re: Breaking: Mosque Shooting - New Zealand

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The man who committed this atrocity was not a Christian and didn't follow the example that Jesus set. He sounds like an atheist libertarian... that's a growing group that just like the atheist progressives have no higher moral authority.

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Religion wasn't the motivator, nationalism was. They both certainly have proven to motivate violence and have similar paths of radicalization in the internet age.

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Sharia Law is such a meaningless umbrella term. It can range from wanting halal options for food to full-on Taliban-style control of a population. Very few Muslims would support the latter, and in practice, very few Muslims do.

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Can you tell me what percentage of Muslim majority countries have blasphemy laws?

Probably most of them, as even Christian countries have such laws. Only very few have harsh sentences for blasphemy laws, as I think it's limited to Iran, the KSA, and Pakistan.

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You can disagree which is fine obviously. Your average muslim follows sharia the same way your average catholic follows the magisterium. Not everyone truly follows every aspect of their religious law.

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So somehow they don't really want sharia, don't like it and yet nearly every single nation that is majority Muslim has sharia law?

Do you know why that is? It's because that is what their teachings say should happen. Their source of truth says that Islam must dominant the culture and political sphere if you are a follower.

The Jewish people's source of truth is authoritarian in a sense, but it was only applied to their own people without as much of an emphasis on conversion or expansion. Islam at its core teaches expansionism. Christianity is also taught to be expansionary, but not through political subjugation.

Go to the sources of all three of their holy texts and you will see the motivations and playbook of each group. This will continue to play out over and over this year and the year after and beyond. Muslims are people like anyone else. But the belief system is different from Christianity and Judaism and the impacts on its culture are different.

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Show me modern "Christian" countries that have blasphemy laws?

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Many of them are actually old. Australia has a blasphemy law dating to 1797. Denmark's law dates to the 1860's. Ireland's dates to 1855.

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Typically any blasphemy laws in the West have originated in the last 20 years and it hasn't been Christians pushing them, but progressives and Islamic leaders.

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Actually there has been a trend of repealing these laws in the West. Iceland repealed theirs. Ireland found its laws to be unconstitutional.

I'm not saying blasphemy law isn't a problem in Muslim countries; it most definitely is. Turkey has been more progressive, suspending and then repealing the sentence of a pianist who came out as an atheist. There has been a movement against the blasphemy law in Pakistan too. We will see how the governments react.

So much fail

The last time someone was convicted in the US for blasphemy was 1928. The last person to be jailed for blasphemy occurred in 1838.

Care to guess how often blasphemy laws in the middle east are enforced?

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3. Muslims pay Zakat (their version of tithing) to terrorist entities like the Holy Land Foundation, CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood, etc.

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FACT

It's the same underground funding mechanism employed by the IRA in the 80's & 90's...

As a young Sailor I witnessed this multiple times in a famous Irish pub on King Street in Alexandria VA. Always at midnight an announcement was made on the speaker system to make donations for "the boys back home" as a top hat was passed around the bar among the patrons. I often asked who these "boys" were and got the same reply everytime... "Our Irish Republican Army Comrads".

ETA: Went back to this establishment 5 years ago to see if this was still going on, it wasn't.

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It's cool that you learned a new word and all, but your ignorance of both history and geopolitics is profound.

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I 100% know more about Islam, history, and geopolitics than you do. Read any of my former posts.

Iran's Islamism issue is both revolutionary, in that previous Ayatollah's have taken a political quietest stance, such as Sistani in Iraq, where as Khomeini was overtly political. He also told the Guardian Council in 1988 that the state had to come before Islam. Iran's geopolitics would stay the same whether the Shah or the Ayatollahs are still in power, as they want access to their historical sphere of influence.

Hezbollah is the only major terrorist group that is Shia, but they've shown much more ability to work within a political framework than any of the Sunni Islamist groups, gaining widespread support from people like Michel Aoun, a Christian, who supports them openly.

In terms of Pakistan, the issue is between the civilian government and the military, which has frozen out the civilian government numerous times, most famously in the form of the S-Wing of ISI, which courted Islamists as a way of directing Pashtun nationalism in a way that Pakistan wanted. That direction has made Pakistan an enemy of the Afghani government, who resents the influence of Pakistan on Pashtuni politics.

Again, Iran is limited to a geographic area, and rarely do terrorist attacks on a wide-scale in the West, instead relying on assassinations. Hezbollah is the same. Shia Islamism can be limited because it is geographically limited. Not only that, they are diametrically opposed to the Wahhabi-Salafi jihadis. The school at Qom produces a couple thousand scholars a year, all of whom spend great energy dispelling Anti-Shia bigotry that has become mainstream in the Islamic world. Wahhabism is dangerous because it thrives with Saudi money, as it has done in the Balkans and the Caucasus's. It has especially risen to prominence in Central Asia, where Soviet De-Islamification efforts in the 30's, 40's, and 50's didn't work, except to separate groups of people from their relatively well-ordered Sufi orders, a gap in history that the Saudis exploited.

So when I say Wahhabi-Salafi is a problem, its because it is. I know plenty about specific events, the history of Islam in West Asia and geopolitics. Saying Islam is the problem avoids the actual realities on the ground, and conveniently allows you to be ignorant of those changing realities.

All that being said, Islam is the problem. Dress it up and call it what you will but it is the problem.

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Calling Islam the problem doesn't illuminate anything. It doesn't illuminate the geopolitical battle between the Turks, Iranians, and KSA

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Sure, but at the same time, when Chechens were fighting Russians, all three of the populations of those countries were supporting jihad, same as in Bosnia, Israel, Sudan or any other place in the world where the bloody borders of Islam touch the "Dar al Harb".