Very true.
The thing is, how are they going to do that? The guy with a gang equipped with AK47s is hard to get rid of.
Civil disobedience (like Ghandi) only works if you’re dealing with a rather ethical ruler.
I’ll quote Harry Turtledove’s story again:
Orgy of hate?
I don’t want power over anyone. But I don’t want anyone to have power over me .
There are political and religious movements who want that power, and I don’t want them to have it.
And I think you are being very disingenuous if you think that islam is not one of them.
Are you also pissed off that similar cultural heritage sites like Westminster Abbey in London and Notre-Dame in Paris also remain operational churches holding Christian services? Because that sort of status seems to be the goal for Aya Sofya/Hagia Sophia:
While I think there are a lot of things to criticize in Erdogan’s authoritarian desecularization agenda for Turkish civil society, ISTM that the issue of whether the historic mosque Aya Sofya/Hagia Sophia is or is not being used as an actual mosque for Muslim worship is very far down the list of things to be concerned about. It doesn’t bother me when, e.g., disused Jewish synagogues in Greece are restored for Jewish worship, either.
Your brush is so broad there that your arguments just look stupid. We can all agree that there are specific radical-Islamist movements that want tyrannical power over believers and unbelievers alike, just as there are specific radical-Christian movements that want tyrannical power over believers and unbelievers alike.
But boogeymanning that concern to extend to the entire Muslim religion of nearly two billion people as a single entity is just dumb.
Read the Koran.
Read the Bible and you can come to a similar opinion.
No argument. Though I do have to say that the Bible has some entertaining stories, 
Then maybe stop getting your panties in such a bunch about “Islam” in particular as a mythical monolithic tyranny.
You can be as paranoid and hysterical as you like about specific radical-Islamist movements like Islamic State or Daesh or the Taliban, I won’t disagree. But pretending that such movements form an undifferentiated mass with all the rest of “Islam” is silly bullshit.
And yet you don’t target all Christians based on what some extremists say.
The “left” 's response to Islam doesn’t have to do with tolerating bigotry. It has to do with recognizing you can’t tarnish the whole because of a part. It’s about acknowledging the good so that we can have some influence over the bad.
Tolerating intolerance isn’t really a thing we do. This tends to piss off said intolerant people.
I say, we put boots on the ground and stamp out the Taliban. How tough could that be?
We already have a banner to display once we get the job done, just have to borrow it from the George W. Bush Presidential Center.
I for one refuse to vote for or donate money to the Taliban candidate running in my Congressional district, even if he’s in favor of a Calipari buyout and more jobs in the bourbon industry.
Nonsense, clearly the first thing we have to do in the war… sorry, WAR that’s going on here is to nuke Indonesia. I mean it’s got more Muslims than any other country on the planet and we all know they’re constantly stoning women to death in public over there.
Second time I’ve had to use this xkcd quote on the board today:
“We must embrace false dichotomies, because the only alternative is cannibalism!”
I admit I have deep suspicion of many fundamentalist branches of many religions, including fundamentalist movements found in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. I find them even more concerning when said movements advocate and/or commit violence in the name of their causes. I can’t tolerate the intolerant actions of these sects.
Sadly, it does seem that reformist movements in Islam have had less success than those in Judaism and Christianity. Islamic modernism is definitely a thing, but seems to have been losing ground rather than gaining it in many portions of the Muslim world.
Such regression has been seen in US Christianity too, in certain regions (including my home area).
I will be there during Ramadan, in fact. I’m sure the secular nature of the country, courtesy of Atatürk, will make it impossible even to tell there’s an important religious observance going on.
This.
There is a really strong component of forcible intolerance in Christian culture. (Among others.)
I’m not at all sure that you’re not exhibiting it in this thread.
About the fastest way to end it would be to start by picking some particular religion and throwing that one out. Or trying to.
I think you are being either disingenuous, or a total bigoted ignorant fool, depending on whether you just want us to think, or actually yourself think, that all of Islam is one of them.
Good question.
Stoning women to death is terrible. What should we (as Americans) be doing when women are being killed in Afghanistan.
Should we speak out? Done. But that doesn’t seem to be stopping the killings.
Should we invade Afghanistan and try to put a regime in power that doesn’t kill women? We tried that. It didn’t take.
Should we invade Afghanistan and run the country indefinitely? I’m a little more iffy on that one.
There’s also the issue that wars kill people. And it seems morally ambiguous to us to start killing people in order to demonstrate our opposition to people being killed.
Yeah. That’s the problem.
If we can do something useful, then we should. But there doesn’t appear to be a useful thing that the USA can do – other, possibly, than attempt to strengthen Muslims who don’t behave like that. Attacking all Muslims would be playing right into the Taliban’s/Isis’s/etc. hands.
You could try to regime-change Afghanistan, but the U.S. and allies already tried that, and got beaten fair and square.
More cynically, let’s keep talking about the U.S., I don’t think they give a shit about fundamentalism per se, as they have not toppled the rulers of Saudi Arabia (e.g.), quite the contrary.
More generally, “we” as in normal people, or even Muslims, do not tolerate intolerance and that is an offensive stereotype. You cannot equate a minority of religious fundamentalist Muslims/Jews/Christians/Hindus as representative of an entire religion.
I’m sorry, but is that a mote in your eye?