Quote Originally Posted by Monty92 View Post
I don't agree that demonising the entire religion serves to demonise all those within it, and the claim that it does is used almost exclusively by people who have bad motives and want to shut down debate. In the Cold War, this was called 'semantic infiltration' and is a tactic used to control the parameters of debate through the control of language. In the case of Islamists, this tactic is seen in the reframing of the utterly meaningless word 'Islamopobia' to make it impossible for people to criticise Islam without being called a bigot.

If you're worried about a rise in anti-Muslim bigotry (of which there is of course plenty), then the best thing you could do to tackle this IS demonise the religion. Because it is the perpetual, almost pathalogical, reluctance to say that these problems are rooted in Islamic scripture that is doing more than anything to make people less inclined to differentiate between good and bad muslims and just lump them all in together.
We can argue back and forth about whether it demonises the entire religion. Likewise, we can argue over whether different interpretations of Islam already exist. For example, many Islamic scholars will tell you that fundamentalism (strict adherence to archaic values and the most vicious forms of sharia) is a relatively recent movement in Islam and a reaction to the dispersal of muslim populations to (particularly) non-muslim countries. I wouldn’t be confident enough to comment on that.

The bigger, broader principle here is whether you can blame an original text for what people or groups choose to do with it. Is Catcher in the Rye responsible for the death of John Lennon? Was Clause 4 to blame for British Rail being so ****? Would the Old Testament be to blame if some new crazy organisation decided to start enacting some of the crazy **** contained in it?

By blaming the script you partially absolve these individual rapists of their desire to rape, or of the horrific consequences of their views on white women. You also present the millions of good muslims with the notion that their religion is sick and twisted in a way that others aren’t. You also ignore the fact that these guys, alongside being evil ****s, were also pretty **** muslims- for one thing, they were drinking and taking drugs. Proof if any were needed that they are not exactly Quran-clutching zealots on some sort of holy mission.

I am not suggesting there is no link whatsoever between these acts and the ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds of those committing them. The numbers confirm that. You seem to skate past this clutch of issues and go straight back to scripture despite the fact that these individuals never mentioned it, never cited it as motive and clearly haven’t ****ing read or taken note of significant parts of it.

There is a difference between saying there are problems with social attitudes within our muslim communities and there is a problem with Islamic scripture. Apart from anything else, if scripture is the problem how do you propose to solve it? You can’t change the word of God? I don't see how blaming scripture helps separate good and bad muslims.