Despite that, the power of Jewry and its supporters grew so great in the German people that it lead to the collapse in 1918. The primary cause for this was the large increase in the population of our people, combined with growing liberal tendencies, which led more and more Germans to misperceive the fact of the racial problem, and thus become indifferent to the Jewish danger.
Always those darn liberal tendencies, weakening the ethnostate by allowing the undesirables in. At least own your fascism, don’t blame it on me or mine.
Your argument is that Muslim nations follow a “universal pattern”. Your words. Turns out, they don’t. Maybe try your OP again, with a new claim?
Never said that, or anything like it.
This is your grand point, that the US and the Third World are different? Who are you arguing with?
Sure, that’s true. One thing to note is how many of those Middle Eastern & North African countries got Soviet aid in their fights for independence, and became Soviet allies after the fact, leading the US to scramble to secure its own allies in the region to serve as a bulwark against Communism. This led to a lot of dictatorships being propped up, some aligned with the US (Saudi Arabia, Chad, Sudan, DR Congo, Sudan, etc), and some with the Soviets (Libya, Iraq, Algeria, Syria, etc). Unsurprisingly, these countries are a bit behind in democratizing, compared to non-aligned countries like Tanzania and Niger.
Nah. All that work Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins etc have put in to help “liberals” and they still refuse to understand. Claiming everyone is just the same or it’s just a few Muslims who don’t understand the Koran like we do.
I think you’ve missed an important step in your argument. So far as I can tell, you haven’t actually linked the bad things you associate with Islam with Islamophobia - that is to say, you have said that Islamophobia is the response to “bad shit in Islam”, and then supported your “bad shit in Islam” point (which is being debated), but you don’t actually seem to have connected actual Islamophobia *to *that bad shit.
For “bad shit in Islam” that you’ve brought up to be the “root of Islamophobia”, you need to show that those who are Islamophobes have accurate knowledge of that bad shit and that that is the cause of their reaction. And I think you’ve missed that step out.
I just listened to a talk by Maajid Nawaz, he points out an important distinction to be made, between Muslims and Islamism, I think most of the people that are tarred with the “islamophobe” brush are against Islamism, not necessarily against Muslims. Personally I get along just fine with the Muslims I know, I probably wouldn’t get along well with an Islamist (and vice versa).
I think the OPs observation cuts through all of that. If you look at the places where Islam is a strong majority, what types of societies are formed there? Are they societies that mesh with Western values or conflict with them?
Right now, at this moment in history, are there some Christian countries that are doing better than most all the majority Muslim countries when it comes to upholding liberal values? Sure. But when you look at the whole history of Christianity and the whole history of Islam, I don’t really see much difference. Both have done plenty of awful things in the name of the religion, and plenty of awful things that they found religious excuses for. Things got substantially better in some Western democracies as they became increasingly democratic. Things got substantially worse in some majority-Muslim countries when theocracies took over. In both cases, it wasn’t the religion that changed, but the political system.
Also, I’ve been co-workers and friends with people from Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Jordan, and Turkey, and grew up with close friends whose parents hailed from some of these places. My personal experience has consistently been that the lives and values of Muslims in America aren’t really substantially different from mine or most of my other friends. Yeah, that’s anecdotal experience based on a sample that’s biased towards well-educated middle-class people living near large cities… but still, at least it’s an opinion formed from actual experience. I wonder how many of the people who are convinced that Muslims are so unable to embrace American values have actually spent any time getting to know any Muslims in America.
Also, it might be worth considering the many examples of Western democracies actively supporting dictators and monarchies in the Muslim world, and even helping overthrow the democratically elected leader in Iran, leading ultimately to the theocracy they have there today.
The fact that autocratic and theocratic governments are not conducive to freedom and protection of civil liberties is pretty much a tautology. The claim that it was Islam specifically that made these countries go that way is far more suspect.
Yes, they do.
And you are trying to fall back on an argument that finds tiny exceptions to argue there is no pattern.
Which is what you have to do to maintain a pretense that Islam-majority nations do not all follow a universal pattern.
While the extent varies, the overall pattern does not, and the vast vast majority of Muslims living in a Muslim-majority nation live under regimes and cultures and laws which reflect the end of the spectrum that is very very antithetical with the west.
This is the fundamental reason Islamophobia is as pervasive as it is. Not some argument about whether or not the Jews in the Old Testament were as violent as the modern day Islamist extremist. Not some argument about how peaceful the leaders are…
What makes Islamophobia so pervasive is the observation of how antithetical is the pattern within Muslim majority nations. Where Muslims make up the majority, the nations suck wrt western ideals. And the pattern is universal.
I am amused, for example, at how often Indonesia is raised as a relatively model Muslim-majority nation as if, outside of Bandeh Aceh, things are just peachy.
I challenge you to truck off to Jakarta and try a little freedom of expression out in the streets with your bikini-clad model carrying a poster trumpeting LGBT rights along with the need to turn away from Islam.
Now, what’s “special” is various facts of geopolitics, history, and the like. Not anything unique or special about the Quran or the tenets of Islam as a whole.
Politics, war, conquest, economics, colonialism, and similar things are responsible for this mess; not religious scripture or tenets. And only political and economic solutions could have any hope of fixing it.
My point is, if Islam were the reason for the problems in those countries, this effect would have shown up throughout much more of their history.
Instead, there are historical reasons why more theocratic governments arose in these countries (not least of which is substantial Cold-War meddling by the Western powers), and then those theocracies were based on what the local religion happened to be. If you changed which countries were majority Christian and which were majority Muslim, but left other factors the same, then I think it likely that we’d have ended up with something like a Christian Ayatollah, a Christian Taliban, a Christian ISIS, and so forth. (Or sure, swap in Judaism or any other religion and it’s much the same.) It’s not something inherent in Islam, that’s just what the theocrats and fundamentalists in those countries had to work with.
Of course you might say, even if it’s really about the geopolitical history of these countries and not something about Islam itself, it still may be that people from these places can’t assimilate and embrace Western values. But that assertion doesn’t match up with any of my personal experience with people from Iran, Jordan, Pakistan, etc. Sure, maybe my experience with Muslims in America is not typical… but until someone shows some actual evidence of that, I’m going to believe what I’ve seen with my own eyes. Most of the concerns I hear about Muslims in America seem to come from people who haven’t really gotten to know any American Muslims very well.
…well, as the resident self-admitted SJW of these boards, I am astonished and delighted to find out that I am a threat to secular democracy. And a facist to boot. And a collaborator! Who am I collaborating with?
I’d love to be able to use this new found power of mine! What would you suggest that I do first?
Do you believe that all Muslims share the same culture?
