Don’t hate my hateboner. It’s sensitive.
Well, I just wish it weren’t so scared of long words. It responds well to short phrases like “Muslim world” and “Muslim cultures” and “Islam”, but specific terms like “radical Islamist fundamentalism” or “Islamist-extremist terrorists” seem to give it the droopies.
All Islam in the realm of politics is inappropriate and regressive. Where it falls on the religious conservatism scale or whether it uses terrorism is irrelevant.
There are a few progressive Muslims in the Middle East and other places. Not many, but a few.
And the only people who get to criticize Islam as a whole, IMO, are agnostics and atheists, etc… Conservative Christians criticizing Islam for being violent and backwards is sooooo hypocritical.
All theocratic ideologies of any religious flavor are inappropriate and regressive. Whenever adherents of any religion start trying to make the laws of civil society conform to the rules of their particular sect, things get ugly.
So if you want to criticize particular manifestations of theocratic Islamist-fundamentalist ideology in politics, have a ball. But as I noted to get lives, it requires you to be able to use somewhat longer words and to distinguish between entities that aren’t actually the same thing.
If you’re just using particular manifestations of theocratic Islamist-fundamentalist ideology in politics as a cover to let you hate on Islam unqualified and Muslims in general by tarring them all with the same broad brush, then you’re merely wallowing in bigotry.
Well, truthseeker2 doesn’t seem to want to respond to post 149, so how about Haberdash? What are your concrete proposals to deal with The Muslim Problem?
I mean, the incessant hand-wringing over the Islamic threat is nice and all, but it doesn’t really get us anywhere, does it?
One can criticize the religion without impugning all adherents.
No one in this thread has accused all Muslims of radical violence. You are making this non-existent connection because it allows you say “Islamophobe-bigot-moron-ignoramus!!!” and not ever address that it is, in fact, your religion that is inspiring these attacks.
You spend all your energy trying to turn it against us. All we are doing is calling a spade a spade; that makes you uncomfortable so you have to dig up your drivel that we hate all Muslims.
You try this schtick every so often, and it always fails.
No one wants a Muslim Holocaust.
No one has come within a light-year of suggesting a Muslim Holocaust.
Please, for your sake, try a new tactic. This one sucks.
One more big jump in battery technology, and the problem goes away. The U.S. can stop pretending to be friends with the Saudis/Egyptians/etc., and we can get rid of the TSA.
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I haven’t said anything about a ‘Muslim Holocaust’.
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You clearly feel very strongly about this issue, yet when you have a chance to clarify your position, and propose solutions rather than bitch ineffectually, you clam up. Got it.
So, nothing to bring to the table. I get that as well.
Depends on the criticism. If one’s making a specific critique like “I disapprove of Muslim doctrine’s ascribing divine status to a book associated with a historical human”, sure, that’s an expression of personal opinion that criticizes the Muslim religion in the abstract without unfairly disparaging its followers. Fine and dandy.
But when one’s “criticisms” are actually just vapid and/or hysterical overgeneralizations like “the cold steel of Islam’s Machete” or “Islam is too crazy to be allowed in the modern world” or “those responsible…did so with religious motivation” or “Islam is the cancer of the 21st century” or “the need to expose [Islam] for what it truly represents”…
…then yes, one sure as hell is “impugning all adherents” of the Muslim religion by dishonestly pretending that Islam as a whole is identical with the particular radical-Islamist ideologies that are promoting intolerance and terrorism.
[QUOTE=Stringbean]
No one in this thread has accused all Muslims of radical violence.
[/quote]
Nobody has used the exact words “All Muslims are guilty of radical violence”, true. But anyone who uses the type of sloppy bigoted overgeneralizations that I quoted above is indeed implying that the radical violence of some Muslims is the fault of Muslims in general and Islam as a whole.
My religion? Your pronouns are going a little wonky. As most regulars who’ve encountered me on these boards know, I personally am a lifelong atheist, not a Muslim. (I’m also an American of mixed Jewish and Christian heritage, so I’m not even “culturally Muslim”, unless you count having studied Classical Arabic to some extent for non-religious reasons.)
Bizarre as it may seem to you, there are actually some of us around here who reject and call out religious bigotry even when it’s not directed at our own personal beliefs.
No, what you are doing is calling a spade “human-invented digging tools” and then whining when it’s pointed out to you that the term “human-invented digging tools” is too broad a category to be equated with the spade you claim to be talking about.
If you would indeed stick to criticizing the spade for the spade’s faults and wrongdoing, nobody around here would have a problem with that. It’s when you sneakily and/or sloppily try to generalize the spade’s problems to “human-invented digging tools” in general that you get corrected.
I apologize for the error. I mistook you for a poster who had acknowledged being a practicing Muslim.
No problem, it’s easy to get confused in a busy thread.
- And, indeed, the Nazis never said anything of a Holocaust to end the Jewish Problem.
I suppose your use of the term “Muslim Problem” (capitals and all) was not leading at all…
- My position has always been that it is the responsibility of the Muslim world to adapt to Western-style secularism. This cannot be forced on them, but rather achieved through the continual influx of Western media and Western thought.
(In fact, I answered your exact same question back in Sep. of last year. There you were less obtuse in your clear insinuation that I and others seek a Muslim Holocaust)
BTW, I heard on the radio yesterday that the Islamic percentage of the world population is growing rapidly, mainly because of high birthrates in Islamic countries. And there will soon be more American Muslims than American Jews.
Ramira already spoke to this, but you get that Muslim-majority countries aren’t all theocracies, right? That the Muslim world consists of a wide variety of political systems?
Yes, but even some the democratic societies are struggling mightily with the secular notion that you can criticize someone’s religion without fear of punishment.
Not to mention the rights of women, gays, etc…
The OP of this thread was a reaction to an incident highlighting this very problem. That a country is not explicitly run under Islamic theocracy does not mean that the religion does not play a critical factor in undermining the freedoms that we all take for granted in the West.
My argument has been that secularism is inevitable, and Islamic countries are currently going through the growth pains. These bloggers are being killed because they want secularism. They speak for a younger generation, which is exposed to Western media and our values. At some point, enough people will speak out that the extremists can’t kill them all. The culture of fear can’t work forever.
End tolerance of Islamic politics of any kind. Stop wasting time parsing out what is or isn’t “terrorism.” There is zero acceptable role for Islamic ideology imposed against the will of anyone; whether it’s done by a bomb or by a democratic government doesn’t matter.
No more agents of Islamism tolerated in liberal discourse or on campus. If you advocate Muslim governance, “hate speech” laws, or compromise with Islamism then you are not welcome in the discussion. No more Hamas/CAIR chapters being quoted for opinions on “civil rights” on NPR. No more “Students for Justice in Palestine” allowed to run student government bodies at colleges. If you want an opinion about Palestine or Muslim civil rights, then you will limit your opinions to those topics and not call for the destruction of the rights of non-Muslims, or you will be ignored by reasonable people.
A realistic, fact-based approach to “transforming the Islamic world to modern, civilized people.” No more denial that backwardness and barbarism have too much sway in every Muslim culture, no more evading what the goal must be. No more U.S. Presidents talking about how great Islam as it stands today is – more silence on the topic than anything. It’s not the government’s business to preach about the awesomeness of any religion.
Equal justice under the law for everyone in Western countries. No role for religious thugs intimidating their communities in the name of “Sharia.” No hesitating to investigate child rape because of fears of “Islamophobia” accusations. Life imprisonment for anyone in the West who engages in female genital mutilation including any parent who allows it to happen.
The U.S. should live up to its principles by also ending the indiscriminate bombing of targets in Islamic states, adopting a policy of neutrality towards Israel, and purging Christian fundamentalists from its internal politics. It would not be sensible to try to lead a campaign for secularism and peace until we live up to those ideals.
Islam must secularize. Societies in which religious intimidation has no role in public life are superior to those in which it does. We must have leaders who are not afraid to say this and facilitate it happening. Right now we have people who don’t even believe it.
See, these problems are orthogonal to Islam. You’re attributing human problems, and particularly third-world problems, to Islam in particular. The freedoms we have in the West largely don’t exist outside the West, whether the locals are Muslim, Christian, atheists, or whatever else you care to name. Meanwhile, in the West, people of all religions are able to share Western values. Poor countries with broken governments are going to have conservative social mores and radical politics, period.
Ramira spoke to this too, but the radical Islamism we see today is a fairly new thing. It is a recent aberration, not some default setting for Islam.
Hey, Stringbean, see post #178 above? That’s how you answer a question, if you actually have a viewpoint that you feel is worth disseminating.
Now, I’m not saying I agree with all or most of the things Haberdash mentioned (just for one example, I have no idea what “ending tolerance of Islamic politics of any kind” would mean in practice), but at least he made an effort. Thanks for that.
Meanwhile, I’m glad we’ve at least established (I think) that you guys are not for the all-out repression of muslims for the sake of being muslim. 'Cause I hope you can understand that reasonable people might get that impression from some of the rhetoric posted to this thread.