police violence and rape culture: 2 sides of the same coin?

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Ah ahah ahahahah! Us women and our cuh-raaaazy emotions, am I right?

Oh look! A comment about an individual woman has suddenly morphed into a generalized comment about all women again. Funny how often that happens.

There's no reason to act arrogant toward LKL. For a non-Muslim commenting on Muslim issues, and a non-woman commenting on women's issues, I feel like a little humility might be appropriate here.

Barchan, stop trying hard to turn this topic into a gender war.

It won't work.

and LKL isn't that non-arrogant either in the the way she usually responds -

I responded to her in exactly the same tone and way she addressed to me.

So don't worry about her feelings, she doesn't care.

Barchan, I wish that one day you will start realizing the rape culture that is plaguing our Muslim cultures and to start questioning things in your culture, and seriously...let's leave the West problems to the Westerners to worry about.

We have it much worse when it comes to rape, and don't let me start on the police violence.

I am a westerner, though. I think I've lived in America long enough to call myself an American, and the west's problems are not foreign to me.

I don't think Islam's problems can be solved if we keep drawing a line between "Islam" and "The West."

I thought you live in Iran or somewhere in the MEA? - must have confused you with another member.

Well ok, fair enough.... you win this one, carry on.

A side note: if you want to be a true westerner, then you should never promote Sharia to be adopted in your host country (not saying you do, but just in case) - you can worship Allah or the bull for all they care, but the West has a strong Christian heritage and you should respect that and not attempt to change it in any way.

No, I was born in Iraq but moved to the US in 2003.


Actually, most of what we consider "western values" is a product of the Enlightenment, an atheistic movement built on mountains of Christian corpses.

I don't find the Enlightenment to have been atheistic at all. There was lots of Deism, though---wherein God created the world, then let us fight it out amongst ourselves.

The Enlightenment was a bloody, but arguably important period, not least because of the values that came out of it, values that we still today recognize as fundamental to a free and healthy society. Islam is a plagiarism of bronze-age mythology that has produced nothing of comparable magnitude, whilst leaving no shortage of corpses in its wake. I am very glad that there is, in fact, a gaping chasm between western values and islamic values.

The Islamic culture was very influential in medieval Europe, though we were ambivalent about it to say the least.

Many people were scared of it because of its exotic/mystical flavor.

And because, of course, it did not extol Jesus and Christianity.

your response (note: your response, specifically you, in this instance) is a case in point about my argument

it's not a crime to be emotional. i'm often emotional myself. it just has to be acknowledged for what it is. human it is, but rational it is not

i got nothing else to add

Last edited by anagram on 01 Aug 2016, 8:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The Enlightenment was the 18th Century Age of Reason that spawned the American and French Revolutions. Secular, but not exactly "atheistic".

Far more Christians were murdered in Europe in the name of Religion during the age that preceded the Enlightenment: the Age of the Reformation during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, than during the 18th Century Enlightenment.

And the perpetrators of that earlier mass murder of Christians were... fellow Christians! Europe was bathed in blood for two centuries after Martin Luther sparked the Protestant Reformation in 1517. The blood of Christians massacred by other Christians. Catholic vs Protestant, and various Protestant sects against each other (with witch burnings and pogroms against Jews as well, and Jews also persecuted each other in Europe at that time).

My theory is that the Arab world is going through similar societal growing pains today to what Europe went through during the Renaissance/Reformation. Sectarian violence is symptom of similar dislocations in society.

In fact- you will learn more about the modern Islamic Middle East from reading the history of Christian Europe during the Reformation than you will learn from watching CNN because its...the same story! Theocratic dictators (The Spanish Inquisition, Calvin in Geneva, and Cromwell in Britain were no different than the Taliban and the Ayatollahs), torture, wars, civil wars, genocide, and ethnic cleansing, all in the name of religion. Same as the latest news.

The alliances of Sunnis built around Saudi Arabia, facing off against the alliance of Shiite forces led by Iran, bares a striking resemblance to the alliances between Catholic powers lead by Spain and Austria against the Protestant powers of northern Europe: that led to the genocidal continent wide Thirty Years War (the World War Two of the Seventeenth Century)from 1618 to 1648. The modern Middle East seems to be sliding towards its own equivalent of the Thirty Years War (all out region wide sectarian war).

I hope that some of you in the Middle East can survive it, because then you might be able to move to the next phase, and start your own Age of Reason.

Actually, Jesus (peace be upon him) is greatly respected by Muslims, and the second coming of Jesus is an important part of Islamic prophecy.

The muslim's concept of Jesus is entirely different than the Trinitarian christian concept of Jesus.

Basically, Muslims believe that Jesus was one of the Prophets, but not the Son of God.

From the viewpoint of Medieval European Christian, that wasn't good enough.

It's good enough for me, though.