By death count? Even if this is so, there are vastly more white people in the US. What's important are the per capita numbers.
and the people pushing to make their religion the basis of law are also Christians, not Muslims.
Why would you expect Muslims to try to impose their law on a society when they haven't got anywhere near the political power to succeed? How dumb do you think they are? The important questions are whether they'd try to impose their religion if they had much more political clout, and what the outcome of a successful imposition would be for the people here (hint: not awesome).
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It's not anti-Christian to recognize patterns. You can't be a clinic that provides reproductive health services (even without abortions!) without getting threats, and you definitely can't provide abortions without getting death threats or even getting killed.
If you look at mass killings in the US, the majority of major attacks in the US have been done by men who are white and nominally Christian, falling into the broad categories of "Christianity-motivated" or "bitter at life, esp. the military or women". Check out a list of US shootings at http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-m... for instance.
Full disclosure: I'm some version of Christian too, but I feel quite threatened by other Christians who want to enforce their versions of morality upon me by law. I do not feel threatened by Sharia. When I got some testing done on my fetus at 20 weeks and was faced with a possible, but thankfully irrelevant, choice of being forced to carry a terminally ill or dead kid to term or not, it wasn't Muslims forcing me to make that choice.
Also, I'm currently in US and I don't feel my way of life is being destroyed by Muslim people. I think anti-Muslim sentiment is more of a negative influence on my life, as I work in academia and have had to deal with co workers and students being unable to continue research due to the immigration ban amongst other things. Also the whole "an Indian engineer was shot and killed by a white man for looking like a Muslim" that occurred recently has put fear into a lot of my peers, a significant chunk of them Indian or Pakistani. It's really kind of made my workplace tense and afraid whenever current events and the current political administration are brought up.
Most all major acts of terror in the USA have been by white people. I believe the vast majority have been by whites in the USA. In the last 10 years included. I don't see where you're getting the "major terror attacks" thing. In USA we had a stint where white men were shooting up schools and killing children practically every month. I'm pretty sure white people have committed more acts of mass killing in the USA than Islamic terrorists. Where is the pattern recognition here?
Anti-Islamic sentiment has long been regarded as applying to a lot more than Islamic people. Sikhs, Indians, anyone that looks "brown" enough gets the anti-Islamic sentiment. I've even had an anti-Islamic person tell me that there's a rule in the Quran that allows an Islamic person to lie about being Islamic if they feel they are in danger, and therefore you can never trust anyone who looks Islamic, because they could be lying about their belief in Islam. I'm not saying you personally agree with this, but these are also other anti-Islamic sentiments I've discussed with my peers. They seem to trend towards racism.
Given they constitute 1% of the population, would you expect to feel that way? Why would a visible 1% minority group openly try to attack the way of life of the host population?
"Most all major acts of terror in the USA have been by white people.... In USA we had a stint where white men were shooting up schools and killing children practically every month."
Those aren't considered terrorist attacks. Also, what are the per-capita numbers? Isn't that what's important?
"I've even had an anti-Islamic person tell me that there's a rule in the Quran that allows an Islamic person to lie about being Islamic if they feel they are in danger"
Is this what they were referring to?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taqiya
How to spot someone ignorant of history: Use of the argument "Thing X (that just happens to relate to contemporary political angle the are pushing) caused the fall of Rome."
Pretty good, all things considered.
> I'd prefer they integrate, speak the language, and stop blowing shit up.
Guess what: For 99.999% of them this already holds true.
> Apparently that's too much to ask.
No it isn't, and the refugees actually agree with you.
> I'd also prefer they stop preaching support for fucking Sharia law, but that's too much to ask.
Oh, the old Sharia law saw. Again, in no Western country is there a realistic chance of Sharia law being applied to you or me. But if two parties consent to having a non-official arbitration done then they are welcome to do so. Similar things happen in the Vatican and in the Jewish community and nobody ever thought that that was a problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Vatican_City
(Note that the Vatican holds a very special position in spite of being inside the borders of Italy).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beth_din
> You've got some real cognitive dissonance.
Do you see me as supporting Sharia law? As for being against integration, teaching immigrants the local language or being pro 'blowing shit up':
I'm against Sharia law as much as I'm against religion: but I recognize the law of the land here that says that people are allowed to do this since they are consenting adults, even if the net effects of both are quite possibly negatives. Just like I can't stop you from eating bad food or from smoking. Those are freedoms we give to everybody in order to not limit ourselves. Reduce those freedoms for others and we too will end up with reduced freedoms.
I'm hardline against genital mutilation, whether done by Islam adherents or Jews is not relevant to me. That is the sort of invasion of bodily integrity that I really strongly disagree with and that no person should have the right to do to another, even when we're talking about parents and children.
I'm 'pro' integration, but I also recognize that not everybody integrates equally well. And some simply don't care. Most notably: American, British and Japanese friends who after having been here decades still don't speak the language because they simply do not need to. Contrast with most Turkish and Moroccan immigrants who speak the language just fine.
Other than that their 'integration' is their affair, not mine and the embarrassing integration courses that the government forces on refugees here are more hinder than help (and cost a fortune). Who gives a damn where our (immigrant) queen comes from?
As for blowing shit up: the people that have the most to lose from assholes blowing shit up (or, you know, white guys running people through with swords) are the refugees and the immigrants. Because they (and their children) are going to be the ones to pay the price, not the idiots that blow themselves up.
Also, fwiw, Islam is not a race, hence you can't be racist for criticizing it. It is an ideological system. In that way it is no different than Democracy, Communism, Buddhism, Capitalism, Mormonism, Anarchism, etc, etc. Race doesn't define any of those ideologies either. In a free society we must be allowed to criticize ideas.
I'm allowed to criticize Islamism and its practices and beliefs. I'm also allowed to criticize Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, et al. However only one of these ideologies regularly/commonly threatens to kill (and actually will kill) people who leave the faith. Only one of these ideologies has a large constituency who condones the intentional targeting of innocent civilians. It isn't a majority, but it isn't a fringe 1% either. Pew Research Surveys show the number to be 20-30% of these practitioners worldwide. (http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religi...)
http://www.vintag.es/2014/09/pictures-of-tehran-iran-ca-1960...
The problem with all this is if it achieves escape velocity then it can take a long long time to undo the damage. We're almost four decades into Iran being an Islamic state and I wonder how that would have all ended if there had not been so much meddling in Iran and Iraq (and less money flowing to the house of Saud).
Quite possibly Iran (then Persia) would have been a real powerhouse in the region, highly educated citizenry and vast natural resources.
Very appropriate that the US had a huge hand to play in dislodging the normalcy of life in both of these places.
[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-340480...
Here is Ethiopia for instance:
http://addisairport.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/addisabab...
Highrises are simply a function of the price of ground in cities going up dictating more use per square unit of area.
And FWIW the roots of most of our civilizations lie in the Arab world, at some point in time those regions were the moderns and our regions were backwards.
To directly answer your question: Major cities like that have existed all over the globe for many centuries, the 'modern' look as you call it was most likely inspired by looking abroad but that has never stopped anybody from imitation.
Turkey was well underway to becoming a very modern state, Iran ditto. All this long before we began propping up the Shah and destabilizing the region around Turkey. The meddling began roughly around the time oil became important and really took off after World War II, in part accelerated because of the cold war.
Yes, Islamic fundamentalism is the anomaly, and it would not nearly be as powerful as it is without the CIA and the Saudi's funding and arming their initial round.
Let's just use this as an example, from the website you linked to above: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yOvi_Hupn0M/VA34gNyV1DI/AAAAAAAA8R...
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Do you think that kind of thing was "normal" for the Islamic middle east?
Turkey was well underway to becoming a very modern state
The temporary modernization of Turkey was a result of having rulers and elites who looked to the west to copy their success. It was absolutely not a result of a popular movement. Modernization was not supported by the bulk of the population at any point in time.
You mean collaterals and the US ?