I think I get what alliance is trying to say, and I predominatly agree with his points (if I have them correctly)
Basically, the argument might be phrased similar to the NRA's "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." Only in this case, exchange Islam for guns. I do see some truth in this claim, and it would be foolish to outright claim that there are no personal or psychological issues involved in the mentality of those who do wrong things.
There is also the fact that unlike guns, Islam is not a tangible object. In the case of guns, people are by nature more aggressive and violent in the presence of guns than they in the company of a tennis racket or some such. Leonard Berkowitz studied this phenomina and claimed "The finger pulls the trigger and the trigger pulls the finger". Islam cannot be like this, because aside from religious artifacts, there is nothing physical or perceptable about it. Now, the argument could be that the artifacts could instill aggression in people like the gun, but I find that absurd. A gun instills aggression because it is commonly associated with aggression in our society. While I believe a proponderance of religious symbols in a society may foster a stronger polorized belief, it would certainly not foster aggression, unless your claim is that Muslims are angry because they see religious things that they believe in.
I think there also needs to be some teasing out of certain paths of argumentation. For instance, I would say that the influence Islam has on people to be violent is not really related to the influence Islam has on people treating women as property. Honestly, in the majority of human rights abuse cases, I would agree that ALL Abrahamic religions at some point promoted these things, and they were prominant during theocratic rule of Europe. However, the Western world secularized, finding these teaching to be out of touch with human decency, whereas in the Islamic world, during pretty much the same time as the American Civil Rights movement, there were women fighting against secular, Western governments for what we would see as their right to be oppressed under religious rule. The photography of Shirin Neshat is phenomenal for showing this. I think in this case there is a fairly high corelation between secularized and theocratic society and the practice of religious oppression, however, there are other theocratic societies that are not based on Abrahamic texts, that have very differant, if as strictly held, beliefs about the roles of men and women and human rights. Instances of these in my mind are many native and aborigional societies, the Norse (thanks Alf 🙂), Tibet, India. For this reason, I think the very specific beliefs of all theocratic Abrahamic societies are the cause of the human rights abuses (as secular westerns would define them) that are seen in the Muslim world today. The fact that the more secularized a Muslim country becomes, the more freedom their women have to enjoy autonomy also seems to indicate this.
Violence and religion may be a little more complex. While I do see Islam as a very strong motivating factor, that could easily be redefined as confrmity and authority rather than the influences of the faith itself. By this I mean, people are motivated to do violence by people they see as authority figuers and the disceminators of truth. I would consider this to be a stronger motivating factor than other socio-economic things, seeing that many "terrorists" are educated and have some degree of fiscal determination over their future. Not all of them, and many local suicide bombers I'm sure are easier to manipulate if they are in poverty, but in a case like 9-11, my understanding is that the majority of the terrorists were college educated. This shows there is a definate link between what people believe and how they behave. However, to claim that what these people believe is "Islam" becomes a mincing of terms. Wahhibist Islam certainly believes in Jihad and other violence against Westerners, though there are Western Muslims that are not interested in these things at all.
Saying "Islam promotes violence" to me is true, if a generalization of something that would take many paragraphs to explain. The most potent example, to me, comes from North America, and involves no violence whatsoever.
Andres Serrano took a picture of a crucifix submerged in a bottle of his own urine and called it "Piss Christ". Christians took great offense to this and wrote letters, lobbied congress, and so forth. All major media outlets still ran the picture, and it has never been controversial that they did this.
Fast forward to the recent problem with the Danish Cartoons. The only places where these pictures were published in North America were very local magazines and publications, +1 regional magazine in Canada's west. In many cases, even prior to the publication of these pictures, Muslims rallied accross North America, looking for their governments to condem the pictures and prevent that type of thing from being shown again. In Canada, there was even a case brought to the Human Rights body because of the western magazine publication.
all other issues aside, this is a clear display of how the religious beliefs of people can make them act in ways that are against the general decloration of human rights. There is a definate difference in both the actions and the intensity of that action between the Christians and Muslims in two similar cases. There was no violence, but holding anti-freedom of speech rallies in downtown Toronto is a pretty extreme thing for 21st century Canada.
Leonard Berkowitz - http://www.dushkin.com/connectext/psy/ch15/bio15b.mhtml
Shirin Neshat - http://images.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en&q=shirin%20neshat&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&um=1&sa=N&tab=wi
Andres Serrano - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andres_Serrano
Piss Christ - http://www.artnet.com/artwork_images_423908876_165080_andres-serrano.jpg
Muhanned Cartoons - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy
