Dare To Ask Talk And News About Our Differences
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Two points: 1) Who is white and who is not? I bet you will fail to classify half of my town! How do you you classify Latinos, or Eurasians, or half-Congolese half-Japanese people? I would like to know how people managed to sample people based on race for an IQ test. Is that even possible? Are you talking about race or geography? 2) What’s an IQ test? What does it measure? It measures your ability to know whether the next drawing is a square inside a circle or a circle inside a square. Big deal. Sure, Europeans have invented a lot of nice stuff, but they also discovered such niceties as smog, global warming, the nuke, bio weapons, Auschwitz, etc. And that brings us to Sub-Saharan Africa. I haven’t heard mother nature complaining about the bushmen of South Africa. People are not automatically stupid just because they know how to live in balance with nature. I would like someone to dig out this statistic: How many species were made extinct by white folk, and how many by black Africans (you can win this one with Australia alone).
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,To make a sweeping statement like ‘prophet Mohammed is a terrorist’ without using secular, detailed and valid proof is mediocre at best. Also, if anyone wants to present a valid criticism of prophet Mohammed, it has to be comparative, i.e. you have to compare prophet Mohammed, who ordered that offenders be fought to death, to Moses, who ordered all Canaanite civilans (defenders or offenders) killed: men, women and children. What really baffles us is that no mature discussion of the East-West conflict (if there is such a conflict) has been coming out of America since 9/11. What many people here also think is weird is how any critcism of Israel (let alone Judaism) is considered a crime punishable by law in America and most of Europe, while outright mudslinging against Islam or Arabs is encouraged.
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,First, this law should not be applied in this case according to Islamic law for many technicalities. Islamic law automatically negates many decrees for poor, unjust societies – like most modern Muslim societies. If the law were applicable, it should be carried out on both the man and the woman. The Koran states explicitly that the adulterer and adulteress get equal punishment (by the way, I think the punishment is beating, not stoning). If the man is intentionally ignored, this is due to societal factors, not Islam.
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,The answer is yes, many Muslims smoke cigarettes, cigars, pipes and waterpipes. The religious opinion on tobacco is hazy at best; although most scholars can give very good reasons for considering smoking a sin, others can prove it is a hated act but not sinful. Because there is no clear reference in the Koran or tradition on smoking (as there is, for example, on alcohol) the matter is highly debatable.
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,The point is there are 200 million Arabs (15 percent or more of whom are non-Muslim) and more than a billion Muslims. There is only a handful of extreme Muslim groups, and we are angry at them, but we are also angry at you for stigmatizing us and failing to see that there are moderate Muslims. By the way, most Arabs have no problem with Europe, so it’s not the West, it’s the United States that most people here hate (if you wonder why, look at Palestine and Iraq). If I use your criteria for judging people, then I should condemn all 20 million Jews in the world for Sharon’s massacres, or condemn all Hindus for the massacres of Muslims in Eastern India, or hate Christians for their unmatched crimes during the Crusades. Cliches are tacky however much you try to make them make sense.
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,To make a long matter short, the concept of race is almost unknown in most Middle Eastern countries. In Egypt, for example, you have people of all shades across all classes and religions. For example, when people consider getting married, they usually don’t notice skin color. The concept of ethnicity and culture is very strong, though. For example, in Egypt the Nubians are a distinct group, not because they are black but because they have a different culture. Note also that Iranians are Indo-Europeans, Turks are Mongols and Arabs are semitic. So these three groups will NEVER identify themselves together under a single grouping. So ethnicity and nationality are important and distinct, race is considered amusing pseudo-science here!
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,Arabs are definitely not white. This term relates to Europe mostly. Arabs are not Africans either, most Sub-Saharans refuse to treat North Africans as black (which they are not!). If I have to classify myself (I don’t see the point, and I don’t have to do it over here!), then I would look for an ‘others’ category. By the way is it not time yet for Yforum to add ‘Arab’ to its drop down menu of races?
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,I am from what American media has been classifying as an extreme muslim country lately. I have 4 years of college education, I am a qualified electronics engineer, and I seem to post on this website more than most Americans or Europeans. Visit any Arab gateway and witness their infatuation with polls, there is a new one almost everyday. Which ‘extreme muslim countries’ other than the former Afghanistan do you think prohibit their people from getting an education, working in hi-payed jobs or posting messages on the net??!! Don’t tell me Iran because it has the highest percentage of female engineers in the mideast (higher than Israel, Turkey or even Canada!), and has an obsession with the internet. Not Egypt either, because here Internet dialup is free and uncesored! If you insist on waging an unneeded war on some country, you should first try to understand that country.
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,When they come to Egypt, Americans:
1. Are usually surprised that Egyptians are not black. Most Egyptians are not familiar with Afrocentrism, so they think it’s a bit funny.
2. Are a bit disappointed to find Egyptians take the subway to work rather than ride camels.
3. Insist that Africans, Martians and Atlantians built the great pyramid rather than ancient Egyptians.
Americans are generally much more ignorant than European tourists who come to Egypt. Yet they are really much nicer and more polite, cheerful and respectful of local culture (at least pre-9/11). I can give no reasons, but that’s how it feels.
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,Most Arabs would NOT classify themselves as white. If they HAVE to classify themselves under a race Arabs would search for the ‘others’ option, as I will do when I post this message. I think the word ‘Arab’ can be used as an ethnic classification, but the concept of race is really not known in this part of the world. Concepts like ‘culture’ or ‘background’ are popular here but ‘race’ has a bad ringing (reminds us of years of European imperialism and superiority complex).
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,Muslims do not believe dogs are demonic; dogs are thought of as ritually unclean, and this is particularly true of canine saliva and mucous (which seem to come in abundance all the time). Dogs are not prohibited per se, but because they destroy ablution and ritual cleanliness, they should not be allowed in any area of the house where prayers take place. Generally speaking, Muslims avoid dogs because keeping them in a separate area can be a very hard job. Note that this does not apply to cats, which are actually advised as companions by Islamic tradition. Islamic texts also warn that if someone owns a dog, and that dog suffers from incarceration, hunger or thirst, then that person’s road to hell is paved, so it is a great responsibility.
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,The only place I ever read about that was in an American encyclopedia a few years ago. I have lived in Egypt all my life, and I know no one uses their left hand for wiping off. The part about using water is truer: most people here use both toilet paper and water.
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,To the somali gentleman: The ancient Egyptians were portrayed as lighter skinned than the Nubians and darker than the sea people. This suggest a Hamito-Semitic stock pretty similar to modern Egyptians, who are definitely not black! Moreover Egyptian is a nationality rather than a race, the concept of a nation is what set Egypt appart from the surrounding backward tribes. Now for the land of Pont, as far as I know the only relation Egypt had with it was the Hatshepsut expedition in the New Kingdom. Pont was described as a strange and alien nation not related to Egypt, but (to your pride) it was also described as a land of remarkably civilised people and great wealth. To the Jewish lady: The pyramids were built early in the old kingdom (6th dynasty), Hebrews came to Egypt with the Hyksos by the end of the middle kingdom and left (according to your old testament) by the 22nd dynasty. So if they built the pyramids they had to have a time machine! The architect of the pyramids was Imhotep and the workers’ town was lately excavated and found very typically Egyptian. I don’t know why people readily believe the pyramids were built by Martians, Atlantans, Semites, or the queen of Sheva rather than believe the obvious!
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,Some people argue that the film is one where the bad guy is by coincidence Arabic. Well, it beats me why not so many films are produced in Hollywood with Jewish bad guys. I know you’ll immediately shout ‘anti-Semite,’ but just think about it. If we were in Shakespeare’s Europe, the bad guy would be a Jewish Shylock, but not in Saladin’s Jerusalem (where Jews were welcome!). In that place the bad guy was always a crusader; for the crusaders the bad guy was the ‘heathen’ Muslim and so on. Everyone needs a bad guy to stereotype, and with Communism gone, who’s left? Nowadays it’s ‘the West and the rest.’
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,Islam didn’t originate in Africa, but rather in the Middle East. It is worth noting, however, that huge chunks of African culture became part and parcel Islamic in ancient times. The Hausa, Fulani, and parts of the Yoruba are responsible for large parts of Western Africa being Muslim, while the Swahili extended the religion and associated culture as far south as Mozambique, transforming the whole East Coast. It is true thatthe interiors of all countries south of and including Congo are mainly animist, but it’s also worth noting that most Afro-American slaves were captured in Muslim Western Africa. It is also worth noting that Sub-Sahara and Southeast Asia are famous for having converted to Islam through trade and not through invasion or slavery, as many people in America believe. Middle-Eastern people never colonized the Sub-Sahara except for the English-Egyptian Sudan colonies.
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,
