With all due respect (and I mean that sincerely, since unlike many people whose “comments” are just profane rants or infantile lash-outs, your tone throughout was totally civil and appropriate, and I appreciate that, since increasingly few people know how to disagree without emoting), you’re incorrect in virtually everything you wrote.
Let’s start with this:
Your sources are 2 conspiracy theory websites.
The 1st is an SPLC-identified hate group that’s partially funded by military-industrial complex corporations such as Lockheed, which profit from anti-Muslim attitudes (such attitudes make wars in the Middle East and enhanced border security more palatable, and these companies profit from both). You can look this up right in their funding sources.
The 2nd isn’t really a source at all: anyone can write an article and put it up, with no oversight or even community editing. It’s now unsurprisingly a conspiracy theory hotbed.
There are at least three separate errors here.
The first error is relying on an ad hominem (against the integrity of my sources) instead of taking on the actual substance of the information I took from those sources. If you have some doubt about the actual statistics I’m citing from these sources, then point me to some issue with the actual methodology with which those numbers were gathered or to some problem in the way the numbers are being interpreted. Instead, you’re telling me, in essence, that the organizations that did the surveys were “bad.” I don’t care if they’re bad or not. I’m not endorsing them or their missions. A “bad” organization can still do an accurate survey, right?
The second error is relying on the SPLC’s characterization of any organization as a “hate group.” Unlike a statistic, which has an independent basis in fact, a characterization of an organization as a “hate group” is a subjective assessment, so you really have to look at the nature of the organization that is making that characterization. To be sure, the SPLC used to be a reliable source that tracked genuine hate groups (the KKK, neo-Nazis, etc.), but in recent years, it has crossed every line and become a completely politicized branch of the radical identitarian fringe on the extreme left that libels other organizations that are merely conservative as “hate groups” and that demonizes individuals, even Muslim individuals, who take on Islamic extremism. Most notoriously and embarrassingly, it labeled Ayaan Hirsi Ali as an “anti-Muslim extremist,” despite the fact that she was a victim of female genital mutilation in her native Somalia and has been an activist against that barbaric practice. You can read about the SPLC and how it’s changed and discredited itself here and here.
The third error is that the two sources you describe as “my sources” were not, in fact, my only sources. I had a number of sources that I cited. One of them, for example, was Pew. Are you going to suggest that’s not reliable either?
Let me turn to the other major assertion you make:
Also, you’re conflating the left’s position on Muslims with the left’s position on Islam. At its core, Islam is near-indistinguishable from Christianity, and as such, is violent and intolerant. Muslims however, like Christians, are complex and flawed human beings who generally don’t hold the more extreme views found in their holy book. Those who do ( and who act on them) should be stopped, but those who don’t should be treated the same way moderate Christians are…whatever that entails.
Again, there are several statements here that are, at the very least, highly questionable and, I must say, appear to me to be rather ignorant. You aim to distinguish between, on the one hand, Islam, and on the other hand, Muslims. Islam, you say, is violent and intolerant, while Muslims, you say, show a diversity of beliefs. Let’s think about those claims more carefully.
What you actually write, as to first part of your contention, is this: “At its core, Islam is near-indistinguishable from Christianity, and as such, is violent and intolerant.” Really? Violent and intolerant? Isn’t this a bit of an overbroad label for a whole religion, whether Islam or Christianity? Have you actually read The Bible or The Q’uran, or read any books that describe how these religions are practiced? Personally, I’ve read The Bible, The Q’uran and more than a few books about their practices (including, most recently, Huston Smith’s excellent The World’s Religions). While I’m not religious myself, I find that both of these religions (as well as Judaism) and the major Eastern religions (Hinduism and Buddhism) are based on texts that contain sublimely beautiful and profound stories, poetry and wisdom. I have enormous respect for this kind of literature. And I also have enormous respect for people who devote their lives to the pursuit of the kind of transcendent spiritual truth they find in such texts. In fact, I respect them far more than the distinctly this-worldly Philistine bankers, financiers, lawyers, techies and others who, despite being armed with all the cognitive resources to aspire higher, spend their lives maximizing their portfolios, their social networks and their health and fitness and spend their free time pursuing carnal pleasures, wining, dining and reclining in front of screens. Having said all that, I also know very well that the ancient texts on which the great religions are based contain many passages and commandments that we, today, would find violent, racist, sexist, homophobic and otherwise intolerant. But to reduce these religions to such passages is the height of ignorance and pure bigotry of a different sort.
Let me, however, take a more generous approach to what you wrote and take it to mean that you believe Islam, as a religion, has many violent tendencies and is, in this respect, no better or worse than Christianity. While I’d actually say that The Q’uran is a bit more intolerant towards apostates and non-believers than The Bible, I’m okay to say that they both generally have a my-way-or-the-highway approach to the world.
But now let me turn to the second part of your assertion, which aims to distinguish the actual practitioners of Islam (i.e., Muslims) from what you take to be the violent nature of the religion itself: “Muslims however, like Christians, are complex and flawed human beings who generally don’t hold the more extreme views found in their holy book. Those who do ( and who act on them) should be stopped, but those who don’t should be treated the same way moderate Christians are…whatever that entails.”
This is where I completely have to part company with you. Yes, I agree Muslims are “complex and flawed human beings,” and we shouldn’t be reducing anyone to a simplistic caricature. But we also need to look at statistics and take account of real differences. One big point you’re missing in comparing Christianity and Islam is that, while Christianity went through a Reformation that purged it of some of its more barbaric practices (e.g., you’d be hard-pressed to find any (Jews or) Christians who, today, believe in capital punishment for adultery, as prescribed in Leviticus 20:10), Islam sort of went in the opposite direction. While Christianity was going through its Dark Ages between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, Classical Islamic civilization was far more open, intellectually curious and responsible for preserving many of the classics of Ancient Greek philosophy (rulers in the Islamic world even had “court philosophers” in residence during some periods) and even, in some cases, making the study of secular philosophy a requirement for proper understanding of the religion itself. (I’m thinking here of the Islamic philosopher Averroes’ view that it was the absolute duty of the faithful to engage in philosophical reflection because philosophy could give a rational grounding to the proclamations of faith.) Muslims during this period were also a lot more tolerant of non-Muslims who lived amongst them (such as Jews) than were Christians during these times.
But that was then, and this is now. While Christianity has made a great deal of (what you and I would probably see as) progress in what generally goes by the name of “tolerance,” Islam has gone backwards. With the spreading within Islam of the intolerant philosophy of Sayyid Qutb (see here) and the emergence and dissemination of the hardline Salafi and Wahabi strains of Sunni Islam, as well as the puritanical strain of Shiite Islam in present-day Iran, the Islamic world is getting more rather than less extreme. Some of what you read in that article of mine that you responded to was drawn from this other article I did that describes what mainstream beliefs among Muslims actually look like today:
A few of the statistics I present in that article are drawn from the same sources you’re not crazy about (though, again, I have no particular reason to doubt the stats themselves), but most of the stats are drawn from Pew Surveys, which, if anything, over-sampled Muslims in generally non-extremist nations. Here is one example of a statistic that appears in my article:
- More than nine in ten of the world’s Muslims believe a woman’s role is always to oblige and obey her husband: http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-exec/.
If you take a look at the rest of the numbers cited there, you’ll see that most ordinary, average, run-of-the-mill Muslims today have beliefs that are utterly incompatible with the kind of tolerance, pluralism, feminism, respect for gay rights and general sexual openness that are commonplaces in Western democracies today. Burying our heads in the sand about these kinds of incompatibilities doesn’t do anyone any good.
Obviously, the percentage of Muslims that goes and commits actual violence in the name of Islam is TINY. But we’d be short-sighted if we were looking only at violent acts. When we admit immigrants to this country, we have to be thinking about how they will fit in here and how they will impact our electorate. Do a thought experiment: imagine that we started admitting to this country, in droves, far-right-wing Evangelical Christians who believed women had to be subservient to their husbands, considered homosexuality and abortion capital sins, didn’t believe in the separation of Church and State, viewed practitioners of other religions (or even less “pure” practitioners of Christianity) as infidels, and so on. The more of these people we admitted, the more our overall electorate would gradually drift toward the far right, until these kinds of beliefs (that you probably abhor) would become ever-more mainstream. How would you like that? Probably not very much. Now, understand that Muslims overwhelmingly harbor these exact same beliefs (and many others you wouldn’t like very much).
I’m not against Muslim immigration to the U.S., and I don’t favor a Muslim ban. What I do favor is careful screening and proceeding slowly and with caution. I favor a strong effort at outreach to achieve integration so that we don’t end up like France and Belgium, with poverty-stricken, jobless, crime-ridden enclaves of Muslims living in ghettos and starting to feel ever more disaffected and radicalized. And I also favor a general merit-based immigration system, where we admit people who are educated, have marketable skills, jobs lined up, etc.
Let me know if any of that makes no sense to you, or if you feel like I’m missing something significant. But as I hope I’ve made clear, while I don’t believe in demonizing people or their religion (which wasn’t always like this and can become more open and tolerant again), I don’t think the mainstream Left’s present approach of blinding itself to the real problems that are there is ultimately very helpful.
