oaf@mit-vax.UUCP (Oded Feingold) (10/14/86)
> All the Moslems I know personally are very fine individuals, > particularly friendly, courageous, polite and intelligent. > Also, every Jewish person I know I like and admire. I wish > the two groups would stop fighting each other, and instead > figure out how to deal with Soviet imperialism. [Tedrick] ------------------------------ Last things first - a major goal of Soviet imperialism involves keeping Israelis and Arabs at each other's throats. Mr. Tedrick's question sounds strange, since he's effectively asking why not ev- eryone outsmarts the Russians all the time. Next, a criticism. The reasonable response to negative racial or religious prejudice should not be _positive_ racial or religious pre- judice, rather a rejection of the prejudice. I've met Jews and Mus- lims I would cheerfully murder, as well as some I'd die defending. (Maybe I'm stereotyping too, but ya gotta _work_ to get into one of my categories.) That response also covers Martillo's arguments. Assume for a se- cond that his characterization of Islam is correct, and Muslims are under religious obligation to maltreat others. That doesn't mean any individual Muslim does so; people pick and choose which parts of their religion they uphold, or we'd all be fundamentalist somethings. Re- garding people as stereotypes is not only dishonest and self-defeating (by virtue of deliberate self-deception, misestimation of existing en- emies and willful, gratuitous creation of new ones), but is a delibe- rate abnegation of one's own critical faculties. In characterizing som