Obama directs NASA to Improve Relations with the Muslim World

[Lotus]

Originally Posted by Slingin Sammy 33

I'm no expert on Muslim studies, but there are plenty of folks that are experts in this field that have an opinion similar to mine.

So without going down the whole Islamic extremist hole and completely hijacking the thread, maybe you should read the Koran itself, or books from Robert Spencer (Spencer is a weekly columnist for Human Events and FrontPage Magazine, and has led seminars on Islam and jihad for the United States Central Command, United States Army Command and General Staff College, the U.S. Army's Asymmetric Warfare Group, the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the U.S. intelligence community). I'd say if the folks that fight terrorism for a living are listening to him, his opinion carries a lot more weight than the opinion of an academic.

Maybe you could ask yourself why sharia law allows for stoning to death of women. People have killed over extreme religious views for thousands of years, I don't recall any evidence of people killing because they felt slighted over acknowledgment of their contirbutions to the world-wide math/science community.

I'm thankful that here we can have this debate, in countries ruled by sharia law I'd be executed. Or I could be just full of $hit and "toiling on top of the toilet bowl".

I have read the Koran, several times actually, just as I have read the Bible several times. I read a lot of literature about religion.

You seem to be confused in terms of experts. Robert Spencer is a consultant regarding how to militarily engage Muslims. John Esposito is an expert on Islamic culture. The two are not the same. And, considering my original point was about Islamic culture, experts on Islamic culture like Esposito and Rohan Gunaratna are the relevant experts for this argument.

We can't beat an enemy that we don't understand. The people who study Islamic cultures know Islamic cultures best. I have indicated some of these people already. Now I am reminded of the saying, "You can lead a horse to water..."

As for your statement about Sharia law, you vastly oversimplify a complex issue. You seem unaware that through most of the Muslim world, those injunctions remain unenforced, just as injunctions to stone people in the Bible are not enforced here. Also, those Americans who use the Bible to support capital punishment are doing a similar thing. Thus the situation regarding Sharia law is much more complex than you indicate. Perhaps you should read someone like John Esposito or Rohan Gunaratna.

As for your statement, "I don't recall any evidence of people killing because they felt slighted over acknowledgment of their contirbutions to the world-wide math/science community," I gave you one example already, although the "slight" is not just over math, it is a holistic felt loss of heritage. And your claim that people don't go to war because they feel that they have been slighted doesn't hold up in the light of history. In other words, I offered you an aspect of a complicated situation and you dumbed it down so that you could dismiss it.

Again, we can't beat an enemy that we don't understand. Educating ourselves about Islam helps to fight terror.