Can’t answer right now. Later…
Please read these, if you have time:
http://www.feminist.com/news/vaw26.html
http://www.metroweekly.com/gauge/commentary.php?ak=2076
gum, I think you’re missing the point. Nobody’s denying that there are some serious problems with militant political Islam, or with repressive Islamic theocracy, or with assimilation of Muslim immigrants into Europe. Nor is anybody arguing that Muslim protestors ought to be able to illegally trespass on church property without proper permission. All these issues should be addressed legally.
But that doesn’t mean that it’s anything but monumentally idiotic to suggest, as Rune was trying to do, that Muslim protestors temporarily occupying churches are a symptom of an Islamic “takeover”, or that their temporarily covering Christian images is an act of “desecration”. Nor is it in any way useful to refer to Muslims as “heathens” worshipping “false gods”.
It is also monumentally idiotic to suggest that Islam and Muslims are somehow protected by some kind of “special taboo”:
Horseshit. Muslim-bashing is still far more acceptable than bigotry against many other religions. If a poster showed up on the SDMB, even in the Pit, ranting about how a group of, say, Jews occupying a church were “desecrating” it with their “heathen gods” and their “false prophets”, that poster’s ass would be banned faster than you could say “StormFront”. Say the same things about Muslims, though, and you’ll get away with it.
And while we’re dissecting more of Rune’s monumental idiocy, by the way:
From which we see that Rune counts threads mocking Chick Tracts as part of SDMB “Christian-bashing” in general, which is simply ridiculous. Making fun of Chick Tracts isn’t Christian-bashing any more than making fun of the loony pronouncements on jihad and martyrdom by people like bin Laden and Moussaoui is Muslim-bashing. Mocking the nutty hate-filled extremists of any religious faith is not at all the same as expressing bigotry against that faith as a whole.
In other news: sun rises in east, sets in west.
Exactly.
I’ve been wanting to post this since I saw it in the print edition to see if gum and Rune’s heads make little popping sounds when they explode.
I present, from the (Fox News family) UK Sunday Times magazine, a long and well researched article about the successful integration of the majority, moderate Muslims, into British society. Seems that a right-wing European publication thinks they’re not all extremists after all. Who’da thought it? The front cover of the magazine features a smiling Muslim woman wearing a Union Jack as a hijab.
jjimm - you’re missing the perfect circuitousness of the argument.
There is no such thing as moderate Islam…therefore, moderate Muslims do not exist…so there is no need to rebut cases such as yours from the Sunday Times…hence the blindness to evidence for most European Muslims being moderates…therefore Muslim=extremist.
It’s like its straight out of Catch-22. Beautiful