You can always condemn extremism without implying that belonging to a race or a religion is the cause of it. More or less like you can condemn all murders and not be racist, but when you imply that people of a race are predisposed to murder, then you are being racist.
Indeed, but religion is not race.
No, they’re “extremist Islamic” beliefs. Just like killing abortion doctors is an “extremist Christian” belief. It’s not a Christian belief, and suicide bombing is not an Islamic belief. The “extremist” tells us a lot more. The Islamic/Christian/etc. only tells us what flavor of extremism it is. Extremism is the problem here, not Islam.
What point? What am I ignoring? They’re Muslims, and that tells us nothing. They’re extremist and radical, and that gives us useful information.
I’ve already addressed these issues. More terrorists happen to be Muslims. This still doesn’t tell us anything about Islam or Muslims in general, since the vast majority are not terrorists. And answering “yes” on a poll doesn’t make someone a threat to us.
Of course not, but hating somebody because of their religious affiliation is still discrimination.
I must say I’m a bit mystified by the notion that Christianity hasn’t been a violent religion for the last 400 years. What about “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, for example? Certainly, there were also other factors at play, but the conflict definitely had a large sectarian component. Likewise the Yugoslav wars in the 90s. Plus, Christian views have served as a pre-text to much anti-semitism in the 20th century. I’m sure one can find more examples.
Then there’s also isolated acts of violence motivated by Christian ideas, at least nominally—Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in 2011, considered himself to be a ‘Christian crusader’. The National Liberation Front of Tripura has killed hundreds in terrorist attacks in order to establish the kingdom of God and Jesus Christ in Tripura, India. The wikipedia pages on Christianity and violence, Christian terrorism, and sectarian violence among Christians list many more contemporary or roughly contemporary examples.
So while I don’t know how the numbers stack up, I wonder how much of it is just that typically, Christian violence is differently contextualised in our media—a conflict with Islamist background is more readily considered to be explicitly due to religious reasons, while violence with a Christian background is viewed in a more differentiated way, since it’s the same background we live in—we tend to see it as just being part of ‘the culture’, while more readily stereotyping influences external to it.
Not to mention the actual crusades and the inquistion, etc. I’m sure that the muslims thnk that christians ae a particularly blodthirsty lot killing millions while they fight back with the murder of dozens at a time (a couple of thousand in one instance).
One difference is that there aren’t a whooe lot of Buddhist religious leaders that are exhorting their folowers to go kill muslims while there are muslim leaders that are declaring jihad with as much fervor as Christians leaders used to declare crusades.
Its even mre comparable if you are willing to look back a few generations. Not really recent but not ancient hisory either.
That’s what i don’t get. Bill Maher didn’t strike me as a racist before this. I thought he was just being anti-religious.
Certainly. But if you ignore the fact that the extremists are loudly and explicitly using religion to justify their actions, then you are never going to be able to deal with that extremism.
When the KKK used Christianity to justify their murderous conduct in the USA–and at the peak of their activity, in the 1920s, they were doing precisely that–genuinely Christian organizations denounced them publicly and repeatedly*.
This is an important and necessary step in combatting extremism. To pretend that the rationalizations and pretexts on which extremists base their actions are irrelevant, or to claim that the pretext should be taboo to mention, is to abdicate moral responsibility.
*One source describing these denouncements: Philip Perlmutter. Legacy of Hate: A Short History of Ethnic, Religious, and Racial Prejudice in America. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1999
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=4910
The troubles were a localized conflict that was more about politics and less about religion. Politics being the loyalties to either Britain or Ireland. It just so happened that the two were Catholic and Protestant. They weren’t killing each other exclusively because one was Catholic or one was Protestant, but because of where their loyalties were.
And the Troubles as far as violence goes, were unbelievably minor compared to the absolute death and destruction that Islamic Extremism has waged across the Middle East. The Troubles killed something like 3,500 people over a 30 year period of time, ISIS has killed more people in the past 24 hours, quite possibly. Its just not even in the same ballpark of violence.
Well, yes, exactly. I love your example because I think it absolutely makes my point. Maher and Harris are saying “being a white Christian leads to things like the KKK, and if we say that, we are called racist.” and Affleck is saying (or trying to say) “Well, yeah. That’s because that’s a very racist point of view.”
What you’re ignoring is that it is Islamic religious leaders who are encouraging the violence and extremism, in the name of Islam. They are preaching hate and declaring jihads in the Mosques and on the radio and internet, and they explicitly say it is to be done in the name of Islam.
The unsound remarks in this post have been successfully countered in posts 39 and 46, so I won’t repeat what was well-expressed there. Your insulting remarks, here, were both inappropriate and unjustifiable.
I do agree that the message of many discussions of extremists who use Islam to justify violence often is “Islam is a religion of violence”–and that message is incorrect and dangerous. People use such messages to justify their own indefensible conduct, and that should be called out and condemned.
However, I don’t think the solution is to stop mentioning that some extremists are using Islam to justify their violence. To impose silence on the fact that Islam is being misused in this way is to behave like the proverbial ostrich, head-buried-in-the-ground.
Instead, the solution is to point out–loudly and often–that extremists are misusing Islam as justification for their violence. And then, to point out that this is unacceptable.
Just as American Christians of the 1920s denounced the KKK for misusing Christianity to justify their violence, Muslims today should let extremists know that their cloaking brutality in a show of Islamic faith is deplorable and irreligious.
Clearly this thread is not the place to debate the various research studies on the benefits (or lack thereof) of removal of a baby’s foreskin. That there are many such studies that do find benefits is, of course, incontestable.*
But I would certainly like to challenge you to provide reputable research giving evidence of health benefits provided by slicing a piece of flesh (whether rice-sized or bean-sized) from a clitoris.
Citations, please.
*Again, it’s stipulated that controversy does exist over whether foreskin-removal’s health benefits exceed any psychological or physiological costs. The claim here is simply that reputable studies exist which do find health benefits to foreskin removal.
This.
No, it’s because the governments in Christian dominated nations are more firmly in control. The “most fanatic fundie Christians” would cheerfully kill people for drawing a cartoon they didn’t like. Many of them openly advocate the destruction of all of humanity except their own little sect, or condemning most of humanity to eternal torture; they’d hardly balk at executing one guy if they could get away with it.
I hear Christians on a regular basis call for the extermination of every Muslim in the world; pretending that Christianity isn’t interested in religious violence is just silly.
They weren’t “Christian leaders”. They were “leaders”, a few of them were “Christian”, but they explicitly tried to separate religion from their political advocacy.
Those are the extremists. Most Islamic religious leaders are not doing this.
And in that the Troubles are completely different from most Muslim conflicts/terrorism hotbeds because… um… well… you know, like, I mean…
I’m completely with Bill on this. Our PC attitudes won’t allow us to call,a spade a spade.
They don’t seem to be in any hurry to modernize. We need to protect ourselves in the meantime.
Yes, most are not. But you refuse to acknowledge that this one particular religion has a LOT of extremists. Pointing that out and denouncing it is in no way racist or Islamaphobic.
The ones who are doing it are the ones acting in good faith. That’s what their holy book tells them to do, and it either means what it says or it doesn’t. Christianity is the same.