The perfect response to people who say all Muslims are violent, in one tweet
Comedian and HBO talk show host Bill Maher sparked a major debate last week over Islam, arguing that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are actually not extremist outliers but represent the inherent violence and intolerance of Islam itself, and by extension its 1.6 billion followers. This is not actually a new debate (we've been having it on-and-off in America since September 2001), it's not just Maher making it, and, to be really clear about this, the arguments are both factually incorrect and deeply bigoted. (READ: It's not just Bill Maher. Islamophobia on cable news is out of control.)
Still, Bill Maher is popular, and his ideas are unfortunately not uncommon, so you may find yourself facing some version of his argument in your daily life. There a number of ways you can respond: by pointing out Maher's factual errors, by noting that ISIS is widely loathed in Muslim-majority societies, and so on. (READ: Everything you need to know about ISIS.)
Or you could show them this one tweet, from Libyan-American Hend Amry, which skewers Maher-style Islamophobia concisely and just about perfectly. (The meme is originally by lawyer and commentator Arsalan Iftikhar.)
Amry's point: if Maher's argument is that the rise of ISIS proves that all of Islam is extremely violent and intolerant, then by the same logic wouldn't the spate of Muslim Nobel Peace Prize-winners prove that all Muslims are also extremely peaceful?
Here are the winners in the photo: Shirin Ebadi (Iranian activist, 2003), Mohamed ElBaradei (former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, 2005), Muhammed Yunus (microfinance pioneer, 2006), Tawakkol Karman (Yemeni activist, 2011), Malala Yousafzai (Pakistani activist, 2014).
This tweet is a very straightforward way of making a point that shouldn't need to be made, but does: generalizing across a vast and diverse demographic group based on the actions of a few of its members isn't just bigoted, it's logically ridiculous. The fact that we are so ready to embrace that reasoning when it lets us promote deeply negative stereotypes about Muslims, including on major news outlets, is just another of many signs that Islamophobia is increasingly rampant in America.
More: http://www.vox.com/2014/10/13/6968999/bill-maher-islamophobia-muslims-violent-debunk
= new reply since forum marked as read
He's relevant. I have always thought him a condescending jerk that enjoys picking fights and laughing at the fray. He's a waste of time.
Some love him. Others, not so much, obviously.
~ Lmsp 🙌
They get all excited at the idea of playing dress up:
But what it amounts to is they want to get all Byzantine in their asses.
You know,...for the love of Jesus.
In the case of the Middle East...
IMO, it's OP worthy in and of itself.
Anyone know what that is called?
he was basically saying that the religion itself is violent and exhorts its adherents to violent acts... which is bullshit. I mean has he ever read Leviticus or the Old Testament? What is the Bible filled with roses and rainbows?
he seems to criticize fundamentalists. But in this particular case he puts the onus on the entire faith. He basically describes Islam as a call for violence. I don't believe that and i think he is foolish for stating it.
Guns, hatred, and lawlessness are deeply intertwined with RW ideology.
The sad thing is it's actually true.
Shields up, friend, you will be roundly attacked for saying so.
Do you have an opinion on the percentage of muslims who favor the death penalty for anyone who gives up Islam? :
Link to Washington Post article discussing the results of the Pew Poll.
However, even assuming that 0% of those people (who don't want sharia to be the law) support executing apostates it is still a very high percentage (to a majority) of the total Muslim respondents in countries like Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan.
http://www.pewforum.org/files/2013/04/worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-full-report.pdf
Those who support making sharia the law of the land:
Those who support Sharia who support death to apostates
From here its a simple matter of math. In Egypt the % of Muslims supporting death to apostates is 74%*86%=63%;
So that is 63% of the respondents in Egypt. In Pakistan its also 63%. In Afghanistan its 78%, The Palestinian territories its 59%, Jordan its 58%, and Malaysia its 53% of the total population of respondents.
In countries where it would be a minority view it can still be a large portion of the people. In Iraq it is 38% of respondents, Bangladesh its 36%. That is more than one out of every 3 people.
Of course, as the charts show this is not true of most countries in the poll. Turkey, the numbers would be as low as 2%, Kazakhstan its below 1% (by my numbers its 0.4% in fact). Further, it should be noted that not everyone in those countries are Muslim so we would have to break down the county's total demographics to determine the % of the entire population.
Though I bet you haven't yet scored the gold medal of being called a friend of Hamas. The person who did that must think that Hamas have a wing called The Al-Aqsa Atheist Internet Warrior Batallion...
I like both you and Turbo, and think you two have far more in common than either of you think
Contrary to what is alleged by bigots like Bill Maher, Muslims are not more violent than people of other religions. Murder rates in most of the Muslim world are very low compared to the United States.
As for political violence, people of Christian heritage in the twentieth century polished off tens of millions of people in the two world wars and colonial repression. This massive carnage did not occur because European Christians are worse than or different from other human beings, but because they were the first to industrialize war and pursue a national model. Sometimes it is argued that they did not act in the name of religion but of nationalism. But, really, how naive. Religion and nationalism are closely intertwined. The British monarch is the head of the Church of England, and that still meant something in the first half of the twentieth century, at least. The Swedish church is a national church. Spain? Was it really unconnected to Catholicism? Did the Church and Francisco Franco’s feelings toward it play no role in the Civil War? And what’s sauce for the goose: much Muslim violence is driven by forms of modern nationalism, too.
I don’t figure that Muslims killed more than a 2 million people or so in political violence in the entire twentieth century, and that mainly in the Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988 and the Soviet and post-Soviet wars in Afghanistan, for which Europeans bear some blame.
Compare that to the Christian European tally of, oh, lets say 100 million (16 million in WW I, 60 million in WW II– though some of those were attributable to Buddhists in Asia– and millions more in colonial wars.)
THE REST:
http://www.juancole.com/2013/04/terrorism-other-religions.html
