Public Islamophobia - What Would You Do? Justice and goodness is put to the test

[falah]

Unless you talk to atheists, then it's atheists who started those wars.

They simply had the greatest technology the world has known, and the greatest ability to wreak havoc.

Anglican Christian Winston Churchill started World War II by declaring war against Germany on September 3rd 1939.



Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, an Episcopal Christian, approved the bombing of Germany which notably included the destruction of Dresden killing hundreds of thousands of Christian Germans.


Christian German woman burned to death in air-raid shelter in Dresden during bombing by Christian US and Christian UK air forces.





Christian women and children killed by Christian US and Christian UK bombing of Dresden





Pile of Christians killed by Christian US and Christian UK bombing in Dresden





Christian German civilians killed by Christian US and Christian UK bombing at Braunschweig




Christian Churchill and Christian Roosevelt also ordered the firebombing of Japanese cities like Toky which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.




Japanese civilians killed by firebombing of Christian US forces in Tokyo





Japanese woman and baby killed by Christian US firebombing of Tokyo




The man who ordered the massacre of half a million civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a devout Presbyterian Christian named Harry S Truman.

[hathair]

Anglican Christian Winston Churchill started World War II by declaring war against

Would you like me to post graphic pictures of Muslim women and children butchered by their fellow Muslims? Is that how the game is played? I'll repeat what I just wrote in case it was lost on you while you were scrambling to Wikipedia: Your religion makes mighty claims for itself. Apparently you have a holy book filled with unparalleled guidance and wisdom; and you spend much time in reverence and worship of your protector. You were also blessed with natural resources, location, etc. Considering the state of things and your inability to safeguard the most vulnerable members of your community for generations, clearly you've been terrible guardians of this truth - and you must therefore shoulder most of the blame. What do you expect from us lowly non Muslims, wretched beings separated from righteousness? Are you now measuring yourselves against us, counting bodies to make the fact you've turned so hideously on each other more palatable, less distressing? Is that how far you have fallen?

[falah]

While Christians were busy slaughtering themselves and Jews during WWII, Muslims were busy saving lives:

When Muslims Saved Jews

...During that time of systematic persecution, it is nearly impossible to accept that there was one country in Europe that saw its Jewish population grow. But that is exactly what happened in Albania and Kosovo - Jews were safe there. Muslims ignored the grave risks to themselves and sheltered not only their Jewish neighbours, but also thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi terror. “During the Nazi occupation of Albania,” states Johanna Neumann of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, “there is not one confirmed instance of a Jew being handed over to the Nazis by a Muslim Albanian.” By contrast, in Macedonia, just 170 miles from the Albanian capital, the oldest Jewish community in mainland Europe was exterminated.

The Albanian government actively defied Nazi rule. In 1938 King Zog, the first and only Muslim King of Europe, issued four hundred passports to refugee Jews, granting them safe entry into Albania. After learning of the Nazi campaign elsewhere in Europe, the Mayor of Tirane issued documents to Jewish families, protecting them by stating they were Muslims. When the Germans occupied Albania and demanded lists of Jews from the authorities, the Albanians answered, “We don’t know any Jews, we only know Albanians.” Everybody knew, but nobody told.

The Albanians’ resistance is a hidden period in history, emerging now only after the fall of an isolationist communist regime. American photographer Norman H. Gershman has been exploring that tale. He is a long-time supporter of Yad Vashem (the Jerusalem-based Holocaust memorial), an organisation that has honoured more than 22,000 non-Jewish Holocaust-era rescuers. Gershman became fascinated by the little-known fact that Muslims had saved Jews, and decided to document their stories...

http://www.emel.com/article?id=67&a_id=1788

[falah]

While Christian history is filled with murderous rampages like:

Crusades, Pogroms, Spanish Inquisition, Roman Inquisition, colonialsim, WWI, WWII, Hundred Years War, etc. etc.

Muslim history is filled with examples of saving people from such persecution. Christian Jews sought sanctuary in Islamic Spain, the Islamic Middle East, the Ottoman Empire and also from various Muslims during the Holocaust.

So, what did the Muslims do for the Jews?

By David J Wasserstein, May 24, 2012

Islam saved Jewry. This is an unpopular, discomforting claim in the modern world. But it is a historical truth. The argument for it is double. First, in 570 CE, when the Prophet Mohammad was born, the Jews and Judaism were on the way to oblivion. And second, the coming of Islam saved them, providing a new context in which they not only survived, but flourished, laying foundations for subsequent Jewish cultural prosperity - also in Christendom - through the medieval period into the modern world.

By the fourth century, Christianity had become the dominant religion in the Roman empire. One aspect of this success was opposition to rival faiths, including Judaism, along with massive conversion of members of such faiths, sometimes by force, to Christianity. Much of our testimony about Jewish existence in the Roman empire from this time on consists of accounts of conversions.

Great and permanent reductions in numbers through conversion, between the fourth and the seventh centuries, brought with them a gradual but relentless whittling away of the status, rights, social and economic existence, and religious and cultural life of Jews all over the Roman empire.

A long series of enactments deprived Jewish people of their rights as citizens, prevented them from fulfilling their religious obligations, and excluded them from the society of their fellows.

This went along with the centuries-long military and political struggle with Persia. As a tiny element in the Christian world, the Jews should not have been affected much by this broad, political issue. Yet it affected them critically, because the Persian empire at this time included Babylon - now Iraq - at the time home to the world's greatest concentration of Jews.

Here also were the greatest centres of Jewish intellectual life. The most important single work of Jewish cultural creativity in over 3,000 years, apart from the Bible itself - the Talmud - came into being in Babylon. The struggle between Persia and Byzantium, in our period, led increasingly to a separation between Jews under Byzantine, Christian rule and Jews under Persian rule.

Beyond all this, the Jews who lived under Christian rule seemed to have lost the knowledge of their own culturally specific languages - Hebrew and Aramaic - and to have taken on the use of Latin or Greek or other non-Jewish, local, languages. This in turn must have meant that they also lost access to the central literary works of Jewish culture - the Torah, Mishnah, poetry, midrash, even liturgy.

The loss of the unifying force represented by language - and of the associated literature - was a major step towards assimilation and disappearance. In these circumstances, with contact with the one place where Jewish cultural life continued to prosper - Babylon - cut off by conflict with Persia, Jewish life in the Christian world of late antiquity was not simply a pale shadow of what it had been three or four centuries earlier. It was doomed.

Had Islam not come along, the conflict with Persia would have continued. The separation between western Judaism, that of Christendom, and Babylonian Judaism, that of Mesopotamia, would have intensified. Jewry in the west would have declined to disappearance in many areas. And Jewry in the east would have become just another oriental cult.

But this was all prevented by the rise of Islam. The Islamic conquests of the seventh century changed the world, and did so with dramatic, wide-ranging and permanent effect for the Jews.

Within a century of the death of Mohammad, in 632, Muslim armies had conquered almost the whole of the world where Jews lived, from Spain eastward across North Africa and the Middle East as far as the eastern frontier of Iran and beyond. Almost all the Jews in the world were now ruled by Islam. This new situation transformed Jewish existence. Their fortunes changed in legal, demographic, social, religious, political, geographical, economic, linguistic and cultural terms - all for the better.

First, things improved politically. Almost everywhere in Christendom where Jews had lived now formed part of the same political space as Babylon - Cordoba and Basra lay in the same political world. The old frontier between the vital centre in Babylonia and the Jews of the Mediterranean basin was swept away, forever.

Political change was partnered by change in the legal status of the Jewish population: although it is not always clear what happened during the Muslim conquests, one thing is certain. The result of the conquests was, by and large, to make the Jews second-class citizens.

This should not be misunderstood: to be a second-class citizen was a far better thing to be than not to be a citizen at all. For most of these Jews, second-class citizenship represented a major advance. In Visigothic Spain, for example, shortly before the Muslim conquest in 711, the Jews had seen their children removed from them and forcibly converted to Christianity and had themselves been enslaved.

In the developing Islamic societies of the classical and medieval periods, being a Jew meant belonging to a category defined under law, enjoying certain rights and protections, alongside various obligations. These rights and protections were not as extensive or as generous as those enjoyed by Muslims, and the obligations were greater but, for the first few centuries, the Muslims themselves were a minority, and the practical differences were not all that great.

Along with legal near-equality came social and economic equality. Jews were not confined to ghettos, either literally or in terms of economic activity. The societies of Islam were, in effect, open societies. In religious terms, too, Jews enjoyed virtually full freedom. They might not build many new synagogues - in theory - and they might not make too public their profession of their faith, but there was no really significant restriction on the practice of their religion. Along with internal legal autonomy, they also enjoyed formal representation, through leaders of their own, before the authorities of the state. Imperfect and often not quite as rosy as this might sound, it was at least the broad norm.

The political unity brought by the new Islamic world-empire did not last, but it created a vast Islamic world civilisation, similar to the older Christian civilisation that it replaced. Within this huge area, Jews lived and enjoyed broadly similar status and rights everywhere. They could move around, maintain contacts, and develop their identity as Jews. A great new expansion of trade from the ninth century onwards brought the Spanish Jews - like the Muslims - into touch with the Jews and the Muslims even of India.

A ll this was encouraged by a further, critical development. Huge numbers of people in the new world of Islam adopted the language of the Muslim Arabs. Arabic gradually became the principal language of this vast area, excluding almost all the rest: Greek and Syriac, Aramaic and Coptic and Latin all died out, replaced by Arabic. Persian, too, went into a long retreat, to reappear later heavily influenced by Arabic.

The Jews moved over to Arabic very rapidly. By the early 10th century, only 300 years after the conquests, Sa'adya Gaon was translating the Bible into Arabic. Bible translation is a massive task - it is not undertaken unless there is a need for it. By about the year 900, the Jews had largely abandoned other languages and taken on Arabic.

The change of language in its turn brought the Jews into direct contact with broader cultural developments. The result from the 10th century on was a striking pairing of two cultures. The Jews of the Islamic world developed an entirely new culture, which differed from their culture before Islam in terms of language, cultural forms, influences, and uses. Instead of being concerned primarily with religion, the new Jewish culture of the Islamic world, like that of its neighbours, mixed the religious and the secular to a high degree. The contrast, both with the past and with medieval Christian Europe, was enormous.

Like their neighbours, these Jews wrote in Arabic in part, and in a Jewish form of that language. The use of Arabic brought them close to the Arabs. But the use of a specific Jewish form of that language maintained the barriers between Jew and Muslim. The subjects that Jews wrote about, and the literary forms in which they wrote about them, were largely new ones, borrowed from the Muslims and developed in tandem with developments in Arabic Islam.

Also at this time, Hebrew was revived as a language of high literature, parallel to the use among the Muslims of a high form of Arabic for similar purposes. Along with its use for poetry and artistic prose, secular writing of all forms in Hebrew and in (Judeo-)Arabic came into being, some of it of high quality.

Much of the greatest poetry in Hebrew written since the Bible comes from this period. Sa'adya Gaon, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Ibn Ezra (Moses and Abraham), Maimonides, Yehuda Halevi, Yehudah al-Harizi, Samuel ha-Nagid, and many more - all of these names, well known today, belong in the first rank of Jewish literary and cultural endeavour.

W here did these Jews produce all this? When did they and their neighbours achieve this symbiosis, this mode of living together? The Jews did it in a number of centres of excellence. The most outstanding of these was Islamic Spain, where there was a true Jewish Golden Age, alongside a wave of cultural achievement among the Muslim population. The Spanish case illustrates a more general pattern, too.

What happened in Islamic Spain - waves of Jewish cultural prosperity paralleling waves of cultural prosperity among the Muslims - exemplifies a larger pattern in Arab Islam. In Baghdad, between the ninth and the twelfth centuries; in Qayrawan (in north Africa), between the ninth and the 11th centuries; in Cairo, between the 10th and the 12th centuries, and elsewhere, the rise and fall of cultural centres of Islam tended to be reflected in the rise and fall of Jewish cultural activity in the same places.

This was not coincidence, and nor was it the product of particularly enlightened liberal patronage by Muslim rulers. It was the product of a number of deeper features of these societies, social and cultural, legal and economic, linguistic and political, which together enabled and indeed encouraged the Jews of the Islamic world to create a novel sub-culture within the high civilisation of the time.

This did not last for ever; the period of culturally successful symbiosis between Jew and Arab Muslim in the middle ages came to a close by about 1300. In reality, it had reached this point even earlier, with the overall relative decline in the importance and vitality of Arabic culture, both in relation to western European cultures and in relation to other cultural forms within Islam itself; Persian and Turkish.

Jewish cultural prosperity in the middle ages operated in large part as a function of Muslim, Arabic cultural (and to some degree political) prosperity: when Muslim Arabic culture thrived, so did that of the Jews; when Muslim Arabic culture declined, so did that of the Jews.

In the case of the Jews, however, the cultural capital thus created also served as the seed-bed of further growth elsewhere - in Christian Spain and in the Christian world more generally.

The Islamic world was not the only source of inspiration for the Jewish cultural revival that came later in Christian Europe, but it certainly was a major contributor to that development. Its significance cannot be overestimated.

David J Wasserstein is the Eugene Greener Jr Professor of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University. This article is adapted from last week's Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-deb...uslims-do-jews

[falah]

Muslims also saved Christians from slaughter by their fellow Christians:

Since '94 Horror, Rwandans Turn Toward Islam

When 800,000 of their countrymen were killed in massacres that began 10 years ago this week, many Rwandans lost faith not only in their government but in their religion as well. Today, in what is still a predominantly Catholic country, Islam is the fastest growing religion.

Roman Catholicism has been the dominant faith in Rwanda for more than a century. But many people, disgusted by the role that some priests and nuns played in the killing frenzy, have shunned organized religion altogether, and many more have turned to Islam.

''People died in my old church, and the pastor helped the killers,'' said Yakobo Djuma Nzeyimana, 21, who became a Muslim in 1996. ''I couldn't go back and pray there. I had to find something else.''

Wearing a black prayer cap, Mr. Nzeyimana was one of nearly 2,000 worshipers at the Masdjid Al Fat'h last Friday. The crowd was so large that some Muslims set their prayer mats on the dirt outside the mosque and prayed in the midday heat.

The Muslim community now boasts so many converts that it has had to embark on a crash campaign to build new mosques to accommodate all of the faithful. About 500 mosques are scattered throughout Rwanda, about double the number that existed a decade ago.

Although no accurate census has been done, Muslims leaders in Rwanda estimate that they have about a million followers, or about 15 percent of the population. That, too, would represent a doubling of their numbers in the past 10 years.

Muslim leaders credit the gains to their ability during the 1994 massacres to shield most Muslims, and many other Rwandans, from certain death. ''The Muslims handled themselves well in '94, and I wanted to be like them,'' said Alex Rutiririza, explaining why he converted to Islam last year.

With killing all around, he said, the safest place to be back then was in a Muslim neighborhood. Then as now, many of Rwanda's Muslims lived crowded together in the Biryogo neighborhood of Kigali.

During the mass killing of Tutsi, militias had the place surrounded, but Hutu Muslims did not cooperate with the Hutu killers. They said they felt far more connected through religion than through ethnicity, and Muslim Tutsi were spared.

''Nobody died in a mosque,'' said Ramadhani Rugema, executive secretary of the Muslim Association of Rwanda. ''No Muslim wanted any other Muslim to die. We stood up to the militias. And we helped many non-Muslims get away.''

Mr. Rugema, a Tutsi, said he owed his life to a Muslim stranger who hid him in his home when members of the Interahamwe militia were pursuing him...

...Church leaders acknowledge that attendance at many parishes dropped after the killing rampage. They have taken pains since 1994 to teach a message of healing and to distance the church from clergy members who were implicated in the killings...

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/07/wo...ard-islam.html

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id...d+rwanda&hl=en




Meanwhile Christian priests led killings against their fellow Christians:


Priest convicted in Rwandan genocide

Former Rwandan priest convicted of genocide

Rwanda: Catholic Priest Convicted for Genocide

[Pink]

Sadly there are groups who call themselves Muslim, they have picked parts of Islam and added their own sick and twisted rules to their 'religion'. If you look into it you will find it is the genuine Muslims who follow the Quran and ways of the prophet (p.b.u.h) who are being attacked by other so called 'Muslims' (Shia) who don't follow Quran or the prophet (p.b.u.h) they harm themselves for worship, talk trash about the companions of the prophet (p,b,u,h) worship graves and people, 'marry' for sex then divorce after one night (pretty much prostitution), sell their daughters ect. So when you hear on the news of Muslims killin Muslims it's normally these sick and twisted 'Muslims' who are actually anti Islam killin the ones who are trying to live peacefully following their religion in the proper way. When you hear of Sunni mosques vein bombed it will more than likely be Shia group who have done this.

[SammerTX]

Yes, I'm aware you are not perfect - definitely human. I completely agree with your statement: "Muslims are human beings and are not perfect; just like non Muslims." But your religion makes mighty claims for itself. Apparently you have a holy book filled with unparalleled guidance and wisdom; and you spend much time in reverence and worship of your protector. You were also blessed with natural resources, location, etc. Considering the state of things and your inability to safeguard the most vulnerable members of your community for generations, clearly you've been terrible guardians of this truth - and you must therefore shoulder most of the blame. What do you expect from us lowly non Muslims, wretched beings separated from righteousness? Are you now measuring yourselves against us, counting bodies to make the fact you've turned so hideously on each other more palatable, less distressing? Is that how far you have fallen?

I still don't know what you are arguing about.

People have been at conflict with one another since Adam's two sons.

What exactly is upsetting you?

[abu turaub]

" But your religion makes mighty claims for itself. Apparently you have a holy book filled with unparalleled guidance and wisdom; and you spend much time in reverence and worship of your protector.

Considering the state of things and your inability to safeguard the most vulnerable members of your community for generations, clearly you've been terrible guardians of this truth - and you must therefore shoulder most of the blame. What do you expect from us lowly non Muslims, wretched beings separated from righteousness? Are you now measuring yourselves against us, counting bodies to make the fact you've turned so hideously on each other more palatable, less distressing? Is that how far you have fallen?

I still don't know what you are arguing about.

That is the root of the problem for the muslims. Blind as bats. There's plenty of verses in the Qur'an that cover this issue - clearly. And warnings from the Messenger. SAW. And the salaf RA.

[Habibi27]

I had something similar happen to me where I was denied a room at Motel 6 in Bakersfield, CA based on I was Muslim. What did I do?

1.) Make a complaint online with their guest services
2.) Wrote the CEO of Motel 6 a letter
3.) Contacted CAIR they referred me to fill out a complaint with the Fair Housing (Gov site) which I did.
4.) Write a press release
5.) Contact the local News Station for Bakersfield, CA
6.) Contacted a Civil Lawyer for advice. He felt I did not have a case
7.) posted it publically
8.) Contacted the Mayor of Bakersfield, CA

I do not know what more I could do.

All I want is that boy to be fired from his job.

[Jayne]

Habibi: What do you gain by having that boy fired? Maybe he was following the managers and/or owners rules? Perhaps he made a one-time mistake and he won't do it again?

I have no issue with people complaining, but actually gunning for someones job is going to far. Let the business know what happened, that it may/will affect whether you continue to do business with them in the future and then let them handle it. Trying to deny someone their living just because they upset you... afraid I've got some bad news for you. You aren't that important, and in my years working in customer service I've never once seen that threat come to pass.

In fact, the moment you start gunning for someones job you usually become a joke and you lose all credibility.