@ cobrat -
I am well aware of the religious bigotry that led to the holocaust and the anti semitism that still permeates the west, I am well aware the religious leaders in the US helped sink any idea of the US taking in any number of Jewish refugees, between the US Catholic Church and the evangelical Christians, politically it was impossible to even think of such a thing (and it might have saved the lives of millions of Jews).
I am also aware of the KKK, and I am also aware that politically the government basically did nothing about either of them, in part because of the political power they held (HL mencken called that particular branch of the Democratic party, based in the south and the farm belt, “The KKK Branch of the Democratic Party”…). I am not saying that western civ has always been this font of total enlightenment, nor that western civ doesn’t have it stains of religious intolerance, much of the history of the middle ages into fairly recent times was full of it.
However, what you leave out is the epic battles to try and erase these things and more importantly, that in the west the mechanisms are there to change it. The biggest was the separation between church and state, that broke the back of religions total control of things. It took centuries, part of it happened because secular rulers were tired of the Catholic Church’s hegonomy (and taxes), part of it was the enlightenment and the idea that religion and God are not the basis of political power. It isn’t perfect, religion had far too much power in the US for far too many years, and to this day the GOP’s powerbase is reliant on fundamentalist Christians who aren’t all that much different than the radical muslims we are talking about, but the difference is that because of the rule of law that separates religion out, there are mechanisms, legal mechanisms, to stop the religious bigots from enforcing their will on others.
France has a long history of anti semitism, but they also have a long history of those fighting the repression of the church and the government. When the Drefyus affair happened, the country was split in two, the intellectuals and the socialists and others, who otherwise would find Dreyfus an unattractive person (Barbara Tuchman described him as the type of person that if he could do it, would probably have prosecuted himself), and while it fanned vicious anti semitism (in part fanned by the French Catholic Church), it also fanned literally fighting in the streets and such by those who recognized it for what it was.
And my whole point about the people who perpetuated this is that their motivation is not isolated from the beliefs of mainstream muslims in many cases. Islam is unique, it is a very socially and politically entangled belief system (some of which, quite honestly, is a heck of a lot more advanced than Christianity; the social justice aspects of Islam make Christ’s teachings pale, and put it this way, in Islam you couldn’t have someone like Joel Osteen preaching that the rich are blessed and Jesus wants you to be a billionaire…). The problem is that among probably the majority of muslims in muslim majority areas, they don’t see Islam as a faith separate from government, they see it as a one stop system to live and that includes the law, and that is the problem. The west, even with the less than stellar things, created a legal system and a government, whether by a constitution as in the US or by evolution, as in much of the rest of europe, that was above the religion, and as a result it created a mechanism to try and right the wrongs that religion can create. It is kind of ironic, a Catholic monk wrote a treatise in the 1950s that said that the greatest thing that happened to the Catholic church was the separation of Church and State in the US constitution, that it allowed Catholics, a despised minority, to flourish here…and he was silenced by the Church, threatened with excommunication, because the Vatican of the time still believed that separation of church and state was a threat to religion (they changed their stance at the time of Vatican II)…
My point being that even if they condemn the violence, the fundamental point that is not present in the Islamic world is that religion is not above being lampooned, ridiculed, etc, and when governments are established in Muslim majority countries, they tangle the religion with the government, and there is no mechanism to separate it. When the Muslim brotherhood took over Egypt, one of the first things they wrote into the new constitution was making Blasphemy or anti islamic statements a major crime, and the same is true in a lot of other Muslim countries. Is it their right to do this? Sure, but the fundamental point is that among many Muslims that while they might denounce those who committed violence in this case, they also fundamentally are sympathetic to why they did it, and that is the problem. If you say something against my faith is offensive, it must be punished, it doesn’t matter whether it is the law or someone committing violence, the mindset is the same, and that is the problem. Among other things,that Blasphemy doesn’t just apply to non Muslims, it applies to fellow Muslims as well who disagree, so if you are a shiite in Egypt or Tunisia, you are up the creek…and given that in many of these countries what is blasphemy is often decided by fudnamentalist clerics, you in effect have the radicals deciding things there, too.
For the record, I also am not saying that Muslim immigrants are a threat, that they want to impose Sharia on others and so forth, that is just as ridiculous. I have heard interviews with Muslims in France, and while they were not happy with what the paper put out, and would speak out against it, most interviewed also said that the paper had the right to publish such things. Many of the muslims who immigrate, especially to the US, are doing so for economic reasons, but also because of religious persecution from other muslims from where they live. I have friends who are Sufi, and they face discrimination from both Shia and Sunni Muslims in their home countries, and Sunnis and Shias hate each other. They came here to get away from that, why would they want to impose the same crap here?
What I am saying is that the liberal “this is because Muslims are second class citizens”, while having grains of truth, is also a major simplification of a complicated issue with a complicated religion.
Put it this way, when I see fatwas issued against the people in ISIL, when I see prices put on the heads, not of author’s who write something considered blasphemous, but against those who publicly we are told are not Muslim, not acting in the way Islam teaches, when instead of hearing “of course we are against this, this isn’t Islam” and I see action, then I’ll feel differently. Several years ago, a cartoon was published in a Danish newspaper that infuriated Muslims around the world, and millions turned out to protest and were so incensed, rioted and many ended up dying; where is the same passion against people like the ones who did this, Al Qaeda, ISIL and the like, given that these “non Muslims” are hurting the faith a heck of a lot more than a cartoon or a book.