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1. Embed this notice
   chris (chris@s.the-brannons.com)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 23:44:44 JST chris

   • Aral Balkan

   @aral I loved this: https://ar.al/notes/islam-is-privilege/.

   It needs to be screamed from the rooftops.

   Islam is not a race. Islam is an ideology that can be (and is) adopted as dogma by anyone regardless of age, sex, or race.

   What’s ironic is how Western liberals have jumped on the same bandwagon of false conflation as conservatives. I (white American) have on at least one occasion needed to explain to white American friends that Islam is not a race. That there are majority white countries, Bosnia, Albania, where Islam is the national religion. I had to explain to the same idiot that the Qur’an doesn’t say “kill all the white people”, because the idea of white people wasn’t even a thing in the 7th century. And I’ve actually read it.

   Western liberals make the same mistake as the racists who attack and harass Sikhs, Hindus, whatever, because they “look Muslim”.

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 23:44:25 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Sandra

     @Sandra @chris But, just so we’re clear, we’re not equating me putting a price on your head and calling for my followers to murder you with someone insulting someone’s imaginary friend in a drawing, right? The former is incitement to hatred and violence. The latter is offensive. You have the right to offend people without being subjected to physical violence or losing your life. I’m assuming we’re all on the same page on that but, still, bears repeating.

   • Embed this notice
     Sandra (sandra@idiomdrottning.org)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 23:44:34 JST Sandra

     in reply to

     • Aral Balkan
     @chris
     
     You already know I'm against the death penalty.
     
     The fatwās proclaiming death on these caricaturists is wrong. Those fatwās are speech, and an obvious example of how some speech is wrong.
     
     I want a very strong protection for freedom of speech and that includes having very few exceptions, and being very clear about what those exceptions are. I am not onboard with death penalty fatwās nor with the type of Volksverhetzung that often takes the form of these caricatures that the white ingroup produces in order to attempt to bind and subjugate the brown outgroup.
     
     Matthew 7:3. "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" The white conservatives are making hay as the open and just society dies.
     
     @aral
   • Embed this notice
     chris (chris@s.the-brannons.com)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 23:44:36 JST chris

     in reply to

     • Aral Balkan
     • Sandra
     @Sandra @aral Trump's Muslim ban,
     Paludan, and Harris et al wanting to nuke the Middle East: these things
     are clearly and obviously racist.
     Drawing a caricature, that one's a lot more nuanced. If someone spray
     painted it on a mosque, that's a hate crime. If they published it
     in a paper: that's unkind, maybe it's even unacceptable. I can
     agree with that. But it doesn't warrant death. It shouldn't be against the
     law. We've fought hard to rid ourselves of blasphemy laws.
     Where do you draw the line? Because clearly there are lines to be drawn here.
     
     I'm the guy who calls the Christian god an abuser. If I could draw,
     I'd love to draw some caricatures of Christianity, because that well runs deep
     and I can imagine some really creative ones.
   • Embed this notice
     Sandra (sandra@idiomdrottning.org)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 23:44:41 JST Sandra

     in reply to

     • Aral Balkan
     Not on board with your perspective here at all, @chris, because even though what you're saying is literally and technically correct (probably better known as the worst kind of correct), the counterpoint is that in de facto practice anti-muslim sentiment is driven by racists for racist reasons. It's, in many racist's view, a "brown people religion".
     
     So when pluralists decry the Jyllands-Posten caricatures or the Paludan muṣḥaf burnings or the Trump travel ban or the Dawkins or Harris showing fondness for the village vicar but wanting to nuke the Middle-East as racist, that's not particularly far-fetched. I'm, for once, completely onboard with the pluralists as they make that condemnnation.
     
     It was such a huge get when it was revealed that Jyllands-Posten had, two years earlier, refused to publish caricatures of Christianity. And Paludan has his program where he literally wants everyone that has a parent born more than one country away from Denmark deported—probably better known as ethnic cleansing—is not the guy you wanna turn to for a nuanced take on various strands of Islamic scholarship.
     
     @aral
   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Sunday, 20-Aug-2023 00:30:34 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Sandra

     @Sandra @chris Yes, well, fuck the Christofascists (and any fascists, really), but, unfortunately, either you make causing offense a crime or you don’t. And, believe me, Erdoğan just can’t wait for it to be crime. (It’s already a crime in Turkey. If you offend Erdoğan, you go to prison. There’s a reason I no longer visit the land I was born in.)

   • Embed this notice
     Sandra (sandra@idiomdrottning.org)'s status on Sunday, 20-Aug-2023 00:30:36 JST Sandra

     in reply to

     • Aral Balkan
     @aral
     
     Good that we're both condemning speech acts that are calls to literal violence. 👍🏻
     
     (And our condemnation is of course 900000000000 times stronger against actually executed violence.)
     
     The problem is that the racist crew often attach their persecutions and crusades and ethnic cleansing attempts to insults and caricatures so that any reaction to the racism looks super petty and thin-skinned. So that they can say "OMG you can't even say 'It's OK to be white' for these lib█████". A reverse Trojan horse; the poison razorblade hidden in the flaming poop bag.
     
     This is why the lulz approach is so dangerous, this discourse-killing turkey curse: Any protest against the racism comes across as "why can't these sensitive snowflakes just take a joke?"
     
     Jylland-Posten aren't just goofin' around with someone's imaginary friend—a 2004 (that's one year before the caricatures) report from the European Network Against Racism showed how JP has contributed to the rise of the racist European far right.
     
     https://web.archive.org/web/20060325023310/http://www.enar-eu.org/en/national/Denmark2004_enOK.pdf
     
     @chris
   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Thursday, 24-Aug-2023 02:01:54 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Sandra
     • blake shaw 🇵🇸

     @rml Hey Blake, thanks for explaining Islam to an ex-Muslim, I really appreciate it. We need White folks™ to explain things to us because we’re usually rather dim, you see, and our lived experiences under oppressive systems are, of course, immaterial next to the musings of Western folks who Know™.

     (Also, you are conflating respecting the human rights of trans people with obeying the dictates of dogma.)

     Please educate yourself – Islam is privilege: https://ar.al/notes/islam-is-privilege/

     @Sandra @chris

   • Embed this notice
     blake shaw 🇵🇸 (rml@functional.cafe)'s status on Thursday, 24-Aug-2023 02:01:57 JST blake shaw 🇵🇸

     in reply to

     • Aral Balkan
     • Sandra

     @aral @Sandra @chris You don't depict Mohammad for the same reason that you don't dead name trans people. Because violating such a simple request is hate.

     Directing your readers' attention towards wahabbists that form a marginal extreme of Islam (and came to prominence through the buttressing of colonialists) is precisely what Edward Said described as the primary mechanism of Orientalism