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PeonForHer -> RE: New Front in the Battle for Religious Freedom (8/12/2016 10:11:21 AM)
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quote:
I'll make this simple, because I'm sick to death of people's idiocy. Islam and the West are engaged in cultural warfare. The confrontation between the most violent imperialist culture the world has ever seen and the greatest cultural imperialist the world has ever seen (Western lifestyle seduces like no other) was inevitable.
Islam attempts to inoculate its people against seduction by the West with varying degrees of success. Islam's highly structured lifestyle appeals to those people who lack purpose and particularly those without a strong will.
Islam is like a weed. If you don't stamp it out whenever it appears in your society, it WILL choke the life out of your culture. Anyone who's even made a passing attempt to study the history of Islam knows this.
Opposition to a violent, theocratic culture which is inimical to the foundations of freedom and democracy which are fundamental to Western societies is inherently rational - and it's only complete fucking morons who have no fucking idea of what is happening in the world around them who label such people as "bigots".
This is broadly the thesis that Edward Goldsmith expounded in 'The Clash of Civilizations' in 1993. Since then there have been multiple criticisms, e.g.:
"Huntington has fallen under the stern critique of various academic writers, who have either empirically, historically, logically, or ideologically challenged his claims (Fox, 2005; Mungiu Pippidi & Mindruta, 2002; Henderson & Tucker, 2001; Russett, Oneal, & Cox, 2000; Harvey, 2000).[14][15][16][17] In an article explicitly referring to Huntington, scholar Amartya Sen (1999) argues that "diversity is a feature of most cultures in the world. Western civilization is no exception. The practice of democracy that has won out in the modern West is largely a result of a consensus that has emerged since the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, and particularly in the last century or so. To read in this a historical commitment of the West—over the millennia—to democracy, and then to contrast it with non-Western traditions (treating each as monolithic) would be a great mistake" (p. 16).[18]
In his 2003 book Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman argues that distinct cultural boundaries do not exist in the present day. He argues there is no "Islamic civilization" nor a "Western civilization", and that the evidence for a civilization clash is not convincing, especially when considering relationships such as that between the United States and Saudi Arabia. In addition, he cites the fact that many Islamic extremists spent a significant amount of time living and/or studying in the Western world. According to Berman, conflict arises because of philosophical beliefs various groups share (or do not share), regardless of cultural or religious identity.[19]
Edward Said issued a response to Huntington's thesis in his 2001 article, "The Clash of Ignorance".[20] Said argues that Huntington's categorization of the world's fixed "civilizations" omits the dynamic interdependency and interaction of culture. A longtime critic of the Huntingtonian paradigm, and an outspoken proponent of Arab issues, Edward Said (2004) also argues that the clash of civilizations thesis is an example of "the purest invidious racism, a sort of parody of Hitlerian science directed today against Arabs and Muslims" (p. 293).[21]
Noam Chomsky has criticized the concept of the clash of civilizations as just being a new justification for the United States "for any atrocities that they wanted to carry out", which was required after the Cold War as the Soviet Union was no longer a viable threat.[22]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations
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