Muslims are peaceful people

[GHook93]

The "pro-Islamic" side says: look, only a tiny fraction of Muslims are members of Al Queda, just a few thousand out of a billion people; or, only 5% or 8% support attacks on civilians.

Support this assertions with a sources or sometime; otherwise, it lacks creditability!

The "Islam-is-the-enemy" side tend to point to the history of Islam as a military-proselytizing religion, and to many scary passages in the Koran; and to the popularity among various groups of Muslims of attacks on the US; and to the alienation felt by many young Muslims in Europe.

The Arab Crusades are a reality not a myth!

 

[Doug]

GHook: are you asking me to source my claim that the pro-Islamic side says that Islamic terrorists are a tiny isolated minority among Muslims? I was just paraphrasing DeadCanDance's post earlier in this thread, to which I replied with a detailed analysis of the statistics in his reference, which, I claimed, he had somewhat misunderstood: he claimed that, when all Muslims were considered, the ones approving of terrorism were just a "statistical blip". I tried to show that this was not correct, and that a significant minority did.

More importantly, in earlier and subsequent posts, I have tried to get over the idea that viewing the question as "either/or" guarantees you will get the wrong answer. Rather, we have to see Muslims as on a continuum, with the terrorists at one end, and modernizing Muslims who quite strongly and consciously oppose these terrorists on the other, with the vast majority of Muslims spread out between these two poles. I used the analogy of Germany and the Nazis.

I think you may have come in at the end of the thread. You may wish to go back and read the debate, at least starting with page 4 or 5.

As for the "Arab Crusades," I don't think that what peoples' ancestors did hundreds and hundreds of years ago is very relevant.

Otherwise, we would all be living in fear of being conquered by the people now inhabiting the Italian peninsula.