Friday, August 11, 2006

I think We're in Trouble Here, Kids

Yesterday, when I found out about the terror plots in England, I asked the middle aged, kind, informed woman beside me, who the suspects were.
"Muslims," she said.
"Oh, oh," I thought. "She just clumped an entire religion in with some terrorist faction."

But then today, I read this on the Telus News homepage:
The identities of 19 [suspects] were disclosed by the Bank of England as it announced it had frozen their accounts. They ranged in age from 17 to 35 and had Muslim names, many of them common in Pakistan.


Even these people can't/won't distinguish between a religion and a terrorist group.

Oh my gracious. This does not look good for Utopia.

6 comments:

Sixth Estate said...

"Muslim names"? Oh, dear! Run and hide!

I wonder if "the Muslims" ever regret saving our ancient literature for us while we torched our heritage during the early Middle Ages. Or letting us learn astronomy from their textbooks in Italy.

Of course, since church socialized me into habitually referring to non-Christians collectively as "the world," and now I all too often refer to conservative evangelicals collectively in much the same way, I'm not sure how much room I have to criticize here.

Angela said...

i didn't know that bit about astronomy in italy. do tell.

Sixth Estate said...

I'm not sure there's much fascinating about it, but as far as I'm aware, a lot of the early scientific knowledge developed in the Renaissance, particularly with regards to astronomy, was imported into Italy from the Muslim world. A lot of the work that Copernicus was building on, for example, was from Muslim scholars.

Angela said...

oh, so then it IS the muslims' fault that the earth is not at the centre of the universe.
i knew it.
thanks.

Sixth Estate said...

Yes. They picked it up and moved it during the night.

Angela said...

hmmmm.
have you seen this though?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=401419&in_page_id=1770&ico=Homepage&icl=TabModule&icc=NEWS&ct=5