The far-right and anti-Islam populist Geert Wilders is heading for a massive parliamentary election victory. It's one of the biggest political upsets in Dutch politics since World War II and one that is bound to send shockwaves through Europe.
I think though you are also getting a backlash throughout the world in that this white glove woke treatment of Islam that suggest they do not need to rein in the fringe extreme elements within their faith is acceptable is becoming unacceptable. That they are not collectively responsible for the actions of the those that take their faith too literal wears thin. It is akin to the pressures put on the Catholic religion that was expected to clean up their sins of which were far smaller in size. That was expected and maybe it should be expected that the group as a whole becomes responsible
The result is that we are starting to see majority of people begin to say you need to actively denounce and more so, take steps to remove those of your faith that engage in violent methods otherwise we will collectively group you together and effectively punish you. And while maybe this is a hard pill to swallow, that might be the only effective way to change human nature on a large scale.
In the larger context, it appears to me that the author is arguing that when there are bad faith actors in a larger group, it becomes the responsibility of the larger group to denounce the actions of the fringe.
It is not the same as saying the whole is responsible for the actions of the few.
This isn't a novel idea in our society.
-We expect all Catholics to denounce the actions of pedophile priests, and if they don't, we do view them as part of a systemic problem
-We expect all white people to denounce racist behaviour when other white people do it, and if they don't, we do view them as part of a systemic problem
-We expect all men to denounce mysogonistic and sexually predatory behaviour when they see other men do it, and if they don't, we see them as part of a systemic problem
If I were to take any issue with the original post, it seems to imply that the broader community IS silent on extremism. I don't think that this is actually true. I think that the media systemically dampens the voices of Muslim people, EXCEPT when they have extremist sound bytes, which causes an incorrect perception of the general Muslim sentiment.
So, that is where the error is.
NOT with the idea that it's the responsibility of anyone in any group to call out bad behaviour within their group... But that they don't appear to believe that it is happening.
We don't expect all Catholics to do that. No. In fact, we don't care if they do that. Denouncing. A simple verbal response means nothing. We expect them to take action to stop what's going on. And make effort to keep it from happening again. I don't care if they denounce it ever. As long as they take steps to make sure it doesn't happen.
It's nice to have people denounce racist behavior. But what would be nicer is if people simply just didn't tolerate racist behavior and didn't associate with people who behave in a bigoted or racist fashion. I don't care if they denounce it. So many people do that and then never make any steps towards distancing themselves from it. Actions speak louder than words.
And again no we don't expect all men to denounce mysogyny, etc etc etc. We expect people on the whole not to support it and not to further it.
If you are in a room with a pedophile, a racist, or a misogynist. People will generally laud you for coming to the victims defense. No doubt. But if you had nothing to do with it. Don't share the the offending viewpoints of the offender. Never have made any actions to give anyone any indication that you might. You don't need to say anything. And pretending that people do is pretending that the whole group is responsible for it when they aren't. That would be like saying all conservatives everywhere need to. Constantly apologize for the thousands of people murdered at the hands of far-right extremist constantly there. I think that they should take some culpability from it and perhaps work to change their culture a little bit. But I don't expect or want them to apologize for it necessarily. I would rather they actually take action to keep it from happening.
It's no different than Christianity, except they don't believe Jesus was the son of God. The people following the religion are just as varied as Christians. Some people are fundamentalists, while others are extremely liberal, and consider themselves merely spiritual and call themselves christians.
It's an interesting one this. My wife's mum is Iranian and my brother in law is Pakistani and I've heard (so take this with a metric tonne of salt) that families that emmigrated from middle Eastern cultures are often much more strict that those who didn't.
This is simply because the community in the country the emmigrated to is much smaller and more isolated so doesnt allow views to slowly shift as easily as in a large group where you can more easily find like minded people if there's a point you don't agree with.
But like I said, I've only heard this so maybe it's bs, I've never visited either country myself so it's literally just another's opinion. But I found it interesting and it made me think a bit more about how hard it must be to feel like you belong in a country different than your origin. Obviously we (the west, generally speaking) have the benefit of seeing comfortable Christians in comfortable situations who are able to more easily challenge the traditional beliefs, but I wonder whether a typical Christian family who emmigrated to a non Christian country a generation or more ago would be more strict as a rule.
Mild pressure is put on the catholic church as an organization (!) to stop actively aiding the still ongoing mass rape of children over multiple continents through their clergy.
That is not even close to the same as expecting all people of Muslim believe to denounce things that completely independent people do that just so happen to also be Muslim.
And don't get me wrong, Islam might be even more stupid and archaic than Christianity, but your argument just doesn't hold water at all.
I would go so far as to say that it is likely that this very argument was conceived as a racist fig leaf to have some reasonable sounding argument to not like brown people.
Not that this is necessarily your motivation, but you just publicly repeated it.
Being concerned about Muslim extremeism != racism. You’re the reason people like geert are winning. People are tired of bad faith arguments with the left in which common sense is called racism.
Common sense is not boiling hundreds of years worth of geopolitics into a single talking point and acting like you've somehow solved all problems in an area if we just somehow did this one thing.
In fact, the extremism you are talking about is largely due to foreign countries destabilizing regions around the world that happen to be majority Muslim countries.
You'd respond the same way if a handful of countries showed up at your doorstep, set up military bases, bombed your neighbors, friends, and family, and then toppled your government causing wide spread famine, inflation, and collapse of your economy.
Honestly, how could you not end up hating someone for doing that?
Nope, just wondering how you still can't see that an entire generation of people become radicalized when you carpet bomb their nation and topple their government.
Says the apologist repeating some of the rhetoric Wilders and his voters use to try and convince non-islamophobes to vote and behave like islamophobes.
No I am not and right wing nuts blaming the left for even more extreme right wing nuts is just an obvious lie.
The empirically proven truth is though, that people like Wilders, LePen, Farage, Trump, Höcke etc. are successful because their inflammatory racist rhetoric gets echoed by stupid "centrists" that care more about fighting the left than the right.
People like you.
But I understand that it feels much better for you to blame lefty people that you don't like anyway.
..created by, come on, say it with me: the fucking VVD who a couple of hours ago "washed their hands of it."
It's an urban / rural divide the VVD exploited for years, privatizing everything so that your town has one bus that maybe runs once an hour, of course you're pissed. And probably are ok with blaming people with different color skin for it instead of the conservatives who did this to you.