Every single Republican voted against tracking or countering Islamophobia like we do anti semitism.

Indeed Green ranted her support for Islamophobia, again publicly claiming all Muslims are terrorists and saying fear of any and all Muslims is reasonable. Not a single Republican disagreed. Many publicly agreed, accusing Omar of being a member of multiple terrorist organizations such as her religion.

Damn you people are so childishly ignorant and hypocritical it’s shocking.

I think you are making the mistake of believing all on the left believe what the most extreme far lefties do.

Yes, some have attacked Chappel, but far more leftists have come to his defense….I will. What I’ve heard is FAR from transphobic.
He doesn’t limit that to Islam, all religious extremists are prone to violence, so only a select few looking for Islamophobia call it that, IMO.
Only the insane trans community thinks trans women are full 100% women. I ignore people like that. They don’t live in reality. I’m not alone on the left thinking that.
Edit: I misunderstood…sorry. Yes, the far left “feminist” segment does think fair trial=don’t believe the women. That’s insanity….as is thinking you should lock people up based on one person’s unverified accusation. I think most leftists think you should investigate any claim of abuse and bring charges when appropriate, not just outright believe every one.

Yes, I think you’re wrong. Those have been attacked by extremely tiny, but vocal minorities on the very far left, not main stream leftists nor centrists. Just as all on the right aren’t raving lunatic Trumpists that gladly put orange daddy before reality, country, and democracy, all on the left aren’t as you’ve described them….very few are.

@newtboy,

thanks for clarification.

So in your view, do you see the left objecting to any of the following things that kinda speak to Maher's point, and I think fits to the point of the 'left' being upset with him,

-Defending Chapelle which left would decry invoking their definition of dog whistle, transphobia...
-Pointing out a correlation between violence and Islamic extremism which left would decry as islamophobia
-Believing sports/olympics should divide competitors based on biological sex rather than gender identity == Transphobia
-(Big any famous celebrity accused of sex crimes) and suggesting they deserve a fair trial == failure to believe victims/survivors

Those are all things that have been pretty commonly defended by large groups of the left from what I've been seeing. Am I wrong?

"Common side effects include Racism, Sexism, Nepotism, Corruption, Collusion, Xenophobia, Homophobia, Islamophobia, Anti-Semitism, Hypocrisy, Delusion, Gullibility, Paranoia, Fascism, Greed, Rage, Hate, Fear and Mullets.... destruction of the economy, the Constitution, the ecosystem, the idea of truth, the post office, and basic human decency"

This list of Trump supporter side-effects seems short.

Please expand, because while I can see that he's picking and choosing some easy targets for criticism (over the top SJW stuff) that may not be representative of the at-large "Progressive" agenda, nothing really jumped out at me as a "straw man" argument.

I'm a somewhat conservative-leaning person (at least on issues that I think should be in the realm of government), but I feel like I have a legitimate beef with some of what the party that is "supposed" to cater to conservatives actually does in government; what the GOP seems to present as its "platform".

This guy is a liberal-leaning person who feels like he has a legitimate beef with some of what his party thinks their platform should be. And I tend to agree with a lot of what he's saying.

And I would hope that even if I didn't agree with anything that he was saying, I'd be all for protecting his right to say his piece. Some people/groups test our patience for that, like the Westboro Baptist Church -- ostensibly a crazy right-wing organization that just wants to get their message (of hate and bigotry) out there. But in reality they are just a bunch of con men who stir up trouble in order to provoke violent or other responses that they can start litigation over. The point is, there are good ways and bad ways to deal with idiots like that.

Threats to free speech from the other side of spectrum are much more subtle, and therefore perhaps more insidious and dangerous. For example, at about 3:00 in the video where he lists "racism, bigotry, xenophobia, homophobia, and islamophobia" as "meaningless buzzwords". For many people, those words are NOT meaningless, but real, concrete problems that they actually have to face in their lives. Problems many orders of magnitude more significant and weighty than any of the minutia that can make or ruin our average day. Unfortunately, those words do tend to carry a lot less weight when they are bandied about willy-nilly every time we disagree with someone for any reason.

I guess, we all really do have more things in common with each other than things that separate us from each other. The frequent and extreme factionalizing and partisanship today seems very counter productive. And there's plenty of blame for that to go around.

@gorillaman

The only thing I see failing completely is your absurd attempt at rationalizing your bigotry--more aptly labelled in this case by its proper name: Islamophobia. I don't for a second believe what I'm about to post will change your mind about Islam or Muslims in general but I do believe that this kind of bigotry needs to be called out when it rears its ugly head. And my, you went full ugly there, didn't you... comparing Muslims to rats and seriel killers? Classy.

Despite your protestations to the contrary, there are in fact Muslims who do not believe in God but for a variety of reasons (keeping peace with religious family members, maintaining a connection to their cultural heritage, networking, etc.) continue to attend services and identify as Muslims. This is true of many believers in all the major religions, including Christianity and Judaism.

You see, as much as you'd like Muslims to all be boogeymen coming to bring Sharia law down on the rest of world, anyone who has actually met and talked with a Muslim (and god-forbid actually visited one of the countries StukaFox listed) realizes that Muslims, like all people, are extremely diverse (again, despite your protestations to the contrary).

Indeed there are Sharia zealots. But there are also moderates and reformers and even liberal radicals. Mostly, though its just a lot of people trying to get on with their lives the best way they know how.

Now, I find most religious beliefs to be repugnant. However, I don't find the ideas expressed in the Koran to be much more repugnant than, say, the Bible. In fact, I'm less concerned about what is written in supposedly holy books and more concerned with how believers attempt to implement those ideas in reality. I do indeed find particular forms of this implementation, such as forcing women to wear a bhurka, disturbing (just as I find Christians' attacks on LGBT rights disturbing). It's important to note, though, that such practices are NOT universal. For example, in some Islamic countries like Malaysia it's enough to simply cover your hair with a colorful scarf.

On the other hand, other practices that you mentioned such as Female Genital Mutilation and virginity tests ARE NOT Islamic. FGM predates Islam and is still practiced in the locales where it originated (places such as Mali, for instance) that now happen to be Islamic majority areas. The Indonesian virginity tests as well do not stem from some universal commandment in Islam but from Indonesian culture which sees women as "the symbol of the nations moral guardians".

Again, I don't suppose any of this makes any difference to you. You want to see the world in black and white, us versus them, "rats" and "serial killers" versus you, the white knight who is just trying to save us all from our cultural relativistic blindness. And so the shades of grey I am describing to you will likely go overlooked. I would be happy to be proven wrong, but I suspect the reality is I'll receive some lengthy reply that can be distilled down to, "Islam bad, hur." Or perhaps, "All religions bad, but Islam worst, hur." To which I can only reply, that demonizing the practitioners of any particular religion is unlikely to bring about the reforms you seek.

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.

Why do they hate Family Guy?

And why is it only Muslims who still get upset enough at irreverent media to seriously deter its production with predictable threats of violence? To hell with all chilling effects and censorship based on outrage based on bronze age myths. Every threat against a speaker should and usually does spawn dozens more like him in solidarity with the threatened speaker. On the internet this is known as the Streisand effect and it's pretty much inevitable. The assholes making death threats against cartoonists are way behind the times. "Islamophobia" acquiring the opprobrium of racism is absurd. Religion is a choice like becoming a member of the asshole tea party, not something unchangeable that you're born with like skin color. One might as well coin a term "Republicanophobia" and apply it to any harsh critic of the Republican party. All religions are rotten to the core just as all major parties are rotten to the core. But some religions are worse than others and some parties are worse than others, notwithstanding individual variability.

@SDGundamX

I cannot agree with that definition. The problem I have with the concept of "Islamophobia" is as I've stated above: it conflates the individuals and the ideology, thus causing those who use the term to be guilty of the error they are often accusing their opponents of. And that conflation lets it be used - by Islamists as well as by self-righteous (or ill-placed-guilt-ridden) lefties - to silence criticism of Islam. This term has been particularly abused in this manner in Europe, where the ghost of the Holocaust weighs a lot heavier on politicians and the media than it does in the US.

"Muslimphobia" may not roll of the tongue quite as nicely, but it would at least be a more honest and acceptable term to denote the irrational fear/hatred of Muslim people. Mostly, what people refer to as "Islamophobia" is a combination of religious discrimination, xenophobia and racism, and we should not be afraid to use those meaningful terms in our criticism of such discriminatory behaviour. It may even help to break it down in that way, instead of trying to wrap it up in a simplistic and ambivalent term.

There is another big problem with "Islamophobia" which I have already discussed here: http://videosift.com/talk/Dare-we-criticize-Islam, (the difference to be made between what one is and what one believes).

As for Harris' unfortunate and highly irrational/illogical defense of racial profiling, the Cephalopod Prof says it better than I can (as he often does).

edit: ach, how can I be such a cad and forget to thank you for the kudos? I still have much to learn, but thank you for taking note of my reduced antagonisation, knee-jerk reactions and general verbal belligerance.

@hpqp

I'm at work, so I can't write a very long reply and besides which many others (especially @aaronfr) have already expressed ideas similar to what I would have said, so I'm not sure it's even necessary. I will say that I think you've done a great job of responding to comments made in this thread and that the tone of your posts has improved dramatically (I see you've even gone back and toned down a post using the edit function) from when we used to spar on the forums. I know that was something you said you'd be working on, so kudos for that.

Just one thing I would like to point out: Islamophobia can be demonstrably shown to exist. You can see ample evidence of it in the NYPD's illegal surveillance of the entire Muslim community in the NY/NJ metropolitan area and the hysteric outcry that accompanies the building of new mosques in many U.S. states. I understand why you yourself would not want to be labeled an Islamophobe as you've taken great pains to explain your problem is with the religious texts and teachings and not people who happen to be Muslim. But certainly, I think you've recognized that, for example, Sam Harris advocating racial profiling is irrational and not a logical extension of his arguments against Islam's teachings.

Can we not agree then that Islamophobia--defined as an irrational fear of or hatred of Muslims simply because they subscribe to Islam--does in fact exist? I think it's difficult to maintain the position that it doesn't exist in the face of the discrimination many Muslims face in some Western countries.

I love how such a narrow clip provokes such wide-ranging discussion here on the Sift. I think the clip itself raises two central questions:
1) Is Islam - in this point in history - more dangerous a religious ideology than the others, and
2) Is such a question/comparison even relevant? Or perhaps "promotes Islamic hatred" as the douchebag facing Maher seems to think?

To 1), I've argued above that yes, it is. as for 2), raised mostly by the commenters here, I would have to say "no, but" to both. Religious (and non-religious) ideologies should be strongly and non-violently denounced whenever/wherever they do harm. In the US, for example, Christianity does way more harm (to women's/gay's/atheist's rights, to education, etc.) than Islam does, but neither excuses/diminishes the evil done by the other. The "but" would be for when people get accused of discrimination and "islamophobia" when calling out the evils of Islam.
The necessity of the second "but" is illustrated by @shinyblurry's comment: there is always the danger of right-wing and/or Christian fundamentalists taking criticism of Islam to be a defense/validation of their own strain of wrong/dangerous BS and/or racisms (to be fair, sb only exhibits the former). This is inevitable, and should not stop people from criticising/denouncing unethical ideologies, nor should it prompt amalgamation of "criticising Islam" with "hating the for'ners/ragheads/Muslims".

Beyond the subject of the video itself, the correlation between poor socio-politico-economico-etc. status and the adherence to extremes, a point well-made by @Babymech, @Yogi and others is an important factor in the higher numbers of "Islamist evil" worldwide, one that I am well aware of. There is no better way of turning whole populations to fundamentalist extremes (or at least worse ones than they had before; let's not fall into the "noble savage" fallacy) than by meddling with their politics and then bombing the hell out of them. The danger is to go to the extreme of excluding the very nature of those fundamentals from the picture, which is just as simplistic and false as is blaming them exclusively.

Moreover, I always shudder at the left-wing strain of argumentation which puts ALL the blame on the Western invaders, (edit: 19-20th c.) colonisation and co. This view relies heavily on the "noble savage" form of racism, which assumes that only "White people/Westerners/Judeo-Christians" can wreak political/social havoc in the lands of those poor, innocent "Brown people/Muslims" (those two often being conflated). Having lived in Africa for 5 years I have a knee-jerk reaction to this kind of self-centered guilt-tripping, which deprives the "Brown/Black people" of one aspect of human nature: the ability to be evil, to fuck themselves up without any help from the "West". They can, and they do.

This tangent may seem irrelevant here, but the reason I bring it up is because that it is this sentiment that is behind much of this "Islamophobe" name-calling in the US and Europe, and behind the difficulty many "Westerners" have in bare-facedly criticising Islam, when they often have no such difficulty with their "home"-religion, Christianity.

@aaronfr raises the problem of how to go about denouncing an unethical set of beliefs, and gives several good examples of how not to (it is noteworthy that the only example of violent action is one taken by other religious people; I have yet to hear of atheists using anything other than words and pictures to make their point). Hitchens’ endorsement of the Iraq war lowered my esteem for him greatly (somewhat saved by the fact that his stance on this was of no influence to anyone, contrary to his huge effort against the evils of religion), but it is noteworthy that he and Harris are the most criticised (and the least influential) when they hold such positions.
On the side of the religious, however, it is often the crazy fundies who are the loudest and, in certain areas (with the aid of socio-etc factors of course) the most influential. And they have, especially in the Quran and the life of M., a reliable and divine source of hate/violence-mongering.

As you say, peace and prosperity are some of the best deterrents to religious extremism and unethical behaviour (but not solely; cf: the US, Saudi Arabia and co.) This does not render unnecessary denouncing the unethical nature of Islam, Christianity, etc. As noted above, the negative effects of religion are still felt in relatively peaceful and prosperous nations today (in France, for example, homophobes of Christian, Muslim and possibly Jewish faiths are causing a significant rise in homophobic violence ever since the gay-marriage hearings).

So long as the distinction between "Islam(/religious ideology)" and "Muslim(/person)" remains clear, we should be free to criticise and denounce the former to our hearts content. (Note how "Islamophobia" shits all over that distinction; one of the many reasons that term should never be uttered unironically).

_{My apologies for the dissertation-length comment}

I agree with most of your last paragraph, namely that greedy and inhumane capitalism causes huge amounts of damage (arguably more so than religious ideologies), but that is not the discussion here. What, pray tell, is wrong (both morally and factually) with strongly denouncing Islam?

As for that appalling, intellectually dishonest hackjob of an article you link to (which of course uses the term "Islamophobia" non-ironically, displaying it's dishonesty from the get-go), PZ Myers expresses better than I would* how such atheist-bashing fails hard, with the bonus of putting Sam Harris in his place viz. "the war on terror" (Harris lost most of his credibility for me when he defended racial/religious profiling, and Dawkins when he took the wrong side in the feminism debate, but I digress).

If you really agree with the lines you quoted, you might want to read a history book or, you know, watch the news. I would snidely suggest you go live the life of a woman, atheist or homosexual (to name only a few) in a place ruled by religion if you still adhered to such a belief, but that would be meanness beyond even me.

*http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/04/03/both-wrong-both-right/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/04/12/why-should-anyone-have-to-read-your-goofy-holy-book/

No one said you can't criticize Islam. But you might want to get your facts straight before you do: female genital mutilation is a tribal custom that predates Islam but has been integrated into the religion in some regions of the world (predominately Africa) and is practiced by both Muslims and non-Muslims alike (look it up on wiki page, it's extremely well documented).

Also, you asked for evidence of Islamophobia? You need look no further than the hysteria in the U.S. over building new mosques or the NYPD's unwarranted surveillance (including wiretapping and undercover agents) for years of the entire Muslim community across the NY/NJ area. They caught zero terrorists during their investigation, BTW, while wasting untold millions in taxpaper dollars in the process.

So we can't criticise Islam unless we live under a theocratic regime that doesn't allow us to criticise Islam?

Let me very clear. I believe that the vast majority of muslims (any figure would be a guess, but I'll go with at least 90%) are decent people who, deep down, are probably kinda embarrassed at some of the bullshit inherent in their religion (much as the majority of catholics are truly disgusted at their churchs handling of child rape cases).

But that does not stop me from criticising the ideology within the religion. This is not some hypothetical internet argument; the WHO estimates that 140 million girls have their genitals mutilated annually, most in the name of Islam. (I'm not even going to start on the socially accepted genital mutilation of males).

Finally, I take issue with the term "islamophobia", not because it's an *irrational* fear, but because it's a *fear*. I am not afraid of Islam. I object to parts of it on moral grounds.

So yeah, call me an "internet atheist" if you want. Unless you have some evidence to back up your specious little rant, I'm not interested.

>> ^Fletch:

>> ^SDGundamX:
You've been registered since 2007, so surely you must know that there exists a segment of Sifters who are hardened Islamophobes (though they hate being called that).
"Islamophobe" is a word the reality-challenged use so they can more easily compartmentalize and parse a confusing world. I am no more islamophobe than I am a cilantrophobe, Romneyphobe, or panflutophobe.
I've been registered since 2006, but that has nothing to do with recognizing there are some hardened ignoramuses here (although I'm sure you don't like to be called that). There will be Islamic "extremists" and "fundamentalists" (or, as @gorillaman correctly stated, Muslims) as long as the Koran exists, because they are simply following what it tells them to do. Moderate or peaceful Muslims are not (at least, on the whole). They ignore much of the cornerstone of their religion, choosing to cherry-pick from it those tenets that suit them and the kind of life they wish to lead, just as all the various Christian "sects and factions" selectively follow the Bible.
Now, I'm all for muslims who choose to live peaceful, tolerant, and inclusive lives. If you're going to believe in magic and ancient fairy tales, I'd much rather your delusions lead you to First World, socially acceptable life choices. But portraying them as true Muslims is just ignorant, and denies what Islam is. Islamic "fundamentalists" are far, far from a fringe group.


Just for the record, I wasn't implying you specifically were an Islamophobe. Certainly there are lots of Sifters who have submitted anti-<insert pretty much any religion name here> vids to the Sift because they know they'll get a little traction and probably get Sifted. Congrats on getting Sifted, by the way.

Also for the record, Islamophobe is a word used to describe an irrational fear of Muslims that usually leads to discrimination in some form, whether that be people calling for the prevention of the building of a proposed mosque or spying on the entire population of Muslims without cause across multiple states and trying to pass it off as "anti-terrorism tactics" (i.e. the NYPD).

So the view that Islamophobia is "reality-challenged" seems itself to be "reality-challenged" as the above real-world examples indicate.

P.S. Calling someone who disagrees with you an ignoramus says tons more about you and your argumentation skills than it does about your opponent.