"Yes, I left it out in order to consciously deceive people, didn't I?
I doubt that is the case. I assumed it was the echo chamber effect. The question was edited out by someone else and has been bounced around the internet for a while, Often a completely different question (e.g. FANTASTIC answer to Muslim woman claiming all Muslims are portrayed badly"
The question was "How do you fight an ideology with weapons? In other words, "How can we expect to win the hearts and minds of the people by indiscriminately killing their fellow countrymen?"
Now to your question: Are peaceful people irrelevant?
Relevancy requires a frame if reverence, Ms Samon defines Islam as a religion of hate and violence, then in an ultimate example of cherry-picking, simply decrees the overwhelming peaceful majority of Muslims as irrelevant,
She argues that peaceful people are irrelevant to leaders with imperialistic ambitions; Imperialists openly dismiss the peaceful as irrelevant, while understanding that a peaceful majority is a future pool of possible recruits for an opposition to the empire,and as such are very relevant.
You still don't get it. When extremists act, the non-extremists have no effective response. When the 9/11 terrorists killed 3000 people (not all of them Americans, some of them Muslims), the peaceful Muslims were largely silent. What could they say that would change anything?
Peace...is the natural state we all seek.
We seek peace after we seek the basics of life. These can be anything from food to access to something of cultural importance. After that, we week safety and security. Unfortunately, it sometimes takes conflict to obtain those basic needs
Only then can we seek peace.
The point of the woman's rant is that moderating forces typically don't drive world events, extremists do.
If 99% of people "develop mutual respect, honesty, trustworthiness, humility, and self-discipline" but don't radicalize, the 1% of the rest will still be the ones having the major impact.
The war profiteers, be they weapons manufacturers, or media giants, are the ones dismissing peaceful Muslims as irrelevant, They are very relevant, as our heavy-handed military policy , driven by extremely conflated threat numbers has effectively been the best recruiting tool for Al Qaeda
If we went totally socialist and isolationist, the extremist Muslims would still be wanting to spread their interpretation of the Koran worldwide. They don't need our help recruiting since it only takes a small number of extremist to do huge damage nowadays. 9/11 wasn't done by a mob.
Her claim is that the majority in irrelevant is complete BS. Especially if you beleve in democracy, where the majority rules.
I grew up om Manchester TN, currently best known as the location of the Bonnaroo Music and Arts festival The town has a population of a more then 10,000, and tends to support Republicand in national election. But for manmy years there was one registered, card carrying communist in Manchester, I remember hi,m from high school.
Applying the same twisted rhetoric would we claim that Manchester is a Communist Stronghold because the Republican majority is irrelevant to our opinion.
Your argument is built on picking and choosing only parts of the argument I was examining. Is this Communist a terrorist? If he isn't terrorizing or making terroristic threats, he's not driving events. Once/if he does, get back to me and we'll take a second look.
Especially if you beleve in democracy, where the majority rules.
I would pick a vocal minority that actually shows up to vote on election day over a silent majority that sits on their butts. Does anybody remember Prop 8?
A few can make things happen while the many sit by and watch. I think the same dynamic applies to religious zealots v moderates. The peaceful moderates render themselves irrelevant through their minimal response after the fact.
On a side note, don't you think some of these religious moderates know who the extremists are before they take action? Someone knows which mosques/churches/etc are havens for extremists and which aren't. Somebody knows a neighbor who has been asked not to attend their church anymore because of extremist viewpoints. Somebody knows when that neighbor took an extended vacation to Pakistan, for example. Somebody knows these things and keeps their mouth shut. And they keep their mouths shut because, deep down, they believe these extremists are more devout and follow more closely the letter of their shared holy book. I think they are culpable in their silence before the fact as well.
Somebody knows these things and keeps their mouth shut. And they keep their mouths shut because, deep down, they believe these extremists are more devout and follow more closely the letter of their shared holy book. I think they are culpable in their silence before the fact as well.
"Not to choose is itself to choose."
At the same time, another motivation you didn't mention is fear of reprisals. There is very little true privacy or anonymity left anymore, so it's safer to just turn one's back or close one's eyes than to pass information along and possibly endanger oneself or one's loved ones.
Peace does not require leadership.
Why don't you name some leaderless peace movements. I can't think of any.
Can you tell me who the head of the christian peace movement is?
For that matter, who leads the atheist peace movement, or the American peace movement, Or the capitalist peace movement?
As far as I can tell, those things don't exist.