Quote Originally Posted by Peter View Post
Yes, of course it does. and it has more work to do than most, and it has to come from them.

However....the fact that plenty of muslims deplore this stuff (and the terrorism by the way) shows that there are large parts of our muslim communities (the overwhelming majority I would say) that have made this progress already. If you want their broader attitudes to women and gays to be consistent with ours then that will take longer.

I am not saying the religion plays no role in it. My point is that demonising the entire religion demonises all those within it. It is ok for someone like you to think like this. When notions like this are given the terminally hard of thinking we have a problem on our hands.
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.