JayhawkerRedLegs said:
@AsadZ The other 2 things I find hard to figure out, is: 1) Why dont moderate overwhelming majority do more to stop & discourage these radical factions? No group needs spillover negativity & persecution because of the actions of a few radicals, right?
I agree with you on this point, but let's ask a few questions.
Last month in Charlottesville, a small, radical minority of white supremacists marched and shouted their angry rhetoric. I know that those people are substantially outnumbered by the reasonable voices that I see and interact with on a daily basis. And yet they still marched.
It would be quite unreasonable of me to hold you (or any other white person, for that matter) responsible for the actions of a reprehensible few. You understand that. I understand that. I think we can both agree.
So why do we expect Muslims to control their minority fringe when literally no group on earth can control its minority fringe. Literally no group.
That's why they exist as a minority fringe movement - there's no support among the majority of their group, so they break off, find likeminded people and fester like a sore.
Every population has these people. Its unreasonable (and unfair) to ask why Muslims can't rein in the radical minority among them.
A couple of weeks ago a police officer (now former officer) in Georgia was caught on camera telling a woman that he pulled over (sarcastically, some say) that police only shoot black people, so she had nothing to worry about. He's a police officer, so he was fired, but he worked on the police force for years with either 1) that type of attitude in his heart or 2) an inability to understand what is and is not appropriate to say, even jokingly.
He was fired from the police force. You can't fire someone from being white, or Muslim, or black, or Christian, or Jewish, or Asian, or whatever ethnicity, race, or religion someone happens to be.
If you look through history, you will notice that the Crusades of the medieval era happened where people were forcibly converted or put to the sword. Heck, the British conquested most of the planet like that (so did France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and others).
To now look at Arabs (or Muslims) and angrily decry them ignores the fact that the very maps we pick up every day were drawn based on conquests driven by religion and ethnicity. Most of the continent of Africa is divided based on European conquest. So is much of the middle East.
We cannot undo that history now. The strands of time have wound it far too tightly to be unspooled now. Our only choice is to move forward, focused not on blaming the reasonable majority, but rather by uniting with them in a way that allows us to work together to isolate and irradicate the thinking that begets the type of extremist violence that harms us all.
When someone drives a car into a crowd, or sets off a truck bomb, or commits some other act, all of us (and I use that encompassing everyone here on this board) should stand against that, united, whether the person committing the act was black, white, brown, yellow, red, purple, pink, paisley, irregardless of who they pray to or if they pray at all.
That is our shared responsibility.
