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Racist Fireworks Found Being Sold in Wis.

  • #21
I kind of skimmed through, but that kind of thing was widely said and thought about Irish a long time ago both here and in Britain, both in writing and in newspaper/magazine cartoons. The Irish, being pretty powerless at the time, were extremely sensitive to it and threatened by it. Many people considered the Irish to be a different and "lower" race. Now that people of Irish ancestry are White and as well entrenched as people of any other ancestry, they mostly tolerate the drunken Irish stereotype and go along with it & live it up.

As for flag burning, I think places like car dealerships hanging flags everywhere this week and loading up their ads with flags, etc is far more insulting to the flag and those things for which it stands. At least someone who burns it sees it as a powerful symbol of something. I hate seeing it used for crass marketing.
 
  • #22
CAIR huh?

Finally! A completely fair and impartial civil rights group to straighten everything out..........
 
  • #23
I don't think CAIR claims to be impartial and, like every other organization or person, they aren't likely to be. They advocate for their side of the story and, truth be told, somebody has to do it because there's a lot of ignorance about Muslims in the US. Just like there's a lot of ignorance about the US in the Muslim world. But we don't have the excuse of having teeming masses of uneducated poor people looking for a scapegoat. We have teeming masses of educated middle class people looking for a scapegoat and that's pathetic.
 
  • #24
Rattler, some groups are more sensitive then others. Let's not like this become like the MJ thread.

so just cause a group is more sensitive they get treated different......screw'em all, grow a thicker hide.......life is to short to get worked up about this kinda stuff.....

this is a group of ppl that started rioting in Europe over a political cartoon......if they are going to destroy thousands of dollars worth of other ppls property over a cartoon printed in a newspaper maybe they should be wiped out cause they have no respect for anyone else.....if it was a group of European ancestry doing it we wouldnt stand for it, why should we because they are Muslim?
 
  • #25
They have sold one in NE for years called a exploding terrorist head. One brand is specifically a "Bin Laden."
 
  • #26
An exploding Osama Bin Laden head is to me different than something aimed at the Muslim community as a whole, or rather the ones who made their pilgrimage. However there are billions of Muslims who are not terrorists or Bin laden supporters. Probably a number of whom might think something like what Griffin described would be funny so long as it was clear it was supposed to be Bin Laden and not just any Muslim person. However to make a whole group of people who did their duty to their religion (their Haij) out to be Bin Laden's and deserving to be blown up - that's where I see a difference.
 
  • #27
question.......why has christian bashing been half way tolerated here in the past....but as soon as some one combines the words muslim and terrorist in the same post ppl seem to want to drop the issue like a hot potato and condem it....but it was fine to link the christian religion to terrorist acts.....and i ask this as a non-christian watching from the sidelines.......

im about as un-racist as a person as yah can find.....though im a white boy in the groups i ran in up through the time i graduated....i was the minority.....the groups i ran with were primarily native american.......learned early on to judge the individual and not the ethnic or relgious group.....however i am not one to apologize because i am a white male which seems to be the common thing these days.......ive never oppressed any culture, my father never, hell my great grandfather never did so dont complain to me about slavery that happened near 200 years ago and civil rights issues that happened when my family was out here farming and ranching and not keeping anyone from doing anything but screwing with their family and friends.......

i also refuse to apologize for being a white american....the UN can kiss my rear, american dollars protect more third world rat holes than any other western nation even comes close to doing and yet we still tollerate the third world running our name in the dirt.......which is BS.....would love to see the US pull out of every country we are currently in and watch most the world implode.....see us quit sending rice and aid to African and Latin American countries......quit going in and putting a stop to most the civil wars that errupt....it ticks me off to watch our boys and girls go to some third world rat hole to put a stop to ethnic cleansing only to have our hands tied behind our backs and scorned by UN loud mouths that refuse to send in any of their countries ppl to help but insisted someone had to do something....

i am white, i am an American(no hyphen, i hate that) and i will not appologize for it, i will make stereotypical comments like telling my native employees to quit shaking their damn rain stick during my hunting season(to which they usually reply well yah shouldnt have killed our tatahnka and your pup would make dang fine soup) and not feel bad about it cause the vast majority of ppl realize life is to short to worry bout this kinda stuff and let it bug yah and we arent going to censor ourselves to make a few with guilty consciences have a warm fuzzy kum-bi-yah feeling cause no one used the N word today....

lifes a *****, get used to it or get a helmet.........
 
  • #28
Christian bashing isn't threatening the same way. Some of them play the oppressed minority card as much as anyone, which is laughable, but their cultural, political and economic dominance makes them fair game in my opinion. I believe in the old saying "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." The world would be a better place if we all did that.
 
  • #29
Woooo boy I had an excellently funny post for this, all's I can type of it (upon second sober thought) is the firework would be called "Priest comes from behind"

And with that the subject is doomed
 
  • #30
Well my intention here was to show how this firework was racist in it's generalities by the blanket statement it was making. Taking a broad general view of any segment of society usually leads to some rather ignorant assumptions whether it's about christians, muslims or voodoo priests.
 
  • #31
I just meant that even without being a PC nut, there's a certain amount of respect one has to have for different folks- religion-based or otherwise, crude is crude
 
  • #32
Christian bashing isn't threatening the same way. Some of them play the oppressed minority card as much as anyone, which is laughable, but their cultural, political and economic dominance makes them fair game in my opinion. I believe in the old saying "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." The world would be a better place if we all did that.

actually given if yah look on a map of the world where muslim countries are highlighted muslims arent much of a minority and given the fact that in most these countries it is often fairly dangerous to practice another religion such as christianity, yep they really do have a religion of peace and tolerance....i often see christian groups standing up and saying some wacko christian cult was wrong but i dont see this with muslims....are there peaceful muslims? ofcourse but near as i can figure they must be a minority cause they aint doing much of anything to police their own.....i defer back to the riots in europe over a cartoon printed in a newspaper mocking Mohammad...you dont see mass riots when Jesus is mocked......infact it seems to be OK to do that.......
 
  • #33
But you do see riots and violence over all sorts of Christian agendas. They just don't get as much press, as Western sects causing trouble around here is nothing new. And, as long as you're bringing up the example of the Mohammed comic, didn't that riot happen after the paper that published it declined cooperate with the requests of the imams of the region? So, it's not like the Muslims that rioted just read the paper, stood up and said, "Someone's gonna pay!" They were worked up about it because it became a point of formal protest and the concerns of their entire community (at least from the rioter's perspective.) Also consider that Muslims as a whole have had a big bull's-eye painted on them for more or less the past decade (or two) - that has to wear on you after a while. (Being slightly on the conservative side, haven't you grown sore of the constant Repub-bashing that's been so popular in the same span of time?)
I believe the same kind of thing has a way of happening here in the States when folks like Fred Phelps get up on their soapbox around here. The only difference is, everyone understands the nuances of neo-Christian politics around here can see that the small fraction of Christians who back up people like Phelps are the minority, are acting out of earnest (arguably misguided) concern, and are not representative of Christian attitudes or agendas at large. Want a non-secular example? PETA, gay rights, public schools, free trade, emissions controls, logging protesters... the list goes on. When people are unhappy and then taunted and ignored long enough, they revert to their basal instincts, and get violent. That's an attribute of people; not Muslims, not facists, not treehuggers.
I think the reason you don't see Muslims policing their own is because they don't have the means. Most Muslim nations are theocracies where the bulk of the populace takes relatively strict orders about their conduct, particularly about their political actions. I'm not trying to be standoffish, but I think you're outright wrong that the Muslims community didn't try to curb those riots; I remember hearing a lot of Muslim protest on the TV news and in the papers condemning the riots. It didn't receive much press until the imams also called for an end to the violence, but well before then I remember seeing quite a bit of "man on the street" interviews with local Muslims that were pretty much all of the bent that it was an inappropriate response, with varying shades of "but the paper started it."
I believe the important part is that Islam has a different structure and social dynamic than Christianity. As far as I understand, the Muslim clergy is much more uniform and closely tied than the governing bodies of the myriad Christian sects. Unless I'm mistaken, Islam is closer to single sect, like the Catholics, than it is to being an umbrella term like Christianity. That is, all formal Muslim practice falls under the authority of one group of clergymen, unlike Christian offshoots which mostly just share their scriptures and little else. As such, Islam comes off a bit more like an oligarchy - it isn't as adaptive or progressive as Christianity because there's a consolidation of authority among a few fairly permanent leaders. Many Christian churches are small and accept little dictation from whatever governing bodies they belong to; as such, the whole of Christianity is quite adaptive in it's stances on societal issues, since if one church is saying things that the congregation doesn't like, anyone can just walk down the street to a different church. That kind of option isn't really available in many Muslim nations, especially in third world and immigrant communities, as well as the first-world Muslim nations that are controlled by the church.
I think that if you were to look at some of the more cloistered Christian communities, you would find analogous instances of intolerance and violence. It's all a matter of scale.
~Joe
 
  • #34
Muslims have as many sects as christians.......Muslims tend to be more intollerant than christians because most arabic societies are based on tribal culture......and tribes tend to be very closed minded, my way or the highway types.....aint saying its wrong, but thats the way it is........and in alreality it has no real place if you think everyone should do their best to get along cause the mentality that you need to get along with your neighbor instead of wiping them out for the most part does not exist in tribal societies.....

as for muslims having a target on their back, that is of their own doing as a whole......look at the history of Iraq....yah got three groups, the Shittes, the Sunnis and the Kurds.....all have been trying to wipe the others out since they came into existence.....the Saudi's dont like their neighbors, the Turks dont like theirs, the Iranians dont like theirs and they all hate the group currently called palistinians....

I think that if you were to look at some of the more cloistered Christian communities, you would find analogous instances of intolerance and violence.

actually not really.......im in a small town(2,500) that has over a dozen churches as well as Mennonite and Hutterite colonies north and south of here....Mormon, Lutheran, Babtist and Catholic churchs are all big here...Jehovahs Witnesses make their home here aswell.....yet everyone gets along fine.....in fact as a rule in the modern first world Christians tend to get along just fine....dont mean they dont give each other crap....my wife is a Lutheran and loves giving the Catholics verbal jabs but no one takes it seriously.....

as far as the Arabics, there has been a big push for places like Canada and France to allow for Sharia law and to respect it.....these groups have no interest in assimilating into the western world....they want to keep their tribal beliefs.....which is fine by me, but stay in Islamic countries than...there is no place for it in the US where everyone should be treated as equals....
 
  • #35
Muslims have as many sects as christians.......Muslims tend to be more intollerant than christians because most arabic societies are based on tribal culture......and tribes tend to be very closed minded, my way or the highway types.....aint saying its wrong, but thats the way it is........and in alreality it has no real place if you think everyone should do their best to get along cause the mentality that you need to get along with your neighbor instead of wiping them out for the most part does not exist in tribal societies.....

as for muslims having a target on their back, that is of their own doing as a whole......look at the history of Iraq....yah got three groups, the Shittes, the Sunnis and the Kurds.....all have been trying to wipe the others out since they came into existence.....the Saudi's dont like their neighbors, the Turks dont like theirs, the Iranians dont like theirs and they all hate the group currently called palistinians....

OK, this is really not acurrate at all. Islam has many sects but they are primarily on the conservative side of the spectrum. More liberal sects do exsist though they have few followers. The conservativeness of Islam goes all the way back to the early days of the first Caliphs who outlawed the more liberal sects which allowed each individual to interpret the Qu'ran as they saw fit, though during this time almost all Muslims were ruled by one man in one empire. The influnce of Arabic tribal society is quasi indoctrinated in the Hadith, the oral traditions of Islam.

The Problems in Iraq stem from the Mandate period where the Western Nations which controlled the former Ottoman empire intentionally broke up the area to incorporate groups that were different so the colonial gov't could pit them against each other, which they did. The Saudis are ruled by an unpopular family in their own country that maintains control through the sale of massive quantities of US weapons, something that all Americans are responsible for. Iranians are ruled by a religious council the US supported and helped to put in power over the democratically elected anti-west government, again our fault. As for those groups not liking Palestinians, what world have you been living under. Where do you think Palestinians get their money and weapons from. Iran is one of the biggest finical supporters of Hezbollah.

As for Muslims not policing themselves are you familiar with what went on in Jordan during the 1970's when King Hussein eliminated the radicals in his country and out lawwed groups like Hamas and Hezbollah?

As a final note, any Christian Church that supports the actions of Israel is just as guilty of supporting violence and murder as any Muslim sect. Until these churches push for the arrest and trial of Israeli war criminals and cut off funding to Israel they are being just a violent, they are just using other people to do their killing that is all. This goes for all western nations which give funds and arms to the Israelis. I am not trying to start a whole new debate here, only trying to point out that Christianity is still guilty of much violence and bloodshed, just not on our own land.
 
  • #36
Muslims have as many sects as christians...

That's correct - they are comparable in that sense. And each of those sects have political and territorial agendas that often put them at opposition to one another. But do they have divisions in their theology? My understanding of Islam is fairly basic, but I was under the impression that there was one central religious authority among Muslim congregations. If I'm correct, that's a significant difference sociologically, because especially in the many third world and emerging Muslim nations, the church has a great deal of control over education and media. If the church has a central authority governing it, that grants a level of control over the common beliefs of their followers that is almost incomparable to that found in Western religions.

actually not really.......im in a small town(2,500) that has over a dozen churches as well as Mennonite and Hutterite colonies north and south of here....Mormon, Lutheran, Babtist and Catholic churchs are all big here...Jehovahs Witnesses make their home here aswell.....yet everyone gets along fine.....in fact as a rule in the modern first world Christians tend to get along just fine....dont mean they dont give each other crap....my wife is a Lutheran and loves giving the Catholics verbal jabs but no one takes it seriously.....

See, I wouldn't call that cloistered at all. There are a selection of faiths all with different ideas, all with a very contemporary attitude of tolerance common to them - you even have two of the Christian sects that have their own unique religious texts. I'm thinking more along the lines of Waco, or Scientology's Rehabilitation Project Force. These things end up being a lot more bizarre and often sinister than tribal infighting and zealotry over one's primary religious icon.
~Joe
 
  • #37
Waco, or Scientology's Rehabilitation Project Force

those fall under cults, not religious sects.......

As for Muslims not policing themselves are you familiar with what went on in Jordan during the 1970's

one small country, wow.........

As for those groups not liking Palestinians, what world have you been living under. Where do you think Palestinians get their money and weapons from. Iran is one of the biggest finical supporters of Hezbollah.

yet the Iranians will not give the Palestinians a place within Iran, neither will any other Arabic nation....the Palestinians are the white trash of the Arabic world, no one wants them........and these nations are more than happy to give them weapons for fighting Israel because of the old saying "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"

The Problems in Iraq stem from the Mandate period where the Western Nations which controlled the former Ottoman empire intentionally broke up the area to incorporate groups that were different so the colonial gov't could pit them against each other, which they did.
this would be the english and the french, not us.....

As a final note, any Christian Church that supports the actions of Israel is just as guilty of supporting violence and murder as any Muslim sect. Until these churches push for the arrest and trial of Israeli war criminals and cut off funding to Israel they are being just a violent, they are just using other people to do their killing that is all. This goes for all western nations which give funds and arms to the Israelis.

BS.....read your history, the Israelis LEGALLY PURCHASED most of the land currently called Isreal after WWII, they paid a hell of alot of money for the land too, far more than it was worth had it been sold any other way....however the Arabic countries refused to recognize it....those that did ntot want to sell were allowed to stay on their own land and most that chose to stay were actually treated alot better under the Israelis than they had under the arabic rulers.....

arabs_vs_israel.jpg


who really are the intolerant ones?
 
  • #38
Can we please close this thread? It's getting insulting in here.
 
  • #39
I thought the discussion has been really tame so far. Conflicting views can't be resolved by not talking about them.
 
  • #40
I've only skimmed this topic, but it seems to be a good discussion thus far. Lets just make sure we're staying away from any type of insults and such of course ;)
If I've missed something that should be corrected (or that may pop up later) everyone please remember you're welcome to point it out to a mod/admin by using the "report" button witch is under the post count of each person... Just use the button in the reply you want to report and let us know why you think it needed to be reported....

Carry on.
Andrew
 
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