An example of the problem before us
Reader comment on item: Keeping Muslim Girls under Wraps in France
in response to reader comment: To prove the case, throw in the whole thing

Submitted by Taimur Beg (United States), Jan 9, 2006 at 22:28

The problem with this French guy, IMHO, is his baseless fear. Because a quack harms his patient in some way does not mean that it's the fault of Science. Understand? Otherwise, millions of Muslims - even very religious Muslims - living in the States for example would have done the same thing - shut themselves instead of becoming doctors, nurses, engineers etc. You will *always* find a small minority doing something absurd - are you going to look into their minds and do a root cause analysis and fear ramifications of every thing they believe in?

The scheme is absurd because you have to take individual temperament and stupidity into account. Some things are explicity disallowed in Islam - yet Muslims do them. Are you going to point towards Islam once again? That was my point regarding the teenager analogy.

No one is saying that there is nothing wrong with Muslims. Yes, there is. They need to change. But when you say " Isn't there a potential threat to western society ?" given Muslims are seculding themseves, I laugh. For that stretch to work, one would have to believe in what you are saying. My apologies - but you will have to give a solid argument before anyone starts believing in the "profound meaning". Fortunately, most educated people and balanced people will actually continue to ignore what you are probably trying to get across (one of the complaints of the learned author, remember?).

In my posts, I have pointed out only flaws in logic by illustrating how the arguments are flawed. I have refrained from shifting the blame. When I spoke of Hindu influences, I didn't say that there is something wrong with Hinduism - but that the influence of Hinduism on some people makes them do something un-Islamic (NOT something immoral or evil or bad) - hence if you catch these people doing an activity (not necessarily Hinduistic or Islamic), are you going to talk about Islam too? The focus should be on the foolishess of these people, rather than on Hinduism or Islam etc. If you think that Muslims as a group are a problem, I'm afraid that's the same logic Hitler was employing.

I brought up Hindu influence to give an analogy, and I'm afraid you thought that I was blaming other religions or ideologies or glorying their religion -- I wasn't, if you read carefully and without prejudice or fear. Sans courage and intellect, even an earthworm would appear as a snake. No one is saying, 'let us not be cautious' - but only that at the very least, don't create further misunderstandings between the two civilizations.

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