It’s interesting that in our past dialogue about the other article about the racist old European guy, you didn’t seem to care a jot that there was not even a shred of evidence the author of that article offered for the conclusion he was asking readers to draw, namely the conclusion that the anecdote he described was generalizable, that he wasn’t describing just one odd case of an old racist but rather that he was describing something common, just how white privilege works on an “average Tuesday,” as he put it. Yet, in approaching my article, which has every important empirical assertion that’s controversial documented with evidence, you apply a total double standard. You go, pretty much, sentence by sentence (including sentences that make entirely trivial and obvious claims that don’t need support), and quibble, question my sources, etc. Despite approaching my article in that extremely uncharitable fashion, looking for things to find wrong with it, you actually seem to find that most of what I wrote was well backed up by evidence. So I’m not sure why you concluded that this article was in some way “shocking” or why I’m such a “racist,” “supremacist” or “bad person,” as you suggested in your other response to me.

I’m not going to get into this game of going sentence by sentence with you, because I gave you a careful response to your other post, and you, feeling overwhelmed by it and too “tired” to respond, started name-calling. So I won’t waste my time on you that way again.

Instead, I’ll just make a few broad points.

First, it’s not enough to just plug a media source into the https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ search engine and stop there. You can plug The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post and other “mainstream” sources into that same search engine and see that they display a pretty good deal of leftist media bias. I don’t accept or dismiss any of these sources universally. I read them critically, which is how you should read everything. Yes, of course, the National Review is right of center. No one is denying that. But they’re also generally a reputable source of information; they don’t make things up or peddle conspiracy theories like some far-right and far-left outfits routinely do. But what’s more important is the specific article of theirs I linked to rather than the general reputation they have. Do you have any specific problem with the facts adduced in that article? If not, who cares where that article ran?

More generally, if you’re interested in the facts (or lack of facts) on #BlackLivesMatter (meaning, on the myth that there’s an epidemic of unjustified police shootings of black people going on), here is my more detailed discussion of those. The data I rely on is almost entirely DOJ/FBI statistics, coupled with pure common sense. If, after reading that (only if you’re interested, of course), you don’t come away thinking that there isn’t a big problem with how the whole police-shootings-of-blacks narrative has been presented to us, let me know ….

In terms of the facts about Muslims and what mainstream Islamic beliefs actually look like, I’ve also written a piece that presents those facts succinctly, in bullet-points. Here it is: https://medium.com/@Zoobahtov/let-s-stop-spreading-p-c-lies-about-muslims-7e6a4b758140.

Almost all the data there is drawn from PewResearch surveys, which is pretty universally acknowledged to be a reliable source.

You’ve passed along some links about Shariah law. The Washington Post article you linked to is one I’ve actually read before. It doesn’t really deal with most of the issues that make Shariah law concerning. I will quote a few sentences from the article of mine that I just linked to, so that you understand what I’m concerned about:

Shariah law means punishments like whipping or cutting off the hands of thieves, stoning for adultery and the death penalty for leaving Islam. When asked specifically about those penalties, most Muslims who believe shariah should be the law of the land still support them. In Pakistan, for instance, among those favoring shariah, 88% favor its punishments for robbery, 89% favor stoning for adultery and 76% favor death for apostasy, i.e., leaving the Islamic fold. In Egypt, those numbers are 70%, 81% and 86% respectively: http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-beliefs-about-sharia/.

My general point about Islam in that other article I linked to is that we need to be realistic about what mainstream Muslims actually believe. We can’t sugar-coat it or act like P.C.-driven apologists when it comes to Islam. I don’t believe any religion is all good or all evil, but I do believe we have to look carefully at the way people practice that religion right now, and with Islam, in the contemporary world, there is certainly an issue. Again, I don’t believe that Islam has to be like this or has always been like this, but right now, today, many of its mainstream practitioners are out of step with mainstream beliefs about tolerance, women’s rights, gay rights and other such shibboleths in the West. We routinely criticize Evangelicals for their alleged “intolerance,” but we have a double standard when it comes to the far more extreme “intolerance” currently prevalent within Islam.

You also linked to an article about why Trump’s Saudi Arabia deal is bad. I don’t actually understand what relevance that has to anything I wrote. I read the article, and as it happens, I already completely agree with the position it was espousing. I’ve long had the view that our long-standing foreign policy of demonizing Iran and coddling and financially supporting Saudi Arabia makes no sense. (I describe some of my views about that issue here, for instance.) Iran, in contrast to Trump’s statements about it, has not been actively involved in international terrorism since the late 1970s/early 1980s. I don’t think any of the big terror attacks since that time have involved Shiite Muslims. They’re all Sunni. Saudi Arabia has been spreading its extremist brand of Wahhabi Islam throughout the world, and that kind of Islam is taking the place of more moderate forms of Islam traditionally practiced in many places, such as Albania and other parts of the former Yugoslavia, the former Soviet republics that are majority Islamic, parts of South Asia and, of course, throughout the Arab world. The major reason we’ve traditionally embraced the extremism-spreading theocrats of Saudi Arabia is because of (i) oil interests, (ii) direct financial support by Saudi Arabia of Presidential candidates/Presidents such as the Clintons, the Bushes, McCain, etc.; and (iii) Israel’s fear/hatred of Iran due in part to Iran’s funding of/support of Hezbollah, which brings us, as a long-standing ally of Israel, into the waiting arms of Iran’s most bitter enemy, Saudi Arabia. But, again, I don’t see what any of this has to do with what I wrote about the threat Islam poses to Europe.

In terms of the Muslim threat in Europe more generally, it’s not just about Germany. Germany’s made the big headlines with Angela Merkel’s extremely reckless move to admit one million inadequately vetted Muslim “refugees” (I put the word in quotes because many questions have been raised about the motivations of many of those seeking “asylum” in Germany), leading to the spate of thousands of sexual assaults in Cologne and other cities in Germany, but think also about situations like the notorious case of 15 years of unpunished child rapes and sexual assaults by Pakistani men in Rotherdam, England, coupled with the spate of recent terror attacks by Muslims in London, or think about the fact that the Muslim population of France (about 7.5% of France) largely lives in poverty, with many of these people not working and instead taking advantage of France’s generous social welfare system, all while comprising a whopping 60% of France’s crime rate. Or think about Belgium, where Muslims are also a large problem in the same way as in France. They comprise some 25% of Brussels, by the way. (I can provide you with sources for all the stats/statements in this paragraph, if you have any doubt about any of them, by the way.) My view is that if you admit these people, you need to make sure they assimilate. Otherwise, it’s a recipe for disaster.

Again, I’m not going to go statement by statement with you because I don’t see many of your objections as significant, nor do I have faith that you’ll actually be willing to engage in a constructive dialogue, as opposed to more name-calling, but these are just a few observations of mine in response to some of your major points.