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From: tbray@mprvaxa.UUCP (Tim Bray)
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: Anti-Arab flaming
Message-ID: <503@mprvaxa.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 25-Mar-84 19:29:53 EST
Article-I.D.: mprvaxa.503
Posted: Sun Mar 25 19:29:53 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 27-Mar-84 00:29:18 EST
Organization: Microtel Pacific Research, Burnaby BC
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There has been a large volume of anti-Islamic and anti-Arab flaming
on this newsgroup recently.  I would like to make a few general
comments on this, based on my life in the Arab world for 11 years and 
my repeated visits there since that time.

1. Regarding Lauren's hair-raising news stories from Saudi Arabia.
   SA is indeed a primitive country, and yes, they still do apply
   the death penalty via public beheading.  Also, they punish repeat 
   thievery offenders by amputation of one hand (in a hospital).
   And Saudi women are extremely repressed by our (or any) standards.

   HOWEVER - until they struck oil in the 40s, this was a feudal,
             nomadic society.  They have come a long way since then -
             check out some of the other side of the coin.  
             As for that rape trial - disgusting, I agree.  However,
             I would argue that N. American standards of rape jurisprudence
             are not that much better.  Recently in Ontario, a rape
             victim was jailed for several days for refusal to testify
             against her assailant, who got off scot free.

2. Regarding the stories of the rape/murder of pregnant Jewish women.  
   While I have no sympathy for the corrupt, murderous administration of 
   Assad in Syria, or the off-the-wall practices of Gaddafi, I find
   these stories just a leetle hard to believe.  They just seem a
   touch too cartoonish... the kind of stories Hitler and Stalin used
   to fling back and forth when they were trying to cover up their
   dirty work.  Can anyone substantiate these a little better than
   has been done so far on this net?

   I suppose Arabs have oppressed Jews.  I never saw it in Beirut, my
   former home town, which had a reasonably prosperous Jewish community,
   but I have heard ugly stories from Iraq and Yemen.  I would point out
   two facts though:

   - Islamic doctrine explicitly calls for brotherly coexistence with
     "peoples of the book" - Christians and Jews.  
   - Historically, Jews living among an Islamic majority have been less 
     oppressed than those among a Christian majority.  Classic examples 
     of this are Moorish Spain, North Africa, and the Levant.  The current 
     MidEast dispute has put a terrible strain on this coexistence.

3. Islam, as defined in its holy books and classical tradition, is an
   enlightened, tolerant religion.  As applied by Khomeini et al it
   is something else.  This is one reason why it scares the shit out
   of me when Falwell and his ilk start making political moves.
   By the way, it seems to me that the primary responsibility for Khomeini 
   and his doings has to lie with the governments of the United States who 
   aided the Shah with money, arms, and expertise in bloodily eliminating 
   all alternatives except for Khomeini.

Look, I don't want to put myself in the position of defending corruption
or opression.  But it makes me very angry when people on the net point
a finger at such practices and equate them with Islam or Arab nation-
ality.  This seems to be very closely akin to the kind of reasoning
that correlates high crime rates in urban centres with "criminal
tendencies in the Negro population".  This is not a very nice kind
of thinking.  Furthermore, it does nothing to move the world towards
the solutions and progress that are needed so desparately, especially
in the Third World.

Tim Bray