View original postThis is an event that has completely transcended the magnitude of the action. A dozen people were murdered in Paris by two terrorists with Kalashnikovs (which apparently they had no problem getting despite gun control laws). The terrorists shouted "Allahu akbar" and murdered cartoonists whose only crime was to poke fun at Islam. The Left immediately forgot its political correctness and started hypocritically tweeting, texting and holding up signs of "Je suis Charlie". They then quickly turned to the tragic story of the Muslim police officer who tried to stop the terrorists and started texting "Je suis Ahmed" because of course you can't say anything bad about the "religion of peace". The anti-semitism of the whole thing was brought into relief today when a person who may have been a copycat or another member of the cell murdered people at a Jewish grocery store.
For one thing, I don't see what's "hypocritical" about the left being as shocked about this as the right.
View original postSo what do I think? I think that we in the West need to be willing to speak honestly about the problem with Islam. Yes, Islam. It's not just "a few fanatics" who are killing. It's the culture of intolerance that breeds them and encourages the extreme minority to do what it does. For every Ahmed who tries to stop them, there are people who sit quietly or even tacitly approve of the murder of those who offended the Prophet. Some 85% or more of Egyptians believe execution is acceptable for apostasy, and so-called "honor killings" are far, far too common in the Muslim world.
Obviously I can see the case for dispensing with all those qualifiers and complicated nuances, and just talking about "Islam". But on the other hand, doing so is and remains counterproductive by alienating all Muslims, tolerant or not, and it is and remains simply not that accurate.
Religion and politics are inextricably linked, in Islam like in any other religion, and in the Middle East that mixture contains a lot of old frustrations, wounded pride and general resentment about the sorry state of their region as a whole, or the even worse state of some parts of it. Same for various hotbeds of Muslim radicalism outside the Middle East (like, say, Chechnya).
In the extreme cases, these essentially political factors push people to embrace more radical kinds of Islam and view things through the lens of "Christianity" or "Crusaders" oppressing Islam - and some of them go so far as to commit acts which are completely against the tenets of every reasonable strain of Islam. It takes a really twisted, bizarre view of Muhammad to believe he would ever have condoned blowing up mosques or mass assassinations of Muslims, regardless of whether or not he would have condoned similar acts against other people.
The other issues you mention are a completely different beast - honour killings, or the belief that apostasy deserves death. Those are manifestations of an archconservative and indeed intolerant kind of Islam, sometimes promoted or, under external pressure, only grudgingly curtailed by governments - but that's a matter of cultural and social norms more than anything else, and the Christians in the Middle East often hold similar views. People in other parts of the world may have similar views as well, or at least similarly intolerant/repressive cultural practices. Those in the West did too, not that long ago, even if the more extreme kinds like witch-burning are rather longer ago. These are things that of course have to change, here the silent majority has to change its view, but you can't expect them to change overnight, and the more Muslims have the impression that their religion is under attack, the less open they'll be to that kind of change.
View original postThe general atmosphere of intolerance in the Muslim world has given birth to the Muslim Brotherhood, al Qaeda, Daesh (ISIS), Boko Haram, Hamas, al Shabab, the Taliban, countless splinter groups in Pakistan and other minor groups that never really took off like al Nusra in Syria. While other political and economic grievances may help to sustain these groups, they all use religion as a prism through which to focus the anger and discontent into suicidal and homicidal rage. Their victims are primarily Muslims, too, whether they're blown up in the hundreds in car bombings in Baghdad or slaughtered in schools in Pakistan or shoveled into mass graves in Iraq. Of course, their intolerance is also driving millennia-old Christian communities out of the Middle East. Even groups as large as the Copts are subjected to terrorist attacks, murders and threats.
Abuse religion, might be more accurate. And I don't think it's quite fair to include the MB in that list. But otherwise, yeah.
View original postThe way I see it, it's not up to me to be more tolerant of Islam. It's up to Muslims to be more tolerant of me (and my friends - I personally drink vodka like it's running out, I eat pork, I reject the Koran and Muhammed, and I have friends who are Jews, gays, women, apostates from Islam, etc.). The Muslims in the United States, and in some places on the fringes of the Islamic world, are actually more tolerant, because they live among non-Muslims and don't have some quixotic belief the whole world will convert (a belief that is so unbelievably absurd when you consider how frequently they kill each other). I feel terrible that they are subjected to suspicion and fear as a result of what their co-religionists are doing, but we all need to work together to send a very clear message to the millions of people in Muslim countries who fantasize in some way that the whole world will be Muslim: it never will. Start learning how to live with people who think differently from you rather than trying to kill them.
I think the Muslims in the United States are more tolerant because they are richer and better educated, more than anything else. Simple economic factors explain why the Muslim immigrants who could afford to go as far as the US have thrived there, much more so than the ones who couldn't afford to go further than Europe - but, from there, can easily return to their homelands on a yearly basis, and in so doing voluntarily place themselves in a kind of neither-here-nor-there position.
The real travesty, for me, are the Islamic countries which are rich and well educated, but nevertheless indoctrinate their people and propagate manifestly intolerant kinds of Islam - i.e., Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the rest of the GCC minus, arguably, Oman. It's kind of ironic that those are the countries that get the most support from the West.
View original postAnd no, you can't bring up the Crusades. If we were living in 1204 I would be happy to concede that Christians were the problem, but we're not living in 1204, or even in 1490. We live in 2015, and there is only one religion that has a problem. It's Islam, and it has a multitude of cancers growing on it. You can't keep saying "this isn't the real Islam" when hundreds to thousands of people get murdered on a daily basis in the name of Islam. You can say that when one lone guy goes on a shooting spree once every few years.
They can and must keep saying it: not in our name,
this is not us, we as the silent majority of believers deny that this is the real Islam. But as a statement of intention, a spur to action, not as a way of denying the problem.
View original postThere are some wonderful things about Islam, and Muslims, but we can't continue to live in the politically correct world where somehow we have to call the religion in whose name I would venture to guess at least 95% of the religiously-motivated murders are committed worldwide the "religion of peace". It's up to Muslims to start cultivating tolerance. The ones who are tolerant need to spread the message to the ones who aren't, which, if the latest polls are to be believed, are a high percentage of people in the core area of the Middle East (as though the endemic violence isn't also an indicator of low tolerance levels).
I think you're conflating issues there that can't be resolved in the same way or at the same time. Ending terrorism and religiously motivated murder is a more concrete, short term goal than generally changing people's mindsets and having them embrace pluralism and full freedom of religion and expression - those last ones seem more like something happening across generations.
