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It's just garden variety tribal defensiveness, of the sort other groups with even less justification to deny their people are responsible use.
Muslims were more defensive and conciliatory in the wake of 9/11 and it didn't change that some people still suspect that there's something particular about Islam (in fact, it may have gotten worse) and it justified many things Muslims don't like both on the foreign policy and immigration fronts so why bother? Blacks don't ever go "Yeah, crime is on our heads alone. We need to be the ones work on it" and politically they've probably been better served by just forming an ever deeper phalanx of scapegoats and rationalizations.
Now that the left wing is totally on board with the alternate theories and has applied the "blaming culture==racist" paradigm and the Muslim population is just a fact of life, it all seems a bit embarrassing to have gone so far for so little. Just blame the West/American foreign policy/white supremacy like everyone else. Whitey clearly buys that shit.
The important thing is that it doesn't stop at terrorism, which most would be willing to write off. Muslims have been wrestling with the West and being seen as backwards across the board for centuries (I know some apologists who complain bitterly that the complaints about Mohammed bedding a pre-teen Aisha were unknown before modernity, implying modern liberal Westerners are the weird ones, which...well. How they raise their children, manage relations with women, etc. are all under suspicion under strong liberalism. Granting that there's something illiberal and backwards about Islam opens the door to correction on a broad number of matters from the West and that's just unacceptable because liberals don't know how to stop at a reasonable concession. They just take more and and more and more. As Americans, they see that.
They've seen what happened to Christianity. You cede that your religion should be subject to review by kaffir and next thing you know the the degenerate gays are dancing in your cathedrals and your daughters are being transed. Why wouldn't they? They saw you trying to be more British than the British, apologizing for the faith. You've ceded the moral authority to them.
No, nip it in the bud. We have our own ideas about justice and that's all there is to it. Some people did something, as a certain Congresswoman said, but we're not going to cede the whole moral core of the faith by saying it's Muslims as such
Sometimes it seems to me that the social currency of DSA types is just, well, unabashed shamelessness. It certainly explains the number of self-identified "working class" fail sons that had daddy buy their first house or live rent-free, or hyper-progressive businesses that haven't paid their taxes.
If that's really true, it seems like all you'd need to subvert it is a critical mass willing to play along by its own rules. Get a bunch of Eastern Europeans to show up to a meeting and center that "in living memory, Slavs have been the primary victims of capitalism", and raise etymological concerns every time someone else uses the word "slave". Those facts are, arguably, not even wrong. If they kick you out, raise discrimination claims under the Civil Rights Act. There is certainly an element of the crab bucket to it, too. On the other hand, I'd recommend against it because of what could happen if you were successful: what is literal Naziism if not turbo-woke except centering blond-haired, blue-eyed Germans as the primary victims of history at the hands of Jews and other European powers?
To tie it back to Islamism, I haven't listened to OP's podcast, but my broader concerns there are that many on the left (not even always Muslim believers themselves!) lack the self-awareness expected of "the rest of us". I'm expected to appreciate the historical nuance and implications, but to them, history always begins at a very convenient choice of time.
ByzantiumConstantinopleIstanbul has always been Muslim land (see also Jerusalem). The only slave trade worth mentioning is the Western Atlantic one. It's only "genocide" when it's done by perceived-as-white people; pay no attention to the last century in, to name a few, Armenia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, Kashmir, South Sudan (in some cases, literal skin-color-based murderism), or religious minorities within the Middle East like Druze or Lebanese Christians. I'll pretty reasonably acknowledge that bad things have been done by Christians and in the name of Christendom, but it feels very much like a one-way street.To be clear, this isn't an "all Muslims" thing. There are plenty of quite reasonable minds here. Whom amongst us doesn't have weird teachings in corners of our religious texts that we are at least a bit uncomfortable with? It's more a question of what you choose to do with it and where we go from here. The Reformation was, to put it bluntly, not the best time to live in Europe, but the Westphalian peace and the Enlightenment seem important results from that which aren't as universally-assumed as they ought to be.
I’m not sure how many of those failsons or tax-evaders are out there, but it’s almost certainly fewer than you think.
This is a stupid plan with several obvious failure points. Where are you getting these Slavs? How are you training them to promote your party line? Do you pay them? Why should you expect the target organizations to listen to a bunch of obvious plants?
Oh, come on. I can think of half a dozen load-bearing differences, and I bet you can too. How about “revanchism” or “self-abasement” or “overthrowing a fucking government”?
Your models are cartoonish.
I'll concede it's a bit of an overzealous, maybe even facile model. But I'm not sure I have a much better model for most extremist ideologies (except maybe the Quakers, if they count as such) that doesn't devolve into totalizing revanchism regardless of initial direction: it's a common thread among literal Nazis, through Pol Pot, all the way to the Hutus, Lost Cause stans, and both side in Israel/Palestine. It's really easy as humans to blame all sorts of things on our outgroups; I won't claim to be immune to that one.
But I have trouble finding any sort of consistent principles in modern progressivism that don't boil down to "who, whom". Genocide is bad, but maybe we can poll watchers of The Young Turks how they feel about Armenians. Blasphemy laws are bad, but don't you dare draw The Prophet. Black lives matter, except the ones in Africa killed by (often-Muslim) militants. The most reliable metric for "Omni cause" support seems to be more along the lines of voting blocs than moral principles, and I have real misgivings that the political standards that are IMHO not-even-unreasonably applied to Christianity are largely brushed off for everyone else that will vote for them at present. That part gives me pause.
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This post made me more firmly opposed to Muslim immigration. Sorry, but they're free to have their own ideas about justice in any of the 50 Muslim nations. Here they have to tolerate Piss Mohammad and getting tickets if they park illegally when they hear the call to prayer.
If not, remigration/expulsion are the kind, moderate options.
Leftists will skinsuit the religion; traditional Muslims will be attacked as backwards right-wingers. Its unlikely they will get deported. What I'm not sure about is if verbal attacks on "Islam" will be phrased exactly the same way as against Christianity ("Islam" having a residual connotation of being a victim). I am pretty sure the Cathedral can coordinate a phase change once necessary. This probably will be near the end of our lifetime, if even within our lifetime.
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Your prerogative. I just don't think they believe you. Where's the great groundswell of support for the banning of Muslims? Even Europe, which has much more serious problems, probably won't.
So what's the point of catering to people like you anymore? You lost, as they see it. If 9/11 and the rise of ISIS or the grooming gangs didn't cause a ban or rethink nothing will.
If any part of my post is sympathetic to the case it makes about how people think it's that we all know it won't stop at this. Plenty or even most American Muslims tolerate this (I grant there's just a seemingly impossible to filter minority that become deranged and use violence that punches way above its weight) but "live and let live" is a lie. The minimal secular state is a lie.
Liberalism doesn't really compromise, it just pauses to reload. On many matters American Muslims are just conservative religious people circa a couple of decades ago and that is theoretically acceptable within the secular framework of the country, but will constantly be put under pressure by liberal hegemony.
What exactly has the constant compromising bought Christians? Have evangelicals stopped being the boogeymen? Did the liberal state take the win on gay marriage and leave it at that? Or is it demanding the right to trans and indoctrinate your kids as well? And what's the response to complaints? That it's just like gay marriage, which you were on the wrong side of history for. This argument actually works on people.
Muslims might be willing to accept some sort of millet system or one where each faith has its own way but with neutral strictures to protect freedom but clearly that's not what's being debated.
The debate is one side saying Muslims are incompatible with the country, and the other side saying they're compatible so long as they cede moral sovereignty and start down the long road of becoming Unitarians or some other faith colored appendage of globohomo that's gonna die anyway (the churches with the lowest apostasy rates are not the ones that just go along to get along). Hell, it's arguably already begun with Mamdani and co. You can see why people don't want to give inches away rhetorically.
You may have heard of this guy named Donald Trump. His anti-immigration ire is only marginally focused on Muslims right now, but your rhetoric would make my "Ginsberg t-shirt and coffee mug" mother want to limit and deport.
Liberalism is the compromise. If you don't care for it, the alternative is Deus Vult and blood eagles and the red ruin of your culture.
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I think education is and always will be the crux here. The progressive view trends towards the idea that religious freedom is a right to be exercised by legal adults making an informed, personal decision as to which religion seems true to them after being exposed to the full spectrum of options, such that attempts by parents to raise young children within a particular religion scan as prima facie sinister attempts to box in their thinking before they're old enough to make up their minds for themselves as they're entitled to. The conservative view, meanwhile, is rooted in a deep feeling that the right of parents to raise their children within their hereditary belief system is sacrosanct, and any attempt by the state to mitigate this amounts to a sinister totalitarian plot to brainwash kids and break apart communities. One is individualistic, the other is communitarian.
These are idealized views, of course: religious conservatives would struggle to defend against the charge that they're just upset at somebody brainwashing their children other than themselves rather than anything more principled, while progressives don't cover themselves with glory with regards to "okay, but are you actually giving young minds an unbiased range of options or are you just weighing the scales in a different direction". And misc. interference patterns arise from the ol'Oppression Olympics, such as progressives sweating bullets when asked to criticize sharia schools as their principles should normally dictate. But nevertheless, I think that's the basic dichotomy at work, the scissor-statement nature of "the state should stop parents from indoctrinating children into their religion" as a proposition.
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You're definitely correct about everything except that the Muslims are also going to go gay and trans just like Christians did.
Take a look at the cratering birth rates in Muslim countries. Look at the absolute softness of their military forces. The selection process of modernity hasn't even fully hit them yet. Can Abdul from Riyadh resist internet porn and video games? Doubtful.
You're thinking like a Puritan. The point isn't to eliminate sin, it's moral hegemony.
Abdul from Riyadh can both watch porn and still be all for the murder of any gay person who got uppity and tried to challenge the faith.
Notice that adultery never triggers the same defense mechanism as homosexuality, because it's widely seen as a sin while the homo stuff is a challenge to the prevailing moral order. (A lot of Muslims love to sin while vociferously resisting pork since it's an outgroup marker, for another example)
The real problem is whether Mohammed bin Salman feels the same. The state can only keep it's people fat on oil-created do nothing jobs for so long.
...Then what are honor killings about?
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I'm more thinking that the only groups that have successfully resisted modernity are the ones that have extremely strict systems set up to defend against it like the Amish and Hasidic Jews. Even groups like Mormons are getting steamrolled. I think Muslims will get steamrolled too. They might still maintain their "otherness", but they'll abandon their true belief and become feminized just like other groups have.
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