Originally Posted by
DVPGSR
You just don't get it.
Crusades were done on both sides, Muslim and Christian to claim, reclaim, capture, etc. the Holy Land. That happened centuries ago and is not relevent to today.
When was the last time there was a forceful Christian conversion?
Not at all relevant. There is no forceful Muslim conversion going on either, not that it's really that necessary anyway to use force since converting to Islam is really easy. And there are plenty of Christian missionaries around the world converting people as well. Whether by force or not, well, we don't really know.
Who was the last native empire that Christians eliminated?
Well there are the native Americans in the US. And the Germans really put a good dent in the Jewish population in the 40's. Oh, and how bout the African and Pacific Islander tribes that the Western world displaced in the early 1900's?
Discrimination? Against who?
How bout Jews (a la 3rd Reich)?
Or each other (a la Catholic vs. Protestant Northern Ireland)?
When was the last abortion bombing done by Christians?
The last major one that you probably heard about is 1998. However, in 2005, there were two arson attacks on abortion clinics (firebombing, if you will).
But the biggest difference is that there is a huge majority of Christians that will speak out against that and chastise those that perpetrate it. When was the last time that the Muslim/Islamic community stood up and called for an end to the suicide bombings perpetrated by Palestinians? When was the last time the stood up and repudiated the calling for the death of the Pope? They hada good chance recently. When was the last time a large majority acted against Al Qaeda in Iraq for bombing markets and killing police recruits?
Sure the radicals make up a small percentage of Muslims and I think the majority are peacefull. But their silence at worst makes them complicit or at best scared of reprisals from the majority, either way it leads to a worse impression of Islam and at this point they need to be on a huge PR blitz to make the rest of the world believe them. And not just their words but their actions.
Please, show me evidence of a huge majority of Christians speaking out against violence. Even more so, show how you know that the large majority of Muslims in this country don't speak out against violence. When I lived in Ann Arbor and here at Stanford, there were plenty of peace demonstrations by Palestinian/Arab students. But, when it's just 500 students or so, it's not going to get past the local newspaper. Multiply that by a hundred or so major college campuses, and you have a lot of Muslims speaking out against violence.