re: #362 iceweasel

Also— let’s all remember that this rhetoric of a cancer, a disease, an infection— all these exact same images were used by the Nazis from 29 onwards. Portraying the Jews as an ‘infection in the blood’ and a ‘cancer on the body politic’, and ultimately as a virus or parasite that had to be killed before it killed the host—these were all images deliberately and repeatedly invoked by the Nazis and this paved the way not only for genocide but for the specific form of the genocide: cold, mechanised, ‘hygenic’, sterile. It was portrayed as essential to the health of the German people as a people, and this nationalistic, racist ideal was grounded in very specific bodily imagery about disease and parasites and infections in the blood.

People who advance the idea that Islam is a disease do so in order to prepare the way for the kind of remedy one would apply to a disease - extermination. The rhetoric of those who want to claim that Islam is forever unreformable - eg Robert Spencer - also seem to be trying - in Spencers case slyly - in others more overtly - to promote the idea that the only way to deal with it is via war to rid the world of it - ie it’s followers.