re: #77 wrenchwench

That’s an inaccurate restatement of the poll question. This kind of recasting of words is necessary to keep the fear mongering going. It’s bullshit.

I’m not ignoring anything. What are you doing to combat fanaticism among religious people? Posting about it on the internet?

If you insist on being upset by the numbers, perhaps you should look into the reasons for the difference between how Indonesian Muslims see the issues and how Egyptian Muslims see them.

How about this:
There are about 165 million (actually more) Muslims that feel that suicide bombers can be justified in the name of Islam. I added the “actually more” because this only count she ones that say “often justified” or “sometimes justified”, it does not include the ones that state it is “rarely justified”, which still means it could be justified.

Does that phrasing make you feel better?

Seriously, the feeling I get here is that there is no interest in looking at the issue, only complaining about the person talking about the issue. You want to make this about me, and Maher and Harris (and apparently Andrew Sullivan) who stated:

Christianity has a bloody past and a deeply flawed present. Islam has a glorious past in many respects, and manifests itself in many countries today, including the US, humbly, peacefully, beautifully. But far too much of contemporary Islam - from Pakistan through Iran and Iraq to Saudi Arabia - is more than usually fucked up. Some Muslims are threatening non-believers with mass murder, subjecting free societies to shameless terrorism, engaging in foul anti-Semitism, and beheading the sinful in Saudi Arabia just as much as in the Islamic State. And if liberals - in the broadest sense - cannot stand up for freedom of speech and assembly and religion, and for toleration as a core value, then what are liberals for?

I do find that you are trying to shut down any conversation about it (not any single one of you, but a collective piece of the website). Nice to see being called a bigot, what if I raised the same complaints about Christians? This is the same argument that Affleck used, no facts, just name calling.

As for what am I doing about it? The more important question is “What the fuck are the moderate Muslims whose religion is being smeared by the extremists?” This is a Muslim problem and has to be solved by Muslims, maybe they should get off their collective asses and fix this, and not wait for someone else (AKA the West) to show up. Maher believes the US should not be in the Middle East, but the moderate Muslims were doing not to help the Kurds, the Yezidis or anyone else until the US showed up.

And I will finish with a quote:

“Many of them [the Western liberals] have betrayed us liberals in the Middle East and other Muslim countries, and sided with the Islamists against us.”

Faisal Saeed Al Mutar