And yet, there are 100-150 million Muslims living in India under a secular government primarily run by Hindus. If all Muslims actually believed the above, then the Indian government would have collapsed into chaos a long time ago.
There is certainly a significant and dangerous problem with Muslim extremism (many who do preach what you say above), but clearly a significant amount of the Muslim population doesn’t believe any such thing.
Valteron, you are a useful polemecist for extremist Islamists. By creating as scary a picture as you can of anything Muslim, you increase the chances that people of good will will never be able to discuss anything without fear of being branded traitors by those on “their side” of the discussion. Once there is a complete and utter lack of communication between the two sides, then the wild stuff that you and your Islamist counterparts can make up can be waved about in a vacuum of information, increasing the chances that there will be more conflict.
This is absolutely not accurate. The actual Islamists have been quite consistent in describing their motives and expectations and it is every bit as scary as you want it to be. It would be amusing, if it were not so sad, to see you dragging out the old playbooks of the John Birch Society and their fellow travelers and applying the same sort of inaccurate demagogery to Islam that your predecessors applied to communism.
There probably are people who address two different audiences who speak in different words and different tones when they address each group. A few of them may even do it dishonestly. On the other hand, unless you, yourself, speak Arabic and are fluent in the language and culture of the speakers whom you are so desirous of condemning, then you are not really revealing what those speakers are saying; you are revelaing what some other anti-Muslim demagogue is telling you that they are saying.
Given that there are any number of people who make accusations that parallel yours, pointing not to Muslims, but to the proponents of the “Gay Agenda,” it would seem to me that you would want to be a bit more cautious in accepting rumors of world wide plots and conspiracies in which every member of a group is either a fanatic or a sleeper agent hoping for the eventual success of the fanatics, but perhaps not.
But as tomndebb pointed out, the extremist shari’a zealots are not saying two different things for different audiences. Extremist zealots like the homophobic Muslim legislators you mentioned are being quite candid, in every language, about believing that homosexuality should be a capital crime. The extremists aren’t being shy or coy about promoting their extremist views of Islamic principles.
I mean, if the repressive violent program of the radical Islamist extremists is really such a big secret, then how is it that we know so much about it? Anybody who opens up a newspaper or a website can find references to militant violent repressive Islamist extremists promoting their militant violent repressive extreme views.
Your invocation of taqiyya seems to be essentially a strategy to allow you to tar all Muslims with the Islamist-extremist brush. When militant radical extremist Muslims declare jihad on the West or demand the death penalty for homosexuals or stone women for going out of the house unveiled, you say “See?? These militant violent repressive Islamist extremists are violent and repressive!!” (And everybody else nods and says “Yes Valteron dear, we’ve noticed.”)
And then when tolerant moderate Muslims say “Islam is a religion of peace and we oppose terrorism and repression and intolerance”, you say “See?? These cunning sneaky Muslims are practicing taqiyya!!” (And everybody else just thinks :rolleyes: .)
You’re still not getting my point. I’m not arguing that law-abiding Muslims who support repressive legislation such as recriminalization of homosexuality in the UK can’t be described as “extremists”. Sure they can, although of course it’s true that they are “less extreme extremists” than the suicide-bomber types. But they are still extremists compared to tolerant moderate Muslims, such as the many Muslims who don’t support criminalization of homosexuality, whether in the UK or in Muslim-majority nations such as Turkey.
And my point is that you are playing the extremists’ game for them by refusing to acknowledge that the tolerant moderate Muslims have just as much right to define what Islam is as the extremists do. You’re arguing, in essence, that only the repressive extremists are entitled to speak authoritatively about the true nature of Islam. If you dislike and fear the repressive extremists so much, why are you working so hard to promote their success?
Ah yes, play the gay card on Valteron!
You are not the first to come up with this argument, Tom, which in essence says that since gay people have been accused by religious fanatics of being part of a conspiracy, they have no right to object when they see the very foundations of the western freedom on which they depend being eroded by political correctness and a desire to appease Islam by sacrificing our freedom.
Why is it necessary to prove that “every member of a group is either a fanatic or a sleeper agent hoping for the eventual success of the fanatics” before we can be concerned about Islam? To go back to my oft-used analogy, not all Germans were Nazis. But during all the years of the 30s when people like Churchill were called alarmists, it was not necessary that EVERY German be a dedicated Nazi, was it? Not that I would compare myself with Churchill, but the analogy is plain.
Bruce Bawer, Author of *While Europe Slept *and Surrender – Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom is also gay (his partner has been gay-bashed four times in Europe by Muslim thugs) has dealt with this kind of argument and does not feel that his sexual orientation should deny him the right to speak.
Indeed, he points out how often gay rights activists in the west turn into submissive lambs when other minorities are involved. “Even to mention the high levels of hostility to gay people in black neighbourhoods, for example, has long been considered off-limits. . . .” (Surrender, p. 193)
Now, a politically incorrect person would ask the African-American community how people subject to such horrid and enduring discrimination could turn around and mercilessly visit it on other minorities, but I digress.
As Bawer puts it: “. . . .gay activists are now skirting the even graver issue of Islamic attitudes towards gay people. . . . . . While every gay person in America and Europe knows about the the Christian right’s attitudes toward homosexuality, many are under the dangerous illusion that Muslims are gay people’s friends and allies – that they have understanding and sympathy for the situation of gay people because they, too are an ‘oppressed minority’.”
Once again: 72% of British Muslims want homosexuality recriminalized in the UK. Yes, Muslims are only a small minority in Britain (with a huge birthrate and immigration rate.) I suppose that will keep British gays alive for the present.
Yes, we heard you the first time, and we agree with you that this is a reprehensible and alarming phenomenon, and we strongly condemn it and repudiate these bigots’ position.
Why are you playing into these same bigots’ hands by letting them be the ones who define what Islam is?
I don’t know what is happening in Europe, but the idea that gay organizations in the US somehow excuse either African-American or Islamic homophobia is complete nonsense. African-Americans here took quite a beating after California’s Prop 8 election and gay organizations here routinely and vociferously condemn Islamic governments’ homophobia. I can’t take any author seriously who is unaware of this.
I have said nothing about any rights you might have to believe whatever you wish.
I made a futile appeal to your intelligence to consider that your words parallel those of others who enjoy hating or fearing whole groups of people in the off chance that you would consider the ramifications of your rhetoric.
No big deal. Carry on.
Well, at least you have gotten out of the absurd idea that Islam is made up of “good, moderate” Muslims with an “M” on their foreheads, and “bad, extremists” with an “E” on their forehead.
Now if you could just get it into your head that I am talking about Islam not whether Muslim mommies are nice ladies who give cookies to their children, we might get somewhere.
One small example. Here in Canada, I wanted to do something useful for my country after retirement. At the volunteer bureau, they said I would make a great tutor for kids who needed help in school, especially with English, French, Geography and History. I was interviewed by a Muslim woman who works for the Volunteer Bureau. She explained that most of the need is at the level of immigrant groups, (mainly Muslims), whose kids have a lot of trouble catching up in a new country.
I could see myself helping these kids turn from failures to top students. I already had dozens of ideas to make their studies more fun and interesting. The Muslim lady was enthused. She noticed my wedding ring and asked if my wife was a teacher. I said that my spouse worked outside teaching and described him as “he”. Immediately her face changed. Because it was inconceivable that a “homosexual” be left alone with a Muslim kid, now wasn’t it? She essentially admitted that very few Muslims would let me near their kids. I do not volunteer as a tutor. Now I help AIDS hospices.
What should I have done when the parents asked what my wife did, as I sat at the table next to their kid? Lie? Pretend to be married to a woman? Now, were those “good” or “bad” Muslims? Or is it what Islam taught them?
Do you see the difference? Would you stop telling me that not every single Muslim on Earth is an extremist as if that were a relevant argument?
I never had that idea in the first place. It’s apparently not only Muslims that you have some serious comprehension problems about.
I’m sorry to hear about your bad experience and I sympathize with your frustration as a result, but surely you realize that there are thousands of Christian communities where you would have gotten exactly the same reaction? Now, would those be “good” or “bad” Christians? Or is it what Christianity taught them?
My argument, to help you out with the comprehension thing again, is not merely that “not every single Muslim on Earth is an extremist”. Rather, my argument is that you are foolishly and counterproductively knuckling under to the Islamist extremists when they claim to be the final arbiters on what Islam is.
The correct answer would be: What Christianity taught them. Which is why I fight for the separation of church and state and why I am an atheist. But to my knowledge, no “Christian” organization in North America besides the Ku Klux Klan and maybe Fred Phelps’ outfit want to kill me for being gay. Even the vast majority of conservative Christians don’t want recriminalization. But a majority of Muslims do, according to polls and according to Islamic criminal law in countries where Muslims are the majority…
Allow me to return the favour and help you with YOUR comprehension. If I were an Islamist looking forward to the eventual “victory” of Islam over the west, I would certainly be grateful to YOU for foolishly and counterproductively lulling your society by painting Islam as just a harmless religion (not a repressive ideology) that poses no danger to our freedom and our way of life. I am not allowed to call you what Lenin called such people except to say you are “useful”.
So if 72% of British Muslims do not define what Islam in Britain is, may I please know who does?
I’m sorry to dispel your comfortable illusions, but if you care as much as you say you do about fine-honing your “instincts for identifying dangers to your survival”, I think you should be a little better informed about, say, Christian Reconstructionism in the US.
Sure, Christian Reconstructionists are nowhere near as numerous or influential in Christian societies as extremist shari’a zealots are in many Muslim societies. However, they’re not just confined to tiny fringes like the Ku Klux Klan and the Westboro Baptists either. In North America, they are certainly a more powerful and influential threat to the rights and safety of gays, for example, than militant Muslim shari’a zealots are.
Except that I’m not “lulling” anybody, and I’m certainly not trying to downplay any actual dangers from militant Islamist fundamentalism. Your irrational conviction that the threat of radical extremist Islamism is something that is somehow being hidden or overlooked, and that “the west” or “our society” risks simply not noticing our danger because we’re clinging to our childlike faith that Islam is nothing but sunshine and butterflies, is starting to seem downright delusional.
Wake up and look around you—everybody ALREADY KNOWS that radical Islamist extremism is a dangerous and regressive phenomenon.
I’m not in any way pretending that radical Islamist extremism doesn’t exist or isn’t dangerous: in fact, I clearly acknowledge its dangers and firmly reject its claims. You’re the one who’s helping the cause of “victory” for radical Islamist extremism by cravenly accepting its claims of authority in proclaiming its own interpretation of Islam.
Nobody is the official authority who gets to define what Islam is in Britain or in any other culture—that’s the whole point. All Muslims (and non-Muslims, for that matter) are entitled to support and advocate their own perspective on Islamic ideals. I cannot for the life of me figure out why you are spending so much time and energy arguing in favor of the correctness of the vision of Islam articulated by violent radical Islamist extremist misogynists and homophobes.
The point is, “radical” and “extremist” are not the right words to use for something supported by the majority of a group.
All right, maybe we should say “current Islam”, because in the future the majority of Muslims may decide that Islam demands they accept gay people.
But I think that is a silly argument. It is implied that current Islam is under discussion when you say “Islam”. Future gay-friendly Islam is what would need an added descriptor.
What you have correctly spotted, Carmady, is that like the pacifists of the 1930s were towards the Nazis, Kimstu would really like to believe that there is a “real” Islam that is gentle and kind and progressive, even if hardly any Muslims subscribe to this ideology. Just as Neveille Chamberlain proclaimed Hitler was “a man he could do business with.”
Because for people like Kimstu, attacking the ideology of Islam as a whole and admitting we will have to fight it for the survival of our western values and freedoms sounds too horrible, even bigoted, just as the idea of another world war against Germany was too horrible for many people in the 30s.
So, like the relativists of today, they would guiltily exagerate the “wrongs” of “our side” (well, the Treaty of Versailles was unfair to Germany, after all) and point to the many decent, moderate people in Germany.
Both facts were true. AND NEITHER FACT WAS RELEVANT TO THE TRUE NATURE OF NAZIISM, FOR ANYONE WILLING TO READ “MEIN KAMPF” OR LISTEN TO WHAT THE MOVEMENT AS A WHOLE WAS SAYING.
That is about all I have to say on the subject tonight. I’m getting to bed. Night all!
Okay, if you want to restrict the words “radical” and “extremist” only to views that are held by a numerical minority of a group, fine by me. By the way, do we have evidence that a majority of the world’s Muslims support killing homosexuals? Do we have evidence that a majority of the world’s Christians oppose making homosexuality illegal? If you’re requiring a majority of a religion’s adherents advocating full acceptance of gay people before you’re willing to clear the religion of charges of homophobia, I don’t think you’re going to find many non-homophobic religions.
Still, I have no problem with using terms like “militant fundamentalist Islam” or “shari’a zealots” as synonyms for “radical Islamist extremism”, if you want to be fussy about the quantitative implications of “radical” and “extremist”. It doesn’t change my essential argument in any way.
Horseshit. As I keep saying, the chief problem with your mindset of “attacking the ideology of Islam as a whole” is that it is stupid. It strengthens the enemy rather than undermining them.
Equating modern militant fundamentalist Islamism with Islam as a whole is like equating German Nazism with the entire history and culture of the German people. Did Churchill go around saying that Germans as a people are innately bigoted and repressive and the very fabric of their language and culture since the dawn of their history has made them intrinsically inimical to us? No way: Churchill had too much sense. He (correctly and wisely) painted Nazism as a termporary and contingent perversion distorting the true nature of a fundamentally admirable people:
Yes, freedom-loving people have to fight violent repressive fundamentalist Islamism, just as freedom-loving people had to fight Nazism. But we don’t have to be dumb enough to hand the propaganda war to our enemies right from the get-go, by accepting their grandiose claims of cultural authority. Churchill knew better than that.
Again, your whole argument (capital letters and all) rests on the unsustainable assertion that violent-fundamentalist-Islamism = Islam in general. Nobody’s disputing that the “true nature” of violent fundamentalist Islamism is regressive and dangerous, just as nobody disputes that the true nature of Nazism was regressive and dangerous.
All I’m trying to get across to you, apparently with no success despite repeated attempts, is the simple observation that the “true nature of violent fundamentalist Islamism” isn’t equivalent to the “true nature of Islam”, any more than the “true nature of Nazism” was equivalent to the “true nature of Germany”.
Valteron, your level of discourse is not only shallow but also deliberately inflammatory. **You **brought up the claim that (summarized) muslims are hostile to homosexuality. I simply showed you how your own society is abundantly hostile (particularly historically) to homosexuality, should you at any point want to look at the problem from an even standpoint. I even showed you how a majority Muslim country was over half a century ahead of your own land of freedom in legalizing homosexuality.
This was done not to illustrate that Islam is friendly to gays (it isn’t, nor is any religion as I already explained) but to illustrate how generalizations about religion lead you down the wrong avenue of inquiry. It’s not so much religion that is the issue in today’s clash of civilizations, it is backwards cultures (predominantly patriarchal) and politics.
Neither Tomndebb nor I have used the gay card here - **you **have by portraying youself as a hapless victim that will be crushed under the invaders unless resistance is mounted immediately. There is no bigger gay card than that!
You brought up the (summarized) “they want to kill us all” claim. I just showed you how the popular perception around the world is diametrically opposed to your claim. The ones who are dying are largely not Westerners or Americans. They are Muslims from various ethnic backgrounds, most of them totally innocent of war, terrorism, incitement, or even common beliefs and policies.
Consider this again, hopefully with greater effort this time: you lost 3,000-odd people in one event and a few thousand more in the war, and you are still angry and terrified. How do you think the situation looks from the other side? One million Muslims killed over false pretenses. What if instead of Arabs and Muslims it was one million Christians or one million gays who were killed in such fashion by an unstoppable superpower? You would be making a complete mess of your trousers right now.
I used the Iraq war as an example of the double standard that assigns more value to the lives of a few American aggressors than it does the lives of a vast number of foreign victims. This was, again, in response to your highly generalized alarmist claims about terror, murder, and oppression.
One thing you have made abundantly clear: you are obviously not interested in any kind of common ground or reconciliation or deeper understanding of the problem. All you want to do is inflame others so they will rally around your cheesy little banner and chant hate-speech with you.
Your attitude is a fundamental part of this global problem. What you are doing is no better than those radical Muslim exponents about which you gesticulate so energetically. Yes, they want people to rally around their cheesy little banners just like you do. They perceive an obvious threat just like you do. They have some justification in perceiving such, just like you do. They want to take action against that threat, just like you do.
They are just like you.
Of course, the term “they” is misleading here, referring to a radicalized and hyper-politicized minority. In actual fact Islam is by no means monolithic. Instead of extending a hand to the moderates so that the various cultures where Islam is predominant can evolve (just like Western cultures have had to evolve), your fallacious and factless rabble-rousing only empowers the extreme fringe. Your activities are, in addition to being part of the problem, also counter-productive to your own goals.
First, the gays and Islam argument seems really queer as until say the 1950s, the Islamic world had a gay-friendly (or perhaps better, “flexible sexuality” friendly reputation). Western artists with “flexible sexuality” - the American Paul Bowles comes to mind - spent extensive time or moved to countries like Morocco and Egypt because they could “indulge.” British colonials were also of that reputation (it shows up in literature).
Never mind the classic literature in Islamic poetry with gay themes.
So in living memory we have a rather different dominant perception of Islamic attitudes relative to “gay behaviour.” Of course outside arty circles that was taken as evidence of the decadence of Islamic society… odd, plus ca change…
Second, in the living memory of the Islamic world, Western powers brutally colonised almost its entirety. Certainly British behaviour in Iraq or French behaviour in Algeria hardly showed great genuine humanitarianism. Lot’s of dressed up excuses of course. Rather like the most recent Iraq war. Doesn’t make the Islamic radicals civilian oriented terror right, but one has to be bloody dense not to see there are connections.
Valteron’s flaming hysteria aside, he’s not in any real danger from Islamic radicals, but he is in fact throwing oil on the flames of bigotry and hate.
I do a lot of business in Islamic countries, mostly African, on a real life basis while gays are not popular, the gays I run into live a lot more openly than I recall gays living in the UK in the 1960s.
As an added thought, re the Islam angle, I’d point out that Hindu fundamentalists contain a rabid anti Christian (to the point of murders and burning churches in the past 5 years) and anti Western element. I would suggest if India sat on a huge amount of petrol resources in the same manner as the Middle East, that suddenly Christian-Hindu nastiness would be rather more important on all levels, as would US interference in ‘Hindu affaires.’
Are you sure they’re not mistaking any curly-haired darkish kid for a Muslim? I’ve been there and didn’t get any trouble, but then, I’m in my 40s now so maybe I don’t look like a target any more.
First of all, Abe, your comment implies that the legal condition of gays in Muslim Jordan is somehow “half a century ahead” of that of gays in the USA. Of course you do not say it in so many words. The art of relativist apologism consists of subtly suggesting with absurd comparisons. But this comparison is the most grotesque relativist distortion I have ever seen.
I will not take the trouble of refuting every point in your extremely long ditraibe because much of it has been covered before ad infinitum. Let me just say that decriminalization on the books in Jordan does not prevent multiple and ongoing murders of Jordanian gays by their own families in “honour killings”. No, I do not have statistics to back this up. Funny thing, but when you send a census form around in Jordan saying “list any family members you have murdered for being gay since the last cesus” you don’t tend to get a lot of useful data.
It took until 2003 for the Supreme Court of the US to finally strike down some remaining state laws criminalizing homosexuality, laws that had been rarely applied anyhow but that legislators in conservative states did not want to take flak for rescinding. Has Jordan had openly gay legislators or entertainers, pride parades, gay marriage, etc. etc.? Does Jordanian television have its own “Will and Grace” or “Queer as Folk”?
Secondly, it is not a matter of “my” land of freedom. If you had really read my posts you would see that I am a Canadian living in Canada, where decriminalization dates from 1969 and full marriage rights from about four years ago. I am legally married to my spouse of 35 years.
How do you think I feel when Muslims just arrived in my country tell me that homosexuality should be criminalized, and that gays should be put to death? How do you think I feel when the gay communities in major cities like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver note startling increases in gay-bashings by Muslim thugs? No, do not ask me to document this with statistics, because our politically correct government and police refuse to collect such statistics. They collect statistics on hate crimes, but only those identifying the victim. Our community knows what it knows, I assure you, and knows to what extent Muslim gay-bashing is on the rise in Canadian cities (as well as Europe).
But even in Canada, leaders of gay rights organizations do not dare make an issue of Muslim gay-bashing because of their fear of being politically incorrect. As author Bruce Bawer puts it in the Chapter “Selling Out the Sodomites” in his book Surrender – Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom", gays who write objective articles criticizing homophobic doctrines in Islam, such as the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association did in Britain in February 2006, get “piled on” by gay and leftist groups denouncing them as “racist”. Since when is Islam a race? I have seen Muslims who are blond and blue-eyed and others who are blue-black.
The fact that there exists non-Muslim homophobia, especially from Christians, in North America, is hardly the point. This thread is about Islam and I am explaining why I and other gays are right to fear it. It is a bit like certain American Jews in the 1930s who, when they became alarmed about the rise of Fascism and Naziism in Europe (or even Nazi organizations in America), were essentially told that, sure, the Nazis were nasty, but there was already enough homegrown American antisemitism for them to worry about. And some of the people telling them this were other, liberal Jews whose first instinct was not to rock the boat and not to rile Mr. Hitler.
I once asked why, given the substantial Jewish presence in Hollywood, there were few if any films attacking Naziism produced before WWII except for “The Great Dictator” by Charlie Chaplin (who was NOT Jewish) and a short entitled “They Stooge to Conga” by the Three Stooges (who were Jewish). The answer that I got from mainly Jewish correspondents is that American Jews in the 1930s were afraid to appear war-mongers, were afraid to appear what we would today call “politically incorrect.” And Germany was one of the biggest foreign markets for films.
Let me say it for the hundreth time: I know there is a threat to me and other gays from the conservative Christians. Yes, I know that there are some Christians, a tiny, tiny minority, who would go so far as to demand execution of gays.
But give me some credit, will you folks? We in the gay community have learned over the decades to survive criminalization, bashings, job and housing discrimination and even being beaten to death like Matthew Shepard Matthew Shepard - Wikipedia .
Yes, I KNOW he was not murdered by Muslims. The point is that we gays have developed a community instinct for relative levels of danger. We are not, and have never been blind to the dangers of Christian homophobia or any other home-grown varieties.
When you have scars on your face from where the skin was opened by a fist, as in my case, it gives you a marvellous sensitivity to spot danger from a good way off.
Like the rat described by SS Colonel Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds, we have learned to live in an incredibly hostile world and have developed a marvellous survival instinct. So when the rest of you so kindly inform me that there are non-Muslim sources of homophobia in the West, I can’t help but feel a tiny bit patronized.
In the present case, we spot a murderously homophobic ideology (much more an ideology than a religion), Islam, spreading slowly into our society, insisting on its way all the way, insisting in its very foundational documents that it is unchanging and meant to rule to world, then our antennae go up. We have paid dearly to develop those antennae, to hone our appreciation of danger.
When I list the manifestations of that approaching danger already being felt by gays from Europe to America to Australia, perhaps I am being more than a misguided paranoid.
I think I have said all I can on this subject. Thank you for reading.
Thankfully we have people in the FBI and the CIA who aren’t traitors and try to donwplay the threat from extremists in this country. I wish I could say the same for the general population.