Couldn’t we import an outside bigot, on, like, a temporary visa? Just long enough to get beat up and run out on a rail?
And, of course, just a tiny little bit of effort would have revealed that Adhami is no longer connected with the Park51 effort. When it all happened over a year ago, Adhami was turned loose by the group after only three weeks, (a point noted by a gay oriented news service that also quoted the Park51 group rejecting his views). The original planner of the Park51 project, Imam Rauf, has never supported Adhami’s views and even though Rauf and the Park51 project team have gone separate ways, they still rejected Adhami, so there are multiple Muslims rejecting his ideas.
So, basically, you have one guy who was offered a job as an advisor, and who then shot off his mouth and was promptly tossed out for his views.
Obviously, some Muslims hold the views that you legitmately deplore. But it is also obvious that other Muslims reject those views. Are you willing to acknowledge that?
You have failed to establish that point as fact. (I am not going to wade through multiple pages of your propaganda looking to substantiate this claim.) It is, indeed, possible that some homosexuals in Germany have been accused of racism for statements made against Muslims. On the other hand, if they tend to speak in a manner similar to yours, it is also possible that they simply conflated the views of those Muslims whom they legitimately opposed with broad brush claims against everyone from the Middle East and are being callenged for those less accurate and more insulting epithets. (Rather in the mode of starting a thread with a title that implies that Muslims are homophobes instead of challenging those beliefs among some or many Muslims that are homophobic.)
Your link isn’t working. Not intended as a criticism.
No doubt gays are worse off in Islamic areas than most of the United States. But so are non-religious people, Jewish people and believers in non monotheistic faiths. Somehow beliefs in the lands of Islam need to become more tolerant. In terms of tolerance, they seem to be at about where New England was in 1680.
How can that situation be improved? That’s the big gorrila in the room.
Sorry, but that link does not work.
Generally, the reason that your threads are sent to The BBQ Pit is that they open with you yelling and screaming invectives–the proper behavior of The BBQ Pit and the inappropriate behavior in Great Debates.
Given that this has, indeed, happened on multiple occasions, one would hope that you would learn to post rants and invective in the Pit and to post debates in GD. I am still not exactly sure that this is a debate, (I am open to you actually supporting some of your claims rather than posting anecdotes that fail in that regard), but I will give you an opportunity to actually provide a debate, here, although the opportunity is not open-ended.
You have yet to provide evidence of people being accused of bigots simply for criticizing Muslims who engaged in homophobia.
Please do so.
Are you really that terrified of the number of immigrants coming to the US and Canada from Jamaica and the Christian parts of Africa?
Guts, or bandwidth? Politicians condemn anti-gay attitudes and violence all the time. I see them condemning anti-gay sentiment in Islamic countries just about as often as they condemn other human rights violations there. We cozy up to Saudi Arabia, which doesn’t allow the practice of Christianity within their country. I guess we’re afraid to accuse Muslims of being anti-Chirstian. :rolleyes:
Yes, there are some queer Muslim organizations and many Muslims are vastly more enlightened then Valteron implies.
Obviously traditional Islamic teachings are quite homophobic but they’re not inherently any more homophobic than either Christianity or Judaism and people will notice that Christians in in the Middle East and the more primitive parts of Africa are hardly more welcoming of gays than Muslims.
Moreover, the relationship between gays and Islam is not as simply as Valteron thinks.
Probably up until at least the 1930s it was better to be gay in the Islamic world than much of the West and as late as the 1970s(when my mother was in Iran) it was easier in many ways to be gay than in the US. In fact the man who introduced my mother and father was a gay man with the US Embassy who, like a lot of the gay Foreign Service personnel in the ME went there because it was vastly easier to be gay in Iran than in the US. Admittedly, that is no longer true but Inshallah it will be again at some point in the future.
This, of course, is the second commonly used red herring. Since 100% of Muslims do not hold homophobic views, that is somehow an argument against my position.
By the same reasoning, we should not condemn Nazi Germany because Germans were not 100% Nazi.
At least Tomndebb recognizes that the number of murderously homophobic Muslims might be “many”. If only 10% of Muslims want to see me stoned or hanged, that is 150 million. Call me a frightened faggot if you like, but 150 million people who want me dead is not comforting. But in fact, I strongly suspect that a huge majority of Muslims feel that the only good queer is a dead one.
For example, apoligists for Islam often try to tell you that stoning and killing of apostates are extreme views held by a small minority. But Pew Research showed in a poll in the fall of 2010 that 80 to 85% of Egyptians believe apostates should be killed and that an adulterous woman should be stoned. And these are the people who will turn Egypt into a modern, free democracy? I don’t believe the Pew research delt with homosexuality, but I think we can imagine what those same respondents would have said.
If murderous homophobic views are so rare and marginal in the rapidly growing Muslim communities in the West, why are the non-homophobic majority not contradicting this small group and making it clear that they do not speak for them?
Speaking of red herrings.
I noted that we do not have evidence, yet, that cries of homophobia are met with cries of racism and pointed to specific example of the sort of confusion created when one uses broad brush condemnations of entire groups, indicating how such confusion could occur. In response, you provide us with nitpicking on a separate issue while utterly failing to provide an example of anyone actually being accused of racism when they pointed out homophobia.
You seem to be intent on ranting rather than debating. Are you sure that this is what you want to do?
Nobody has called you that and you live in Canada not Saudi Arabia so why are you terrified of us.
What do you think is going to happen. We don’t sit around compiling lists of gays to kill and sending them back to central HQ to make sure they’ll be taken care of once we take over Canada, ban the selling of pork, forbid the drinking of Molson and require all schools be closed during Ramadan.
All of that is horrible but it’s completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not people can criticize Islamic homophobia without being accused of bigotry.
You have yet to produce evidence of this and it’s your thread.
Would you please produce some evidence of this.
Thanks
Eh. People of all stripes “believe” all sorts of stupid things. There are over 1,000,000,000 Muslims in the world. Exactly how many adulterers were stoned to death last year? Sure, it’s a problem, but it’s sooooo far down on the list of problems in this world. I’d start with the number of children killed by malaria. When that gets to within 2 orders of magnitude of the number of people stoned to death for adultery, then it’ll ping my radar.
Everyone is afraid of what might happen Egypt. No one is naive enough to think it’s going to be Switzerland (or even Turkey) in next year.
I’d really like to write something scholarly on the history of homosexuality in Islam because from the little I’ve read it is really interesting, though as you say, not a simple relationship at all.
Case in point: When Rifa’a al-Tahtawi (an Egyptian Muslim) visited Paris between 1826 and 1831, he wrote an extremely interesting profile of the French. One thing he noted about them (approvingly) was that the French, like the Arabs, detested homosexuality and had absolutely no truck with it. To illustrate this, he mentioned how when the French would be translating Arabic poetry, they would change “he fell in love with a boy” to “he fell in love with a girl” or something else like that. So we have a - for his time, quite enlightened - Muslim guy nevertheless disapproving of homosexuality, yet at the same time revealing that in fact homosexual references were weaved into Muslim culture.
One thing that complicates Western Islamic attitudes towards gays (and a whole host of other things) as compared to Christians and Jews is that Western institutions for training Islamic scholars are still as yet relatively immature and among many Western Muslims there is still a dependence on foreign imams, especially from the Arab world, for rulings. One big problem that European Muslims have is finding well-trained Imams with good Islamic credentials who are also familiar with European culture. So you have French Muslims who say their sheikh is al-Qaradawi or al-Buti or al-Albani (three quite different guys) and who they turn to for guidance over local figures. The creation of Western forms of Islam is still ongoing, but it is yielding a lot of good things, in my opinion, not just bad things.
For example, the word “racist” is broadly used against any Defence League that is concerned with the growing Islamisation of their country, such as the English Defence League (which is proud to include black, brown, Sikhs and all races, as well as a gay and lesbian section.) Similar charges of racism are also shouted at the Dutch Defence League, the German Defence League, the Canadian Defence League, etc., although all of these groups make it clear that they have no racist bias.
I’m sorry, but this post is utterly moronic.
You were asked to provide evidence that criticizing Islamic homophobia brings about cries of bigotry.
Yes, the English Defense League is accused of bigotry, but not for condemning Islamic homophobia but for actually engaging in bigotry.
You might as well claim that the Nazis for accused of bigotry for being anti-Communist and this is proof one can’t condemn communism.
Sorry, but if you’re going to complain that you can’t criticize homophobia amongst Muslims you’re going to need to provide more evidence than simply the fact that the British versions of the KKK are called bigots.
Anyway, please provide evidence of people who’ve condemned homophobia practiced by Muslims being accused of bigotry. Since you started this thread it shouldn’t be difficult.
Thanks
You have just proven my point. You have compared the English Defence League to the KKK. Yet the EDL has demonstrated against Islamic homophobia and rainbow flags are often carried in their demos. They condemn racism and have members of all colours and sexual orientations. Tommy Robinson has condemned homopbobia in his TV and radio interviews. And he is inevitably called a racist by his critics.
By the way, does this look like something the KKK would do? It is something Muslims did. You ask what I am terrified of? Take a look. muslims-hang-gays.jpg (image)
Read something about the Islamic Jihad against gays here: http://crombouke.blogspot.com/2010/01/violent-muslim-homophobia-jihad-against.html
Oh but wait! You PERSONALLY would not do this to me, right??? There is that argument again. It is not 100% of Muslims who would string me up like a pig. Just millions and millions of them, in rapidly growing communities that build hundreds of new Mosques in the west every year, that demand Sharia Law courts in Western Countries, that speak of a world-wide Caliphate, and that believe they have a mission to win the entire world to Islam as stated by Mohammed himself.
Whew! For a second there I thought some Muslims wanted to harm me. But it is not 100% of them, so every thing is all right.
I have to get to bed now. We can continue this tomorrow if you like. But to sum up my point, if you will read my OP, I am not actually saying that the second anyone criticises Islamic homophobia he is instantly called a racist. The core of my idea can be found in the second sentence of my OP which states: “At what point can we ask the growing, increasingly militant and assertive Muslim communities in our countries to realize that diversity and respect are a two-way street?”
I will put it another way. The day I see Muslims in the streets as enraged about those two gay youth swinging from a rope as they are over a friggin cartoon of Mohammed, then I will believe they see respect as a two-way street,
The EDL is an anti-immigrant group, (hence the KKK comparison that may or may not be valid), that focuses on attacking anything Muslim. There may be an occasion when the EDL has protested Muslim homophobia, (although you have not demonstrated any such thing), but they are called “racist” for their general stance against (brown) foreigners, not because they have protested homophobia–if they ever have. In their eagerness to attack Islam, I note that at one point they invited the American Terry Jones to speak, and he hates homosexuals every bit as much as he hates Muslims. I also note that Gay groups in Britain are among those who shun the EDL. The best you can say about the EDL is that some folks dislike them, but there is no evidence that they actually support gay rights or that they have ever been condemned for supporting gay rights.
You keep playing this theme and refusing to actually demonstrate that anyone has been labeled a racist for opposing homophobia in the Muslim community. You really seem determined to go back to your ranting when I have made it quite clear that you need to actually debate your own point if you wish to have this thread remain in GD.
I’m sorry but this has to be one of the most ignorant things I’ve read on this site.
It’s very possible to be racist and yet not be homophobic just as it’s possible to be extremely homophobic and yet not be racist.