maybe he got a little exasperated by the apologizing for people who support violent oppressive criminal laws, like the state defenestrating gays, amputation, jail for no hijab, etc.
As a Muslim, I wholeheartedly agree that we’ve been slow to catch up with the rest of the world when it comes to LGBT rights, women’s rights, etc. etc. But I do not think that Islam as an ideology is at fault. The Western world has been through a remarkable process of modernization and industrialization and many social ills of the past were eradicated with western reforms. So Christianity was affected by the western reforms so now it is more accepting of LGBT people and isn’t really violent nowadays. You see, Islam has not gotten this widespread reform movement yet. Hinduism got it through the British and Hindu reformers like Swami Vivekananda/Tagore/Gandhi/Nehru (They used to do a lot of stupid stuff like suttee, caste system(Still do), etc.). Islam just needs that big reform movement that other religions has received. There are stuff in the Torah and Bible that are just as bad as stuff in the Quran when it comes to LGBT, women, etc. But Islam hasn’t received this reform we so desperately need.
On another note, terrorism…
That is purely sectarian, some sects do not support it like me, the Muslim Sufi’s of South Asia, others somewhat do like Wahabism/Salafist. Muslim terrorists used to terrorize the Muslim Sufi Kashmiri communities in Kashmir. They would come around and randomly choose men and behead them, people who advocated for reform in Islam or fought against the terrorists were systematically executed and their families put to death. The Sufism sect of Islam is highly tolerant, though not free of evils like treating LGBT people badly, it still is a really tolerant sect, this is how Muslims and Hindus got along for centuries before both groups got really religiously nationalistic during the Indian independence movement. Remember the Mughal Emperor Akbar? He was tolerant of other religions and would often discuss religion with fellow religious experts. We Indian Muslims were slaughtered by those Muslim terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir.
Also the guy who opened this thread. I have mad respect for you for being open about being an islamaphobe. I know there are some who just want to shut you up but I like that you are demonstrating your freedom of speech.
Apologizing? Who did that? Seriously, who the fuck in this thread has done that? Give me some names and post numbers, so’s I can open a scathing Pit thread. We’ll flame the shit out of them together, Derek m’man.
Just show me the posts and we’ll tear those assholes up.
It has to do with your unsupported assertion that the Orlando terrorist attack was “the worst terrorist attack in the US outside of 9/11”. By any quantitative metric, the Oklahoma bombing was a worse terrorist attack in the US than the Orlando shooting.
But since the Oklahoma bombing wasn’t committed by a Muslim, it apparently doesn’t even register in your memory as relevant to the issue of terrorist attacks in the US.
That makes no sense, but I’m going to guess that the coherent thought you were attempting to express by that incoherent statement was something like “Now” is special when dealing with problems that are affecting the world now.
Which is very true. But it misses the fundamental point that you can’t rationally explain the problems of Now by appealing to religious origins from Way Back When, unless your explanation can also account for the Time In-Between.
It’s the religious-essentialists like Magiver who are proposing such Way-Back-When explanations of Now problems in Islam, completely ignoring the fact that the historical evidence from much of the Time In-Between flatly contradicts their hypothesis.
We anti-Islamophobes are not the ones who derailed the justified criticism of modern violent-extremist theocratic interpretations of Islam, and their unquestioned role in causing and exacerbating serious problems of Now such as terrorist violence, by introducing bullshit Just-So Stories to pretend that the problems of Now are nothing but consequences of allegedly inherent religious differences from Way Back When.
Islam, as practiced in the dominantly Muslim countries of the Middle East, has no tolerance for gays. Sharia Law is quite unkind.
It’s more than just the ugliness of the Middle East. No British Muslims when surveyed in 2009 found homosexuality acceptable. A more recent 2016 poll of British Muslims found that 52% think homosexuality should be illegal.
It’s all about the way a religion is practiced. The peace and love San Fransisco Imam that goes to the gay pride parades is in the minority. Islam needs to be reformed, to be moderated. I wish an honest conversation could be had about that without the routine cries of Islamophobia.
Thanks Yuweg, and welcome to the Straight Dope. There could not be a more eloquent case for the rational anti-Islamophobe position that the undisputed evils of many of today’s aggressive extremist interpretations of Islam are not any kind of unique and inevitable concurrent of Islam.
In particular, I hope that this remark:
will make some of these militant Islamophobic keyboard warriors, who are statistically far less likely to be actually harmed by Muslim terrorists than to be struck by lightning, properly ashamed of themselves.
Those murdered Muslim reformers and defenders of freedom are the people whose courage and principles the Islamophobes are pissing on, when they attempt to claim that Muslim terrorists are just doing what “Islam” tells them to.
Which is exactly what the anti-Islamophobic side has been saying all along.
[QUOTE=Gruff]
The peace and love San Fransisco Imam that goes to the gay pride parades is in the minority. Islam needs to be reformed, to be moderated. I wish an honest conversation could be had about that without the routine cries of Islamophobia.
[/QUOTE]
Like I said, the anti-Islamophobic side has been attempting to have that honest conversation all along. We have been repeating over and over and over that we fully concur that radical-extremist interpretations of Islam are causing severe violence and oppression worldwide, and that modern Islam has a disproportionately high incidence of such radical-extremist interpretations compared to other global religions, until our typing fingers are worn to stubs.
It’s the Islamophobes who have been poisoning the well of that honest conversation by repeatedly claiming that the problem is not “about the way a religion is practiced” but about the religion itself. Because, allegedly, “Muhammad was a warlord” or “Jesus never wrote anything down” or “literal words” or some similar bullshit argumentum ab ano.
You can’t expect to get rid of the “cries of Islamophobia” from the anti-Islamophobes until you get rid of the Islamophobia itself. We’re not going to stop calling it out if it persists in recurring.
That’s your justification for posting contra-factual material? That’s your justification for self-contradiction?
Weenie justification.
I’d never heard that one before. Nice!
May I add, instead of a cri de coeur, Islamophobia is a cri de cul?
Agreed.
So you can’t disagree without being disagreeable. Glad we cleared that up.
iiandyiiii understood my statement without difficulty, so seems the issue is you.
You knew I was referring to current events but since you went down that road then you have to include 9/11. Which was committed by Muslims. Not as relevant to the Orlando attack in a thread about violence against gays but you chose to play games with my use of the word “outside”.
You can’t see the correlation between public approval to kill people for leaving a religion and terrorist groups who kill people for the same reason as well as for other sins such as homosexuality?
Really?
Really?
That goal post sits in cement all the way to the center of the earth.
Correlation is not identity. The people who may (or may not) support harsh and oppressive laws are not the same as terrorists.
Also, pseudo-naivete is a very poor debate technique, and you don’t even perform it well.
While there was a sea change in reform that was a function of upending the political structure. the social reforms were the product of the separation of church and state. It’s one of the driving forces behind the migration to North America from Europe.
Islam doesn’t have the central power structure once held in Christianity. It’s easier to knock down Goliath than take on a world for of smaller Goliaths.
After the death of Mohammad the religion started to splinter. Even within the divisions of Islam there is no central power structure. As such it’s difficult to create a defining moment in history particularly in the face of fanatics willing to go to any extreme to prevent it.
I don’t see any mechanism that allows inroads to established centers of the religion.
And yet you persist in painting it as an ideological monolith. Bizarre, dude.
You make a good point Magiver. But the same can be said about Hinduism. Hinduism isn’t one religion as many people in the West think it is. Hinduism is HEAVILY divided along language and ethnic and regional lines. Each region and each language has its own version of Hinduism that is different from the rest. Each city and village has its own principal set of Gods and mythological creatures (i.e. demons (We call them rakshasas) or magical animals like Garuda). There are Gods in South India that literally no one else in Hinduism believes in. Hinduism was by no means one “thing” and there was absolutely no power structure whatsoever, and since the religion is really a collections of different religious traditions across India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal, there is no mechanism for reform.
YET. Gandhi and the other Indian and Pakistani and British leaders managed to reform it slowly like for example outlawing Sati and many have worked to end the caste system. Of course the caste system is still prevalent but its on the downside with the younger generation and people are still fighting against it.
What I’m saying is that Islam is the same scenario but we have to do reform AT LEAST AMONG OUR OWN MOSQUES IN THE WEST (EUROPE, CANADA, USA). After 9/11, President Bush and the FBI worked with Mosques in the US to watch for terrorist activities or signs of it. There are may instances where the Mosque goers have discovered someone or some plot and reported it to the police. The Orlando Mosque where Omar Mateen went to was going to receive training in finding terrorists among their attendees. This type of stuff needs to be given to Mosques across the US. I am Muslim and I want that.
It’s not a phobia when radical Islam has struck on America’s doorstep and elsewhere time and time again. People have the right to be afraid of any religion, or all of them, given the amount of bloodshed done in their names over the centuries. Right now and for the foreseeable future the great majority of that bloodshed is being done in Islam’s name. That’s a huge, dangerous problem which should rightfully catch people’s attentions.
Islam could potentially become as harmless as the other religions, but many violent Quran passages have to be ignored, just like they are in those other religions. That’s not happening in the Middle East today and it’s not happening well enough with Muslims abroad to give the term Islamophobia any real meaning.
Hey, Magiver. Do you care to weigh in on [url=http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2016/06/27/Transgender-marriages-allowed-under-new-fatwa/3231467070387/]this news out of Pakistan regarding transgender marriage?
Hey, I have nothing but admiration for iiandyiiii’s ability to correctly translate "problems that are effecting the word ‘now’ " into “problems that are affecting the world now”.
But it was a seriously garbled sentence, and I don’t feel embarrassed either for not having understood it right away or for criticizing your carelessness in garbling it.
:dubious: Yeah, whining about how somebody else should have clairvoyantly auto-corrected what you wrote to what you meant to write is so much more responsible and impressive than just saying “Oops sorry, what I meant was the worst terrorist attack since 9/11, although you really didn’t have to be so snippy about it.”
(And indeed, I didn’t have to be so snippy about it, but the more you sulk and whine instead of frankly acknowledging you were wrong, the less compunction I feel for my snippiness.)
As with Waymore’s post, all I know about what you’re trying to say is what you post. If you post something different from what you actually meant to say, and it’s incorrect, you can expect to get called on it. Welcome to the Straight Dope.