Look, Islam is not the enemy

[BrainGlutton]

Spinoff from this thread. Yes, Islam has some problematic and intolerant elements baked into its DNA, elements which will always make for a difficult relationship with the infidel world. But the last thing the world needs – and the very thing ISIS longs for, and the very thing a lot of RW Americans also seem to long for – is a “Clash of Civilizations” between Dar al-Islam and the West. If Islam as such is the problem behind terrorism, then why don’t we see just as much terrorism coming out of Indonesia or Bangladesh as out of Syria?

[Claverhouse]

I’m not sure why people need ‘enemies’ — as distinct from having them forced upon one by circumstance or the enemy’s choice — to function, but Islam has been around long enough for most of the world to get along with it.
I find it singularly annoying, more so than other religions I don’t follow, probably because of it’s smugness and assertiveness, but although it is perhaps ultimately merely an illusion of the Adversary, it is not an Enemy. No more than mormonism or unitarianism.

[Stratocaster]

Nobody but the fringe loonies think that all of Islam is inherently evil, IMO. But elements are “problematic,” eh? Yeah, I’ll say. The ones who chop off cartoonists’ heads, fly planes into buildings, and want want a war with the infidels, in the name of Islam, those are the guys that concern me.

Why is this so important, by the way? I asked my brother, who is a pretty left-leaning guy, why the refusal to use phrases like “Islamist terrorist,” why the constant apologetic tone to the Islam world, lest we give them offense? He shrugged his shoulders and said, damned if he knew. I ask this in sincerity, why is this so important to you? Why is it so critical to acknowledge unambiguously at every juncture that “Islam is a religion of peace” and all the usual sound bites?

And do you see anyone who has the authority to do so actually waging a war against some monolithic (as they see it) Islam?

[Alessan]

Islam isn’t the enemy.

Certain radical Muslims are a problem. Most Muslims are cool.

[MrQwertyasd]

Lots of muslim women are very gorgeous, even under the scarf. I noticed.

[BrainGlutton]

@Stratocaster

Nobody but the fringe loonies think that all of Islam is inherently evil, IMO. . . .

Why is this so important, by the way?

Because there are a lot more “fringe loonies” than you seem to acknowledge. Just look at the wave of deranged Islamophobia that washes through the most ignorant and/or cynical elements of American society every time something like the Paris attack happens. Look at this sort of thing, for instance.

[Jackmannii]

Man is wonderful, very wonderful
Look at him
Beware the future

[BrainGlutton]

@Jackmannii

Man is wonderful, very wonderful
Look at him
Beware the future

If that’s haiku, the syllable-count is off.

[Procrustus]

@BrainGlutton

If that’s haiku, the syllable-count is off.

free verse haiku

[MrQwertyasd]

In fact scarves are quite nice, actually. Silly to wear them for religious reasons, but they do look rather natty.

[Jonathan_Chance]

@MrQwertyasd

Lots of muslim women are very gorgeous, even under the scarf. I noticed.

What the hell does that have to do with anything.

Stay on topic.

[Hank_Beecher]

@Stratocaster

I asked my brother, who is a pretty left-leaning guy, why the refusal to use phrases like “Islamist terrorist,” why the constant apologetic tone to the Islam world, lest we give them offense? He shrugged his shoulders and said, damned if he knew.

This is part of the reason:
Meet the honor brigade, an organized campaign to silence debate on Islam

You have shamed the community,” a fellow Muslim in Morgantown, W.Va., said to me as we sat in a Panera Bread in 2004. “Stop writing.”

Then 38, I had just written an essay for The Washington Post’s Outlook section arguing that women should be allowed to pray in the main halls of mosques, rather than in segregated spaces, as most mosques in America are arranged. An American Muslim born in India, I grew up in a tolerant but conservative family. In my hometown mosque, I had disobeyed the rules and prayed in the men’s area, about 20 feet behind the men gathered for Ramadan prayers.

Later, an all-male tribunal tried to ban me. An elder suggested having men surround me at the mosque so that I would be “scared off.” Now the man across the table was telling me to shut up.

“I won’t stop writing,” I said.

It was the first time a fellow Muslim had pressed me to refrain from criticizing the way our faith was practiced. But in the past decade, such attempts at censorship have become more common. This is largely because of the rising power and influence of the “ghairat brigade,” an honor corps that tries to silence debate on extremist ideology in order to protect the image of Islam. It meets even sound critiques with hideous, disproportionate responses.

The campaign began, at least in its modern form, 10 years ago in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, when the Organization of Islamic Cooperation — a mini-United Nations comprising the world’s 56 countries with large Muslim populations, plus the Palestinian Authority — tasked then-Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu with combating Islamophobia and projecting the “true values of Islam.” During the past decade, a loose honor brigade has sprung up, in part funded and supported by the OIC through annual conferences, reports and communiques. It’s made up of politicians, diplomats, writers, academics, bloggers and activists.

In 2007, as part of this playbook, the OIC launched the Islamophobia Observatory, a watchdog group based in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, with the goal of documenting slights against the faith. Its first report, released the following year, complained that the artists and publishers of controversial Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad were defiling “sacred symbols of Islam . . . in an insulting, offensive and contemptuous manner.” The honor brigade began calling out academics, writers and others, including former New York police commissioner Ray Kelly and administrators at a Catholic school in Britain that turned away a mother who wouldn’t remove her face veil.
“The OIC invented the anti-‘Islamophobia’ movement,” says Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and a frequent target of the honor brigade. “These countries . . . think they own the Muslim community and all interpretations of Islam.”

Alongside the honor brigade’s official channel, a community of self-styled blasphemy police — from anonymous blogs such as LoonWatch.com and Ikhras.com to a large and disparate cast of social-media activists — arose and began trying to control the debate on Islam. This wider corps throws the label of “Islamophobe” on pundits, journalists and others who dare to talk about extremist ideology in the religion. Their targets are as large as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and as small as me.

The official and unofficial channels work in tandem, harassing, threatening and battling introspective Muslims and non-Muslims everywhere. They bank on an important truth: Islam, as practiced from Malaysia to Morocco, is a shame-based, patriarchal culture that values honor and face-saving from the family to the public square. Which is why the bullying often works to silence critics of Islamic extremism.

“Honor brigades are wound collectors. They are couch jihadis,” Joe Navarro, a former supervisory special agent in the FBI’s behavioral analysis unit, tells me. “They sit around and collect the wounds and injustices inflicted against them to justify what they are doing. Tragedy unites for the moment, but hatred unites for longer.”

In an e-mail exchange, the OIC’s ambassador to the United Nations denied that the organization tries to silence discussion of problems in Muslim communities.

The attacks are everywhere. Soon after the Islamophobia Observatory took shape, Sheik Sabah Ahmed al-Sabah, the emir of Kuwait, grumbled about “defamatory caricatures of our Master and Prophet Muhammad” and films that smear Islam, according to the OIC’s first Islamophobia report.

The OIC helped give birth to a culture of victimization. In speeches, blogs, articles and interviews widely broadcast in the Muslim press, its honor brigade has targeted pundits, political leaders and writers — from TV host Bill Maher to atheist author Richard Dawkins — for insulting Islam. Writer Glenn Greenwald has supported the campaign to brand writers and thinkers, such as neuroscientist and atheist Sam Harris, as having “anti-Muslim animus” just for criticizing Islam.
“These fellow travelers have made it increasingly unpleasant — and even dangerous — to discuss the link between Muslim violence and specific religious ideas, like jihad, martyrdom and blasphemy,” Harris tells me.

Noticing the beginnings of this trend in December 2007, a U.S. diplomat in Istanbul dispatched a cable to the National Security Council, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and various State Department offices. The cable said the OIC’s chief called supporters of the Danish cartoons of Muhammad “extremists of freedom of expression” and equated them with al-Qaeda.

Most of the criticism takes place online, with anonymous bloggers targeting supposed Islamophobes. Not long after the cable, a network of bloggers launched LoonWatch, which goes after Christians, Jews, Hindus, atheists and other Muslims. The bloggers have labeled Somali author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a born Muslim but now an atheist opponent of Islamic extremism, an “anti-Muslim crusader.” Robert Spencer, a critic of extremist Islam, has been called a “vicious hate preacher” and an “Internet sociopath.” The insults may look similar to Internet trolling and vitriolic comments you can find on any blog or news site. But they’re more coordinated, frightening and persistent.

One prominent target of the honor brigade’s attacks was Charlie Hebdo, the French newspaper where several staffers were recently killed by Islamic extremists. According to some accounts, as the killers massacred cartoonists, they shouted: “We have avenged the prophet Muhammad.” The OIC denounced the killings, but in a 2012 report, it also condemned the magazine’s “Islamophobic satires.” Its then-secretary general, Ihsanoglu, said the magazine’s “history of attacking Muslim sentiments” was “an outrageous act of incitement and hatred and abuse of freedom of expression.”

Charlie Hebdo is not the only evidence that, to self-appointed defenders of the faith, a call to kill the message can very easily become a plan to kill the messenger. In January 2011, a security officer for the governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province, Salman Taseer, assassinated him after Taseer defended a Christian woman accused of blasphemy. In court, supporters laid flowers on the shoulders of the assassin in approval.
Murderers like him would be much harder to radicalize in a climate that welcomed debate about Islam rather than seeking revenge on its critics. But in so many Muslim communities now, saving face trumps critical thinking and truth-telling. This is why reform from within Islam is so difficult. In my experience, if you try to hold the community accountable, you’re more likely to be bullied and intimidated than taken seriously.

[astorian]

When “the Troubles” in Ireland were at their worst, nobody hesitated to speak of “Catholic gunmen” or “Catholic terrorists,” so why be shy about calling ISIS “Muslim terrorists.”

[Stringbean]

…because then we are just as bad as ISIS.

…or some similar trash argument bandied about by the liberal apologists.

[Claverhouse]

@Stratocaster

Why is this so important, by the way? I asked my brother, who is a pretty left-leaning guy, why the refusal to use phrases like “Islamist terrorist,” why the constant apologetic tone to the Islam world, lest we give them offense? He shrugged his shoulders and said, damned if he knew. I ask this in sincerity, why is this so important to you? Why is it so critical to acknowledge unambiguously at every juncture that “Islam is a religion of peace” and all the usual sound bites?

Because these sort of people — and many on this board — hate the white western patriarchal colonialist civilisation of their fathers much more than than they mislike those they consider it’s innocent victims, and strenuously believe that without the former the natural goodness of humanity will cause muslims, and everyone else, to spontaneously evolve to match liberals’ own perfection, all instantly discarding their present retrograde beliefs and demanding all the democratic/gender/anti-religious etc. policies of Berkeley.

@BrainGlutton

Because there are a lot more “fringe loonies” than you seem to acknowledge. Just look at the wave of deranged Islamophobia that washes through the most ignorant and/or cynical elements of American society every time something like the Paris attack happens. Look at this sort of thing, for instance.

Meh, sound and fury. No-one takes vulgar nutters seriously, not even the US government. For the rest of us, we have a saying in Britain:

**Ils sont fous, ces **Américaines !

[even_sven]

I spent two years in a community that was probably 50% Muslim, 40% Christian, and 20% traditional religions. It was a quiet, calm, peaceful place. I lived in a poorer Muslim neighborhood. I spent my days teaching, visiting with neighbors, and learning. I’m sure there was a lot I didn’t see, but I never felt religious tension. Now and then the subject would come up, and people would always accept my explanation that I wasn’t Muslim because my parents are not Muslim. I was fully accepted in the community. I was friends with a range of people-- hosuewives, prostitutes, teachers, activists, ladies who sold food on the side of the road…everyone. It wasn’t a perfect place-- child marriage was still a major issue-- but things were changing.

I enjoyed the rhythms of Islam. My day was structured around the calls to prayer. The years were punctated by religious holidays, which brought everyone together (even me). Above all, people were calm, dignified, respectful and, I hate to say it, peaceful. Now and then, I’d face street harassment, and all it would take was a quick rebuke (“is this how you are supposed to treat a guest?”) to stop it immediately.

That region is under attack by Boko Haram. They have been using adolescent girls as suicide bombers. NGOs have pulled out with safety concerns, severing the main connection to the larger world. Commerce has ground to a halt and already poor people are getting poorer and poorer. People who have never had reason to be afraid before are now afraid for their lives. It’s horrible.

How could I possibly hate them? What is there to hate? Their region is being destroyed not by Islam, which has been there peacefully for hundreds of years, but by crazed maniacs and Nigeria’s screwy politics.

[Grumman]

@Alessan

Islam isn’t the enemy.

Certain radical Muslims are a problem. Most Muslims are cool.

What percentage of Muslims would have to support the execution of ex-Muslims for apostasy before you would say the problem is not just “certain radical Muslims?” If you can ask a Muslim in Egypt or Pakistan whether ex-Muslims should be put to death and have a better than even chance that they would agree, I’d call that a problem.

[RickJay]

@even_sven

I spent two years in a community that was probably 50% Muslim, 40% Christian, and 20% traditional religions.

It must have been very crowded.

[Memnon]

@even sven

I spent two years in a community that was probably 50% Muslim, 40% Christian, and 20% traditional religions.

I don’t believe you

[Don_t_Panic]

There are more than one and a half billion Muslims in the world. If they were all the enemy, the rest of us would probably be dead. Or at least very busy beating off enemies. A lot more busy than we are now.

Also, Islam has been around since the 7th century (a.k.a. a long-ass time at this point), and has shown itself perfectly compatible with enlightened golden ages. Nothing to prove there.

History and geography: Go look them up. Actually, I think they even teach them in school.

And if that’s not your thing: How about go hang out with some Muslims, of the regular, non-blowing-people-up sort. I’m guessing most of them won’t make you feel very upset.

Islamic terrorists are our enemies. That’s fine. I’m all for bombing every last one of those into oblivion, because they really piss me off. And if more pop up, keep bombing them. I’m not particularly tolerant or non-violent when it comes to those fuckers, and I don’t bother with PC niceties when talking about them. The whole Paris thing literally makes me feel sick.

But look, Islam is not the enemy. And saying “Islam is not the enemy” isn’t being a sucker, a collaborator or a bleeding heart liberal. It’s just being, you know, not stupid.

There’s no Clash of Civilizations. If there were, trust me, you’d all notice. And there probably won’t be one unless all of us around here decide to kick one off, which I think would count as a Very Bad Idea. So can we all get some perspective, and stop sounding like morons when it comes to this subject? Thank you, absolutely everyone out there right now, much appreciated.

Yeah, I guess I needed to get that off my chest. Thanks for the opportunity.