Is anyone else fed up with Muslims complaining all the time?

Because so far, it has been. When newspapers cravenly refused to print the controversial cartoons, or do anything else that might offend Muslims, they gave a clear message that violence is an effective tool for the Muslim world to get what they want.People need to understand that they have no right not to have their religion disagreed with. Unless they lived in America. You have no idea what Christians can get away with here.

Did they? Given the level of violence occuring in the background of both of those situations, to my mind it's impossible to say that their non-violent actions had such an effect.

You know, algebra has formed the basis for every mathematical/computational advance in the past several hundred years. Look at that word, "algebra." Just by the sound of the word where do you think that's from? For that mater, why do you think they're called "arabic" numerals?It's hilarious when people indict the Muslim religion for "not contributing anything", and then looking up at the stars and calling them by the same names given them by Islam's astronomers centuries ago.Here's what I think happened, Randman. You heard someone say that "Muslims gave us zero", and you took that to mean that they hadn't ever invented anything. What you failed to understand was that they were telling you that the concept of zero - a digit that expresses the lack of something - originated in the Muslim world. But, hey. Never mind that you wouldn't even have computers without the contributions of Muslim scholars. I'm sure you'll figure out how to give Christians the credit for all that stuff. (Though how you'll get modern computer technology without mentioning the Christian persecution of Alan Turing, I have no idea.)

Well, I think it's easy to forget that a few extremists don't speak for everybody.But I think it's undeniable that we live in an age when the religious are hyper-sensitive to any suggestion that the rest of us don't take their bullshit seriously. These riots exist in the same social reality as the made-up "war on Christmas" that Christianists were so up in arms about.Christians have been making a big deal for decades about how they have the right to not be disagreed with. Any surprise that Muslims are now clamoring for the same? And is it any surprise that in the Middle East, such clamor would result in violence? If Christians lived in the same conditions, they'd be doing the same thing. (I think Dan just made this point.)

And yet people fought. Not his people, but people nonetheless. Same with Ghandi.Certainly those figures were prominent, and remain so, but who's to say that they actually had any effect at all? Maybe the successes we think of as theirs were merely the success of violent action, which they co-opted.

I don't believe that they've said that, though. They don't claim the right to respect and dignity because they've offered it to others; they claim the right to those things because they're Muslim. I agree. Of course, they take the exact same position most religious partisans take - they're not under an obligation to respect religions that are false. But everybody should respect their religion, which is true.It's pretty ridiculous, I agree.