Vlürch wrote:So, if being told that I'm wrong and me understanding why, changing my view on the issue (even if only slightly) gets me compared to flat-earthers and creationists, I have no idea what you expect. A complete 180 degree turn? When, as far as I know, I already agree with you on the important parts?
I know you said you're done, but please, tell me what part of what I said is so wrong that it warrants comparing me to some of the worst scum on the earth? I just don't get it.
I didn't understand what you were trying to say in that part I bolded up there.
A lot of this stuff is honestly pretty basic information. The only reason I'm inclined not to be surprised that you don't know it is because you said on another thread that you've never received formal education beyond primary school.
Jews could in the future be under threat of genocide by Arabs.
This is impossible in our lifetimes as long as the US continues to fund the state of Israel and supply it with weapons.
I mean, a huge part of Islamic extremism is centered on antisemitism, and Islamic extremism is on the rise, so Jews are going to be more threatened if it keeps growing.
Pragmatically speaking, most Islamic extremist movements do not have Israel as their primary concern. The only movement of any kind that seems to have attacked Israel in recent years appears to be Hamas. Most of these movements have attacked fellow Muslims plenty of times, though.
the Arabs I've talked to have been assholes. That includes a few Arabs in real life, including a doctor; he was definitely doing his job, but he was a total cunt and told me to man up as the first solution. Just because he turned out to help me more than I could imagine most doctors do, that doesn't erase his rudeness.
I'm sorry to hear that. I've met plenty of Arabs who were nice, including at least two on this forum.
I'd like to understand why they have any connections to terrorists
Well, if that's all you need to know, then why not just ask? Asking Uyghurs "why do any Uyghurs have any connections to terrorists?" is probably going to be a lot less offensive than saying, "You know, I just can't sympathize with you Uyghurs' struggle for independence because the fact that a small minority of your people are engaged in terrorism puts me off of it."
The basic answer at least seems pretty simple to me: Terrorism doesn't have an ethnicity or religious affiliation or anything. There are terrible people in every ethnic group (and religion, etc.), and if they have enough power to engage in terrorism, then they probably will. If their entire ethnic group is subjugated in some manner, then they can probably gain more or less widespread support, too.
most terrorism in China is committed by Uyghurs
No, it's not. It's committed by the Chinese government.
there are Palestinians that want to exterminate Israel out of existence; they don't necessarily actively seek to genocide Jews, but it could happen in the future much easier than Jews genociding Arabs
Okay, first of all, Palestinians committing genocide against Jews is not comparable to Jews committing genocide against all Arabs, if that's what you meant. The vast majority of Arabs live nowhere near Israel and are not going to do jack shit about Israel no matter how much they may say they want to.
Second, not all Jews live in Israel. Palestinians don't give two shits about Jews who don't.
Third, it is by no means easier for Palestinians to commit genocide against Israeli Jews than the other way around. (Modern) Israel was formed by the British government and has had plenty of support and assistance (including lots and lots of military capabilities and soldiers) from Western countries throughout its history. The range of modern-day Palestine (or Palestinian territory) is a direct result of the conflicts between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, and Palestinians get nowhere near as much support or assistance from anyone as Israel does.
if Israel started to genocide Arabs, it wouldn't be hard to imagine every single Muslim majority country in the world starting to bomb the fuck out of them and killing all Jews within their borders.
Very few countries border Israel, and the Jewish population elsewhere in the Middle East seems small enough to die out all on its own.
The opposite could never happen.
The opposite pretty much already has happened. The US is a longtime ally of Israel and has already bombed the fuck out of all sorts of Muslim-majority countries (and then some). It has never attacked Israel in any way.
That's like saying that if Finland, Estonia and Hungary were nuked out of existence, it wouldn't be worse from a cultural and linguistic point of view than if Slovenia, Bosnia and Poland were nuked out of existence.
That's exactly right, and you know I speak with authority on this at least as far as the linguistic point of view is concerned because I am a linguist. It's not worse; it's equally bad. One set of human beings being murdered is just as bad as another set of human beings being murdered. Murder is bad, period.
The latter three are all Slavic countries, but the former three are Uralic and the only non-Indo-European countries in Europe, so it would be a huge blow to diversity in Europe.
Sure, it would be a pretty big blow to diversity in Europe (you would still have some non-Indo-Europeans left, though: Basques, Maltese, Turks...). This does not make it any better at all for anyone else to be nuked, though.
Similarly, if Basques were genocided, it would be a fuckton worse than Finns being genocided because Basques speak a language isolate.
Every language will die someday, and once either Basque or Finnish dies, we will lose a lot of valuable linguistic information either way. Once Finnish dies, we will no longer have access to a lot of information about the Uralic languages. And sure, once Basque dies, we will no longer have access to a lot of information regarding the languages of Europe in general. But the flip side of the coin is that European languages in general have a lot in common, too; even Basque has a lot in common with other European languages.
For me, language death is one of the saddest things in the world.
Although this opinion is common and I actually study as wide a variety of endangered languages as possible, I have never really understood this opinion. I mean, sure, death of any kind is bad, but languages have probably been dying almost as long as they've been living. I think what's more tragic than the mere fact that languages are dying is the fact that languages are currently dying at a faster rate than we've ever seen before.
If the last speaker of a given language is murdered, that's worse than him/her dying of natural causes.
Well, yeah. If anyone is murdered, that's obviously worse than them dying of natural causes. That has nothing to do with languages.
The same applies to entire cultures and languages.
I have no idea what that's supposed to mean.
I didn't know there were speakers of other languages than Arabic in Palestine, so I now understand that my argument is flawed in that regard, but with Palestinian Arabic and Hebrew it's still valid because Hebrew is the only non-Arabic Semitic language spoken in the region which's whose speakers have an independent country.
In what region? And what difference does it make that they have their own country? They didn't, say, a hundred years ago.
Yes, but they are both Arabs. Jews are not, and as such, the extinction of Jews would be worse than the extinction of Palestinians.
The extinction of anyone is as bad as the extinction of anyone else. Fortunately, it doesn't seem as if either Israelis or Palestinians are realistically in danger of extinction at this time.
Yes, that's fortunately the case now, but if there was a full-blown war between Israel and any Arab country, Jews would be the ones at risk, not Arabs.
There have been at least three full-blown wars between Israel and Arab states, and Israel won every time. The first time AFAIK was in 1948 when it was invaded by five Arab states all at the same time.
I just don't like how the argument is often made that it has to be either one way or the other, not both. Like, if the community that the terrorist came from condemns it, nobody outside the community has the right to condemn it, and the other way around, that if someone outside the community condemns it, the community itself isn't expected to condemn it.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think you're misunderstanding the argument. The point is, it's always easy to point fingers at other people and blame them for terrorism or violence or any other bad thing. It's much harder to look at ourselves and think about what we can personally do about it, but it's also more important to do that because obviously, if everyone just points fingers at everyone else, no one will fix their own problematic actions.
Why can't we all unite in at least our opposition to terrorism? How can that be so hard, unless some of the non-terrorists are secretly in support of terrorism?
Every human is unique and different. Therefore, it tends to be somewhat difficult at least to unite humans for a particular cause.
That Jews are Jews even if they're also other things, so they can always have more in common with each other than others if they want, which is why it's surprising to me that there are such huge differences not only in individuals or small groups but within Israel as a country that relate directly to the Jewishness rather than other issues like every country has as well.
How is this any different from Finns?
Besides, remember that Jews are non-territorial, which means they come from all over the world. Finnish Jews, Russian Jews, Egyptian Jews, Indian Jews, and Japanese Jews all have very different sets of experiences despite all being Jews, in much the same way that Finns, Russians, Egyptians, Indians, and Japanese also all have very different sets of experiences despite all being humans with a mostly European/Asian cultural background.
I meant the different branches of Islam, since they're objectively not as different from one another as Christianity or Hinduism or whatever are from each other, so it would be easier to indoctrinate people into another sect within Islam gradually than to suddenly force an entirely new religion on them. Isn't something like that pretty much what happened in Oman?
Where'd you get the idea that that happened in Oman?
Sure, it may be easier to indoctrinate people into another sect than into another religion, but indoctrination is hard just in general. It's probably easier (in the sense of requiring less effort than conversion) to just let people believe whatever they want.
In the case of Bahrain, what apparently happened was that a (relatively extreme? militant?) sect of Shia Islam called the Qarmatians took over Bahrain but were later defeated by the Abbasids who practiced a more moderate version of Shia Islam. Later Sunni rulers apparently preferred this over the Qarmatians' brand of Shia Islam, which kind of makes sense, right? In fact, they encouraged it.
I know, but the founder of Buddhism didn't personally massacre tons of people like the founder of Islam did.
The founder of Islam didn't, either.
Nonviolence is at the core of Buddhism
Islam, too.
Violent Buddhists are contradicting themselves and their beliefs and they're hypocrites, violent Muslims are strict followers of their religion with no contradiction and often no hypocrisy
Nope. They're all contradicting themselves and their beliefs and are hypocrites.
Sufi interpretations are different from the obvious
Nope. They're just different.
Yeah, and that's sad, but it also has probably a lot to do with Xinjiang having been a part of China for so long
Well, yeah.
and it's even known by the Chinese name.
Well, there is an alternative in use.