General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Ben Affleck vs. Bill Maher on Islam: Bill's right. [View all]Ampersand Unicode
(503 posts)A lot of liberals can't reconcile the idea that it's possible to criticize Islam without becoming an "ally of Christianity" -- and therefore the historical enemy of so many minority and indigenous people. It probably has to do with the historical atrocities of colonialism and the fear of being seen as racist. Guilt by association, too, i.e. if Fox News wants profiling of Muslims, we can't allow ourselves to be in agreement with Fox News. Yet they're OK "standing with Rand" when he criticizes the NSA, even though he believes that private businesses should have the right to discriminate against black people because the "free market" needs protection from government, but not with anyone who wants a travel embargo to and from Muslim countries and a complete cutoff of all U.S. involvement with them?
Some guy was quoted in The Week as saying that if Affleck was to come around to the idea that the Islamic world is a barbaric and primitive universe, or that Islam is a backwards ideology, it would mean abandoning the dogma of multiculturalism that liberals hold sacrosanct in and of itself, and realizing that maybe spreading Western values (or acknowledging their superiority) isn't such a bad idea after all. That doesn't necessarily mean Christian values. It means Enlightement secularism as our Founding fathers intended. The problem is that a lot of liberals nitpick and throw the baby out with the bath water, i.e. how can you say Jefferson was right about X if he owned slaves, and how can you say Founding "Fathers," it's sexist language, and how can you support anything the Founders said or did when this country was founded on the genocide of Native Americans...
Um, I don't just give up on buying a Ford because old man Henry was a Jew-hater. I still listen to my iPod even though Steve Jobs was a dick. I separate the product from the person. The product, in this case, is Western democratic values (not necessarily capitalism either). Jefferson may have been an asshole but that doesn't mean Westernism sucks and let's leave poor Islam alone because of how the Muslims are targeted for this or that reason. To me it's the action and the belief that matters, not the person who proposed X or even the race or color. If Germans all of a sudden started killing Jews again in hopes of getting 72 maidens at Valhalla, I'd be shitting on their foolishness too.