>>believing in Buddha as their God

Somebody got an F in their comparative religion course, that's for sure. Ignorant assholes.

Lewy:
I think Al-Khansa is actually a hopeful note. You never want to arm your slave population, not even with ideas.

I think a lot of the controversy over "radical Islam" could be solved with an accurate defintion-- at the very least, Islam is not a religion, but an addin, or "way of life", which is a superset of any religion, for sure. And actually I think Islam can be defined as an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS).

Surely the RNC merits a paragraph? I tried to feel the love, and I'm still grasping...

Lewy,

A lot of good stuff today on my personal fave topic. I hope you spawn another great discussion.

I think, though, that the events in Russia have left me in a rather more hard-line sort of mood than is perhaps good for engaging in polite chat. So, let me just weigh in with this:

As I surf the news today, the first article I come across that tries to explain the difference between "rebellious freedom fighters in a complicated geo-political conflict" and child killing terrorists, I'm going to reach straight through my monitor and throttle the author.

Which raises the question (for me at least): at what point does media or government driven propaganda cross the line and become hate speech? And how do we hold entire nations, "ways of life", etc. more accountable?

The Egyptian Information Minister has apologized for articles in a government weekly denying the Holocaust.

LOL!

BooPear:
" ..events in Russia have left me in a rather more hard-line sort of mood than is perhaps good for engaging in polite chat.."

What I usually do try is to attempt to understand the mechanism in situ. You can get some distance on the emotives and also search a solution space. Winds is great for that. :)

jinnderella,

Good advice.

You know, the Chechens as a whole have a have a case for independence. Lots would argue a pretty good case. But the fact is that the tactics you employ in your struggle for that independence say a lot about the kind of country you'll have if and when you achieve it.

And that -- ta da! -- allows me to segue back to the actual topic of this thread. The MEMRI link really highlights a problem here: in too many Islamic nations the official line (and / or the "unofficial", nudge-nudge, wink-wink line) is fueling a fire of low-level hatred that, every now and then, is going to flare up into a 9/11, Russian school, or worse. And I'm beginning to think that fire will be extremely difficult to put out without some sort of major intervention, rather than the kind of "shift towards positive" that I've been rooting for.

At what point do nations, religions or ways of life become culpable for fuelling such hatred? And at what stage does this stuff become actionable? When GWB says so? When the UN says so? Because if things keep going the way they are then the Belmont Club's 3 Conjectures are going to come into play, and I for one I'm starting to get nervous that the worse case scenario may be inevitable.

BooPear:
"At what point do nations, religions or ways of life become culpable for fuelling such hatred?"
They are culpable now. But the UN will not even issue a condemnation, and GW cannot, because this is a "religious" issue, and the US is a proponent of freedom of religion. The hijab is not banned in the US, for example.
The brilliant Wretchard has proposed the only viable solution I've seen-- remove the substrate the terrorists feed on (eg, like the Blair/Bush model in Iraq). Unfortunately few countries have experience with fostering democracy, and certainly not Russia.
We can expect a rigorous crushing of the Chechyans, but unless the substrate is altered, Chechyan terrorism will just regrow.
One of the kewlest things I ever heard, was from an Egyptian professor, a dissident that had just been released from a year in an Egyptian prison. He said, "..You cannot force a democracy, but they are highly contagious.." He said this during Gulf II. But the Russians are probably not capable of planting any seeds of democracy, now if ever. Right now there will be revenge.
A thought-- virulent anti-semitism, encouraged by arab state governments, is probably one way of preventing a "democracy infection" from Israel.

BooPear, your write,

...the first article I come across that tries to explain the difference between "rebellious freedom fighters in a complicated geo-political conflict" and child killing terrorists, I'm going to reach straight through my monitor and...

There ya go. That's what I'm talkin'bout.

Rage can inform, and in your case, it looks like it has. Rage, when fed and nurtured, can also consume you entirely - but you seem like the clueful sort of person who understands this, as jinnderella demonstrates.

Force is clearly problematic. I don't believe it can always be rejected out of hand, as some do in self righteous exhuberance. Yet the world has many examples, too many examples, of the misapplication of force.

What is different about this situation from others in history is time. I share your fear that we don't have enough of it.

In the space of public discourse, there are filters in place which inhibit conversation. In a quest for common decency, laudible enough, an attack was mounted on language itself, such that indecent things were unexpressible: You just can't say that! being the curse of the politically correct. Yet this restriction on language makes it difficult to say certain things that need to be said. Difficult, but not impossible...

I believe it is possible to tell the story about what is going on, strongly enough to induce the monitor smashing response you so classically demonstrated, in a way the slips by the filters of political correctness - and does not violate common decency - and thus can reach the people who would otherwise be deaf to this terrible story.

This is what I try to do, though not always successfully. Any "major intervention", whether or not force is involved, is going to require a substantially broader consensus in this country than currently exists.

Lewy,

Yeah, I'm ticked today, but on the whole I certainly wouldn't want to be lumped in with the nuke Mecca crowd.

A couple of interesting threads in your last post (28283) --

"In the space of public discourse, there are filters in place which inhibit conversation. In a quest for common decency, laudible enough, an attack was mounted on language itself, such that indecent things were unexpressible: You just can't say that! being the curse of the politically correct."

Agreed. There are just too many subjects that cannot be brought up for reasonable discussion, because the moment they are someone screams 'Racist!' or 'Bigot!' in an effort to squash the discussion before it even begins. This tactic also serves the purpose of causing the great mass of people in the middle, who might be swayed one way or another toward an actual consensus were a real debate to be held, to simply tune out. Yet at the root of political correctness, there is an idea there that has some merit: contain the infection and it can’t spread beyond a limited base. The small pox defence, as it were. The trick is: who decides what speech is hate and what speech is reasonable for debate?

"Force is clearly problematic. I don't believe it can always be rejected out of hand, as some do in self righteous exuberance. Yet the world has many examples, too many examples, of the misapplication of force."

Also agreed. But allow me to play devil's advocate for a moment and point out:

RTLM in Kigali used to broadcast stuff just one or two steps removed from what is said in mosques across the Middle East each and every week. Roméo D'allaire asked and asked again to be allowed to shut RTLM down, but the boys back at the U.N. (Kofi was one of them) couldn't get a consensus. So they said no, even though they all knew for certain that a simple air strike would help save thousands -- possibley hundreds of thousands -- of lives.

The genocidiaires in Rwanda only had a radio station, a bunch of machetes and a lot of long-simmering grievances to work with, and 800,000 people died in 100 days.

What will it take for mankind to say "never again" and actually mean it?

jinnderella,

I have no doubt the Russian response will be worse than the crime (shudder).

re: "A thought-- virulent anti-semitism, encouraged by arab state governments, is probably one way of preventing a "democracy infection" from Israel."

A throw-away, I know, but it sure cuts to the heart of the matter, doesn't it? What gives me pause is the question: how far away are we from the conditions that might cause the hate speech to become a call to action? And what are we doing to prevent that from happening?

BooPear,

Here's a thought. Conjecture: You can't get support for shutting someone up before everyone has really had a chance to hear what they're saying.

In Rawanda, an airstrike out of the blue on a radio station would have had no public support because people couldn't really hear what was being said. Maybe if the 'net had been what it is today, and CNN had posted .mp3's of the broadcasts with translation transcripts, and if CBS had featured highlights every night for a week, there may have been pressure to do something.

I recall seeing footage of Serbian TV, with subtitles, on CNN before we bombed the station.

The problem is not that too many people hear what the radical Islamists are saying, the problem is that too few are.

Try to imagine for a minute this exchange occurring after a show parodying the tenets of radical Islam, which certainly has its own share of kitsch. You can't, because even if Hollywood hipsters got past worrying about seeming like Muslim-bashers, their own fears of a fatwa would shut the thing down before it even began. There are some forms of hell that even Bill Maher can't joke about.

Yah, I'm wid BooPear-- "Roméo D'allaire asked and asked again to be allowed to shut RTLM down, but the boys back at the U.N. (Kofi was one of them) couldn't get a consensus"
Romeo D'Allaire also asked for 5000 troops, which would have prevented nearly a million deaths. And didn't get them. The UN couldn't pass a condemnation of hate-speech without protest from the arab states. Useless. I hope there's a tenth level of hell just for Kofi. Is that hate-speech?

Jeet at GeneExpression sez: "Give in to your anger. Use your aggressive feelings. It is the only way you can save your friends." He says this in his post about the 12 slain Nepalese. There is a biological basis for anger. It can save your life.

Guyz, it's Saturday, Joe has posted the Good News-- Have a good weekend!
I'll catch up with Hatewatch latah! :)

Jinn,

I don't think we're in basic disagreement. Ultimately anger should burn itself out and be resolved, too much cortisol isn't healthy.

But before it can be resolved, first I think it has to spread. BooPear's epiphany of computer monitor "transcendence" is a promising sign ;)

I'm just looking for the best means.

Have a great weekend!

lewy, jinnderella

At the end of it, I think all of us are looking for a means to bring Islam into the modern world at a minimum cost of lives.

Sure hope we do. (the collective, everyone in the world, 'we', of course -- though who knows, maybe the WoC 'we' will play a role, too!)

Have a good 'un.

-boo