The Islamophobia Thread

Harris said fascists were right about a community of color and religious minority, he is a bigot. Stop playing apologist for him.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on May 6th 2021 at 8:06:09 AM

Generally, the moment somebody says "fascists were right", you can safely disregard whatever they're saying.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on May 6th 2021 at 5:06:15 PM

To reiterate my post last page, ditto for any rhetoric that goes on about "the threat posed by X".

Edited by sgamer82 on May 6th 2021 at 8:13:45 AM

@Fourthspartan 56: I recommend you read De Marquis comment and then my response to that comment.

Are you saying this would not be antisemitism?

"The threat posed by Judaism".

What If there was a big Pew Research poll showing that large percentages of Christians in several Christian majority countries agreed with things like killing ex-Christians or stoning adulterers and statistics showing that the LRA, IRA and other Christian terrorist groups were the most active perpetrators of terrorism in 2019?

And wouldn't It seem odd to you if the person who said it was a problem inherent to Christianity also explicitly acknowledged the existence of moderate Christians and said the problem was not all Christians, but rather "the vision of life that is proscribed to all Christians in the Bible" and yet for some he was still accused of painting all Christians as dangerous?

There's no proof that a majority of Muslims agree with Islamic extremism either.

Quite the opposite, actually.

And if the guy's making generalising statements about a religious group numbering in the millions or more, he's a bigot. Simple as that.

Not to mention that the biggest terrorist threat in my country are fascists - you know, the people Sam Harris claims have "the right idea" about Islam.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on May 6th 2021 at 5:41:55 PM

@nova92: How would it be antisemitism if it were backed up by statistics showing that there's actually more violence being committed in the name of Judaism than in the name of other religions and

it were also backed up by a Pew Research poll showing that large percentages of Jewish people in Jew majority countries supported things like stoning adulterers and killing ex-Jews and

the person calling Judaism the most dangerous religion explicitly clarified that there are moderate people who identify as Jewish and that they weren't attacking all Jews but rather "the vision of life proscribed for all Jews by the Torah" with the implication that decent Jewish people are simply not following what the Torah actually says and

there were indeed Torah passages that could be pointed to as backing up the horrible things that were being done in the name of Judaism?

Same reason everything else you've mentioned would be: It's rhetoric intended to paint an entire group as a threat to all around them. That's Antisemetic/Islamophobic/Whatever the Christian equivalent is. It's no less bigoted if it were backed up by statistics, which it isn't, or you wouldn't be posing your Pew surveys as what-ifs rather than linking to them.

Edited by sgamer82 on May 6th 2021 at 9:04:31 AM

So Drunken Nordmann, what do you think of polling results like these, particularly under "Stoning As Punishment For Adultery" and "Death Penalty For Leaving Islam"? How do you think the authors of the article you linked to would respond to the poll that I'm linking to? Do you think Pew Research is lying for some reason? Do you think "The Conversation" would think Pew is lying?

I'm asking out of genuine curiosity and I don't understand how anyone can reconcile data like that with the notion that it's Islamophobic to say a lot of Muslims agree with Islamic extremism or reconcile it with the notion that it's bigoted to say Islam is dangerous. Of course it would be Islamophobic to say all Muslims agree with Islamic extremism - none of the percentages I linked to are 100%, after all - but I don't see that being said by Harris or by most of the other people accused of Islamophobia.

Okay, but what's wrong with focusing on the world and not just your own country? And the data at that link also leaves me unsure how to escape the conclusion that it's just objectively true that Islam is the most dangerous religion right now. I'm not lumping all Muslims together, but I can't pretend the stats don't bare out that bad people motivated by Islam are more common right now than bad people motivated by other religions. Am I missing something? Because it really looks like people are trying to will the statistical reality out of existence just by making accusations of bigotry against anyone who acknowledges what the data indicates.

Because the world isn't a monolith and various countries face very different issues.

If I may ask a question, ~Every Other Handle Is Taken, what, exactly, are you actually arguing? What point are you trying to make?

You seem to have stopped arguing that Harris guy isn't really an Islamophobe and now keep trying to bring up "what if they said this same stuff about Jews and Christians instead of Muslims?" as if expecting the answer to be different despite being exactly the same situation but with Jews and Christians instead of Muslims.

Are you trying to convince people here we should be phobic of Islam? Because that's the only thing I can really seem to glean here, especially with things like "it's just objectively true that Islam is the most dangerous religion right now".

What is your goal?

Edited by sgamer82 on May 6th 2021 at 9:26:03 AM

But where is the "entire group" part coming from when Harris said "this is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims" and "we must give Muslim moderates every tool they need to win a war of ideas with their coreligionists"?

I feel like at this point, to be honest, it is just a guy trying to find ways to justify agreeing with Fascists.

...Honestly, at this point, I have to ask the same. What is the point you're trying to make here, Handle? Don't take this as a sign of hostility but I feel you may need to reexplain yourself because it's unclear what your argument is.

I'm explaining how the data we have does appear to back up the notions that people who approve of hurting others in the name of their religion are both a large portion of the Muslim population (not the entirety and perhaps not even a majority, but still a large portion) and a larger portion of the Muslim population than any other religion's population and I'm trying to understand why acknowledging this is considered Islamophobic.

We don't consider it sexist to acknowledge that there are more male mass shooters than female ones, right? And if there were statistics showing that the male population of many countries approved of rape (hopefully you've now read the comment where I posted the Pew poll so you can see that no, it's not just a hypothetical on my part), we wouldn't consider it sexist to acknowledge that, right?

I'm also trying to understand why it is that a lot of the same people who think it's Islamophobic to point out how awful the Quran can be don't seem to think it's similarly a sign of bigotry to point out how awful the Bible can be.

Edited by EveryOtherHandleIsTaken on May 6th 2021 at 9:42:05 AM

...I feel the second chance may not have been...deserved.

@Handle: I genuinely can't tell if you are arguing in good faith or if you are just trolling us, but you are clearly ignoring what's been said already, and you're cherrypicking from my posts out of context to boot, so I'll just say this:

Harris has condemned the entire faith of Islam and all it's adherents as inherently dangerous and violent. This isn't at issue, we gave the examples already and I'm not going to repeat that.

You are criticizing people, not practices, despite agreeing with my statement. You want to pass judgement on entire religions rather than the specific individuals who commit violence. You seem to think that the statistics you reference support your point, but actually they only undermine it. But before I get to that, I want to address something more fundamental:

"What If there was a big Pew Research poll showing that large percentages of Christians in several Christian majority countries agreed with things like killing ex-Christians or stoning adulterers and statistics showing that the LRA, IRA and other Christian terrorist groups were the most active perpetrators of terrorism in 2019?"

and so forth with similar arguments, in several posts. This is a logical fallacy. You are proposing that when a small number of people commit violence in the name of a larger group, that larger group is implicated in the violence. By most ethical standards, people are only held responsible for the acts they themselves commit, or directly assist in committing. Most Christians, Muslim, and Jews have neither committed violence nor directly assisted in the commission of violence, so what a small number of crazy extremists say in the name of their religion is irrelevant.

You also seem to suggest that approving of an act of violence makes the person expressing the opinion dangerous themselves. I don't agree. It's easy to express an opinion, harder to commit an act. If we condemn everyone who ever approved of an act of violence, the vast majority of humanity would end up being condemned. I myself have approved of acts of violence committed in the name of an important in-group I belong to (I'm a US citizen). Does that make me "inherently violent and dangerous?" Maybe, but no more so than most people around the world. If you want to make an argument that humanity is inherently violent and dangerous, you can (and you would probably get some support around here), but focusing on one specific faith to the exclusion of others is bigotry.

Your statistics regarding Christian and Jewish public approval of violent acts only supports my point—if every religion does this (and all the mainstream religions do) then no one religion is any more dangerous or violent than any other.

Any by the way, it isn't just religions, political movements have this effect on people too.

So lets just condemn violent criminals and leave the good people of faith alone.

Except he didn’t point out that there are awful things in the Quaran, he asserted that the correct reading of the Quaran is the most awful one and that anyone who reads it differently isn’t a true Muslim. That’s Islamaphobia and when it’s done with the Bible it’s Christianphobia.

Gatekeeping a religion you’re not part of by insisting that only the most violent and backwards members of that religion are ‘true’ followers of the religion is bigotry towards that religion.

It’s urging real fundamentalists as a core from which to construct a strawman. It’s done with all religions/political groups, but in this instance it’s being done to Islam.

Also, as said before, when your argument ends with “the fascist are the only ones talking sense” it’s inherently a terrible argument. Because logic that only makes sense to fascists is fascist logic, and fascist logic is bad.

Edited by Silasw on May 8th 2021 at 1:43:09 PM

But guys maybe the clown who said we should waterboard ONLY radical Muslims might not be Islamphobic.

Look, if Clown Harris said we should be waterboarding every type of terrorist, he would still have stupid and ineffective viewpoint, but at least he would be consistent.

But no, he only specifically mentioned that radical Muslims should be tortured? Why?

Because it sells books?

Given that he's said things like "this is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims" and "there are hundreds of millions of Muslims who are nominal Muslims, who don’t take the faith seriously, who don’t want to kill apostates, who are horrified by ISIS", it appears to me that he's gone out of his way to avoid condemning all of Islam's adherents as inherently dangerous and violent.

He does seem to think that Muslims who aren't dangerous and violent are not following the religion accurately, but that seems like an attack on a religion rather than a group of people. And I don't see how attacking a religion is bigoted anymore that it would be bigotry to attack a secular idea like objectivism or libertarian-ism or any conspiracy theory.

And I've repeatedly tried to explain why the things you've pointed to as examples don't appear to me to actually be examples of condemning all self-identified Muslims as inherently dangerous and violent. I guess I haven't succeeded.

I'm passing judgement on certain versions of religions and asking why it would be wrong to pass judgement on an entire religion given that a religion is an idea and not a person with feelings.

I never have and never would propose that. I'm proposing that if there's more violence being committed in the name of idea A than idea B, it doesn't make you a bigot to point that fact out and it's fair to criticize idea A as an idea more often than you criticize idea B as an idea.

I've probably spent more time in my life criticizing climate change deniers than flat Earthers, for example, but climate change denial is currently doing more damage than flat Earthism. This doesn't mean i think all climate change deniers are bad people or that the worst people who deny climate change are worse than the worst people who believe the Earth is flat, but climate change denial seems like the idea that's more important to decrease the popularity of because it's the belief that's doing more damage.

It looks like Sam Harris believes that what we would call the bad versions of Islam (I'm guessing he wouldn't call it that; see below) is doing more damage right now than what we would call the bad versions of other religions, and the stats appear to back him up on that.

I'm starting to think the crux of the issue is that he's defining "Islam" differently than most of us do. He acknowledges the existence of what we call moderate Islam, but apparently he would argue that moderate, non-violent Islam shouldn't be classified as Islam. I don't agree with him there, but I don't really see how it's a bigoted position, either.

I would think someone who approved of an act of violence would be vastly more likely to commit a similar act of violence themselves.

Sure, but isn't it easier to commit an act you approve of than an act you don't approve of?

But if someone honestly believes - rightly or wrongly - that it's easier to interpret one faith as a call to violence than to interpret other faiths as calls to violence, why is that a bigoted thing to believe? Would it be bigotry to believe that objectivism can be interpreted as a call to selfishness more easily than existentialism can?

Even if there are statistically more acts of violence being committed in the name of one religion than in the name of any other?

Again, I don't see Harris condemning the good people of faith. I've explained or tried to explain why I view that way using Harris quotes, so I'm a little puzzled as to why you see it differently. He does seem to think good people who think they're following the faith of Islam aren't actually following it, but I don't see what's so terrible about thinking that.

Edited by EveryOtherHandleIsTaken on May 22nd 2021 at 11:17:28 AM

See, the moment that you say that attacking a religion is not a form of bigotry and imply that those who are "good" muslims are the nominals ones and the "bad" ones are the genuine ones...yeah, I don't see how we can trust that you are not arguing in bad faith in this thread.

That would be my reading of what he said, yes.

How so? It's just reading a book and coming away with the impression that only one interpretation of that book is accurate. Like someone who reads Twilight and decides it can only be interpreted as an endorsement of men being controlling and manipulative toward women.

It's bigoted to assert that the only true followers of a religion are the people actually doing what the religion's holy book tells them to do?