re: #103 Desmond

re: #96 wrenchwench

Where does your knowledge of Islam come from, then?

Certainly not Robert Spencer, although I try to keep up to speed on the subject from a variety of sources. But what does it matter? Are we saying that one needs to be an authority on Islam to criticize certain aspects of it? Does one need to be an authority on Christianity to criticize opposition to birth control or gay marriage?

I notice you didn’t respond to my questions:

[…]

I didn’t respond to your questions because I would like to get the answer to mine before going on to the next one. Last time you said,

I’ve heard the name before but to the best of my knowledge I’ve never read a thing he’s written.

This time you are certain. 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.

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.

Also:

This hostility is not innate. One is not born with vengeance for a specific group of people. It is instilled and socialized through social and institutional production of ideology from the State, media outlets, academia and everyday social exchange. It is manufactured by ever escalating dosages of premeditated images, sound bites and seductive rhetoric that lures one into regurgitating falsities about a people. 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.

That’s why it matters.

That’s the next part of the essay Klys linked to in her #93. You might be interested to read the whole essay.