May 22, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
09:31
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| Alright, look, it's time for us to cut through some of the scrap around the US and Muslim fear and paranoia. | |
| I'm part of a mailing group with some very, very intelligent people on it who continually talk about their fear of Muslims and how the Muslims want to kill the Americans and how there's just bad, bad Muslim mojo all over the damn planet. | |
| And... I think that it's time that we just got a few of the facts down to try and quell some of this mob mentality around Muslims. | |
| First of all, I'm a philosopher, which means that Islam is a complete nightmare. | |
| It's a theological construct. | |
| It's destructive of human happiness, of gender relations, of pacifism. | |
| It is a religion that in its fundamentalism is fundamentally anti-rational, anti-life, anti-joy, anti-reality. | |
| It messes with people's minds, and it is just a wretched, wretched belief system. | |
| And I want to put that up front so nobody gets sort of confused about where, at least I stand, With regards to this Muslim stuff, but let's look at some of the facts about the relationships just between the US and the Muslim countries, so that we can at least start the discussion with some facts rather than a wild opinion, speculation, and some mob mentality. | |
| First of all, 9-11 in the United States killed upwards of 3,000 people. | |
| Relative to the U.S. population, that's a small number. | |
| It's a large number, and they were all evil murderers, and no question about that. | |
| But let's just look at the numbers here so we can get a sense of the statistical likelihood of who's going to kill who. | |
| Now, Iraq has a population significantly smaller, 10 to 12 to 14 times smaller, depending on how many people have fled the country on any given day, smaller than the United States. | |
| Two to three hundred people have been killed in Iraq every single day for the last few years. | |
| What that translates to, when you look at the population of Iraq versus the population of America, is a 9-11 Every single day for Iraq for the past few years, a 9-11. | |
| Remember how mad you were on 9-11? | |
| Remember how much you wanted vengeance? | |
| How much you wanted to kill and maim and attack and imprison and try whoever did it? | |
| One day, in 300 years, the U.S. gets attacked. | |
| Evil, wrong, no question. | |
| But, but, Iraq has one of those every day. | |
| Every day. The proportionally equivalent population to 9-11 dies in Iraq every single day. | |
| So... Would you rather be an American facing possible suicide bombers and people flying planes into the building, which so far has happened exactly once in 300 years, or would you rather be some helpless Iraq civilian stuck between the US military and the insurgent forces which have come into the country, largely as a result of the US smashing the existing infrastructure? | |
| So that's, I think, a fairly important thing to understand and to consider right up front, that your chances of dying from a Muslim suicide bomber are infinitesimally smaller than your chances of dying from a U.S. bullet or grenade or bomb or an insurgent who've only come to Iraq to fight the U.S. because they did 9-11 to draw the U.S. into Iraq so they could attack the troops without having to go to... | |
| Fort Bragg to do it. | |
| So that's sort of a first fact. | |
| Now the second fact that's probably worth looking into is that the U.S.-U.K.-led sanctions against Iraq throughout the 1990s resulted in an estimated deaths of half a million Iraqi children at a factor of 10 times relationship to population. | |
| That's 5 million U.S. children that would have to die Over the course of a decade, 500,000 children a year, would have to die as a result of Muslim sanctions in order to achieve an equivalent statistical population death. | |
| So, that's just one country in 10 years. | |
| If you put together all of the bases that have been going on in Saudi Arabia, if you look at all of the fact that the Shah was deposed by the CIA, that Saddam Hussein was put in and was Armed by the Americans. | |
| Ooh, he gassed his own people. | |
| Absolutely evil. Where did he get the helicopters, as they say? | |
| Of course we know he has weapons of mass destruction. | |
| The U.S. has the receipts. | |
| So that's sort of something I would like to point out. | |
| The last thing that I'd like to point out, and I've had lots of requests to keep these shorter, so this is me being short and a little abrupt. | |
| Let's look at another aspect of the horror that people have about the Muslims, right? | |
| Which is that apparently 25% of U.S. Muslims support suicide bombing. | |
| Well, that, of course, is pretty bad, no question, right? | |
| I mean, suicide bombing is a form of terrorism. | |
| Terrorism is defined as the use of violence to achieve political ends, say... | |
| Like toppling a regime in Iraq, or say, the welfare state, or say, Social Security, or say, the military-industrial complex as a whole, that is the use of force against taxpayers to achieve political ends, which is the bribing of certain sections of the population. | |
| But, and let's not even start on the brain-numbing gulags at public schools, but 25%, let's say that's totally true, 25% of Muslims support suicide bombing. | |
| So what? So what? | |
| Are you threatened by suicide bombing relative to the degree to which the average Iraqi Muslim is threatened by the US military or the insurgents who've come there to fight them as a direct result of that invasion? | |
| 25% of Muslims support suicide bombing, which affects you virtually not at all. | |
| What is the percentage of Americans who support the invasion and occupation of a foreign country, like Iraq? | |
| See, we're so easy to see the faults and the problems in other people's thinking, and it's so hard to turn that same kind of laser and searchlight on ourself, but it is so essential to do it if we are to actually think, rather than just be mindlessly patriotic and be us good, them bad. | |
| Okay, one more thing, and then I'm done. | |
| I'm going to keep this short. Why are the Muslims the way they are? | |
| Why are the Muslims the way they are? | |
| Or another way of asking that question is, What would you think if you had been born in Syria or Iran? | |
| What would you think? Would you be a gung-ho, pro-American, pro-freedom, pro-democracy, pro-capitalism, pro-whatever? | |
| Of course not. You didn't invent your culture and neither did they. | |
| These people over in these Muslim tyrannies, these theocracies from hell... | |
| Are not able to invent their own culture any more than you or I are able to invent our own culture. | |
| They're born there and they believe the same shit that they're shoveled that we believe here. | |
| That they're good and we're bad. | |
| We're good, they're bad. | |
| The standards don't apply universally. | |
| Whatever we do is good, whatever they do is bad. | |
| What? | |
| They believe the same crap that we believe. | |
| We just have a slightly different shit sandwich to eat than they do. | |
| And yes, our shit sandwich tastes better, no question. | |
| I'd rather be here than over there. | |
| But it's not that I was such a great guy that I happened to be born in the West and didn't happen to be born in Syria, where I'd be stuck in a mosque thumbing through the Koran for the rest of my natural-born life until I went totally mental and deranged. | |
| You didn't invent the West, they didn't invent Islam. | |
| They're just born into it. | |
| And so the problem is with the ideas, not with the people. | |
| The problem is with the irrationality and the contradictions and the moral corruption within the ideas. | |
| Not the people. The people are just helpless slaves of the idea, the same way that most people in the West are helpless slaves of the prejudices that we inherit as part of our culture. | |
| I'm not saying to like Islam. | |
| I'm just saying have a little sympathy for these poor bred livestock who are born into these terrible, terrible situations, and yes, they believe a whole lot of crap, but so do we. | |
| And it's time for us to start peeling away the layers of illusion, of mythology, of storytelling that results in death, For both of our cultures. | |
| And stop just looking at them and saying, well isn't that terrible? | |
| We're so great. Well, we just happen to be great. | |
| We just inherited some kinds of greatness, which we did not invent. | |
| And they just inherited some really crappy stuff. | |
| And we need to help get this rock of irrationality and mysticism off the chests of these people. | |
| Not just dance around saying, hey, we're great because we don't have any rocks of irrationality on our chests. | |
| It's not true. Get them off our own chests, reach over and help those poor bastards over there in the Islamic countries. | |
| And not just say, well, they want to kill us, so let's go kill them. | |
| Where does that end? Remember how angry you were on 9-11? | |
| Imagine that happening every single day to your country or to your culture. | |
| How much would you want vengeance? | |
| How much would you want to hurt people? | |
| So, they hit us, we hit them harder. | |
| They hit us harder, we hit them harder. | |
| It just doesn't end. Back and forth it goes until the world drowns in blood. | |
| And I say, enough. |
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