Thanks Brujo. It is frustrating how so many woke people fail to admit the problems with the religion of Islam, and the fact that so many countries use it as the basis of their law via Sharia. Lukas, in his comment above keeps using Muslim and Islam as if they’re synonyms for each other. By doing that he’s making my case for me in many ways.

For example, the Woke defend people like the Palestinians, they fail to admit that women are second-class citizens there as in the countries in your link. They’re the property of their father (or equivalent), then the property of their husband. They have to do whatever he says, and if they don’t he’s allowed to beat her. She has almost no individual rights. Of course, there is much suffering in Palestine, and Israel has a lot to answer for. But, anyone who has studied the situation with an open mind knows that there are faults on both sides. There are some pretty awful things that the Palestinians have done that can’t be excused by the situation they’re in. Most Woke fail to admit that, if they even know about it.

In some of those countries in the link, women are punished for adultery by being buried (standing) in the earth to just below their shoulders and stoned to death. If you have the stomach for it, there are videos online. Why? That’s Sharia.

Palestinian kindergartens stage elaborate plays in which the children kill the Jewish cast members. There are multiple videos of these online too. No wonder they grow up hating Jews.

Further, being discovered in a gay relationship means a death sentence in Palestine. People were shocked about ISIS throwing gay men off buildings, then kicking them to death if that didn’t kill them. In most Islamic countries, they just hang them. Iran has the “enlightened” policy of allowing the relationship to continue as long as one of the couples undergoes sex change surgery.

Of course, none of it is a reason to hate an individual Muslim (Muslimophobia) unless and until you know s/he adheres strictly to the religion and believes that Sharia etc should be the law.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali speaks out against the RELIGION, as do I. There are many good people who are Muslims. None of them follow the tenets of the religion strictly. They follow a peaceful path in which ALL people are equal.

https://michaelsherlockauthor.wordpress.com/2016/10/27/top-10-worst-nations-on-earth-for-gender-equality-are-all-islamic/?

As SLPC and other civil rights and advocacy groups have noted, Hirsi Ali has expressed extremely hostile positions against Islam that included the explicit call for its “destruction”. I think when she came to the US, many people tried to reason with her and get her to tone down what some hoped to be just “rhetoric” but on the contrary she doubled down on her anti-Muslim activism.

So no – you need to stop with that “I am only against Islam but not Muslim themselves” “semantics game” non-sense. If you expressed the same hostile views against Judaism, you would still be called an anti-Semite (what a capital S – thank you) and rightly so. This is not a political belief that you get to vote for every 4 years.

Here is what ADL says about Anti-Semitism:

“In the 18th century, as the influence of Christianity began to lessen during the Enlightenment — which celebrated the rights and possibilities of men and women to a far greater extent than ever before — religiously based hatred of Jewishness gave way to non-religious criticism: Judaism was attacked as an outdated belief that blocked human progress. Jewish separatism was again targeted. As European countries began to take modern shape in the 19th century and national pride grew, Jews, who were still usually deprived of civil rights and lived throughout Europe as outsiders, were subjected to further hostility. This hostility resulted at times in deadly persecution, as in the late-19th century Russian pogroms — violent attacks on Jewish communities with the aid or indifference of the government.” (https://www.adl.org/anti-semitism)

And from Britannica (the last sentence should be familiar to you):

“Until the French Revolution of 1789, the status of Jews in Europe remained tenuous. Treated as outsiders, they had few civil rights. They were taxed as a community, not as individuals. Exclusion from the larger society reinforced their religious identity and strengthened their communal institutions, which served judicial and quasi-governmental functions. In the French Revolution, with its promise of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the rights of citizenship were extended to Jews. Still, respect and rights were conditioned on the willingness of Jews to abandon their age-old customs and their communal identity. This was the meaning of the slogan “To the Jews as individuals everything, to the Jews as a people, nothing.” (https://www.britannica.com/topic/anti-Semitism/Anti-Semitism-in-medieval-Europe)

Now we know what happened in western Europe decades and centuries after the “enlightenment and reformation”, revolutions and the beginning of the modern industrial age: the most horrific, brutal and gruesome genocide of a religious minority known in history. You don’t need to be railing against Islam or Judaism for the matter in this hateful way because we know that it creates prejudice and bigotry. The Holocaust wouldn’t have happened without the spread of these disgusting anti-Semitic VIEWS. That’s where it starts.

Finally, let me give you another analogy. There are still millions of child bribes happening in (Hindu) India every year and while I think it is a big problem, I do not hold any hostile views against Hinduism – let alone becoming an anti-Hindu activist denigrating Hindu beliefs in the most hateful way like I read on your blog about Islam and its followers.

So I am sorry if you feel like you have been insulted by calling out the bigotry and prejudice that you write or defend. You have the power to change the way you express the things you disagree with.

That is NOT what I said, and I have never said that. Quite the opposite. You’re really starting to piss me off with your constant wrong assumptions about me and what I think and know. I think you might need to extend your knowledge a bit.

I’m quite sure you’re on the right side of these issues yourself, which is why you’re not being banned for constantly insulting me (check out the Comments Guidelines). But there’s a limit to my patience.

Anti-Semitism (should be upper case “S”) is like racism and is (obviously) wrong. It is different from so-called Islamophobia. Those who have a problem with Muslims (Muslimophobes) are bigots. That is having a problem with a person just because of their religion. So-called Islamophobia is different. It is having a problem with a belief system, and should not be called out. It’s okay to not like Christianity, but have no problem with most of the individuals in your life who are Christians. That’s what I’m trying to get at.

Of course I am appalled by what happens to LGBTQ people in South America. They are also treated appallingly in many Christian countries in Africa thanks to people US Evangelical pastors, some of whom spend a lot of time in the Oval Office with Trump. And I do blame, and hate, Christian dogma. That doesn’t, of course, mean I hate all Christians.

You need to separate the belief system from the person. With all people, no matter how much you care about them, there’s always something about them you don’t like. That doesn’t mean you don’t like the person. Bigotry is when you hate all people having a particular characteristic, such as being Muslim, Jewish, LGBTQ, old, fat etc. etc. That’s why the word should be Muslimophobia, NOT Islamophobia. Islam is just a belief system, like Christianity, or Hinduism, or Panpsychism.

I don’t hate anybody, and that includes Muslims. If you were a regular reader of my website you’d know that. I’ve gone to great lengths to point out that most Muslims. especially in the West, aren’t like those in ISIS. And I never implied that all Muslims were responsible for what happens in countries that practice Sharia.

Because I defend Hirsi Ali you’ve decided I must be an anti-Muslim bigot because that’s what you think she is. I am not. I am an atheist, and I don’t agree with the tenets of any religious belief system. That does NOT mean I hate all the people who do. I believe strongly in freedom of speech and religion, as set out in the First Amendment of your Constitution. And that is why I haven’t banned you from my site despite your ignorant and ill-informed final paragraph, and all your other comments telling me things that I already know, (and possibly know about far better than you given that I have researched them at length).

It is ludicrous to claim that ISIS represents mainstream Islam or even fundamentalist Islam. ISIS and other similar groups are outlaw gangs that operates outside the law. Any of their members who are caught are often sent to prison.

Stop telling Muslims that ISIS represents them when they clearly say otherwise. This is insane. It’s like telling Christians that they are all KKK because the KKK claims to be following the bible.

You and other anti-Muslim figures like Hirsi Ali have no business telling Muslims how they ought to interpret their religious beliefs or how to practice them.

Saudi Arabia only represents itself and to infer that somehow all people who happen to be Muslim on this planet bare responsibility for what happens inside of Saudi Arabia is itself a form of prejudice. Majority of Muslim countries don’t agree with Saudi Arabia’s laws and that’s why they don’t have them in their books. Saudi Arabia population is 32 million. There are about 1.2 billion Muslims in the world.

Since you brought up LGBTQ communities, a recent study in Latin American revealed that four LGBTQ people are killed every day (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-latam-lgbt-killings/lgbt-murders-at-alarming-levels-in-latin-america-study-idUSKCN1UY2GM). Do you have anything to do with these killings? is it Catholics or Christian dogma in general? Are Latin American countries enlightened, is Saudi Arabia involved there too?

(On a side note, the Hirsi Ali camp can’t really use the prejudice LGBTQ communities face to promote yet another form of prejudice – That would be what Louis Farrakhan does)

You really should take a good look at the mirror and figure out why you harbor such hate expressed in your messages. You don’t need to espouse prejudice, racism and bigotry to fight injustice.

I don’t have the time to go through all your comments. This is a really old post and I’m not up-to-date with the issues.

I do agree that Hirsi Ali’s comments from the past, and some of her actions, can appear anti-Muslim.

However, I do agree with her that Islamophobia is a manufactured word. For those who are bigoted against Muslims, the word should be Muslimophobia imo.

Personally, i have no problem with most Muslims. I do have a problem with the religion (Islam). There are many Muslims who have morphed the religion into a peaceful one, and those are all wonderful people. However, it is undeniable that the worst representatives of the religion (e,g, ISIS) are actually the ones who most closely follow the Qur’an. The religion was peaceful when it started, then changed as Muhammed preached that the world should be converted, by force if necessary. The Qur’an also says that the later verses override the earlier ones. So those good people who are following the peaceful version are actually wrong.

Christians used to be just as bad. The Enlightenment saw most of them becoming better people. There are still many right-wing Christians who hold views very similar to hard-line Muslims. In some cases the only thing that stops them going out and doing things like killing LGBTQ people, abortion providers, feminists, etc. is the secular law that most Christian countries have because of The Enlightenment. Hirsi Alis argues that what Islam needs is an equivalent of The Enlightenment. There are still multiple Muslim countries where being in a gay relationship, for example, is a crime punishable by death. Check out how many gay men Saudi Arabia executes each year; you will be horrified.

In fact, the law in Saudi Arabia is almost exactly the same as that in territories ruled by ISIS because both use Sharia.

In their personal lives, many in the West are only exposed to those Muslims who don’t want to live in a country where Sharia is the law. Muslims who are just like the rest of us: some are good and some are bad and most are somewhere in between. Hirsi Ali was brought up under a regime which she managed to escape when she was about to be forced into an arranged marriage. She has been vilified because she is an atheist, which in the US is unacceptable to many.

Hirsi Ali hates the religion of Islam for multiple understandable reasons. She does not hate individual Muslims without cause. Hating Islam is not akin to racism. Religion is not something you cannot change like your skin colour, country of birth, sexuality, gender identification etc. Islam is an idea. A person’s religion can of course, be very important to them, but it’s not really any different to a person’s political party.

Thanks for correcting my typo (affront). On Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it does seem like we are talking about a different individual. So to clarify, I am referring to the one who has stated the following:
* [Islam] is a “destructive, nihilistic cult of death”
* “There is no moderate Islam” – “There are Muslims who are passive, who don’t all follow the rules of Islam, but there is really only one Islam…”
* Islam should be “defeated”. When asked to clarify whether she meant “radical” or “militant” Islam, she clarified “No. Islam, period. Once it’s defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful…”
* While in the Netherlands, she has supported and worked with Dutch politician Geer Wilders who stated that “Islam is not a religion” and often compared the Koran to Hitler’s “Mein Kampt”. Hirsi Ali herself has compared Islam to Nazism on many occasions
* Hirsi Ali has participated in a number of anti-Muslim conferences in the US led by far right extremist groups as a keynote speaker (ACT! for America – as an example)
* Only in 2017, she stated that “Islamophobia is a manufactured word”
* Hirsi Ali is often quoted in far right extremist hate groups to further their agendas

What don’t you find as anti-Muslim in the above?

In your view, if Hirsi Ali said “Judaism should be destroyed” or that “Judaism is like Nazism – insert the usual anti-semitic narratives and stereotypes “, would you qualify her statements as anti-semitic?

I haven’t read her latest book but has she renounced what she has said before and realized that she was also fueling a dangerous movement of anti-Muslim hate (and others) that has led to some horrible things (like what happened in your own country) or are we supposed to excuse her because she campaigns against FGM?

I am going to again ask you if you’d be willing to defend an anti-semitic activist because they happen to campaign against some of the injustices that Jewish women could suffer in some fundamentalist Jewish communities?

It’s not clear to me why you continue to distort and misrepresent what Hirsi Ali has written and said on record about Islam and she has made it very clear over and over again that she is not talking about radical fundamentalist Muslims. She always talked about all Muslims.

I don’t have a problem as such with her holding those views as awful as they are. She has chosen that path with her own free will and she has to take responsibility for it. It is however important for people to know the facts. No need to hide them. Let people decide for themselves. We’ve seen that when people realize what she has said, they distance themselves from her as they should.

You obviously need to learn a bit more about Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She is NOT anti-Muslim. Before you comment about her again, try reading her latest book.

And I think the word you want is “affront” not “upfront” (which isn’t actually a word).