Looking at your list of mere violent crimes by Muslims that were branded terrorism, I guess what I’d say is that none of these were high-profile incidents that I’d even heard about previously, and prior to Trump, at least, the U.S. government has been super cautious in ascribing blame to Islam as a whole (or even Islamic extremism, which would’ve been reasonable), even for real terrorist acts in the name of Islam, much less mere violent crimes by Muslims.
The kinds of bias you’re talking about is largely bias at the level of private individuals, not governments. I am sure you’re right that such bias exists. It would not surprise me that there would be an association in people’s minds between Muslims and terrorism, just as there would be an association in people’s minds between black people and all kinds of negative stereotypes that get packaged under the name of “implicit bias.” This is simply because these associations reflect real events people see and hear in the news. The undeniable fact is that Muslims have, in the past few decades, committed more than a few major terrorist acts in the name of Islam in the U.S. and Western Europe. You never hear that some member of a Christian terrorist group went and blew up people and buildings in a Muslim nation in the name of Christian ideals. When we attack Muslim societies, we do it as a nation, not privately, and we do it for the sake of “spreading democracy” or just making the world safe for Western economic interests (in oil, etc.). I am not in any way suggesting that these kinds of attacks of ours on Muslim societies are justified; in fact, I’ve made clear in my last post to which you responded (as well as elsewhere), that I’m completely against such interventions. All I’m saying, however, is that Christianity doesn’t get the same bad name that Islam does in our contemporary world because, as a general rule, you don’t get Christians going into Muslim societies and doing crazy, violent things in the name of Christianity anymore. Instead, America gets (justly) reviled worldwide for its state violence in the name of American economic interests. Now, I personally didn’t engage in such American imperialism and am against it, and yet someone in a different country could well perceive me or any other American as an embodiment of American imperialism and jingoism. This parallels the way someone in our society might see individual Muslims, who have nothing to do with terrorism and are completely against it, as embodiments of a hostile, terrorist religion. It also parallels the way that I, as a little kid who’d immigrated to the U.S. from Russia at the height of the Cold War, was routinely called a “Commie” (even though my family had left the former Soviet Union because of the unbearable living conditions people endured under Soviet communism) because people here just saw me as a “Russian.” You can call all of these kinds of attributions unfair, and I’d agree with you, but it’s just a reflection of the way many people use broad heuristics to make their snap judgments about others.
I do still take have to take issue with your statements about Islam as a whole. Here is what you wrote:
You mentioned Muslim beliefs being out of step with Western values. That’s one of the biggest myths about us. The biggest myth is that we’re all carbon copies of each other, including our beliefs. That’s what gets us all blamed when one Muslim commits a crime or engages in a bizarre or repugnant behaviour (FGM, honour killings etc.) In reality we are no different from Christians, each of us has different personal moral standards, each is different in the way we observe (or don’t observe) our religion. Like Christians, some are more devout than others. Some only go to the mosque once a year at Ramadan, if at all. Like Christians, we work hard, raise families, serve in the military, contribute in our communities.
It is, of course, completely true that individual Muslims have their own beliefs and their own interpretations of religious teachings, just like anyone else. And I believe in treating individuals as individuals. At the same time, my point remains that mainstream Muslim beliefs today are out of step with Western values. This is not a “myth.” It is reflected in unbiased, reliable statistics from organizations like Pew, as I’ve demonstrated. To take just one example from that other article I wrote, Pew Surveys show that more than nine in ten of the world’s Muslims believe a woman’s role is always to oblige and obey her husband. You might not be one of those nine in ten (and I’d guess that the Muslims who live in the West, in places like the U.S. and Canada, are much more likely than the average Muslim not to subscribe to such beliefs), but that doesn’t change the overall statistic. I think it’s a mistake to whitewash away numbers like that and pretend they don’t exist. If we don’t recognize the issue, we’re never going to address it. This is why I’ve said that we need to stop our policy of bombing Muslim societies, deposing dictators and engaging in nation-building, all while lending financial support to the repressive, terrorism-spreading Saudi theocracy, and we need to start working hard to collaborate with the more moderate elements in Muslim societies so that those elements gradually prevail and become the dominant strains within Islam. But, as I’ve said, we need to do that in a manner that’s not obvious and intrusive, because the more openly we continue to interfere in Muslim societies, the more we’re going to spread anti-American, anti-Western sentiments among the local populations there, resulting in more extremism in the name of Islam.
If I were a moderate Muslim who condemned Islamic extremism, I’d actually be supportive of the approach I just described because it combats the extremist strains of Islam that need to be combated, but it doesn’t demonize Islam as a whole.
