I'm telling you exactly what you need to read to become knowledgeable about Islam. It's the same shit shaikhs have to read. It's the same shit mullahs read for their education. You can declare yourself knowledgeable without bothering to read the bare basics of the faith, but the claim quite frankly doesn't mean shit if you have nothing to back it up but baseless platitudes and Muslim Brotherhood approved talking points. You might as well be one of the crazy right wingers that thinks he can read the worst excerpts of the Qur'an on a website and call himself a scholar of the faith. The attitude expressed above is really just the other side of the coin anyway. It tells me you don't really give a shit what the real reasons are, you have the talking points that were given to you and that's good enough for you.
Technically the pope is a "bishop in chief", and so are the different Orthodox patriarchs.
There isn't a real "Islamic" country right now. There hasn't been since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and even that was theologically shaky. A true Islamic nation requires a caliph. The closest thing to a real Islamic nation right now is the Islamic State, and even they keep breaking a lot of the rules governing Islamic warfare.
Eh. Does Saudi's religious/legal establishment count as "leaders"?
Franco was totally right wing. Mussolini was explicitly trying to find a Third Way between liberal socialism and conservative capitalism. Hitler was a Socialist. Stalin was a Commie. Hell, Caesar was a liberal populist. Dictators have come from every end of the spectrum.
Fun fact: The transatlantic slave trade was actually started by Arab merchants. The Europeans were enslaving other Europeans (and the Gypsies) around that time. Then they started enslaving American tribes. Then they started replacing those American tribes with slaves bought from African and Arab traders. People rarely have a decent grasp of how that all played out.
Such moral relativism and faux equivalencies are dangerous...
Then why is anything you say worth listening to? Not only do you not know what you're talking about, you happily admit that you don't want to know and will resist learning anything that counters your talking points. Why is talking to you about this any different than talking to Ken Ham about evolution?
I've cited a few examples of why this assertion is wrong which prove we've had problems with the Islamic world since long before 9/11. I've done my part leading you to them. Now it's your turn to do your part and do some elementary reading. I'll be more than happy to discuss adult topics with you when you have an adult level of understanding. Until then I'll be patiently waiting.
Look, I get that you hate Christianity. That's whatever. I don't care. It's not the topic under discussion. What we're discussing is whether it's immoral to vote for a politician who calls Islam a religion of peace, why it's not a religion of peace, and apparently whether it's racist to accept that it's an inherently violent religion. To reiterate, those reasons can be found in: the Qur'an itself, the biography of Muhammad, the four main books of ahadith (which I don't recommend you study until you're more familiar with the religion and the early major figures), Islamic jurisprudence (which is based mostly on Qur'an and the ahadith), the in depth early history of Islam after Muhammad (from the Wars of Apostasy to the Sunni-Shi'a split to the conquest of the Middle East and a huge chunk of the world to the various fitnan in the new Muslim world - including and especially who the Kharijites were and why they were important), the general later history (especially including notable events like Barbary piracy and our subsequent wars in North Africa, the foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Partition of India, and the Communist-Afghan war and its relation to the formation of al-Qaeda),
I'm not a Christian. I've mentioned this before. Christianity is only marginally better than Islam. Islam isn't a race. Criticism of religions that aren't Christianity isn't racist. We've had problems with Islamically mandated violence since before 9/11. I realize you're probably not going to read anything but LoonWatch and Democratic Underground talking points, but the material was made known to you. You're ultilmately responsible for your own education. You're responsible for finding and learning it. If you're not going to do that, then there's zero point in a discussion where only one party knows what the **** he's talking about and the other doesn't think the actual reasons even matter. I might as well be talking to Ken Ham why evolution is a thing that actually happens or to a pro-choicer about whether fetuses are alive at this point.
