Re: Reaction to this incident misses an opportunity

Submitted by Nomad (Singapore), Aug 7, 2022 at 02:03

Excellent comment by Dave. He gets to the core of the issue very well. At the very least it is about time that the West sits down and has a frank discussion with the Islamic world, and the moral high ground without question belongs to the former. But the problem runs a lot deeper than what somebody like MBS even with good intentions could potentially solve. The real problem is that many of the core illiberal ideas in Islam (killing of the apostate, extreme hatred and contempt for idol worshippers, blasphemy laws and so on) find appeal among a very large slice of muslims (not just muslims in Pakistan or Syria but also among educated muslims born and raised in the West). It is not an accident that so many Islamic countries officially have the death penalty for apostasy. This aspect is very different among other reprehensible groups like, say Nazis, who are an indescribably tiny group and yet get severely opposed by white people in Western countries. It is a problem when people in the West pretend that the Islamist problem is of the same proportion as the Nazi problem. Nothing could be farther from the truth and this needs to be explicitly stated as such.

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