re: #110 wrenchwench

I would like to know where you did get your knowledge, because you are making statements of supposed fact that I believe are incorrect, but I am no expert, and if you turned out to be some University professor who wrote a thesis on Islam, I’d at least read it before going on, so I knew what common ground we might be starting from.

I make no claim of being an expert either, though I have more than a passing interest in the subject.

As it stands, the things you state as fact sound very similar to things Robert Spencer states as fact, so I considered my question pertinent to our discussion.

Which of my facts are controversial? The polls? They raise uncomfortable questions, perhaps. And you may draw conclusions that are different than mine.

It reaches to a point, as we see today, where simply appearing to be Muslim (as if there is a specific aesthetic embodied by us) elicits some of the most unwarranted suspicion, invasive questions and in many cases, outright violence.

So he is describing outright discrimination and naked bigotry, which is of course indefensible. Nothing I’ve posted in this thread advocates or defends this type of reaction to Muslim individuals. The suspicion of all Muslims as being potential terrorists is one of the more ridiculous Western reactions to Al Qaeda and other radicals. That reaction is one of fear, your “Islamophobia”.

I’m not afraid of Islam, but I’m more than willing to criticize it as an ideology that I disagree with, the same as I criticize other religions and other philosophies that I disagree with. And Affleck’s position, that you cannot criticize Islam without slandering its entire population of adherents, is very dangerous in its own right. We need to be able to criticize bad ideas, no matter how many people subscribe to them.

And oddly, the reaction on this thread seems to be that if I say Christianity and Islam are both bad ideas, fine. But if I say, “well, they’re both bad ideas, but I think it’s possible that Islam has some even worse ideas…”, well, everyone loses it! I’m a very bad, terrible, no-good, awful bigot. I MUST subscribe to cultural relativism and the moral equivalence of all religions or else I’m not an enlightened liberal…or something.