I can’t argue with any of that. Labour sometimes seem to think they should win the next election because it’s their turn, rather than presenting good enough reasons to vote for them. It’s good they’ve finally acknowledged they need to work better with the Greens, but I would argue that until recently they couldn’t even work with each other so had to get their own house in order first. And yes, more and more people are recognizing that a few Greens policies actually make sense. I think the Greens have got better at compromising, such as working with National when they can get at least part of their policy agenda enacted. Once upon a time they wouldn’t have done that.

The military does need updating and it can’t be put off forever. Children should be a priority, but it’s not as if they’re doing nothing in that area. I’m not defending them, but it’s the sort of spending governments have to do sooner or later. I didn’t do a proper analysis of the borrowing for tax cuts thing at the time, so I don’t know if it was justified or not. There are circumstances where it can be economically justified, and our economy is currently better than most, so I’m going to withhold my judgment on that one. It might or might not have been the right thing to do. However, now that we’re back in surplus, there’s no justification I can see to do it again so if we get tax cuts next year, I would hope they’re well thought out and not just an election year bribe.

Labour have taken far too long to realise they need to present an alternative govt, not just the Labour party. They’ve finally made an agreement with the Greens, but what matters now is what comes next and how they build on that. As for the Greens views on economics, it’s more that the world is coming round to their views rather than any big changes they’ve made. The really scary economics is borrowing to fund tax cuts as National did, or their announcement today to spend $20b on the military instead of investing enough to get many more of the 25% of NZ children currently living in poverty out.

They have gone down a couple in the latest poll, although it’s disturbing to see that Winnie has picked up in the preferred PM stakes. I’m not so sure that National is so popular, it’s just that Labour and the Greens don’t currently present a viable alternative. That may change if they prove they can work together effectively between now and the election and the Greens continue their progress in not being economically/financially scary started by Russell Norman. At least Labour looks unified now too, which will help a lot. I think David Shearer was a better leader and he should have been given more of a chance, but it’s too late to worry about that now.

By putting Muslims in a separate box from the rest of society you are encouraging them to be seen as different and scary imo. You are equating all Muslims with the worst of Islam and patronizing them with the prejudice of low expectations.

USians hate Muslims because they are scared of them. The only Muslims most of them know of are the ones that commit terrorist acts. It’s just as if the only Christians you knew were the ones that bombed your country to smithereens. About 30% of Iraqis believe that DAESH was created by the US and Israel to make Muslims look bad. Same reason – they don’t know any Christians or Jews personally, they just know the bad stuff about them. And atheists? Everyone hates us until they get to know us. Your attitude perpetuates this imo.

There are not less rapes in Muslim countries, there are less rapes reported, and when you look at what happens to women who report being raped in many Muslim countries, it’s no bloody wonder. UN figures show that the more religious a society is, the more women are abused. (You can look up the figures yourself or wait until I get around to writing about it.) And those women suffer in silence. NZ has a problem with family violence (domestic violence). One of the indicators that the programme to combat it is working is that it is being reported more. When I was a kid that sort of thing was dismissed as, “Just a domestic.” Now it’s a crime, as it should be. You must be aware in your own country that reports of high numbers of sexual attacks on campus have been dismissed by right-wing media because the official numbers are so different. Even in countries that are generally pretty good for women, they do not report abuse of attacks for multiple reasons. I didn’t myself.

Requiring people to wear a uniform is not the same as requiring women to wear particular dress, and to think the two can be equated is just faulty logic. “Maybe there is some coercion …” for goodness sake Paxton. It’s about choice, and whether you’re free to make a different choice. In many parts of the world if a woman wore anything other than the religiously imposed garb she would be stoned or beaten to death. A uniform that goes with a job/school can be taken off. Priests and nuns embrace their choice of the religious life. All religions who impose a dress code for civilians are wrong imo.

Islam isn’t a race, it is a belief system. It should be just as open to criticism as any other belief system. Opposition to Islam is a legitimate position, just as opposition to fascism or Christianity or racism is. You are equating opposition to Islam with opposition to Muslims. Just as you have no time for the belief system of Christianity but have Christian friends, and the same is true of Islam/Muslim friends, and Judaism/Jewish friends, the same is true of me.

You might have been told that Islamists are the greatest threat to world peace. I have not. The problem seems to be with attitudes that are prevalent in much of your country, and that is what needs to be fixed. It will not be fixed by attacking people who are doing nothing wrong in expressing their own opinion, but by people in those parts of your country that never see anyone different to themselves getting to know some new people. To equate Trump with Harris and Coyne is patently ridiculous, which you know perfectly well and you’re only doing it to get a rise.

Criticism of Islam doesn’t have to be put in any historical context to be valid. I don’t have to justify my criticisms of Islam by proving anything about myself as long as the criticisms themselves are valid. The fact that what the US and its allies did in toppling Hussein had so many negative effects for millions of Iraqis does not justify a group of Islamist terrorists raping thousands of Yazidi women, throwing gays of buildings, and making women wear black bags, and using the Qur’an to justify that. And Bush, Cheney et al did not use criticism of Islam to justify their illegal war.

And I can’t get over that you have doubled down on your justification of teaching kindergarten children to hate. Whatever faults there are on the Israeli side, and there are many, at least they don’t formally teach their children to hate one particular people and how to carry out a war, as if it’s some kind of game. They do teach them to hide in bomb shelters at the sound of air raid sirens, which is also something no child should have to live with.

Actually they did. If you have access to BBC World, watch Dateline London. It’s on Sundays NZ time, which means Saturday afternoon for you. I can’t remember the time off hand but it’s an excellent panel discussion if you’re interested in British politics.

And yes it was a disgusting tactic, and it didn’t work. British (and NZ for that matter) are less susceptible to that sort of thing than USians. In fact, in NZ playing dirty is more likely to get people voting against you than for you.

Prominent critics of Islam howl loudly if college students disinvite a fellow Muslim critic who was scheduled to speak to a group of fellow students, but did any of them ever mention this far more serious intrusion of Islamophobia at the highest level of British politics? If so I missed it.

Hi Heather, you wrote: “I am curious about your reluctance to criticize Islam. It’s like you’re saying that there is one idea, amongst all the ideas in the world, that is immune from being questioned or challenged.”

I am reluctant to criticize Islam, because I do not want to add to the rampant Islamophobia in my country (USA) that has enabled unconscionable attacks on Muslim countries, the murder of hundreds of thousands of Muslims, and plunging the entire Middle East into civil war and chaos. I am reluctant to criticize Islam because most of those who do are blind to the role of western imperialism in destroying Muslim societies, overthrowing elected governments, and imposing brutal dictators on Muslim people.

I am reluctant to criticize Islam, not because the beliefs or doctrines of Islam hold any attraction for me; they don’t. I regard belief in any supernatural agency as a delusion. I abhor such practices as FGM, wife beating, honor killing, and the murder of innocent people, whether it be by suicide bombing, F-16s, Tomahawk missile, knives or drones. I regard Muslim dress no differently than the uniforms of nuns, priests, Haredi Jews, or the hair nets of Mennonite women. It’s not my business to interfere. Yes, maybe there is some coercion as there is in requiring schoolboys or soldiers to wear certain uniforms, but I see no benefit in using coercion to fight coercion. I deplore teaching children to hate, and the bombast about destroying Israel and creating a world-wide caliphate. But words are not equivalent to actions and I equally deplore those who use the hateful rhetoric of others as an excuse for committing violence on them. The Hamas charter does not justify the captivity and abuse of millions of Palestinians.

I am reluctant to criticize Islam because I have seen the results of xenophobia and racial, ethnic, and religious hatred in the US, most recently anti-communist hysteria from the 20s onward, leading to blacklisting, witch hunts, and the disastrous Vietnamese terrorism, which killed a million or more southeast Asians along with 58,000 Americans. It was criticism of the religions and cultural practices of blacks and Native Americans that justified slavery and genocide of these people. Most Americans are still in denial of the crimes that facilitated our “manifest destiny”. Most Americans are ignorant of the prejudice and discrimination that Irish, Italian, Catholic, Chinese, eastern European, and Japanese immigrants faced, and even of the internment of thousands of Japanese-American citizens during world war 2.¬¬¬¬

I am reluctant to criticize Islam because I find much of the prevailing criticism to be shallow, bigoted and misleading. Anecdotes are seized upon as evidence, Muslim atrocities are not put into the context of western atrocities that provoked them, the behaviors of Muslims are simplistically attributed to the Islamic religion without due analysis of the context. How many ISIS (DAESH) fighters lost family and loved ones in the US/UK invasion of Iraq? Is it Islam that motivates them to want to kill westerners, or a desire for revenge? And upon further examination, the things that Muslims are criticized for, misogyny, violence, etc turn out to be no worse and often better in Muslim countries than elsewhere. This is what we found when we examined the incidence of rape and domestic violence in Bangladesh and found that many other countries, Christian, Buddhist, atheist, Hindu had higher rates than Bangladesh and other Muslim countries. Murder rates are another example. Much is made of ISIS beheadings and Muslim honor killings. Yet, if we look at the data we find that Muslim countries often have murder rates below the world rate of 6.2 per hundred thousand. Some examples: Algeria 1.5, Egypt 3.4, Morocco 1.0, Tunisia 3.4, Jordan 2.0, Turkey 2.6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

I am reluctant to criticize Islam because so much of western criticism of Islam is false and duplicitous. Some of the examples cited in the last paragraph may be due to negligence or sloppy research, but much of it is due to deliberate distortion of facts that are well-known. We are told of Gazan children being taught to hate Israelis and given toy guns to encourage armed struggle, without being told that the Palestinians who resided in Israel were driven from their homes by force of arms, herded into a sliver of land, held captive for 50 years, denied access to the outside world, and slaughtered by the thousands when they dare to resist their imprisonment. We are told that Islamists are the greatest threats to world peace when they kill dozens in terror attacks, without mention of the hundreds of thousands killed by US/UK/Israel in terror attacks on Muslims. I respect criticism of Islam that is put into proper historical and comparative context, but the criticism of Islam that I see, from Donald Trump, to Sam Harris, to Jerry Coyne, is most often one-sided, biased, makes little or no attempt at balance or objectivity, and by cherry-picking the evidence is deeply dishonest. Criticism of Islam by those I call Islamophobes is moral obtuseness compounded by deliberate distortion, and it serves the purposes of warmongers, oil barons like the Bushes, and war industry profiteers like Cheney. When criticism of Islam is no longer used to justify the destruction of Muslim societies then I will gladly criticize Islam.