I don’t understand what the fuss is all about.
Most hobos can’t afford phones.
Actually, I picture more of a Cartman figure.
[QUOTE=LonesomePolecat]
You can’t criticize Muslims at all with being called a bigot or an “Islamophobe” (yet another example of the egregious abuse of the “-phobe” suffix).
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Not the way you do it, no.
Which is to be expected, of course. Anyone who points out that the influx of Muslims into Western nations cause is causing changes detrimental to those nations creates some serious problems for the ideology of multiculturalism, currently the prevailing religion amongst our intellectual, cultural and political elites. Upset them, or those who wish they were of them, and you will inevitably be called an -ist or a -phobe. Let the two minutes hate begin.
Sooo; basically if you hate people you are a hater, and if you speak out against hating people you are a hater. Doesn’t leave much room to be anything else.
Phobe doesn’t mean you’re literally afraid of something. It means you don’t want to be near it. Like something hydrophobic.
However, modern conservatism is based on cowardice, so I’m sure you actually are afraid of Muslims. Because tinpot, hysterical over-reactions are what drive you people to the polls.
Balderdash, sir! Tommyrot! My own representative, the Hon. Keith Ellison, is a Muslim, and is as bland as hot dish. Save for the slightly brownish hue of his skin, he could be a sales representative for Lutheran Brotherhood. I have Pentecostal cousins who are a lot weirder than him. Weirder than you, for that matter! Well, just a couple, but that is a daunting challenge.
Let me tell you internet, it is sooooo hard being white!
This one time, at a restaurant, I had to wait to be seated just because a minority family got there first!
Sharia law is here!
Please. I prefer “Ultraviolet shielding challenged”.
IBN:
I have been to Britain, France and I have studied in Germany on a few occasions. I speak English, French and German fluently.
I have corresponded with EDL members who are very accepting of me as both a brown-skinned person and a gay man. I have never felt the slightest homophobia or racism from them.
I witnessed (but did not march in) an EDL demo in Britain and I noticed something interesting. One young lad who saw a TV camera filming jumped in front of it and started to give the Nazi salute. Three or four other marchers grabbed him and threw him out of the demo. One of them said to me that he had recognized him as a member of UAF (Unite Against Fascism), a group that opposes the EDL, and that this is a favourite tactic of EDL opponents to paint them as Nazis and far-right.
There were, as I remember, many gay rainbow flags and Israeli flags. I saw at least two black lads and several who were possibly of Hindu or of some other South Asian extraction marching with the EDL. Yet the media continue to call them “right-wing”.
Concerning my friends in the gay rights group in Germany, I did not say that the German police refused to act on individually reported crimes. What happened is that they were speaking to a police representative who handles liason with the gay community. They mentioned that their own interviews with victims of gay-bashing over about a year or two seemed to indicate that a very high proportion, perhaps the majority of the cases they had reviewed, seemed to be immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, and wondered if the Police have statistics of this kind, or would like to draw up statistics on the ethnic/religious identity of suspected gay-bashers.
I think their idea was to see if they might not try some sort of outreach or education in the Muslim community against gay-bashing.
It is at that point that the police liason person (I believe my friends said “sie” so she was a policewoman) more or less told them to forget it because her political bosses would never allow the police to investigate and publish results on a hot potato subject like that. Telling Muslims they must change their homophobic attitudes when they move to western countries is apparently not politically correct. And my friends report that the policewoman used the bogeyman of “racism” charges as a reason not to do such research. Since I have only the word of my German friends that this happened (it was an informal community liason meeting;did you expect it to be videotaped and transcribed?) I guess you and Tomndebb will reject this answer.
Once again, Ibn, you make the argument that I must overlook brutal, murderous, uncompromising and nearly-universal Muslim homophobia because some people in the west, such as Rick Santorum and conservative Christians, are homophobic as well.
This is a disingenious argument that completely ignores the context and the realities of the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds.
Ibn, would you please take a second to look at the map and the article entitled “LGBT rights by country and territory” in Wikipedia?
You will find it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_by_country_or_territory
The countries in dark blue, including my Canada, have 100% marriage equality and equality of other rights for gays. The light blue have certain forms of civil union.
The grey countries do not criminalize same-sex relations, but have no particular “gay rights protections” either. For example, India (over strong Muslim object) recently decriminalized.
Then the countries at the red end of the spectrum are those that impose heavy penalties (organge) or the friggin DEATH penalty (red).
Now I know there are exceptions Ibn (Turkey and Indonesia are grey, for example, and “Christian” Jamaica is a homophobic hell-hole that all gays boycott) but surely you can see the overall difference between the Muslim and non-Muslim world when it comes to treatment of gays? Surely you notice that virtually all the countries that impose the death penalty on gays are Muslim?
How does that compare to Rick Santorum or conservative Christians in the US? Outside a few nut jobs like the KKK or Fred Phelps, Christians who even want to recriminalize gay sex (let alone execute gays) are really a marginalized lunatic fringe.
Besides, I doubt if President Santorum could overrule the Supreme Court decision that struck down all laws criminalizing gay sex.
Yes, Uganda had a “Kill the Gays Bill” which is still in limbo because of international pressure. And that pressure came from President Obama and (wait for it) THE POPE! You heard me, the Pope! Joe Ratzinger, probably the most arch-conservative homophobe among mainstream Christian leaders, is against the execution of gays!!
In the Muslim world, killing, toturing or imprisoning gays IS a mainstream position and the law of the land in dozens of countries.
No Ibn, I do not hate you. And I am not fat (where the hell did that start, anyhow?
) And I have never had my heart bropken by a Muslim lover.
I am terrified at seeing the growth in western cities of communities that make one feel as if a time warp had suddenly occurred and that people from a thousand years ago are suddenly flooding into our modern, western world.
We are talking about a community where 72% of British Muslims feel gays should be recriminalized.
Where a Muslim Mayor of the Borough of Tower Hamlets in London tries to hassle and close a gay bar that has been in operation for decades.
Where people from theocracies who have no notion of what is meant by Civil Society or Separation of Church and State begin to demand that dogs be kept out of parks and withdraw their children from school when there is discussion of evolution, or when a social studies class teaches that there are families that have same-sex parents.
We are talking about an ideology that has so little respect for freedom of expression that it would murder someone like Salman Rushdie or the Danish cartoonists. So little respect for freedom of conscience that they would murder a person who decides to leave Islam (apostate).
We are talking about an ideology that has so little respect for the western value of sexual freedom for consenting adults that they use lashing, stoning and execution to terrorize people into following their medeival sexual morality.
As Geert Wilders has so often said, the whole problem is that Islam is at “right angles” to our democratic, western society.
Finally, Ibn, let me leave you with a personal but true story. An Imam of the local Mosque in my city in Canada was participating in a discussion group. I asked him this question. It was during the period that Salman Rushdie still had a Fatwa against him. I asked this Imam what he would do if he knew that Rushdie was at a certain nearby, unprotected house in our city, and a Muslim gunman asked where he was. What would he, as a Canadian citizen, do?
Now, the answer seems simple. Any law-abiding Canadian would refuse to tell the person, and call the police to report the incident.
Believe it or not, this Imam would not answer my question. He kept objecting that it was “hypothetical”. But since when is it impossible to answer a hypothetical question according to your moral beliefs?
No, I do not hate Muslims. I am terrified of Islam.
It was also no coincidence that those conversions generally occurred in the wake of conquering armies, and a great many of the atrocities attributed to them weren’t just Christian propaganda. Nobody can really dispute that military force was critical to the early successes of Islam, but then you’re the guy who insisted with a straight face that the bloody Muslim invasions of India were a “peaceful migration.”
Don’t know about Israel, Kashmir or the Phillipines, but the conflict in the Balkans was largely the result of years of illegal immigration by Muslims that turned Serb majority regions into Serb minority regions. Nor were Serbia’s actions entirely unprovoked. The only reason the Muslims didn’t have the upper hand is that they didn’t grab the heavy artillery from the arsenals when the Yugoslavian state collapsed. That doesn’t excuse everything the Serbs did, but it’s not like they just suddenly went ape shit and started killing Muslims for no reason.
Most of the world’s conflicts today involve either Muslims killing non-Muslims or Muslims killing other Muslims. If you see a clear pattern of resistance to oppression there, you have a vivid imagination.
Not following your logic here. Are you saying that, because every religion and culture has been guilty of agression at one time or another, we sould not be concerned about Muslim aggression against us? That certainly seems to be what you’re saying.
So what? It’s still just name-calling. You don’t call someone a phobe to describe his views. You only call someone a phobe to attack his character.
Oh, that’s not phobic at all, nosirree.
Reflecting on the left’s lunatic hatred shown to tea partiers and Sara Palin, I’d say you really have no business accusing others of hysterical over-reaction.
Some"? Try “legions” instead.
And who was pushing for the bill? Why, Christians! American evangelical Christians are one of the driving forces behind it.
And so is Christianity, and every other religion. Where religion is strong, freedom and tolerance are weak.
Yeah, right. Americans slaughter them like cattle and prop up dictators over them, and when they express anger over this we bomb them some more and yell about how threatened and oppressed we are by the Evil Muslims.
I’m not afraid of conservatives. I’m afraid they’ll destroy the country.
The Tea Partiers are largely idiots who are operating under minsinformation. They’re more pathetic than hatred worthy.
Sarah Palin is clearly sub-normal. I don’t like halfwits in charge of policy. But any level of stupidity is okay with you, as long as they want to lower taxes and loosen gun laws, right? You couldn’t care less how much they damage the nation as long as your personal chestnuts are roasted?
If you will look at the fuller explanation I give in answer #130, below, I am NOT saying that the German police needed that statistic to arrest someone for assault in a specific case. It is a community liason police officer with whom the gay group was discussing their own findings on gay bashings over a couple of years. They had noticed how many of the victims were convinced their assailants were of North African or Middle East origin. I believe they wanted to do some education or awareness work in the Muslim community, perhaps.
But as soon as they asked if the police had or planned to collect statistics on the ethnic/religious origins of suspected and/or convicted gay bashers, the police liason person more or less admitted that this would be impossible for reasons of political correctness.
I always figured you for a repressed homosexual who lives in a run-down trailer park and teaches English at some cow town community college. You know, one of those annoying little mediocrities who ape the attitudes and manners of the upper classes in the hope of being mistaken for one of them. This is one of your better posts, though. You’ve risen above mere snark and touched the lower levels of flippancy. Perhaps someday, after a lot of hard work, you will craft an actual witticism.
You thought Minnesota has cow towns?
Good Lord, just how ignorant of the American Heartland are you?
Don’t you know anything about the real America?
Also, if Elucid was gay(I don’t know if he’s ever mentioned his orientation) why would he be “repressed”.
Liberals are generally pretty tolerant of being gay so it’s doubtful his friends or family would throw him out.
The closet cases are always right-wingers.
Why do you think that whenever some politician gets caught with their pants down with some rent boy it’s always a Republican.
You may be interested to note that the expression “red herring” refers to a herring that has turned red from being smoked. It has a very strong odour and since it is food, it would interest a dog. It would be drawn across a person’s trail to distract the dog from the true scent he was supposed to follow.
Every time we discuss the brutal, murderous levels of Muslim homophobia, we are somehow “corrected” by the fact that many conservative Christians are homophobic as well.
Berlin, 1938: "Yes, several thousand Jews were beat up and murdered in the Kristallnacht their homes and stores looted, and every Synagogue in Germany set afire, but let’s not forget that there is a lot of anti-semitism in America!"
I have indeed complained of Christian homophobia.
But here is an interesting fact. In Mecca, which is in Saudi Arabia, the penalty for homosexual activity is DEATH.
So what about that other “holy city”, the Vatican?
If you scroll down the list of countries in the Wikipedia article “LGBT rights by country or territory” you will find the Vatican State under “Southern Europe”. And guess what? The Vatican is one of the states where same-sex activity is LEGAL! Now, I am not saying they would rent my spouse and I a room for the night, but I think just that detail illustrates why there is NO moral equivalency between Conservative Christians and Islam when it comes to homophobia.
Maybe he’s simply ignorant of this fact, due to watching Fox News.
How would you know?