re: #10 Randall Gross

You’ve defeated your own argument, and Bill’s point. As you pointed out, in the sixties and seventies, stewardesses on Pakistan Airlines wore mini-skirts. So the current wave of fundamentalism is not the religion or muslims per se, but a dangerous and violent subsect, no where near as prevalent as you or Bill would paint them.

A dangerous and violent subsect yes, but a subsect that feeds off of the relative tolerance of such views by the wider population. These are differences of degree, not of kind. For example, Joe Muslim in Cairo may not believe in murdering Christians because they are Christians, but does he support equal rights for Christians? Of course not, they are kaffir. Until the average Muslim comes around to the view that people should be treated equally under the law regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or religion (as much of the Christian world has), there will be a base of support for Jihadism that isn’t easy to dismiss as a small minority.

You can find the same repressive attitudes and culture in Sub Saharan African CHRISTIAN countries like Eritrea and Nigeria, where they still burn witches and agitate to put gays to death. So like Bill you are still failing if you are trying to make it “Muslim” thing.

It’s pretty telling that we have to go to places like Eritrea to find Christians acting like that. For the vast majority of the Christian world, burning witches and killing heretics are things of the past. And in much of the Muslim world, people don’t “agitate” to have gays put to death, they ARE put to death. In our supposed “ally”, Saudi Arabia, sodomy, homosexuality, and lesbianism are punishable by death, often by beheading. A bit far removed from Southern Baptists telling gays they will go to hell, or the Catholic Pope opposing gay marriage but equivocating on civil unions, wouldn’t you say?

Look, the point is NOT that Islam is uniquely repressive, or uniquely leads to violent ideologies like jihadism. We’ve seen plenty of examples throughout history of repression and violent, genocidal ideologies that have nothing to do with Islam, and a fair share of them have had a lot to do with Christianity. All I am saying is that at this current moment of history, the Islamic world has a particular problem with this, and it is enabled by the strongly conservative views held by much of the population.

Liberals do shy away from this reality, often for good and understandable reasons. But that doesn’t make it any less true.