists.
| I'm not too concerned about the Muslim resentment. As I've noted on a number of occasions, it would seem fair that Muslims be concerned about Western resentment of their love for puddles of blood and explosions, but that seems to go right past them. Therefore, I'll withhold any concern I may have felt under other circumstances about injury to their delicate feelings. And I'll pass on the "non-emotive lexicon," thank you. I'll stick with calling a spade a spade. |
EU officials say that the guidelines, which are not legally binding, would ask European governments to shun the phrase Islamic terrorism in favour of terrorists who abusively invoke Islam, Ahmed said.
| How about "takfir assholes"? Can we use that? How about "bloodthirsty Salafists"? Is that okay? |
Other terms being considered by the review include Islamist, fundamentalist and jihad, he said. He praised this first of its kind effort to separate terrorism from its perceived roots.
| The Muddle East is chock full of people calling themselves Islamists. They're Muslim fundamentalists I really do prefer the term "Salafist" who find jihad is the answer to everything to include "what time is it?" |
| Time, of course, being a post-colonial construct, ontologically oppressing and imposing a reactionary, antithetical, and deliberately hostile teleology upon the victims of Zionist aggression. |
Associating the criminal enterprise of terrorism with the faith of 1.4 billion Muslims, 99.99 percent of whom will never come near any act of terrorism, much less use Islam as a justification for their crimes, is just plain wrong, he said.
| Associating the roots of terrorism with failed states like Pakistan, Yemen, and Sudan seems pretty fair to me, given the quaint local customs. Equating the roots of terrorism with the Grand Mosque in Mecca and its imam also seems fair, since he periodically calls on God to kill us all. |
Ahmed said the 9/11 attacks had brought home the horrors of a new form of suicidal terrorism.
| Lucky for Muslims the West has a damned short attention span. |
More and more scholarly writings are delving deeper into this issue and offering us new insights, he said. The pioneering instigators and the largest purveyors of suicide terrorism are the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are overwhelmingly Hindu.
| The Tamil Tigers are also confined mostly to trying to subvert Sri Lanka, which is a pretty harmless Buddhist state. Much as I dislike the Tamil Tigers, they're not trying to subvert the rest of the world by exporting their violent ways. Al-Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba, al-Tawhid, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Fighting, and their kindred groups are. See the difference? |
Posted by: Fred 2006-05-16 |
