Peaceful folks in Indonesia only killed thousands of Chinese descents and rapped hundreds, in 1998.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1998_riots_of_Indonesia

It was a really horrible event and I'm ashamed that it ever happened. Whilst racial and ethnic tensions [1] have always existed in Indonesia to a certain degree, the event should not be a reflection of the general populace.

I would like to offer you some context FWIW.

Indonesia was in a really bad economic shape [2], the people were frustrated and angry, and were looking for someone to blame. There were already a lot of resentment due to the wealth disparity between the minority ethnic Chinese and the rest of the population, and the riots and violence escalated very quickly.

The Indonesian army could have defused the situation right away through intervention (i.e. deployment of troops), however they was seen as rather complicit in this event for their non-action. Looking back, the more plausible explanation is that they were busy with their own internal power struggles (there were strong rumours of a Coup de Etat, splitting the army depending on their support of Soeharto).

In the 15+ years since the event, the Indonesians have made significant efforts to repair the relationships with the minority ethnic Chinese, and some progress were made. Just to give two examples (which were unthought of in the Soeharto, New Order era):

Gus Dur (Abdurrahman Wahid), one of the President post-Soeharto, is a proponent of pluralism and provided significant goodwill by declaring Chinese New Year as one of the public holidays, and allowing the ethnic Chinese to publicly embrace their cultural heritage.

Ahok (Basuki Tjahaja Purnama) is the first ethnic Chinese Governor of Jakarta, the Indonesian capital. Despite constant opposition and smear campaign from fundamentalist Islamic parties, he is very popular and has a lot of support from the people.

Notes:

[1] - Indonesia has over 300 ethnic groups. Most people speak more than one `language`: `Bahasa Indonesia` and various local dialect(s).

[2] - Currency was highly devaluated (Rp.2000/$US down to Rp.10,000/$US), businesses closed down, and a lot of financial institutions went bankrupt and most of the surviving ones went to a firesale to foreign entities.

thanks for the update.

New phenomenon? Have you had your head in the sand?

Classical civilization was destroyed by Islam!

Headlines from a few Centuries ...

5th Century - Spain: knights defeated and heads cut off, placed into a pile so high a man on horseback could not see over it.

7th Century - Muhammad sends Khalid out, destroys Jazima tribe. - Khalid at the Battle of Olayis spend 2 days rounding up the loses and cutting off their heads in a dry stream bed until it ran red with their blood. - Khalid takes the Captain of the Zoroastrian tribe, cuts his head off and lets the blood drain into the soil then rapes the wife of the Captain on the bloody soil! This is the nature of Jihad! - Umar's conquest of Jerusalem; makes all Christians and Jews dhimmis (3rd class semi-slave).

8th Century - Attack on Sind: 26,000 Hindus slaughtered. - Armenian Nobles and their families (children too) herded into a church and burned alive in it. - Euphesus: 7,000 Greeks enslaved.

9th Century - All new churches destroyed. - Amorium: massive enslavement of ALL Christians. - Egyptian Christians revolt over the jizyah (the dhimmis tax under Shariah).

10th Century - Thessalonica: 22,000 Christians enslaved. - Seville: All Christians massacred. - 30,000 Churches destroyed in Egypt and Syria.

11th Century - 6,000 Jews in Morocco murdered. - Hundreds of Jews in Cordoba murdered. - 4,000 Jews in Granada murdered. - Georgia and Armenia invaded. - Hindustan: 15,000 murdered; 500,000 enslaved.

12th Century - Yemen: Jews forced to convert or die. - Christians of Granada deported to Morocco. - India: many cities wiped out, convert of die: 20,000 enslaved in a single town, the rest beheaded.

13th Century - India: 50,000 Hindu slaves freed by conversion. - 20 year campaign created 400,000 new Muslims out of Hindus. - Buddhist monks butchered, nuns raped. - Damascas and Safed: Christians mass murdered. - Jews of Marrakeesh massacred - Tabriz - forced conversion of Jews under threat of death.

Are you getting the TRUE PICTURE yet??

14th Century - Cairo riots; churches burned. - Jews of Tabriz forced to convert (see above) - Tamerlane (makes Hitler look like a saint!) in India kills 90,000 in a single day. - India: another 30,000 slain. - Tughlaq took 180,000 slaves.

15th Century - Tamerlane devastates 700 villages. - Iraq: Tamerlane annihilated Nestorian and Jacobite Christians. - Constantinople falls to Islam after 700 years of relentless wars.

16th Century - India: son of Tamerlane destroyed temples, forced conversions. - General build two towers of human heads following victories so high you could not see over them. - Nobel women commit mass suicide to avoid sexual slavery and rape.

17th Century - Jews of Yemen and Persia forced to convert or die. - Greek Christians forced to convert or die. - Persia: Zoroastrians persecution taken to new heights. - India: 600,000 Hindus murdered by Akbar.

18th Century - Zoroastrians nearly wiped out world wide as persecution increases. - Jews of Jedda expelled. - Jews of Morocco wiped out. - Hindu persecution continues in increasing levels.

19th Century - Iran: forced conversion of Jews (do I need to say it?) under pain of death. - Jews of Baghdad wiped out. - 250,000 Armenian Christians slaughtered in Turkey. - Remaining Zoroastrians in Iran wiped out.

20th Century - over 1,000,000 Turkish Armenians massacred in jihad.

Are you getting the drift on how BAD ISLAM is?

Let me say it again: Classical Civilization was DESTROYED by Islam!!

Of course, but you are not entitled to personal facts. Islamic extremism is a 7th century phenomenon and it never went away.

7th century? This is pretty immediately after the inception of Islam. What happened during that time frame?

Rome wasn't a world power anymore and nothing had replaced it yet in Europe. Because of that, if you look at the 7th century on world scale, it is surprising for modern westerners how few European conflicts are worth mentioning. See for example http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:7th-century_conflict..., http://www.fsmitha.com/time/ce07.htm

The earlier Romans and later Europeans, starting with Charlemagne and the Vikings in the 8th century, make up for that, though.

Muslims were cruel in those times, but I don't think they were anything special (read that section about Constantinople in 602 in that first link, and think of Rome, the crusades, and the colonization of Africa, centuries later). They just happened to have the overhand for a while.

No questions about what you say. But I was specifically referring to what we now call Islamic terrorism with its hate for the western world and other religions. This seems to be new and kind of a response to the conduct of the western world.

It seems the QuRan (like the Communist manifesto etc) provided an ideology that drove people to conquer and feel good about it. There have been many reasons to expand and conquer in the past, and they were all usually driven by some ideology. Hellenism, Communism, are two examples.

The political idea that a society should be run according to the principles of Islam is sometimes called "Islamism". A huge reason there isn't much "Christianism" today is that the New Testament was written by people who didn't have much power and so focused on peaceful proselytizing. That is not to say that the Church and other institutions didn't at times wield great political power and seek to maintain it. But rather that the WRITINGS advocate for more like anarchism than a philosophy that encourages converting others by the sword.

Judaism has never placed emphasis on proselytizing - whether by the sword or not. It had a much more exclusive character so there is no sense that Jews living in a democratic country would dream of converting that country's structure to one that follows the rules laid out in the Torah.

So Islam in a political and cultural sense is closer to Communism than Judaism and Christianity. And we see much of the same dynamics. McCarthyism in the USA and the Red Scare are now replaced with fear of radical Islam.

> It seems the QuRan (like the Communist manifesto etc) provided an ideology that drove people to conquer and feel good about it.

It seems like the Bible did that, too.

I mean, have you even casually glanced at the history of the West?

> The political idea that a society should be run according to the principles of Islam is sometimes called "Islamism". A huge reason there isn't much "Christianism" today is that the New Testament was written by people who didn't have much power and so focused on peaceful proselytizing.

"Christianism" is one of the solid bases of support for the political Right in the USA. To say that there isn't much of it in the world is, well, completely misguided.

> But rather that the WRITINGS advocate for more like anarchism than a philosophy that encourages converting others by the sword.

If you view the "writings of Christianity" as the New Testament only, that might be defensible, but actual Christians generally don't, and much Christianism -- which is nowhere near as elusive as you make it out to be -- is based very strongly on particular interpretations of the Old Testament (and particular interpretations of the New Testament that make those interpretations of the Old Testament valid for Christians.)

> It had a much more exclusive character so there is no sense that Jews living in a democratic country would dream of converting that country's structure to one that follows the rules laid out in the Torah.

Yeah, I mean, its inconceivable that, for instance, a Jewish-majority democracy would, for instance, prohibit grocery stores from remaining open on Saturday's because of the importance of maintaining the Sabbath [0].

[0] http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.601972

While what you say has some validity, I think you've mostly attacked straw men in what I actually said.

Islamism urges for instituting sharia courts for instance, with judges trained in Islamic law, which includes the death penalty for homosexual sex provided that it is sufficiently proven and the person is unrepentant. Comparing that with the attitudes of the Christian right today yields a vastly different level of punishment in their policy prescriptions. Opposing the state officiating gay marriage and killing homosexuals are two vastly different levels of enforcement. I'm not just picking on Islam here - homosexuality is illegal in India for instance, largely because of Hinduism.

And anyway I am talking about Muslims living in say Sweden who would support the overthrow of its liberal democracy in favor of an Islamic state.

As for the "elisiveness" of Christianism, by every measure it is far less. The number of radical Islamist groups in the world is far greater. I think the Lord's Resistance Army is an example of an actual Christianist group, and even it formed in response to Islamist groups UPDF and NRA committing genocide. One may also count the KKK as a "Christianist" group in some sense although they were more white supremacists. I see this dearth of Christianist revolutionaries today because the writings have very little that necessitates conquering other societies by the sword.

As for Jews... I said that they aren't looking to take over OTHER countries to run them by the principles of the Torah because those principles were spelled out ONLY for Jews. Now of course some Jews were involved in organizing revolutions but as Communists for example. Trotsky and Sverdlov did not consider themselves very Jewish, and they certainly were animated by another ideology.

As for Israel having certain laws such as no public transportation on Saturdays, that is again not at all the same as conquering other countries NOR even restricting others' religious freedoms. Anyone is free to keep their store open on Saturday. France's majority french population "forces" all the government offices closed on Bastille day. USA post offices are closed on Sundays. I think equivocating between that and, say, preventing women from driving, is a bit disingenuous.

Look I will put it simply: there is one religion that has led to more countries with an official State Religion than all others, and among these countries are some of the only ones that crack down on Christians and openly deny Jews entry. You can see that religion in this map:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_religion

I have several friends who are Muslims and I have spoken to Muslims as well as Arabs from all over the world. Many agree that Islamism is dangerous and are not in favor of it. But many are in favor of it and I am worried they would support Islamism if it became an issue the same way Germans who weren't super pro Nazism nevertheless helped bring the Nazis to take absolute control of Germany:

http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religi...

See what happens when it's worded in a certain way:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeC2OLv_Fhw

That's not a lot of steps from having people help out in a revolution that will restrict some group's human rights.

The one religion that has led to more countries with a state religion than any others is Christianity. It's true that mamy of those governments with state religions have since been abandoned them or been forcibly replaced or had the state religion become a vestigial relic with little substance in the same way many monarchies in the same countries have, but that's more due to social developments resulting from economic developments in those countries (in many cases including the social development of declining Christianity in the populace) -- and exhaustion and disdolutionment resulting from centuries of war under the banner of Christianism, including much between various Christianizes with slightly different views of Christianity and what it demanded of civil government -- than a result of mildness in the writings of Christianity vs those of Islam.

I don't disagree that violent Islamism is a particular problem in the world today, probably moreso than violent extremism leveraging any other religion; where I disagree is with your claim in the previous post that this is due to a fundamental difference between Islam and other religions rather than a difference in present circumstances. And I think that distinction is important because confusing the need to fight Islamism with a need to fight Islam changes fighting violentrepressive religious extremism to using repressive religious extremism as an excuse for violent repressive extremism on the basis of religion.

Ok I don't understand the last sentenxe but I think we both agree that we shouldn't confuse the need to fight Islamism with a need to fight Islam. You may be right that Christianity has just as much potential to be used to justify Christianism - but as you and I both agree we now have very few nations AND very few violent revolutionary groups seeking to replace existing governments with ones organized along a "Christian political structure" whatever that may be. I was trying to say that Christianity doesn't COMPEL large swaths of the population at any given point to strongly support a political revolution towards Christianism, which is why the separation of Church and State is rather stable. Whereas I feel that the QuRan among its contents contains prominent instructions as to how a polity is to be set up. Christian writings have this too but the organizational principle is more akin to anarchism so whatever the political leaders wind up using isn't from the NT. Don't you see a difference in the nature of the writings at all when it comes to political structure, conquering and physical violence? I will give one example:

http://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=8&verse=67

Tell me where do you have a comparable verse in the NT? These pronouncements have been interpreted to apply to modern times as well, since Muslims are to emulate Mohammad. That is what I mean.

Look I could be wrong and at the end of the day the only danger I see is in the political and violent aspects of the writings, as something that makes it hard to separate Mosque and State given enough people. It's a "rule of the game" that you can't jettison as easily as Christians can. That's what I meant.