Well, the vast majority of Muslim-majority nations occupy a contiguous “belt” of land, from North Africa to West Asia. They aren’t randomly distributed. That said, let’s examine your profile:
Such support varies wildly, from 8% of Azerbaijan to 99% in Afghanistan. It’s certainly not characteristic of the “vast majority” of Muslim-majority countries.
The meaning of “official sharia” also varies wildly, from merely being referenced in the constitution, to use in personal law, to being the inspiration for criminal law. There’s no one conception of what it means to support sharia.
Can you quantify this in some way?
I suppose, though again “vast majority” is a stretch. Kazakhstan, Bangladesh, Albania, Senegal, Indonesia, Tajikistan, and Azerbaijan all grade out well in women’s rights compared to their peers.
The notion that Muslims are waiting for people like me or you to weigh in on whether their faith is compatible with Western democracy before making up their minds is not worthy of serious discussion.
What does have a big influence, IMO, is the insistence - mostly by liberals - on depicting Trump’s immigration ban as being a Muslim ban motivated by antipathy to Islam. That probably gets a lot of Muslims worked up and helps ISIS a lot.
I think Trump is helping ISIS, in fact – if he hadn’t said that he wanted to ban Muslims, and if he hadn’t referred to this as a ban, and if his people (like Giuliani) hadn’t stated that this was an effort to effect a ban on Muslims legally, then this policy and his rhetoric wouldn’t be so helpful to ISIS. I think standing up to this policy and rhetoric is right and proper, and demonstrates that America is not united in favor of these policies.
Indeed, and it is part of the obfuscation politics to constantly refer to all the recent immigrants to Europe as “refugees”. Most immigrants are here for economic reasons.
I think Trump’s stated policy of banning Muslims probably had a little to do with perceptions of a Muslim ban when he banned people from majority Muslim countries in the first ten days of his presidency. I don’t think there were that many Muslims waiting for liberals to join those particular dots.
And I’m afraid that the idea that Muslims who come to the US aren’t alive to the extent to which their new neighbours treat them as potential threats is one I find not worthy of serious discussion. If you are concerned about the views of Muslims who move to the US you might want to consider how those views might be shaped by the reception they get in their new home. If they are pre-disposed to believe that Muslims cannot find a place in the West, how will a public atmosphere of doubt and suspicion help ameliorate this problem? If they have travelled optimistically believing they and their faith will be tolerated in the US, what effect will public mistrust have on that optimism?
Actually no. The fact that there is vigorous opposition to what is self evidently a ban targeted at Muslims undercuts ISIS’s claim that the West is unified against Islam.
I explained it in post #102, second paragraph. (I don’t recall any specific posts from you personally on the subject, and was referring to liberals generally. It did seem, though, that you were including yourself in that group for this purpose.)
I’ll cop to characterizing (correctly and with oodles of factual basis, IMO) Trump’s immigration EO as a de-facto and partial Muslim ban. But if the accurate characterization of his policy helps ISIS somehow, then it seems to me that the blame very obviously falls on him and him alone – especially when the alternatives, IMO, would help ISIS far more than accurately characterizing it and fighting hard against it.
The best way to fight ISIS, in my mind, is to demonstrate that America rejects this policy and is welcoming to Muslim travelers and immigrants.
Too complex to answer, at least in the amount of time I’m willing to devote to it.
Because the “best way to fight ISIS” has to do with a lot of other valid considerations, both practical and moral. You have your view and Trump has his, and each one could blame the other for helping ISIS based on respective views of the bigger picture.
What I’m saying is that if you look in isolation at the question of “do the actions of so-and-so help ISIS propaganda-wise?”, the correct answer is “yes” both for Trump himself and for liberals maligning his order.
We disagree, very strongly, here. Challenging and opposing his order hurts ISIS (in a tiny way), since it challenges the notion that the US as a whole embraces this order.
America isn’t the only country in the western world. (I really dislike the concept of “western” culture or civilization to begin with, so I should probably use a better term).
There are very clear differences in culture, worldview and social behavior between, say, Pakistani immigrants to the United States and Pakistanis in England.
It is your own side of the isle that is the cause of a slide to the right in today’s politics.
Your continued arrogance, propaganda and heavy handed enforcement of your ideals and lunacies have finaly broken the camel’s back.
But the “alt-right” aren’t today’s version of the fascists.
Islam is the threat to secular democracy and, more immidiate, so are the SJW’s and AntiFa. Certainly they are fascists in their own right but they are also collaborators facilitating the spread of Islam.
There are plenty of US citizens who cling to outdated, ignorant views which ignore science. Plenty of them who seem to think our Freedoms are founded on “the Bible.”
And yet…for whatever reason (Thank you Mr Jefferson?) we are, in practice, a democracy which tolerates free thinking. We are orders of magnitude freer than is a typical Islamic-majority nation to freely associate and freely express. Our culture is orders of magnitude freer to dress or behave as we damn well please.
It is child’s play to show how comparably ignorant, violent, stupid and restrictive are the texts for Christianity and Judaism with the Qur’an and the Hadith.
But in practice, the difference is that broadly speaking, western democracies and Islam-majority nations have, on average, quite different cultures and laws in actual practice.
Islam-majority nations have been able to actually pull off nations which reflect that religion’s tenets. The US Christians have not been able to pull off whatever it is the Pilgrims were trying to establish…
The VAST majority of Muslims who live in Islam-majority nations liveunder a culture where support for Sharia as the law of the land is over 50% of the populace, and where that support has driven laws and culture which reflect that bias.
You are being (deliberately?) disingenuous by claiming a “range” from 8% in Azerbaijan with a population of 10 million, to 72% for nations like Indonesia (260M) or 84% like Pakistan (190M).
And notice Pew was not even able to conduct research in nations like Saudi Arabia or Iran…
It’s just bullshit that “hey; they got some bad places; we got some bad places.”
Bullshit.
Grab yourself a poster mocking Mohammed as a clown using bikini-clad girls to parade it around the downtown in every Islam-majority nation capital. Try the same using Jesus as the subject here in the US. Throw in another set using the national leaders on the posters, and some gay guys in short shorts as the poster holders.
Get back to me with which group is left at the end of your experiment.
One could advance exactly the same argument about racial discrimination. You could do a little “observing” of black-majority nations and reach some “conclusions” about black people, if you were so inclined. No need to focus on cultural and historic factors if that detracts from the predetermined conclusion.
You could even do a little observing – as indeed some have done – of the poorest and most violent-prone domestic urban neighborhoods and observe the racial makeup there. Ignore all facts and history that fail to support the predetermined conclusion.
What does that tell you about black people? Is it factually supportable as a racial discriminator?
Then again, you might want to do a little observing of the behavior of Muslims who are welcomed and assimilated into western society and make some notes about them, too. You might end up with a whole different set of opinions than the ones being advanced by Islamophobes.
The worst of the democracy deficit seems to be in the middle east-north Africa region. Colonial areas in Asia are doing better, and southern Africa is slightly better than north Africa. Latin America is doing much better than either Asia or Africa post-colonial areas. But many Latin American nations have more wealth and rejected colonialization earlier. Plus I don’t think they have the issues with badly drawn borders like Africa and the middle east do.