Muhammad Hidhir B Md Razak has it wrong. Those on top, anywhere, did and do BAD things. Always!

I read today that Islam had a nonviolent, golden age. The age being left largely undefined. It is alleged that Islam had behaved better during this undefined golden age than the US is behaving today in our unipolar world. My personal bias is merely this: no matter how bad the USA behaves and however severely my rights are being reduced even now, I am better off under western colonialism and empire than I would be under Japanese, Muslim, Arab, African or Asian (Indian, Chinese, Thai, Burmese....) imperialism.

There is no one person or country (or empire) free of racism and violence. All of us hate someone, some animal or something. Islam was no different; they forced people to convert in many ways. In Europe, examine the former Yugoslavia where tax policies were so harsh on non-Muslims, that many Slavs became Muslims 500 years ago (Bosnia's present day converted minority). The situation was worse in India before the arrival of the British; some Muslim rulers destroyed Indian temples or built mosques on them, while killing Hindu men and taking their daughters as concubines. No wonder the "harem" is associated with the seemier side of Arab and Muslim culture. To this day, wealthy Arabs, Iranians and others seek virgin girls (often child brides) in India.

Religions are fine and neutral in themselves: people are not neutral or objective. This is why we had the extreme reaction to religion by Thomas Jefferson; he and James Madison insisted on building a metaphorical wall between religion and government. People, however, have turned, and will always turn, religion into a political, social, cultural or ethnocentric football. Every new moral or socail code, new religions, philosophies and social experiments will always be hijacked by the fanatics or the impious but politically astute. Anything that is a powerful force to move people will be used to create a "political party," an in-group, so that there is an outgroup, an outcaste, or a "kefir" world or "house" [dar -al -zinj?] outside our special or chosen group. Hitler's ideas were an extension of this common human tendency to claim ELECT status. The Puritans did it, the Anglo-Saxons did and may be doing it yet. The end of apartheid also brought an "Africanization or affirmative action" phase that tended to exclude people like me who had fought apartheid at great cost (though others paid with their lives, and deserve

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