I just think it's ridiculous that we can be having the conversation on this website about how the exaggerated rhetoric, political extremism, and fundamentalist religious beliefs of Christians in America could conceivably lead to crazy white guys shooting up Planned Parenthood, but once you introduce Islam into the conversation, some of the same people who strongly caution about the former believe that coming to a similar conclusion about the latter is racist or Islamophobic. That there must be other reasons for why they do what they do. It's just such a strange inconsistency. (And to be fair, there are many many people who are hypocrites in the reverse, as well.)
"Well, if this was fifty years ago it would've just been something different, so
blibbityblimblam" is one of the weirder defenses. It's hard for me to see this refusal to acknowledge that there is a core issue with the religion, with that worldview, and how widespread those beliefs truly are, as anything other than hyper sensitive social justice politics.
Lefties in America (and other places in the West) are perfectly capable of looking at the Planned Parenthood shooting and realizing what led to it, and are justifiably outraged. But imagine a broad swath of the world where those kinds of extremist beliefs are not only common, but state-sanctioned. Where those people control genuine patriarchal theocratic regimes and subjugate their populace on the regular. Beliefs that have been inculcated in these people all their lives spiral out of control when outside factors are introduced (be it poverty, political instability, war, some combination of all three) and those are important to consider, but it's ridiculous to pretend like extreme religious beliefs (many of which are widely believed in huge regions of the world, whether that's convenient to admit or not) aren't the largest issues here from which much of this springs.
And like I said, lefties have demonstrated they are perfectly capable of understanding these thought processes, and responding with targeting the appropriate ideologies. Provided the people involved are white.
You know, the problem in the 1930s could have been Islamism, but it was fascism. And, we couldn't hope it went away on its own. We couldn't send the Nazis to self-esteem classes. Thankfully, the Islamists don't control a country as scary as Germany. But, let's acknowledge that parts of Islam are a problem and it needs to change.
This is basically the point I was getting at, more succinctly put. Crabcake specifically understands this,
if you're talking about the Nazis. She's reasonable enough to admit that whether you wanted to or not, you needed to target the ideology as harmful, regardless of how it sprung up. Yes, there were plenty of reasons why the Nazis came to power, and why their belief system spread, but at the end of the day the ideology was influential regardless and did grievous harm. So you target the ideology. But in this case, suddenly targeting the various extremist Islamic belief systems becomes problematic.
Where could this odd refusal to confront the problem be coming from, I wonder?
