19 January, 2007

More Muslim women running? :: Salon

Salon asks.

6 comments:

nzm said...

Also read the comments in reply to the article.

Fear and ignorance rear their ugly heads once more. The people who write this crap should really analyse what they're truly angry about.

Anonymous said...

"...but maybe this is a shortsighted view..."

you betcha! I'd personally rather see all female athletes adopt the women beach volleyball attire; but this article is exceedingly ignorant and western-femi-centered; and only more intelligent than anonymous's comment @ 23:03 above!

Anonymous said...

Dredge, why do you deem my comment not intelligent? NZM asked what the commenters are so angry about, and I answered him. Are you implying that my response is somehow incorrect?

Before 9/11, a vast majority of Westerners were generally indifferent to Islam. After 9/11, and Daniel Pearl, a large majority have become very hostile to Islam. It's not too hard to figure a causal link. (The dancing in the Arab street on 9/11 didn't really generate a lot of goodwill, either.)

Or do you think that Westerners should not be unhappy about those events?

nzm said...

Indifferent to Islam?

Most likely ignorant of Islam - and they still are.

What you see on TV news is glorified sensationalism. Did you know that CNN retracted that film footage of people celebrating in the streets and confessed to it being at least 10 years old? I was in the US during the time of 9/11. I saw that footage being screened and I later heard and saw the CNN anchorwoman apologising for it being shown. But by then, the damage was already done - the images were firmly planted in the minds of the majority of people who saw them and believed them to have happened that day.

There have also been TV programs to educate people on Islam and muslim society, but I bet that none of those message board writers/trolls have ever bothered to watch them, or investigate the concept of Islam any further.

Instead they choose to believe that it is an extremist religion based on violence and jihad, because if they learned any differently, they would have to find a new topic to be angry about, or even more difficult, figure out what makes them into angry people in the first place.

Anonymous said...

NZM: too many Westerners have received their Islamic education from bin Laden. This is a problem for Moslems, not Westerners. They are responding what was done to them, nothing else. You asked what they are "truly angry about" as if there is some long and complicated answer. I suggest the answer is as simple as the one I gave in the first resonse.

I live here (happily) in the UAE, and I know how misunderstood Western ideas about the Islamic and Arab world are, but you can't blame them for feeling the way they do.

Could you provide some sort of concrete link about he "dancing in the streets" video being false? Your claim is the first of the kind I have heard. Sounds more like a conspiracy theory to me. I sincerely doubt CNN deliberately pulled out archival footage and falsely claimed it to be current - that would have been a massive scandal.

Anonymous said...

Dredge: every foreign culture gets ignorantly and stereotypically misrepresented in the popular media of the West. (And the culture of the West also gets similarly misrepresented in the popular media of this region, indeed.) Islam was not singled out in that respect. Truth is, before 9/11, probably 19 out of 20 "average" American were completely indifferent to Islam, they didn't know much about it, they didn't think about, didn't care one way or another, it wasn't on their daily radar. The average American thought about Islam as often as they thought about Ecuador or Tuvalu.

On 9/11, Islam was forced to the forefront of American thought by bin Laden and Mohammed Atta. It's really that simple.

It's a shame that many Americans believe that Islam wants to destroy western civilization, but that's the message that was delivered on 9/11.

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