Oslo bombed

[Ben Kenobi]

Unsurprisingly, the Christians starting killing Muslims and the Muslims responded as they should.

So the crusades were justified self-defense when Muslims attacked Christians?

[Al B. Sure!]

You are grossly misinformed. Go read Hirsan Ali, who btw wasn't lying about her faith as you do.

Please show me where devout muslim men are discouraged from going to strip clubs.

Dude, how is this even a question are you asking? Strippers go against the entire concept of hijab (modest dress). Sexual lust for a woman who is not your wife is also haraam.

So the crusades were justified self-defense when Muslims attacked Christians?

Muslims did not attack Christians.

Do you even know the rationale for the First Crusade? After the battle of Manzikert, Emperor Alexios I needed more troops to attempt to re-take lost Byzantine lands in Anatolia. Pope Urban II saw this appeal for troops as a means to encourage religiosity among the Western Christians.

And don't recite something from the Council of Clermont. That was propaganda to entice men to join the crusades.

And of course, when the crusaders took Jerusalem, they killed everyone in the city: men, women, and children; Christian, Jewish, and Muslim. The chroniclers noted how the streets were filled with blood to one's knees.

When Saladin liberated the city a century later, there was no slaughter by the Muslims.

[giblets]

I'm not sure if the christians massacred any christians:

After the successful assault on the northern wall, the defenders fled to the Temple Mount, pursued by Tancred and his men. Arriving before the defenders could secure the area, Tancred's men assaulted the precinct, butchering many of the defenders, with the remainder taking refuge in the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Tancred then called a halt to the slaughter, offering those in the mosque his protection.[89] When the defenders on the southern wall heard of the fall of the northern wall, they fled to the citadel, allowing Raymond and the Provençals to enter the city. Iftikhar al-Dawla, the commander of the garrison, struck a deal with Raymond, surrendering the citadel in return for being granted safe passage to Ashkelon.[89] The slaughter continued for the rest of the day; Muslims were indiscriminately killed, and Jews who had taken refuge in their synagogue died when it was burnt down by the Crusaders. The following day, Tancred's prisoners in the mosque were slaughtered. Nevertheless, it is clear that some Muslims and Jews of the city survived the massacre, either escaping or being taken prisoner to be ransomed.[89] The Eastern Christian population of the city had been expelled before the siege by the governor, and thus escaped the massacre.[89]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Cru...e_of_Jerusalem

[Ben Kenobi]

Dude, how is this even a question are you asking? Strippers go against the entire concept of hijab (modest dress). Sexual lust for a woman who is not your wife is also haraam.

That doesn't answer my question. Muslims believe in modest dress for women, but they don't seem to have similar constraints on male use of prostitutes who are not muslim. At least not what I've seen. Islam is funny like that, women have no rights while the men can do whatever they want.

Muslims did not attack Christians.

WTF? They sure did. They attacked the Byzantines at Yamuk and defeated them. Do they even teach history in Philadelphia? They spend half a century fighting each other prior to Mazinkert. Mazinkert was when the Byzantines asked for help from the West, which was something they didn't choose to do previously, sorta because they were, up until the First Crusade, the strongest Christian power.

Do you even know the rationale for the First Crusade? After the battle of Manzikert, Emperor Alexios I needed more troops to attempt to re-take lost Byzantine lands in Anatolia. Pope Urban II saw this appeal for troops as a means to encourage religiosity among the Western Christians.

Yeah, and Mazinkert was an attack BY MUSLIMS, on the largest Christian power of the day, IN CHRISTIAN TERRITORY.

Where did the Crusades start, Albert? Did they start in Mazinkert? Could you even find Mazinkert on a map?

What I find hilarious is that you believe that attacking people who attack you is ok, provided you aren't Christian. Everyone else is allowed to do whatever they want, but Christians can't fight back, ever. Double standards much?

[Al B. Sure!]

So a battle between SOLDIERS is equivalent to a slaughter of innocent civilians?

[Nikolai]

Sure, only soldiers died in the wake of conquest Al. This is OT for this thread, but you really embarass yourself here. Islam had tried to conquer Byz for centuries, it conquered half of the then Christian world, and on conquest many were killed if they did not convert. Massacres did happen. But the majority was allowed to live on, as long as they accepted dhimmitude. Dhimmitude was no fun, in case you wondered. I could recommend some history books if you wanted, Al.

[Al B. Sure!]

Sure, only soldiers died in the wake of conquest Al. This is OT for this thread, but you really embarass yourself here. Islam had tried to conquer Byz for centuries, it conquered half of the then Christian world, and on conquest many were killed if they did not convert. Massacres did happen. But the majority was allowed to live on, as long as they accepted dhimmitude. Dhimmitude was no fun, in case you wondered. I could recommend some history books if you wanted, Al.

Here:

The concept of "dhimmitude" was introduced into Western discourse by the writer Bat Ye'or in a French-language article published in the Italian journal La Rassegna mensile di Israel in 1983.[2]

If Ben can make the claim that classes did not exist prior to Marx, then I can say 'dhimmitude' was invented in 1983.

[Nikolai]

It was not. It might be the name has changed at some point, but the discrimination in return for protection is a concept used in Islam since the beginning. It's part of shari'a.

[Al B. Sure!]

It was not. It might be the name has changed at some point, but the discrimination in return for protection is a concept used in Islam since the beginning. It's part of shari'a.

Vs. what? Christian slaughtering of unbelievers and heretics?

[giblets]

WTF? They sure did. They attacked the Byzantines at Yamuk and defeated them. Do they even teach history in Philadelphia? They spend half a century fighting each other prior to Mazinkert. Mazinkert was when the Byzantines asked for help from the West, which was something they didn't choose to do previously, sorta because they were, up until the First Crusade, the strongest Christian power.

Where is Yamuk? Do you mean Yarmouk? And I'm guessing "Mazinkert" is Manzikert. If so those battles were more than four centuries apart, not half a century. Maybe the school system isn't so strong in British Columbia.

[Nikolai]

Vs. what? Christian slaughtering of unbelievers and heretics?

Evil is not relative. Evil is evil.

[Nikolai]

Btw, back on topic:

This is an article written the other day about the reaction some people have had in the wake of the terrorism act:

Hatred, smears and the liberals hell-bent on bullying millions of us into silence

The baleful effects of the recent attacks in Norway, where Anders Breivik bombed Oslo’s government district and then gunned down teenagers at a Labour party camp, murdering at least 77 people, have not been limited to that horrific carnage.
For the atrocity has produced a reaction among people on the political Left in Britain, Europe and the U.S. that is in itself shocking and terrifying.
Former Norwegian prime minister and current chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize committee Thorbjorn Jagland has said that, in response to the violent attacks, David Cameron and other European leaders should use a more ‘cautious’ approach when talking about multiculturalism.
Cameron has said multiculturalism (the doctrine that gives the values of minorities equal status to those of the majority) has failed, and has also talked about ‘Islamist extremism’ as a cause of terrorism.
Jagland, however, said leaders would be ‘playing with fire’ if they continued to use rhetoric that could be exploited by extremists such as Breivik.
This is because Breivik’s so-called manifesto shows that he is violently against mass immigration, multiculturalism and Islamisation — and that he wants the forced repatriation of Muslims from Europe and the murder of all who have promoted multiculturalism.
But to connect such abhorrent ravings with Cameron’s comments is simply grotesque.
First and foremost, this is treating Breivik as if his words deserve to be taken seriously and at face value.
As of now, however, we don’t know whether Breivik is psychotic, a psychopath or under the influence of all the drugs he claims to have taken.
We also don’t know what part, if any, his political views actually played in this atrocity.
After all, since his target was his country’s Labour party one might just as well surmise that he was motivated by hatred of his father, who was a Labour party supporter and who was divorced from Breivik’s mother when the killer was a baby.
In any event, someone who travels to a teenagers’ summer camp and invites them all to gather round so that he can kill them all cannot be considered rational.
Yet the former Norwegian premier is treating Breivik as if he is a political terrorist whose words have the authority of a sane and coherent creed.
Even if he was motivated by hostility to multiculturalism and Islam, it is perverse to suggest that no one should write about these things because some deranged person raving about such ideas has run amok.
It’s a bit like saying no one should express concern about late abortions or animal cruelty because it leads straight to the firebombing of abortion clinics or animal-testing laboratories.
Multiculturalism and Islamic extremism raise entirely legitimate and very serious concerns about defending a culture from attack both from within and from without.
Jagland seems to be cynically exploiting the murder of more than 70 innocents to make a connection which is as obnoxious as it is opportunistic in order to bully into silence those who express such legitimate democratic concerns.
Shockingly, he is merely one of many who are doing so.
As soon as the atrocity happened, people on the Left saw a heaven-sent opportunity to smear mainstream conservative thinkers and writers by making a grossly distorted association between Breivik’s attack and their ideas.
They claimed that anyone on ‘the Right’ who had spoken out against multiculturalism or Islamic extremism was complicit in the atrocity and therefore had a moral duty to stop writing about such things.
To my stupefaction, I have become a principal target of this incendiary witch-hunt, being smeared for having helped provoke the Norway massacre.
One of the first out of the trap was British blogger Sunny Hundal, who delt at length upon two of my articles which had been quoted in Breivik’s purported manifesto and gave the impression that I was a major influence on Breivik’s thinking.
But in Breivik’s 1,500-page diatribe, I was mentioned precisely twice. The first time was a quote from an article in this newspaper about family breakdown.
The second was another article about the revelation by a former civil servant that the previous Labour government had kept the public in the dark about a covert policy of mass immigration.
Breivik made no mention of anything I had written about Muslims, Islamic terrorism or Islamisation.
Moreover, he also mentioned dozens of other conservative or liberal writers and thinkers. Among others, he quoted: Winston Churchill, George Orwell, Mahatma Gandhi, the Labour MP Frank Field, Tory Nicholas Soames, philosopher Roger Scruton, Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson and Swedish thriller writer Lars Hedegaard.
Oh, and William Shakespeare, as well as the fathers of English liberalism John Stuart Mill and John Locke.
So the fact that Hundal singled me out like this while failing to mention these others (apart from a brief reference to Mr Clarkson) was an egregious smear — which was soon circulating and building up hatred on Twitter and the internet.
Soon, others joined in the hate-fest — even across the Atlantic. In the Toronto Star, columnist Heather Mallick wrote that unlike ‘almost everyone else praised by the killer’, I had not said I was horrified by the atrocity in Norway. Not only that, but whereas everyone else had wept at the murder of schoolchildren, ‘she [Phillips] spits’.
But, on the contrary, I had written on my own website in terms far stronger than many other writers that there could never be any excuse for mass murder.
And the quote from my writing on which she based her ‘spitting’ claim was actually not about the atrocity at all, but about the people using those murders to foment just this kind of hatred.
Norweigan police at Anders Breivik’s farm outside Oslo, Norway
Then there was Seumas Milne in the Guardian — who tried to make the smear stick by insisting that my criticism of the secret policy of using mass immigration to destroy British identity was ‘Breivik’s feeling precisely’.
But the truth is that the outrage at that policy is shared by millions of decent British people. So Milne was in effect smearing not just me, but all those millions by implying that their opinions also formed a ‘continuum’ with Breivik’s actions.
As one Guardian reader commented following Milne’s contemptible attack, the fact that he had deliberately blurred the distinction between reasonable political opinions with which one might disagree and the actions of a terrorist meant he was creating hysteria and polarisation.
Indeed, the result of such incitement has been a veritable tsunami of electronically-generated mob hatred.
Some of the comments about me that the Guardian allowed on its website below Milne’s article were vicious.
And people have been emailing me a steady stream of positively unhinged hatred and bigotry, including comments such as ‘evil witch’, ‘your vile outpourings have substantially contributed to fear, hatred and violence’, and ‘you have blood on your hands’.
Some words undoubtedly do have hateful or violent consequences — but they are by definition hateful or violent words.
Nothing I have ever written falls into either of those categories. On the contrary, I try to defend people against hatred and violence.
I’m always careful, for example, to draw distinctions between individuals and causes, such as the ‘human rights’ agenda, and I have always stressed the distinction between peaceful Muslims and Islamic extremism.
No, it is those who under the cover of accusing me of incendiary writing are themselves inciting hatred.
The claim that ‘blood is on my hands’ can so easily translate into someone seeking my own blood. Heaven forbid that should happen — but if it did, there would be a direct causal link with those who have whipped up this wicked firestorm.
Indeed, those who have exploited the killing of innocents in Norway to provoke such an eruption of distortion, demonisation and irrationality should disgust and alarm all decent people everywhere
[/QUOTE]

[giblets]

Evil is not relative. Evil is evil.

Yes. And evil things happened during the crusades, but Ben always gets upset when people complain about it.

[Nikolai]

Yes. And evil things happened during the crusades, but Ben always gets upset when people complain about it.

Doesn't make the evils of medieval Muslims any better, does it? That's what we're discussing. Or rather, we're discussing the rather grotesque claim by Al that killings of Christians is more okay if or person who says he is a Christian "begins". It's kindergarten arguments.

[Ben Kenobi]

Where is Yamuk? Do you mean Yarmouk? And I'm guessing "Mazinkert" is Manzikert. If so those battles were more than four centuries apart, not half a century. Maybe the school system isn't so strong in British Columbia.

Half a century should be half a millennium, figured I'd edit it but Nikolai made the correction, so that was unnecessary.

As for the rest, good for you. Glad to see that your education system teaches you how to correct spelling.

Can you find either on a map without using google?