There are ten countries in the world where homosexual activity is a capital crime. That is to say, there are laws on the books which allow the government to arrest you, try you, and (depending on the whims of the judge) execute you for homosexual activity. Those countries are:
The reasoning behind the laws in each case is explicitly religious. Your attempt to draw a false equivalency between theocratic oppression of gays and extra-judicial hate crimes in secular nations is disingenuous and offensive.
That is true and far be it from me to defend the Islamist stance on LGBT rights. But to tell the whole story I think it is worth mentioning that homosexual activity also carries a penalty of up to life in prison in Christian majority nations such as Tanzania or Uganda. The latter even saw a move to introduce the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality” as recently as 2009 and that was only turned down after a lengthy debate and much foreign pressure.
And you appear to be confused by what a “pattern” is…I guess the world is not warming after all, given that cold spell we had last week.
LOL
But again, if you find reassurance that the Muslim-majority nations are not all that different from western democracies because a handful of nations comprising a handful of the world’s Muslims mean the pattern is not universal, chillax and enjoy your point. You might want to avoid wandering out of your marriage vows even in the nations you think don’t follow the Muslim-majority pattern; in the Southern Eastern-Europe countries you seem to think are somehow close to western democracy, over 20% of the Muslim majority still want to stone you and your lover for adultery. Around 10% would like you executed if you abandon Islam. No pressure.
Meantime, the vast majority of people living in the vast majority of Muslim-majority nations will continue to live within a culture and under laws that are antithetical to western democracy. And that will continue to drive Islamophobia because that pattern is so universal despite pockets of exceptions.
You see, when you have to become a fourth-grader pushing a definitional nuance so you get to be right instead of actually being right, you haven’t gained much in the way of substantive contribution to the debate…
So…is this one of those deals where you are trying to pretend the average pattern is about the same? If not, what’s your point? That any nation has idiots? Completely agreed. And irrelevant to the question of whether the culture and laws follow fundamentally different patterns.
I await your examples of the generosity with which Muslim-majority nations extend permits to gay pride parades.
Sheesh. Surely we can do better here than this fourth grade stuff…
Well, you are welcome to come up with some alternative explanations for why Islamophobia is as prevalent as it is. It is my assertion, correct.
If it were the case that Muslim-majority nations are fabulous places to live, and the world was trying to flock there instead of to the western democracies, I don’t think Islamophobia would be nearly as prevalent. Almost all religions–and especially Christianity and Islam–are full of extremist nutcases. Further, most of the public–including adherents–are not particularly familiar with fine points of texts or theology. So what really drives perception is not what a religion “believes” or stands for. It’s what a religion does, so to speak. On paper you would not have any trouble showing the viciousness of Old Testament Jews as being on par with ISIS. (Read Joshua) In practice, western democracies don’t have the same culture and laws as do Muslim-majority nations, even where Jews and Christians predominate among the population.
In short, I hold that Islamophobia is driven by the fact that most citizens in western democracies think that, where Muslims are in the majority, the way the country is run sucks. I’m not interested in debating so much whether it does actually suck or not–I am just saying that Islamophobia is driven by that observation, versus some sort of failure to understand the fine points of Islamic theology.
I don’t think perception is driven by what a religion does, as you put it. It is driven by what* the most visible part *of a religion does. And in the case of Islam the most extremist part of the religion is also the most visible one. I do not think that many people in America or Europe have more than a very vague idea of what life is like in Indonesia (the most populous Muslim dominated country). But they have read reports about what life under the Taliban in Afghanistan was like and that has shaped their perception of the religion.
Come now, that’s not how debate works. You’ve made an assertion; it’s your responsibility, if only to yourself, to have reasons to make that assertion. If you hold something to be true then you shouldn’t need to say “Come up with alternatives, then”; you should have eliminated the alternatives yourself, and supported the explanation, to whatever rigor your personal standards require.
Did I miss your evidence for this “most citizens in western democracies think” bit? Or evidence that Islamophobia is the result of this?
Would you think it wrong, if the Netherlands decided to bar US citizens from entering because of their propensity for murder? I guess you would and rightly so - despite the fact that the US homicide rate is about five times that of the Netherlands. Bigotry is always wrong.
Well … the US homicide rate is at 3.9 in 100,000, so if we were to assume that Americans are generally homicidal, we’d be 99.9961% wrong. I consider that to be pretty bad. If you use your sample - whatever that may be - to equate Muslim = terrorist, you won’t come out any better.
I know that predjudice is essentially a shortcut, and I know that’s how our mind works. But it should be common knowledge by now that this shortcut holds a few pretty bad traps. To blindly walk into these traps again and again is just not very clever.
Then why bring up Matthew Shepard? It’s clear BlinkyandPinky is talking about the legal oppression of gays in certain Islamic countries, an oppression justified in explicitly theocratic terms. Why bring up Matthew Shepard?
True. And again, the problem is religion. If you read the Bible, you don’t find reasons to be tolerant of gays. But Uganda is not the United States, and to insinuate, as Monty did, that U.S. citizens should check themselves before daring to critique the official, theocratic oppression of gays in certain Islamic countries because anti-gay hate crimes sometimes occur in America is fatuous.
Yes, it has the practical application of making a politician look like he is doing something by playing on the fears of one group of people against another. It has the practical application of weakening America’s identity as a welcoming place for immigrants. It has the practical application of preventing us from learning the major factors involved in predicting a person’s likelihood of acting on terrorism. It has the practical application of creating distrust of government among the targets of the bigotry. It has the practical application of creating fear and distrust between groups of people who might otherwise readily agree that terrorism is a problem that must be fought. None of this sounds all that great to me.
For preventing terrorism bigotry is of no value. It’s an inaccurate and ineffective heuristic. Blaming all Muslims for terrorism and engaging in prejudice because of that belief isn’t effective because most of the terrorists/mass murderers in this country are not Muslim and only a very tiny percentage of the Muslims in this country engage in terrorism. It’s better to understand how and why an American can become a terrorist, no matter the kind, and use this knowledge to intercept these individuals before they can kill others.
Although I could be wrong, adopting extremely conservative religious views, watching lots of ISIS videos online and suddenly having an interest in traveling to Yemen are probably much better indicators of a propensity for terrorism than simply the knowledge an individual is Muslim.
Because you are incorrect that it’s clear BP is talking only about legal oppression.
Again, you are incorrect. It’s the attitude in certain segments of society. And I certainly never asserted nor insinuated that Americans should check themselves before criticizing others. What I have consistently done, throughout my life, is assert that it’s wrong to pretend like it’s only “the others” who have the problem.
And there are certain Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods and communities in Israel where gays wouldn’t be noticeably better off than in any Muslim country. Fortunately, those people don’t control the entire country. Yet.
Now imagine being called an anti-Semite for pointing that out…
Would that help in anyway the people being discriminated against? I would say it does exactly the opposite. It does nothing to help solve the problem to shift the discussion away from it or dismiss any concern about it as being nothing but an expression of bigotry.
I can point it out because I’m Jewish, and Israeli. If an outsider were to say the exact same thing, I might suspect them of being anti-Semites, and I might be right. Either way, there’s little they, an outsider, could do. It’s out problem, not theirs.
