I talk to you the way I do because I don't like you. In the other thread you made a lot of assumptions about me and attempted to talk down to me based on nothing more than pure hubris, and I didn't appreciate it.
Wait, who was making assumptions about who in that thread?
You assumed I'd only been to India "a few times" and then you called me a "fakkit" before I had said one word about you. Then you ripped on my wife for supposedly being Arab (she's not) and claimed I was a "foreigner with feigned concern for the lowly native" and lied saying that I'd sent you PM's "about women brushed up on in crowded Indian markets" before I had made ONE assumption about your insecure American self. Not to mention all the other mocking you engaged in about the things that I actually did say about myself.
You were already ripping on me and talking down to me like crazy
long before I put you in your place.
And of the few and very clearly stated assumptions I made, the ONLY one which you claimed I was wrong about was that your parents were wealthier than the average Indian....and if you really want me to believe that your parents were English speakers from Delhi and Bengaluru who immigrated to America and had you there in the 1980s or whatever while being poorer than the average Indian.
Here again you're assuming that I was a Muslim because of a girl, which isn't true at all.
No, I actually asked you a series of questions with various possibilities of quite a wide range:
"Is your family Muslim or not? Are they the kind of violent people you are railing against here, or just idiots who are ignorant of their own religious teachings? Or were you a Muslim convert? Is this some sort of thing where you starting practicing Islam to simp for some Muslim chick or chicks, and when it didn’t work out you flipped back to the traditional hate with a vengeance? Which one was it? We deserve the truth."
Later on in the same comment I made a joke about you going to Islam for a girl, but that was pretty obviously a joke and you had the whole series of questions to show that I was leaving the door open.
II was a Muslim because I have always been interested in religion and spirituality since a teenager and Islam attracted me. I fell out of favor with it because of personal experiences and my own study of the faith, it's doctrine, social aims, end goal, eschatology, etc....so I share that sometimes here. But even today, although I have reverted back to my own cultural roots a bit, I wouldn't consider myself a Hindu - if you want to get technical. I study Vedanta as a philosophy, when it comes to religious practices as far as ritualism and all that stuff is concerned that could vary day to day.
So you admit that despite having an Indian background, your personal and family's experience of Islam in reality was
benign enough that you chose yourself to follow Islam for a significant time in your life.
I'm trying to understand the world where young GetInTheTruck can have such a positive experience of Islam that he actually became a Muslim, yet anyone else is an idiot for saying things as simple as "you shouldn't paint all Muslims with the same brush."
You keep bringing up the gujurat riots as if that wasnt preceeded by an attack on hindu pilgrims in the first place, where something like 60 people were burned to death. It was unfortunate but we have to be honest with ourselves and make sure we have the whole story.
So going on a rampage across the state and murdering thousands of innocent people and destroying hundreds of places of worship, at times under the orchestration of actual political figures in power, is justifiable because someone else committed a terrorist attack first?
It must have been shocking as hell when 9/11 happened in the States, and only 2-3 "Muslim-looking" people got murked by random racists and we didn't burn all their mosques down.
Muslim history in india is a long and bloody one, just as it is everywhere else, so of course everything isnt going to be all peaches and cream. Islam has always been expansionist in nature, so if that is the case, once the formally subverted populations get a little room to breathe there will be some blowback.
There isn't a single person alive whose grandparents, or great-grandparents, or great-great-great-great-great grandparents were a "subverted population" to Muslim rulers of India. Hell, there was oppression and massacres under the British in living memory and for a couple hundred years before that, but you don't see mobs of Indians killing White people and burning down all the churches. (Okay, maybe that happens from time to time, but not nearly on the same scale.)
It is what it is. India has accomodated Muslims more than any other nation on the planet. What more is needed?
When did this become a referendum on India's treatment of Muslims?
You claimed that Hindus never did a certain action, I proved rather easily that you were wrong. I ain't here to debate the institutional policies of India, I'm pointing out that your stereotypes and generalizations can come back to haunt you.
It's obvious that Muslims in India have had to go through some trials, and it's obvious that things could be worse. There are people in India, even politicians from the ruling party, who have advocated destroying more mosques, voiced support for mobs who killed Muslims on the
mere rumor that they had eaten beef, stated that only Hindu-background Muslims should be allowed the vote, claimed that Muslims were all trying to lure their Hindu girls away, etc.
I think it's really great that the Father of India, Gandhi, the drafter of India's constitution, Ambedkar, and the first prime minister of India, Nehru, were all unified in the belief that people from all religious should be equal in India. But you also have to acknowledge that not everyone in India, including not all of the political parties, have agreed on that note. Do you even agree with the views of any of those three guys who set that standard?
Im glad you agree that India is no where near the bottom when it comes to religious tolerance.... now can you please tell me which Muslim countries are more tolerant? I used to work with a pakistani Christian named Solomon, his whole family had to flee to guess where...India, after partition because otherwise their heads would have probably rolled...but Indians are supposed to take you seriously when you make excuse after excuse for these clowns in the name of "tolerance."
Wait, what? You're talking about knowing someone who fled Pakistan after partition like that's some sort of evidence when millions of people fled India at the same time for the same reason?
I mean, you can compare yourself to Pakistan and all like being better than Pakistan is some sort of accomplishment, but that don't get you far.
India's ranking in
this religious freedom index (5.0) is barely different than Bangladesh's (5.2) and pales in comparison to every Western nation on the list. And it says that in 2007 Bangladesh was at a 4.0, significantly better than India...as is Nigeria.
And the USCIRF report has
India as a "Tier 2" religious oppression nation, "
where governments engage in or tolerate violations that are serious but not CPC-level," while Bangladesh, Bahrain, and Kyrgyzstan are only Tier 3, "
religious freedom concerns in six countries that do not meet CPC or Tier 2 thresholds." Of course, there are a lot of social, historical, AND religious reasons for the current political realities, so it would be ridiculous to simply list the nations by religion as if that explains the whole thrust. You can't name a Hindu country with better religious freedom than the USA, does that allow random Coli posters to dump on Hinduism?