General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Video-Amina: Topless Tunisian Protester Tells Femen She Was Beaten,Kidnapped & Drugged By Her Family [View all]BainsBane
(53,029 posts)Denounce the fundamentalists all you want. Just don't conflate that with Islam as a whole.
You appear to think that religion is the only justification for atrocities. From from it. Look at what our own military does in the name of democracy and American superiority, or what the Nazis did in pursuit of their secular vision of a purer society. Religion provides an ideology of justification, nothing more. For Pol Pot that ideology was secular. For Salafis, it is religious.
If you study history, you will also see that religion provided an ideology to empower resistance movements: Nat Turner's slave rebellion in Virginia; The Males rebels slave rebellion in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil; The Tupac Amaru and Tupac Katari rebellions of the Andean region in the late-Spanish colonial period; and the Contestado movement in Southern Brazil in the early 20th century. There are hundreds of such examples, as well as ways in which religion itself served as a means of preserving the culture of the oppressed. Like any ideology, it has been used to oppress, while the oppressed have in turn taken that ideology and appropriated for resistance.
I'd like to point you to a couple of sources that would give you a different take on Islam. I posted an OP above an article on Sufism. http://www.democraticunderground.com/101661847
The NEH funded a public television show that came out of a conference and public events on Muslims in the Humanities at the University of Minnesota. It is available for anyone to watch on line. http://www.mnvideovault.org/index.php?id=22858&popup=yes&select_index=0 These sources provide just a bit of information, but different from that you see in the main stream media.
Understand that I don't disagree with your outrage at human rights violations wrought by extremism. What I object to is conflating that with Islam as a whole.