After all, we could never infringe on anyone's freedom of religion! It says so in the Constitution!
It's a good job that I'm not American, nor do I think that the US Constitution is some sort of infallible guide for perfect human behaviour.
I can think of plenty of religions that should be infringed upon with a vengeance. However, Islam as a whole seems like far too broad a category for me to even think about persecuting the entire group.
Are you sure? I still don't know why I should deal with religious motivated terrorism that comes hand in hand with islam expansion in Europe ... yeah yeah I know, give it few more (hundred) years so they can sort themselves up, but I feel sorry for those murdered in the process.
You shouldn't deal with
any terrorism in Europe, religiously related or not.
How about we go after the terrorists, instead of the people who happen to go to the same church/mosque/bingo hall as the terrorists?
Unfortunately, one cannot pigeonhole over a billion people into a neat description that fits all.
That's entirely my point. Thank you.
The only thing you can say about a billion people is that they're all people.
The video that RC45 posted earlier is actually worth watching, and it does put some of the problems with Islam into sharp relief. We must be careful not to read too much into statistics that support this or that point of view, but it is increasingly hard to ignore the vast number of Muslims who, while not violent jihadists or likely to pose a physical threat to anyone directly, do support what we (in the 'West') would consider extreme views, or who either sympathize with, actively support or fail to condone acts of violence and human rights abuses, or who are not willing to recognize the right of others to hold different views.
I'd like to see some backing for this "vast number of Muslims".
The extremists are Wahhabis and Salafis, which make up a tiny proportion of Islam in general. Wiki says ~50 million people, out of a worldwide population of ~1.6 billion. Not all of those are militants. For example, actual numbers for members of ISIS are between 50,000 and 250,000, depending on whether you believe independent estimates or ISIS's own claims.
These are not massive numbers, either in absolute terms or as a proportion of Islam.
There is also a big difference depending on which country you're talking about. Ironically, it is secular values adopted in countries like ours, such as the recognition of human rights, religious and personal freedoms, democracy etc. that best provides for the peaceful practice of Islam, as evinced by the fact that the vast majority of UK (and Australian) Muslims could rightly be described as peaceful, non-fundamentalist etc... but this cannot be said for a lot of other countries, and there are hundreds of millions of Muslims across the globe who hold extremist views and reject wholesale the secular values that allow peaceful Islam to flourish.
I want to debate this, but I'm not sure that it's even a valid point. Show me your hundreds of millions of extremists, then we can talk.
This is a huge and multi-faceted problem that cannot be addressed by only focusing on the promotion (and protection) of peaceful Muslims, but also requires that religious fundamentalism and extremist views are challenged as well.
Of course, and that's done by challenging fundamentalism and extremism directly. One does not attack get rid of a diseased branch by cutting down the entire tree, that's merely justifying the extremists fears.
I find the idea that the solution is to go after Islam disturbing. The solution is to go after the Islamist groups who are committing crimes, which is what we're already doing. Because they're committing crimes. There's no need for further persecution of a group of people whose only crime was to be of the same religion as a bunch of criminals.
