The Islamophobia Thread

Pentacostals qualify as a type of evangelical denomination, but they do some things that are considered extreme even by many other evangelicals, such as speaking in tongues.

They're the one's that do that? Ew.

Ive been to a service. They are otherwise very nice people.

Every group has nice people in it, that does not lessen my distaste.

For the most part, they seemed pretty harmless, or at least no worse than any other group of evangelicals.

Pretty harmless and American evangelicals aren’t phrases that I’d associate with each other.

Nor I. <points at Uganda> Thanks, for all the help elevating and saving the lost, starving Africans, Southern pentecostal movements. You haven't helped royally fuck things up. At all. -_-

Link, please?

Here's one going on about it in general terms. There aren't many articles online about the impact of the pentecostal and evangelical movements on African politics and society. So, you can google without fear of being drowned, because who cares about Africa enough to publish much? :|

But, believe me... go there and you spot the massive problems immediately. The huge, multi-pronged anti-gay movement and the push to squelch feminism to be commonly found in high tier politics is quite directly linked. Not to mention the issue that forms of it are prevalent throughout the public school systems in Southern and Western Africa, simply because of textbook supply issues: its straight up propaganda against sex education, liberalisation and a boat load of human rights, while stressing the importance of the prosperity gospel.

And, the effect of preachers on polls is also immediately apparent.

Not to mention some of the witchfinding movements that have sprung up from pentecostal origins, crossed with native traditions. Those get into Nightmare Fuel territory very, very quickly, what with the full-scale child abuse visited upon both genders going on, but mainly on the forced physical and sexual abuse of young girls as political bribary while short-circulating lobela (bride price) and clan compensation issues.

edited 12th Feb '18 1:22:35 PM by Euodiachloris

If I remember right the Ugandan anti-gay laws were literally written by a bunch of Americans.

Good to know.

@ Silasw

While there was American Evangelical influence in Uganda, it's false that they wrote up the bill. They held a conference and later the bill was introduced, but they didn't create it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uganda_Anti-Homosexuality_Act,_2014

edited 13th Feb '18 9:41:01 PM by firewriter

They may also have bankrolled the creation of the bill, as apparently it’s an expensive process to do a private member’s bill and nobody has been able to pin down the source of the funding, and though your source doesn’t say that they did write it (it also doesn’t say that they didn’t), it does include the fact that.

“A special motion to introduce the bill was passed a month after a two-day conference was held in which three Christians from the United States asserted that homosexuality is a direct threat to the cohesion of African families.”

The US’s exportation of religious fundamentalism that encourages state based terrorism is beaten probably only by that of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran.

edited 14th Feb '18 1:51:21 PM by Silasw

Since we are on the topic of Africa, I do think it would be interesting to bring up how some African countries have long disputes between it's Islamic and Christian residents. However, on the bright side there is a light of hope that some people are trying to mend bonds with one another.

http://www.dw.com/en/religious-conflicts-on-the-rise-in-africa/a-40645771

edited 14th Feb '18 3:12:56 PM by firewriter

Yay, the clash of foreign propaganda for hearts and minds! (No, really.)

There are some brands of both Christianity and Islam that aren't aiding and abetting the driving forces behind the tribal conflict, but... at root, it's Dallas vs Riyadh (featuring the nutters that take the madness a bit further than either intended).

Proxy war by dogma and ideology: thanks.

If those two weren't egging various local corrupt bastards on with dogpiles of money, things might calm down. Or, China would start pushing Confusian schools.

So I just found out about this event in 2013, where in the 75th anniversary of the Kristallnacht, someone set a fire in the oldest mosque in Poland, in the same town where there were pogroms against Jews on the same date and the Jewish community expressed outrage at the connotations of the gesture.

I brought it here because I thought it was a pretty positive gesture, and a nice subversion of the "divide and conquer" atmosphere that the far-right likes to foster.

Good for them.

A stark reminder that not all Jews are as Islamophobic as the vast majority of Israeli Jews and pro-Israeli non-Israeli Jews (it helps that a lot of non-Israeli Jews hate the very concept of Israel to begin with).

it helps that a lot of non-Israeli Jews hate the very concept of Israel to begin with

Now, that is a very stretchy statement.

Stretchy how? It is an actual thing. And when I say "the very concept of Israel", it should be obvious that I mean "the establishment of a Jewish state as a Jewish homeland at any cost". Hell, Israel itself explicitly defines itself in its own Basic Law as a Jewish state... though it doesn't offer any specifics on what that means, because nobody could agree on that.

edited 21st Feb '18 5:14:33 AM by MarqFJA

Yeah, you gotta define 'a lot'.

edited 21st Feb '18 5:16:02 AM by TheHandle

You do realize that "a lot" doesn't mean or imply "the majority", right?

I would estimate their number as probably less than Obama's inauguration crowd but larger than Trump's.

Sri Lanka's Anti-Muslim Violence

Cross posting with General US Politics

A site I use to keep track of news, WTF Just Happened Today, hasn't come out with it's daily news dump yet, but it does have a few stories and this one caught my eye.

Reclusive hedge fund investor and multimillionaire Robert Mercer gave $2 million to a far-right neoconservative group called Secure America Now. The group worked closely with Facebook and Google to spread Islamophobic videos and ads on social media that were targeted specifically at voters in swing states who would be most susceptible to the messaging. Secure America Now has no employees, no volunteers, and is run out of a Washington, D.C. law firm. Most of the money to support the group came from just three individual donors, including Robert Mercer.

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2018/04/exclusive-robert-mercer-backed-a-secretive-group-that-worked-with-facebook-google-to-target-anti-muslim-ads-at-swing-voters/

edited 5th Apr '18 10:54:17 AM by sgamer82