Muslims: Are We Bad?

" islam is not a religion of peace!" ( i didn't say that, some muslim guy on CNN said it, on one of those debations about islam)

@Syrup, I guess we've met @Bounties of Jannat. Simply put, i admire your use of English.Seems Fantastic.Seriously .

Nonetheless, you're picking on islam without due consideration of the social,political,cultural, context!!!. 4 God sake, if slay was used in Quran, was it not proscribed for war? @ least ISlam touches all aspects of our lives, from d goods ones to d undesirable ones(war etc).

As for the intellectuals u claim are beginning to confess, oh my God 4 d love of God , my answer would be, some people's position needn't necesarily be the true position of Islam.

In the whole world, if Muslims are bad who is good? You can believe that the good character you have ever came to meet, naturally comes out from Muslims. Nothing bad is from muslim when you take a look at the world's history.
In conclusion, the best peoples on the earth are MUSLIMS.

Never talk something like this.

It's YouTee.

The facts show that Islam tolerates non - Muslim minorities within the Muslim Nation and treats them as independent nations free to worship and live according to their own religious laws. This was outlined in the Covenant of Medina which became the world's first written constitution in 622 AD.

[b]Part of the Covenant of Medina

Muhammad invited the Jews to join the new society as an independent nation, governed by rabbinical court, within the Muslim Nation. The Jews accepted and an agreement known as The Covenant of Medina was signed in 622 AD.

The covenant guaranteed all the parties equality and freedom of religion; emphasized the sanctity of Medina, life, and individual possessions; and prohibited crime.

The Covenant of Medina was a giant leap for mankind and established the basis for treating non-Muslim minorities within the Muslim Nation which ruled the civilized world for more than 8 centuries.

Muslims in Europe:

When the Muslims ruled European countries including Spain, Portugal, southern France, southern Italy, and Sicily; Christians and Jews thrived and were allowed in Muslim Universities. This gave Europeans the scientific and artistic tools which helped them start the Renaissance several centuries later when the hold of the Catholic Church over Europe was weakened.

Muslim taxes were a fraction of the Roman taxes. Muslims considered their sphere of influence as one nation. They did not transfer wealth from the countries they occupied to Arabia or practice genocide against the native population.

When the tables were turned and the Catholic Spaniards defeated the Muslims in Spain and Portugal, they instituted the Spanish Inquisition which killed or expelled millions of Muslims who refused to convert to Christianity. The Jews suffered a similar fate at the hands of the Spaniards.

While millions of Christians and Jews continue to thrive in the Muslim countries after 14 centuries of Muslim domination, there is no trace of the millions of Muslims who lived for centuries in Spain and Portugal. Evidence of their past existence can only be found in beautiful palaces like Alhambra in Granada, flamenco music and dancing, Portuguese fado singing, and the abundance of Arabic words in the Spanish and Portuguese languages.

The Crusades:

The "real" holy wars were waged by the Crusaders against the Muslims in the Middle East. The Crusaders were brutal in their treatment of Muslim prisoners of war and civilians.  When the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem, they killed 70,000 Muslims. When the Muslims re-conquered the city they did not kill anybody.

Orthodox Christians were considered heretics and therefore did not escape the Crusaders' brutality. The Orthodox Churches, which were safe during centuries of Muslim rule, were looted by the Crusaders. The Holy Grail was not the only thing the Crusaders took from the Orthodox churches.

When Muslims ended the Crusades by re-conquering Acre from the Crusaders, Pope Nicolas IV barred Christians from selling timber to Muslims.  This embargo did not result in persecution of the Christians in the Muslim countries.

Napoleonic Crusade:

The Crusades were not an unfortunate episode during the dark age in Europe that ended a long time ago.  When Napoleon invaded Egypt, he ordered his troops to destroy the face of the sphinx and the tip of the great pyramid to leave his mark on them.

His cavalry desecrated al-Azhar mosque, the Muslim World's  equivalent of the Vatican and the first university in the world, with their horses.  The French soldiers burned the rare manuscripts in its library to keep warm.

• Napoleon was proud that he had ordered beheading 5-6 people daily and parading their heads in the streets to scare the population!
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After defeating the Turks in Jaffa, Napoleon ordered his troops to kill about 2500 Turkish soldiers from the city garrison who surrendered. The soldiers were led to the shore and the French kept firing at them until they ran out of ammunition then finished them off with bayonets.  The water turned red from the blood of the slain Turks.  In the city, the killing, raping, looting and burning lasted for 2 days and did not stop until the French troops were too exhausted to continue.

When a survivor of the Jaffa massacre killed a French general, his hands were cut, his wrists were burned then he was impaled.  After his slow death, his head was severed and was given to a French surgeon who showed the skull to his students in Paris as an example of a terrorist and a criminal.

It seems that the principles of the French revolution:   Freedom, equality and brotherhood did not apply to Muslims!  This was later confirmed when the French occupied Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia and declared them French territories.  The French citizenship was given to Jews and Christians but not to Muslims!

Modern Crusades:

When general Allenby, the commander of the British forces in the Middle East during World War I, entered Jerusalem and Damascus he proclaimed the end of the Crusades.

Nazi Crusade:

Abdel Wahab El-Messeri (Al-Ahram Weekly, 23 - 29 December 1999, Issue No. 461) reported:

"In the course of my research for the Encyclopedia of Jews, Judaism and Zionism, I was surprised to find how frequently the word "Muselmann" (Muslim) appeared in the Auschwitz concentration camp lists. According to one source, the victims who were led off to the gas chambers were called "aliens" ((??)) and according to other sources, "Muselmanner". In the Encyclopedia Judaica, I came across the following entry:

"Muselmann (Muslim in German) was a commonly used terms in the concentration camps, used to refer to the prisoners who were on the brink of death, that is to say those who began to show the final symptoms of starvation, disease, mental apathy and physical weakness. The term was primarily used in Auschwitz, but was also used in other camps."

We see here an epitome of one central dimension of the Western mentality. Whenever it destroys its victims it perceives them as "other," and the other, since the time of the Crusades, has always been the Muslim. In the Middle Ages, moreover, Muslims and Jews were closely linked in the Western mind. One can find, for instance, many paintings which portray the Prophet Muhammad (born 570 AD) flogging Christ.

The Nazi experience is an authentic product of this Western mindset. The Nazis were the standard bearers of this vision. They epitomised the Western confrontation with the oriental civilisation closest to Europe: the Islamic civilisation. They never forgot this burden, even when annihilating millions of inhabitants of Europe. The connotation of the term "Muselmann" was simply extended to include the "other" in general, whether Slavs, Jews or Gypsies (as has occurred in a similar manner with the word "Arab" in Zionist discourse). The writer of the preceding entry in the Encyclopedia Judaica attempted to explain how this term came into currency in the camps. The Nazis' victims, he said, would crouch cross-legged in the "oriental" manner and the expression on their faces would be wooden, as lifeless as a mask. One notes that the writer, in his definition, made no attempt to avoid the customary Western stereotype of Muslims. He simply substituted the word "oriental" for "Muselmann"."

Terrorist and fundamentalist have frequently replaced the word "oriental".

Muslims revere Moses, Jesus and all the prophets and consider Judaism and Christianity earlier phases of the primordial religion of God: Islam. The Muslims in Bulgaria, for example, were very active in protecting Jewish groups from persecution, and King Hussein V of Morocco refused to hand over his Jewish subjects to the Vichy government in France.

Unfortunately, Jews and Christians do not recognize Islam or the Prophet Muhammad's mission.  Most Christians and Jews consider Muslims sinners who are not chosen by God or saved and are, therefore, not entitled to equal or humane treatment.

Jewish Crusade:

The United Nations records document countless atrocities against Muslim civilians by the Jews in Palestine.  Infamous examples are the massacres in Kafr Qasim, Dir Yasin by the Jewish terrorist gangs before the UN divided Palestine into a Palestinian and Jewish states.

An Israeli historian uncovered credible evidence that troops massacred 200 Palestinians in a single village on the day Israel came into being in 1948.

Teddy Katz, who researched events in the village of Tantura for a masters degree, said he had spoken to witnesses including soldiers who were present to support his findings.

``It started at night and was over in a few hours,'' Katz said 14 Israeli soldiers were killed in the ambush on the village. Tantura, near Haifa in northern Israel, had 1,500 residents at the time. It was later demolished to make way for a parking lot for a nearby beach and the Nahsholim kibbutz, or cooperative farm.

Katz said the killing spree in Tantura was more tragic and bigger than in the village of Deir Yassin just west of Jerusalem, where scores of Palestinians were killed on April 9, 1948, in an assault by Jewish armed groups.

Reports just after the Deir Yassin killings spoke of some 240 deaths. Up to 700,000 Palestinians fled from their towns and villages or were driven out by Jewish troops in the conflict between Arab and Jew that surrounded Israel's creation.

Fawzi Tanji, now 73 and a refugee at a camp in the West Bank, is from Tantura and worked until May 1948 as a guard for the army in British Mandate Palestine.

He told Reuters he had watched as Israeli troops took over the village, lined men up against a cemetery wall and shot them. Katz said 95 men were killed at the cemetery.

``I was 21 years old then. They took a group of 10 men, lined them up against the cemetery wall and killed them. Then they brought another group, killed them, threw away the bodies and so on,'' Tanji said.

The Israeli newspaper Maariv, which reported Katz's findings Wednesday, quoted the commander of the Tantura attack as saying his troops had no grounds to ask questions or spare lives.

``It was war, When you see the enemy opposite you, he doesn't have a note saying he doesn't mean to shoot you. When you see him, you shoot him,'' retired colonel Bentz Pridan said. (New York Times, January 19, 2000)

Other infamous massacres include the massacres in Palestinian refugee camps in Sabra and Shatila, and the recent massacre in Qana (where Jesus once attended a wedding and changed water into wine!)  More than 200 women, children and old men who were seeking shelter near a UN camp were killed by deliberate Israeli bombing.

Israel occupied southern Lebanon for 20 years. In 1978, UN Security Council Resolution 425 called " upon Israel immediately to cease its military action against Lebanese territorial integrity and withdraw forthwith its forces from all Lebanese territory.

Instead of complying with the UN Security Council Resolution, Israel invaded additional Lebanese territory in 1982, 1993, and 1996 killing tens of thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians.

Israel has been holding scores of innocent Lebanese hostages, some for more than a decade, in prisons in Israel and Israeli-occupied south Lebanon.  Recent news reports also suggest that Israel has been systematically stealing fertile topsoil from Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon and trucking it to Israel.

The value of property, seized by Israel from 700,000 Palestinians who fled Palestine when the Jewish terrorists announced the formation of Israel in 1948, is estimated at more than 6 billion dollars excluding interest.

Violation of the civil, religious and human rights of the Muslim and Christian minorities in Israel, which are 18% of the population, had no effect on the flow of unlimited aid to Israel.  Israel has destroyed about 400 mosques and 400 churches since  the UN divided Palestine into  Palestinian and Jewish States in 1948.

It seems that the US policy of linking foreign aid to human rights and religious persecution records of foreign countries does not apply to Israel.

Serbian Crusade:

The Serb Christians waged war on the Muslim civilians  in Bosnia and Kosovo.   In Bosnia, more than 200,000 Muslims have been killed and more than 1400 mosques have been destroyed or damaged.  About 200 villages have been destroyed in Kosovo and about 250,000 refugees have fled for their lives.

When the Serb Christians invaded Kosovo, they destroyed all mosques despite the fact that the Christian monasteries were safe for centuries in the predominantly Muslim Kosovo.

When the Afghani Mujahideen ( those who conduct Jihad ), aided by fighters from Saudi Arabia trained and armed by the US, fought the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, they were hailed as freedom fighters. Jihad was good in those days. The US was calling for a worldwide Islamic Jihad against the Soviets.

When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, the Mujahideen were quickly denounced as terrorists because of their opposition to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese territories.

Some Christian fundamentalists even turned to violence when they could not impose their views legally and killed law enforcement officers in Waco and bombed abortion clinics in several cities.  The government and the media never refer to the threat of Christian fundamentalists.

Jewish fundamentalists murdered Rabin, their own prime minister, when he finally saw the light. Rabin realized that Israel has to make peace with the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab World to secure its long term prospects in the region.

Jewish fundamentalists oppose peace and conduct demonstrations with banners calling for killing the Arabs.  Many of these fundamentalists have killed Palestinian civilians and desecrated the Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and were either never arrested or quickly released from police custody because there were judged mentally unstable.

These activities are never reported by the media in the US the way they cover suicide bombings by desperate militants who have lost everything to illegal destruction of their homes and killing of their family members by the Israeli government or by Jewish settlers who are illegally taking over Palestinian territories and barring Palestinians from access to their farms and places of worship to pressure them into submission to the illegal status quo[/b].

The West ignores the threat of Christian and Jewish fundamentalists while actively opposing Muslim fundamentalists, even when they are democratically elected. 

The military takeovers of the elected governments in Algeria, Sierra Leone, Tajikistan and Turkey were encouraged by the West.  However, the military takeover of the elected government in Haiti was not tolerated.  The UN  authorized a US invasion to return the elected government to power.