re: #195 Jimmah

Yep - Islamic fundamentalists are dripping with misogyny and a hatred for all things secular. I detest them. But we shouldn’t characterise all of Islam as being represented by the goals of it’s most foaming at the mouth fundies any more than we should characterise all christians or Jews by their worst.

All bigots characterise entire groups by the opinions and actions of their worst individuals - and that is Spencers shtick down to a tee.

And I absolutely agree with that - except it misses in magnitude of how bad it is and scale of adherents to those extreme views. What we would like to lable as extreme is common enough in the Middle East to not be so extreme.

There are to the best of my knowledge no Christian or Jewish decapitation porn videos for example. No Christians or Jews dance in the streets after a successful martyrdom operation. I could make a longer list. But the point is that Islam as practiced as a religion today by a vastly higher percentage of extremists, is on the whole, substantially more violent and backwards than either Christianity or Judaism. There is really no way around it.

That does not mean that educated and decent Muslims do not exist. Of course there are millions of educated and decent Muslims. However, it is foolish to pretend that only a small minority, at its worst, is the problem.