National Socialism is an idea.

Nazis are a people.

You're allowed to hate an idea; you're not allowed to hate people for their ideas.

Actually, yes. That's 100% correct.
Read some of the post WW2 books from the German perspective about what happened during WW2. They are very enlightening as to what people thought they were a part of. The guys that were shooting at American/Canadian/British and other troops on D-Day, those "Nazi's"... They had all been fed a steady diet of propaganda. They were told that the Nazi party and Hitler had united Europe under a single flag for the first time ever and that the Allied powers were coming to try and take that away. In many cases they didn't know the horrors that were being committed upon the Jewish people, sometimes just a few miles from their town. Sounds a lot like the situation in the middle east, except I think most people in Isis know what is going on and actively cheer for murder because their religion demands it.
Now I do think that within National Socialism as well as Islam ,and for that matter any idea (looking at you Christians), there is a potential for people to use the idea in order to corrupt others and spread hate. I think it's perfectly fine to hate those assholes.

Really fuckin' good.

"There are refugees who are suffering in a way that history will not be kind to us for ignoring" gave me chills.

You'll notice I didn't say germans, I said nazis. If you want to exempt someone on the basis that they weren't really signed up to the movement, that's fine, but they're then no longer properly a part of the analogy.

In any case, probably the most generous thing that can be said of the 'naive nazis' is that if they didn't know the people they called jews - judaism is no more a race than islam - were being murdered, they merely thought they were being robbed of everything they owned, used as slave labour, and forcibly resettled. That's alright then.

You see, Penn is flat wrong when he says most people are good. Most people are stupid, and stupid people follow social norms, and social norms are, surprise, for the most part pro-social. It's a comforting illusion.

The friendly nazi baker who loves his family, always has a treat for the neighbourhood children, and never invaded anyone gets no pass from me. He's a fucking nazi. Most muslims don't blow people up or throw homosexuals off buildings, doesn't matter, they're still muslims.

Terrorism is a moronic bogeyman and I spread hate every day. Any idea can be used to corrupt people, that's not important. What is important is whether the idea in question is corrupt in itself; Penn says this one is, I agree with him, and that being so I say the people who hold to it deserve to be hated.

"Cotton candy made of piss" is probably the best description of Trump's hair I've heard yet.

That's a much better statement than your first one and carries way more depth.
But is Islam a corrupt idea? Does it have to be? Even Penn admits that the chance a Muslim would become a terrorist is very, very small. Yet most terrorists are Muslim. Even still, millions of Muslims coexist peacefully with others through out the world. If you preach hate towards Islam then instead of pulling people away from the radicalized edge of Islam you risk pushing them straight over it. Unless your belief is that all Muslims should be eradicated since it is a corrupt idea and evil, just blink and eye and they are all ash and dust.

I'll echo the video again and say you only have to read the qur'an. If you think, for example, 'unbelievers deserve to be tortured forever in the afterlife' is a belief that could be held by a good person, then I just don't know how to find common ground.

People are deceived into defending muslims because they don't like the kind of people they see attacking them. Obviously we don't like Donald Trump, obviously we don't like bible-thumping pastors and their qur'an burning parties, and islam doesn't have to be a race for racists to hate muslims.

None of that bigotry goes any way whatsoever toward excusing actual islamic doctrine. If you examine it objectively and without apology you will find you despise it.

Fear isn't a reasonable reaction to individual muslims, at least not if you meet them in a non-islamic country, but hate certainly is. I don't typically say of people I hate that I'm interested in peaceful coexistence or protecting them from radicalisation.

BULLSHIT. *waits for the jesus bomb* Oh, it was bullshit. Funny. Freaking Penn, you dick. lol!!!

Anyway, his first statement aside, isn't this how legit atheists have always thought? And by that I mean, atheists who practice what they preach and love other humans, as every mammal should. Shitting on belief systems but NEVER NEVER hating the actual person? That's how I function.

I always imagined it was simply the projections of the insecure haters of atheists that projected this perception that we hate Muslims. I never understood how atheism could mean anything other than love. That's why I became an atheist in the frickin' first place, because I realized God isn't loving if he could send people to hell. And from there it simply followed logically towards the absence of God.

I have friends from Malaysia and Iran who clearly CLEARLY have Islamic backgrounds -- but they're badass Americans and beyond that they're human goddamnit -- and I love them as much as I love my Jewish, Atheist, and Christian friends. I can't say that they aren't Muslim, because I don't want to assume anything and I don't want them to be in trouble if they aren't. But yeah, I love all my friends.

And you know what, I love bobknight and that piss flavoured cotton candy Trump thing, even though they both project hate onto us for being liberal. Honestly, I love you bob, and we aren't terrorists and neither is every Muslim. I love you -- even though you support America's terrorists, the police. And I love the police, despite my dislike of SOME (well, maybe MOST) of their views about the world. <3

I agree with you and don't hate Nazis. I hate murderers though, so I hate many of the Nazis but not all of them. Some Nazis helped Jews escape their fate and if it were not for them, some of those people would not be alive today. Disagree with me all you want, I couldn't believe otherwise.

In fact, even some of the mass murderers, the Einsatzgruppen, the meticulous destroyers of entire populations throughout Eastern Europe showed signs of their shame and guilt. When someone feels shame and guilt, that is a sign of their humanity which begs for love and forgiveness.

That doesn't excuse the horrors that they contributed to, but it also shows that they were not merely bogeymen and were themselves victims.

Now, it's very human for you to disagree with my sentiments on this topic out of love and honor for those who were unjustly murdered in this life -- we are a passionate species and it is very right to feel anger towards murderers -- but if an actual loving god (not a torturing one) were to exist, it would forgive and love for the same reasons. That's my belief and I sleep well at night for having it. Otherwise, I would simply be filled with anger and hate for the people who have caused me pain in MY actual life.

Nazis never did a goddamn thing to me directly so it's only conceptual hate that I can feel towards them. But there are people who existed side by side with me who have done me great harm -- and I even forgive and love those people who directly violated my trust. People MUST forgive those that have harmed them in order to move forward with their lives, by accepting their humanity, which although flawed, is still a mammalian emotional being, neocortex enabled and desiring compassion.

Another interesting conceptual form of love is when the family of murder victims forgive the convicted killers who harmed their own family. Isn't that interesting that some people are willing to not hate murderers of their own family members? Or when George Wallace forgave the man who attempted to assassinate him? Sure, he was a born againer and the pro-segregationist who tried to deny black people from signing up for school with white kids, but he still had it in him to forgive and to love, and that to me says he too must be forgiven and loved, because a change occurred in him and his empathy manifested in new ways as his perceptions of mankind changed over time.

it was the closest he came to acknowledging that "bringing democracy" is a euphemism for "bomb them to the stone age"

if people want to insist on profiling terrorists, they should try and be as accurate as possible- being muslim is a terrible filter. where they are from is a much better indicator, especially if they're from a war zone (take your pick- just in pakistan hundreds of innocent children have been killed just by drones over a 5 year period).

i'm pretty sure lightning is still more of a threat than terrorism. in fact i just looked it up: 1 in 7 million for lightning over 9 years, 1 in 3.5 million americans killed by terrorism in 30 years vs 1 in 1.15 thousand iraqi civilians killed in 5 years.

i wonder what these terrorists guys are all butt hurt about? oh right, we declared war on them and have been actively bombing them for over a decade, so easy to forget!

There are two issues here.

Radicalization is the first part of it. And while terrorism, is loud, scary and happening now, it's impact is quite small to the well-being of society as a whole.

The second part, however: the erosion of progressive values over generations, is a much bigger threat to everything society has fought and bled for over centuries.

I've been listening to a lot of Sam Harris podcasts lately, and once you have grasp of the statistics, urgency and severity of what is happening and what the future holds, then you realise Penn is very very wrong on this one.

The solution is not immigration, but foreign aid. We need to erode their fundamentalist ideologies in their own countries, not the other way around.

And no I don't have Islamophobia, my fear is completely rational and based on reason.

I used to think the same thing, because that seems logical, because you're a logical person, but for a fundamentalist's mind, it's not the case at all.

ISIS themselves have stated in their magazine "Dabiq" that the war and bombing is the smallest concern for their motivation. Sam Harris reads this magazine, and about 29 minutes in to this podcast, the magazine goes out of it's way to mention that US/Allied invasion is not the motivator.
https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/what-do-jihadists-really-want/
The truth is much scarier than my rational imagination could have ever come up with.

Most extremists also aren't people who have been affected by war and just want revenge or have mental war scars. The people flying the planes in 9/11 for example were western university educated, engineers, doctors. And other extremists often have grown up in western countries.

These people are fanatics

Ohhhh... I wish people like him would actually read the Quran and the Hadithes and have some experience with the typical muslims.
He doesnt. Because he thinks we need to be compassionate and that will help, solve most problems.
The problem with Islam is that it sees our compassion as weakness. They dont respect us. Their Quran teaches them that we are inferior to them, so much that even their lowly women treat us like we are far below them.

Of course, not every Muslim is that way, but its the vast majority. And that has been proven by polls all over the Muslim world. Im not against helping people in need. But when those guests suddenly act like they own my house, want to change how I live, my culture, my values, and then they are allowed to stay and are treated better, get better chances than my own people, just because its good for the media and PC, then its getting dangerous. And its already too late in some countries. Even statistics are manipulated already to not reflect the huge increase in Muslim crime, to not show the mistakes these "morally superior" people did, like some examples in Sweden and Germany showed. Huge conflicts will come, and its because some people thought they had superior morality, just like so many times before in history, just in a different color.
We just dont learn from history. That much we learn from history.

You Americans still have it good. You check those Muslims coming to your country, if they really want to live your culture, are ready to say "ok, we accept that a part of our religion has no place in your culture", and maybe even turn into Atheists, but many European countries dont. The most conservative Muslims you can find. They just (had to) let them in unchecked, because of a new dictatorship called PC and people following it and its proponents blindly, because it makes them look morally superior and would make them look bad if they would criticize it. Again, history repeating itself at its best.