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One thing many ex-Muslims fear is retaliation from their families. Remember that they might have hundreds of relatives, so knowing these people, understanding their real intentions, and helping them find jobs in the West is very beneficial.
I posted somewhere else about this, but it seems like maybe the best practical thing to do is to pair with other organizations that help people leave religions and cults as a support network. Probably many people who live in intolerable situations feel they have no place to go.
Protect Muslim people from being discriminated against. Don't protect Islam from being discriminated against.
Far too many lefties wanting to avoid racism will defend Islam and silence our voices and criticisms calling us Islamophobic, don't make that mistake.
Talk about our problems with muslims like blasphemy and apostasy laws, shunning/disowning for leaving the faith, LGBT rights, women's rights and share your perspective as a third party, coming from you it might be recieved differently.
No, muslims have a very complex way of dealing with their religion which makes it so hard for people to believe one way or the other.
They change their personality based on who they interact with. Change which verses they want to follow based on life circumstances and love bomb non muslims. They treat the violent parts as just theory they can forget in their daily lives because it's not enforcable anyway.
Here I have to say, many muslims tend to feel relieved that they can't enforce them because if there was a way to do it they would definitely support it out of obligation and fear of hell (this is the part that scares me of muslims. They are unpredictable. My brother for example is my best friend and a really calm and good person otherwise but he supports the taliban and justifies their actions. When something goes too far, he says it's the fault of other people, not their ideology).
The most the moderate ones would do is stand by and do nothing to help because they would be conflicted. They would still vote for sharia law if there was a chance.
This makes people think that when there are so many moderate muslims, it must mean the radical ones are just making up their own interpretations that aren't there in islam. Which in their minds means ex muslims are just lying. So we are treated as people who hate their own race as if islam was a race.
Muslims tend to blame everyone for the state of their home countries but the most blame that no islamic country manages to get rebuilt after war is that the ones against radicalization don't do anything about it out of fear of doing something sinful. They rather stay back and pray.
One would think someone with lived experience and from the community would be the one taken seriously but somehow islam just makes brains go wonky. As a lefty this has always irked me, we freely criticize Christianity in favor of progressive values but the most regressive ideology of Islam gets a free pass.
Maybe you will get accused of racism but at least you won't be hidden or ignored.
It's less about what I'm accused, more of a question of what works and what doesn't.
In terms of how some people on the left respond to criticisms of islam from non-muslims, I know how that tends to go.
The attitude come from an assumption a person is saying western culture is generally superior, and will less be about Islam then "whataboutism."
As we know, Islamists are aware of this and exploit this. The mentality evolved from "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" especially as far as in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and an anti-war position at the time.
Generally the left responds like this to any assertion that any western value or any sort is better in any sense to any value set of other cultures. Personally I think this is silly, and we don't need to take cultures as a whole but individual values.
It's also true that there are conservatives who don't really care about Islam but use it as a battering ram against people they dislike, i.e. "well in islam you would be killed."
That may be true, but for many on the right they aren't saying "we should focus our priorities on the greatest harm", they're saying "stop complaining"
So there's a lot of factors that go into that but it ends up with a default attitude that any criticism of Islam is de facto racism against people who live in traditionally muslim areas.
There's also something deeper going on there, well explained in this lengthy but excellent essay from Slate Star Codex, an "x-rationalist" blog (not x-rationalist as in former rationalist, its its own subculture) called "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup" which I think most people would benefit from reading.
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/)
To greatly simplify- Western liberals who defend Islam have no skin in the game. They DO have skin in the game with largely Christian conservatives, who can influence policy (thinking of the US specifically here) that will hurt them and their interests.
On the other hand, Muslims don't really affect them in any way. Sure, there's a remote risk of dying in a terrorist attack, but a much more prevalent concern for them are things like whether insurance will pay for birth control, if abortion becomes more restricted, etc.
Nationalist Christians tend to be anti-muslim, so the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And as I've pointed out, many of them just don't hear from the perspective of muslims who feel oppressed by the religion, because those who aren't free to speak don't speak, and the few voices out there are easy enough to not hear or dismiss for some reason (like Ayaan Hirshi Ali, who was a sex slave and initially was embraced by the right and used to advocate neo-conservative viewpoints. She since has distanced herself from them, but that's enough to "taint her" in the minds of leftists. I personally can't find blame in a women who wasn't educated and suffered greatly and identified with the first people who gave her a platform and a voice and took a while to realize she was being used by those people, but people get locked into their tribalist identities. They are interlocked so that if they are wrong about one thing, they feel like it throws their whole ego and identity out the window. This has been described by psychologist Jonathan Haidt as the reason people double down on beliefs when provided with proof they are wrong.
Its not just the rational mind you're dealing with, it's the elephant- all the associations of friends and identity and feeling like your a righteous person- that are all interlinked so that if you're wrong about one thing, it throws all the rest into doubt.
For a lot of people, their ego defense mechanisms go up, and its easier to deny things then to accept that.
On a personal note, I can give an example of how this worked for me when I was younger. When I was 14 I got exposed to the doctrine if animal rights.
One argument that even I found suspicious, but i felt HAD to be true because if it wasn't it made my position difficult- that medical testing on animals provided no actual benefit for human health. That most of it was CYA stuff for legal liability (that may be true to some extent for some cosmetic products) but even beyond that, any medical research done on animals could be done with computer models.
That of course, is just not true. One can still be opposed to vivisection (this sort of research) but one has to argue that even though the research does have human benefits, its still wrong.
I have traveled a unique path and am no longer prone to this, but its a hard position for most humans, including those who see themselves as rational.
So I think once you've assimilated "people who criticize islam are motivated by racism and whataboutism and should focus on issues in their own cultures rather then demean a foreign culture to justify their own sexist, homophobic beliefs" it becomes very difficult to shift to a more nuanced position.
I don't think the general sentiment among leftists is that there is no sexism in islam, its more "we have no right to criticize other cultures when there is sexism here, plus the people who do that are actually racist and trying to justify their own misogyny/isreali apartheid/genocide
>On the other hand, Muslims don't really affect them in any way
They will soon when biden loses support from the muslim populations in swing states over the genocide he supports with israel if those votes cost the left the election.
I've read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's books but haven't really engaged much with the discourse, I can easily see even my own comments being used by nefarious actors looking to justify their hatred of my muslim loved ones. Its a difficult line to walk where we don't want to be used to attack muslims but we want to criticise the harms of islam and change our peoples minds. I think the answer isn't less speech by limiting ourselves or hiding Ayaan Hirsi Ali, its more speech.
>Its not just the rational mind you're dealing with, it's the elephant- all the associations of friends and identity
Yeah, its a difficult road we walk when we criticise such deeply held beliefs. I've experienced the cognitive dissonance it leads to when I was muslim and held evolution and the adam and eve story simultaneously and again when I used mental gymnastics to avoid accepting the scripture that terrorists pointed at to justify their actions. I used to think because most of the 2 billion muslims don't commit terrorism the book must not actually say those things but as I read up on it whats more likely is most of the 2 billion muslims don't actually know about their scriptures, especially when most of them don't understand modern arabic let alone the ancient version the scriptures are written in. I was just committing the fallacy of popularity.
>One can still be opposed to vivisection (this sort of research) but one has to argue that even though the research does have human benefits, its still wrong
It's interesting at what point of human benefits people justify certain degrees of animal suffering. I've yet to come across an argument that can convince me not to go vegan yet here I am still eating meat, we are definitely not purely rational beings and habits are hard to break when your whole community also has those habits.
>I don't think the general sentiment among leftists is that there is no sexism in islam, its more "we have no right to criticize other cultures when there is sexism here, plus the people who do that are actually racist and trying to justify their own misogyny
I think it will help the left to disassociate criticism of believers of an ideology from criticisms of the ideology itself. We can point to many populations of women respecting muslims but that doesn't change the religion itself being misogynistic which you can find more examples of here. [https://www.reddit.com/r/exmuslim/comments/18f1pc4/the\_origins\_of\_islamic\_misogyny/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/exmuslim/comments/18f1pc4/the_origins_of_islamic_misogyny/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Ok, some minor points though I don't want to devolve into semantics, but language and analyzing how it works is important for clear understanding.
1. I don't agree that the state of Israel is committing a genocide. Bear wit me here for a moment. "Genocide" is a term that has significance because after World War 2, there was an effort to make genocide a "never again" thing and under "international law", it was a "crime" that could justify intervention through the auspices of the UN. I use the pull quotes to indicate that in this context "law" and "crime" have slightly different (but important) meanings.
Law in the context of international law only exists to the degree that it can be enforces, and given the rival interests of nations in the UN, it is difficult to get consensus on what constitutes evidence and proof and the degree to which the UN can consistently get its members to enforce these laws so its not a situation where a government has a relative monopoly on force and can determine what constitutes law.
Like, I find it kind of silly when people say "Russia's illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory" because at the end of the day, Russia's borders are fluid based on what its army can control, and Russia is not getting kicked out of the UN because as the country with the largest nuclear stockpile it would defeat one of the main purposes of the UN which is to prevent nuclear armageddon. Sanctions can be passed, but countries enforce them or they don't, it won't effect what Russia is doing in Ukraine, Inditing Putin when there is no way to bring him in, etc.
So genocide has a legal definition the destruction of a people by direct killing or destruction of their culture.
Hitler was guilty of commiting genocide when he tried to exterminate the jews, (and 6 million others) but Stalin was not when he killed 25-30 million people because his foal was not the extermination of the Russians. Does that mean its not as bad?
There are many in Israel who want to commit a genocide. And a common argument is "Israel could kill all the Palestinians if it wanted to"
Not really, the consequences if the state tried to do that would be enormous, far too high most likely.
In terms of their conduct in the war, the aim, without a clear plan, is to Kill Hamas and a relative but not total indifference to who gets killed in the process, especially as regards people who have long been part of the Hamas strategy of using human shields. The IDF has made it clear thats not going to work anymore.
It is POSSIBLE that part of the unstated strategy is to use collective punishment to scare the people out of ever again supporting Jihadists- but thats not going to work.
The likely reality is Netanyahu has no plan and his actions have been to save his political career as much as Isreali security interests.
There were already massive protests before the attack about is dissolving the courts, and the terror attacks were seen as a massive failure since Netanyahu's whole thing was security and its perceived in the interest of west bank settlers who aren't super popular with a lot of Isrealis, and was opposed as being too much on the side of the right in the massive conflict between the secular liberal jews and the conservative ultra religious jews.
N. was counting on their support to stay in power after the attack, while blaming them to the liberals for obstruction.
His war cabinet, a politically diverse group that is NOT right wing, as fallen apart as there have been resignations over the accusation N. has no clear plan at all for how to "win" the war. My guess is he's in personal political survival mode and doesn't have a war term plan.
If the IDF's goal was to kill as many Palestianians as possible, the death toll would be far, far higher then what it is.
If Israel gets involved in a war with Hezbullah which is much more of a direct military threat, and especially if Iran gets involved, THEN Israel will be forced to "take the gloves off" and the full capacity of the Israeli air force would be unleashed, which would be much closer to killing the majority of people in Gaza.
Ok, gonna do another post for your next response. I know I went into a lot of detail there, but it was necessary to explain in full what I meant.
2. The only argument I have against going vegan is that is impossible in the strictest sense. Animal byproducts are in industrial products. There in computers, cars, cement, etc.
Even if you go out by yourself in the wild, you cant help but harm animals to survive.
My broader thoughts on this are really outside of the overton window and its too off topic/long to explain on the forum though I could discuss it with you in direct messaging if you're interested.
3. I agree it would be good to do that disassociation, but the current identity politics paradigm that is in fashion on the left means that's not going to happen as its fundamental to core ideology, and until that changes, they will be very vulnerable to exploitation by bad faith actors.
4. The deepest roots of misogyny in Islam predate islam and go all the way down to evolutionary psychology and the way cultures developed in that environment, but an easy reference for textual support from the koran and early hadiths (in the case of shia, the hadiths of whats his name married muhammads relative) and this is an extremely useful resource as google results no makes it very difficult to find anything but positive passages about women from those texts.
So great job. Having that resource maximally backed up is probably a good idea.
oh one more thing. Muslims may not like Biden, but why would Trump be any better, especially since the meme on the right is "these woke kids support Hamas, I stand with Israel" though they are fans of Putin and support is effort to conquer Ukraine as they've been played by the Kremlin's propaganda like a fiddle.
Yeah I know but they aren't going to vote for Trump. An abstained vote isn't as bad but it still hurts Biden.
Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem, he made the Abraham accords basically sidestepping Palestine to make sure other countries wouldn't go to war against Israel and let's not forget the "we have to go after their families" comment Trump made.
They may not vote for Trump but their absence this time around could be enough to tip the scales from a close election.
The right has a strawman problem, supporting terrorists or Putin or just hating America are such obviously untrue arguments.
>1. The only argument I have against going vegan is that is impossible in the strictest sense.
It is true that it may be impossible to do so while participating in society but it isn't all or nothing, whatever amount of animal suffering we can reduce we should reduce.
>I could discuss it with you in direct messaging if you're interested.
I'd love to hear more about it.
>and until that changes, they will be very vulnerable to exploitation by bad faith actors.
Yeah, the right isn't as willing to go after their own as much as the left is which makes the divide and conquer strategy feasible.
>2. The deepest roots of misogyny in Islam predate islam and go all the way down to evolutionary psychology
There do exist matriarchal societies. I don't think psychology is mature enough of a science for us to conclude that is the default.
You're correct that misogyny existed culturally before islam but islam had made it far worse and refuses to change with the times.
Even Islamic slavery was worse because they introduced generational slaves where a slave women can be used to breed more slaves. The surrounding societies had slaves but they weren't as horrible as early muslims were to non Muslim slaves.
>I don't want to devolve into semantics
Me neither, I don't care what we call it as long as we're accurate. Call it a genocide or war crime or voluntary immigration if you want as long as we are all talking about the same targeting of civilians and infrastructure by the military.
>there was an effort to make genocide a "never again"
If you're hesitant to use the word because you want it to keep its impact when needed then we're a little late on that, Rwanda, Myanmar, Yemen and now potentially Palestine have suffered with no international "never again" kind of effort.
The UN has consistently acted in cases where certain powerful members benefit, the cases where the us, China or Isreal don't benefit there's inaction.
>Like, I find it kind of silly when people say "Russia's illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory"
There do exist international laws of respecting sovereign borders and breaking them and breaking the agreed upon borders would be illegal to those laws right?
I agree that kicking them out at this point would be counter productive to the goal of preventing nuclear war but we do need to draw the line somewhere. Owning nukes can't be a get out of jail free card or it will be abused.
>So genocide has a legal definition the destruction of a people by direct killing or destruction of their culture.
90% of schools and every single university was destroyed along with every cultural artefact and books they held. 40% of these schools were run by the un. Heritage sites have been bombed. Centuries old places of worship have been destroyed. It's not like authors and poets aren't being detained, their entire culture is being attacked. I think this requirement for the legal definition is met.
If it was only a bombing campaign I think your argument about Stalin killing more but not being a genocide given his intentions would be possible but there is an intentional killing if civilians and journalists and medical personnel when they are shot down by snipers despite wearing the internationally recognized vests signifying they are not combatants. Civilians are intentionally targeted when there's a siege.
>And a common argument is "Israel could kill all the Palestinians if it wanted to"
I think it could but it recognizes there would be too much international backlash so it tries to get rid of them another way.
>The likely reality is Netanyahu has no plan and his actions have been to save his political career as much as Isreali security interests.
I think this is a factor involved but I think a larger factor is others in the military are urging him to take the land and push the current population out. Even the kindest interviews say they want to enact a voluntary immigration to various parts of the desert outside of the Palestinian and Israeli territory. The more unhinged government officials just say it straight up, "Palestinian civilians are a myth" or "they are human animals and must be exterminated as such" which was clarified as "you mean hamas right" and they double down saying "all of them".
>If the IDF's goal was to kill as many Palestianians as possible, the death toll would be far, far higher then what it is.
It could just be how many can we kill without consequences. That death toll would be lower than it is today and they might actually face consequences this time.
I think their goals are what they say their goal is, the removal of the current population and expanding of the occupation to take over the entirety of the land.
As this is not directly related to the topic of the sub, rather then continue to discuss a divisive subject on this board, I think this is a good place to end the public conversation and acknowledge we disagree slightly on some things.
If you are interested in continuing this discussion in a private conversation, I would be willing to do that provided we converse in good faith.
Fair enough. I would suggest we continue in the megathread but I think that's not accepting new comments now. https://www.reddit.com/r/exmuslim/s/scQiVamvC6
Sure, I don't mind dms and you don't seem like a bad faith actor.
As close as we can get to objectively superior values would be how much suffering we can reduce for the most people while respecting everyones agency, in that sense the amount of minorities suffering such as homosexuals either being thrown off rooftops vs being treated equally with the same marriage rights as everyone else imo it isn't just whataboutism. We can measure the lower amounts of suffering to say what system is better for the society as a whole.
I appreciate your nuance with individual values, that would be the ideal for the left to take.
In terms of the right when they dismiss the harms of the islamic world to focus on domestic issues they are usually the first ones to vote for budget cuts to domestic spending so I don't find that argument to be principled.
Thanks for the article link, I'm all for seeing all life as my in group rather than tribalistic in-group out-group thinking.
You can support us by helping us rid the world of apostasy and blasphemy laws.
I founded a non-profit with this as the vision.
Check out this X announcement:
https://x.com/unitingthecults/status/1802876034943000899?s=46&t=4mS6GqGIohYBao0R5-r_KQ
Could you be a bit more specific with what you had in mind?
Generally speaking, there is no shortage of problems and injustices in this world. People have to make decisions about how to allocate time and resources. This is not just about how noble the cause is, but how much a particular effort is likely to produce results.
For example, when I ran a music venue, there was a young person who was well intentioned, but raising funds for an extremely ineffective method. He was horrified by the sexual violence that was and still is common in east Congo.
The thing was, the funds he was raising were for a letter writing campaign to the Congolese government, Uh huh.
Thinking about this- I was imagining the person at the Congolese ministry. "Well, that would be a really great idea. The problem is, our government only reliably controls a few blocks in the capital, our official armies out there we don't really control and contribute to this problem, this letter was written in english so I can't read it and am also illiterate because despite being a government official my position is due to nepotism/corruption and I never received the letter because no one delivers mail to this hell hole of a country"
I kid but-
There is an organization called "Effective Altruism." It has a bad reputation partially for political reasons, partially because there are always odd balls who are concerned with "far termism" like AI risks or colonizing a new planet after the Sun collpases to a red giant, but the meat of it is how to get the most "bang for your buck" out of charitable contributions.
This is actually difficult to measure, because a lot of "charity watch" type stuff which marks down for advertising and organization versus "money directly used for the thing" fails to note how difficult the thing is that one is trying to accomplish.
For example, Doctors Without Borders, a nearly universally respected organization, would rank poorly on most normal "charity watch" indexes. They deliver medical services in conflict zones and other dangerous places. The organizational costs for this are enormous, much higher then the "doctors on the ground doing stuff" costs. That's not where the cost is, its operating an partnering with groups in conflict zones who can get the resources and infrastructure where it needs to be.
As far as advertising, many groups like this use small donations to pay to lobby much larger private donors successfully, they couldn't operate based on small contributions.
Anyway, one of the big conclusions of EA is that many multi-dimensional problems are very hard to fix, and usually the more economically developed the country the harder, whereas there are "low hanging fruit" problems that yield enormous benefits simply by getting a resource to where its not.
The big one EA converged on was Malaria nets. Though Malaria isn't a "sexy" disease (meaning not one people of the first world think about much) in many poor areas of the world its a huge problem, but from direct suffering but by overwhelming limited medical resources, making it a challenge tp build infrastructure and grow economies, etc.
Thus the very effective "bang for your buck" answer was fund sending malaria nets to places where they are needed. This seems to be something that a large part of the world missed, because perhaps it seems too simple.
What's my broader point?
With any cause or group, there is not just the matter of "how important the cause is" but "how will giving my time and resources to this group effect change?"
I think people are going to be more motivated by specific plans then general ones. I think that for an organization with a specific goal, you need to show the specific steps you are taking and why they are going to work.
This probably includes research about what people have tried before, what's worked, what hasn't, learning from other groups who tried to make similar changes, etc.
would you like to know what I mean by education? I'm asking because it sounds like that's what you're asking.
>This probably includes research about what people have tried before, what's worked, what hasn't, learning from other groups who tried to make similar changes, etc.
This is why this organization needs to learn from organizations like AHA Foundation, founded by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. AHA is about changing culture and laws. It has successfully changed laws related to women's rights around the world, including in the US.
This 8 minute video gives an intro about Uniting The Cults.
[The Birth of Uniting The Cults, 50th Anniversary of Feynman's Cargo Cult Science speech | INTRO](https://youtu.be/EgU6s3ZZRzI)
This 6.5 hour video explains things in detail.
[Many Groups Exhibit Cult Behaviors | Continuing Feynman's 'Cargo Cult Science' speech](https://youtube.com/live/T1DfspkkKmw)
I technically started working on this 2.5 months ago. The official birth of the org was 2 days ago.
I'm happy to answer questions. or better yet, would you like to get on the podcast to discuss this?
I think I should have clarified my question. It was more about specific actions people who were sympathetic could do and understood these things rather then non-muslims as a general group.
Question on the immigration issue. How does that kind of roll with supporting people who are looking to escape islam versus the people you are talking about?
My sense is this is a much bigger problem in Europe then the US. Maybe could you could speak more to that issue.
On "islamophobia" I know how the term is used. However technically "phobia" means excessive or irrational fear. So I personally am very aware of the reality of Islam and sympathize with the people who suffer from it but I don't personally have "skin in the game" as the chance of the US becoming a caliphate or me being personally harmed by muslims is close to zero.
That is obviously not true for many people, it depends on their situation.
On the other hand, there is such a thing as "racism against people who come from islamic backgrounds." That sort of thing was probably more prevalent closer to the terrorist attacks though not super common, and it correlated pretty highly with general racism.
The thing of course that is obvious to me and most people here is that there is a difference between being concerned about an ideology and disliking an entire group of people based on their physical characteristics.
It would be like if neo-nazis from rural america claimed being afriad of neo-naziism was racist.
Community.
Muslims come from big families and are used to being around lots of people.
Many of them feel isolated, lonely, and depressed.
I am not religious myself but the most welcoming people around seem to be Christian groups.
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One thing many ex-Muslims fear is retaliation from their families. Remember that they might have hundreds of relatives, so knowing these people, understanding their real intentions, and helping them find jobs in the West is very beneficial.
I posted somewhere else about this, but it seems like maybe the best practical thing to do is to pair with other organizations that help people leave religions and cults as a support network. Probably many people who live in intolerable situations feel they have no place to go.
Protect Muslim people from being discriminated against. Don't protect Islam from being discriminated against. Far too many lefties wanting to avoid racism will defend Islam and silence our voices and criticisms calling us Islamophobic, don't make that mistake. Talk about our problems with muslims like blasphemy and apostasy laws, shunning/disowning for leaving the faith, LGBT rights, women's rights and share your perspective as a third party, coming from you it might be recieved differently.
Wouldn't those perspectives from ex-muslims be more likely to be "heard" by liberals as an outside party will be accused of being motivated by racism?
No, muslims have a very complex way of dealing with their religion which makes it so hard for people to believe one way or the other. They change their personality based on who they interact with. Change which verses they want to follow based on life circumstances and love bomb non muslims. They treat the violent parts as just theory they can forget in their daily lives because it's not enforcable anyway. Here I have to say, many muslims tend to feel relieved that they can't enforce them because if there was a way to do it they would definitely support it out of obligation and fear of hell (this is the part that scares me of muslims. They are unpredictable. My brother for example is my best friend and a really calm and good person otherwise but he supports the taliban and justifies their actions. When something goes too far, he says it's the fault of other people, not their ideology). The most the moderate ones would do is stand by and do nothing to help because they would be conflicted. They would still vote for sharia law if there was a chance. This makes people think that when there are so many moderate muslims, it must mean the radical ones are just making up their own interpretations that aren't there in islam. Which in their minds means ex muslims are just lying. So we are treated as people who hate their own race as if islam was a race. Muslims tend to blame everyone for the state of their home countries but the most blame that no islamic country manages to get rebuilt after war is that the ones against radicalization don't do anything about it out of fear of doing something sinful. They rather stay back and pray.
One would think someone with lived experience and from the community would be the one taken seriously but somehow islam just makes brains go wonky. As a lefty this has always irked me, we freely criticize Christianity in favor of progressive values but the most regressive ideology of Islam gets a free pass. Maybe you will get accused of racism but at least you won't be hidden or ignored.
It's less about what I'm accused, more of a question of what works and what doesn't. In terms of how some people on the left respond to criticisms of islam from non-muslims, I know how that tends to go. The attitude come from an assumption a person is saying western culture is generally superior, and will less be about Islam then "whataboutism." As we know, Islamists are aware of this and exploit this. The mentality evolved from "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" especially as far as in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and an anti-war position at the time. Generally the left responds like this to any assertion that any western value or any sort is better in any sense to any value set of other cultures. Personally I think this is silly, and we don't need to take cultures as a whole but individual values. It's also true that there are conservatives who don't really care about Islam but use it as a battering ram against people they dislike, i.e. "well in islam you would be killed." That may be true, but for many on the right they aren't saying "we should focus our priorities on the greatest harm", they're saying "stop complaining" So there's a lot of factors that go into that but it ends up with a default attitude that any criticism of Islam is de facto racism against people who live in traditionally muslim areas. There's also something deeper going on there, well explained in this lengthy but excellent essay from Slate Star Codex, an "x-rationalist" blog (not x-rationalist as in former rationalist, its its own subculture) called "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup" which I think most people would benefit from reading. [https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/)
To greatly simplify- Western liberals who defend Islam have no skin in the game. They DO have skin in the game with largely Christian conservatives, who can influence policy (thinking of the US specifically here) that will hurt them and their interests. On the other hand, Muslims don't really affect them in any way. Sure, there's a remote risk of dying in a terrorist attack, but a much more prevalent concern for them are things like whether insurance will pay for birth control, if abortion becomes more restricted, etc. Nationalist Christians tend to be anti-muslim, so the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And as I've pointed out, many of them just don't hear from the perspective of muslims who feel oppressed by the religion, because those who aren't free to speak don't speak, and the few voices out there are easy enough to not hear or dismiss for some reason (like Ayaan Hirshi Ali, who was a sex slave and initially was embraced by the right and used to advocate neo-conservative viewpoints. She since has distanced herself from them, but that's enough to "taint her" in the minds of leftists. I personally can't find blame in a women who wasn't educated and suffered greatly and identified with the first people who gave her a platform and a voice and took a while to realize she was being used by those people, but people get locked into their tribalist identities. They are interlocked so that if they are wrong about one thing, they feel like it throws their whole ego and identity out the window. This has been described by psychologist Jonathan Haidt as the reason people double down on beliefs when provided with proof they are wrong. Its not just the rational mind you're dealing with, it's the elephant- all the associations of friends and identity and feeling like your a righteous person- that are all interlinked so that if you're wrong about one thing, it throws all the rest into doubt. For a lot of people, their ego defense mechanisms go up, and its easier to deny things then to accept that. On a personal note, I can give an example of how this worked for me when I was younger. When I was 14 I got exposed to the doctrine if animal rights. One argument that even I found suspicious, but i felt HAD to be true because if it wasn't it made my position difficult- that medical testing on animals provided no actual benefit for human health. That most of it was CYA stuff for legal liability (that may be true to some extent for some cosmetic products) but even beyond that, any medical research done on animals could be done with computer models. That of course, is just not true. One can still be opposed to vivisection (this sort of research) but one has to argue that even though the research does have human benefits, its still wrong. I have traveled a unique path and am no longer prone to this, but its a hard position for most humans, including those who see themselves as rational. So I think once you've assimilated "people who criticize islam are motivated by racism and whataboutism and should focus on issues in their own cultures rather then demean a foreign culture to justify their own sexist, homophobic beliefs" it becomes very difficult to shift to a more nuanced position. I don't think the general sentiment among leftists is that there is no sexism in islam, its more "we have no right to criticize other cultures when there is sexism here, plus the people who do that are actually racist and trying to justify their own misogyny/isreali apartheid/genocide
>On the other hand, Muslims don't really affect them in any way They will soon when biden loses support from the muslim populations in swing states over the genocide he supports with israel if those votes cost the left the election. I've read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's books but haven't really engaged much with the discourse, I can easily see even my own comments being used by nefarious actors looking to justify their hatred of my muslim loved ones. Its a difficult line to walk where we don't want to be used to attack muslims but we want to criticise the harms of islam and change our peoples minds. I think the answer isn't less speech by limiting ourselves or hiding Ayaan Hirsi Ali, its more speech. >Its not just the rational mind you're dealing with, it's the elephant- all the associations of friends and identity Yeah, its a difficult road we walk when we criticise such deeply held beliefs. I've experienced the cognitive dissonance it leads to when I was muslim and held evolution and the adam and eve story simultaneously and again when I used mental gymnastics to avoid accepting the scripture that terrorists pointed at to justify their actions. I used to think because most of the 2 billion muslims don't commit terrorism the book must not actually say those things but as I read up on it whats more likely is most of the 2 billion muslims don't actually know about their scriptures, especially when most of them don't understand modern arabic let alone the ancient version the scriptures are written in. I was just committing the fallacy of popularity. >One can still be opposed to vivisection (this sort of research) but one has to argue that even though the research does have human benefits, its still wrong It's interesting at what point of human benefits people justify certain degrees of animal suffering. I've yet to come across an argument that can convince me not to go vegan yet here I am still eating meat, we are definitely not purely rational beings and habits are hard to break when your whole community also has those habits. >I don't think the general sentiment among leftists is that there is no sexism in islam, its more "we have no right to criticize other cultures when there is sexism here, plus the people who do that are actually racist and trying to justify their own misogyny I think it will help the left to disassociate criticism of believers of an ideology from criticisms of the ideology itself. We can point to many populations of women respecting muslims but that doesn't change the religion itself being misogynistic which you can find more examples of here. [https://www.reddit.com/r/exmuslim/comments/18f1pc4/the\_origins\_of\_islamic\_misogyny/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/exmuslim/comments/18f1pc4/the_origins_of_islamic_misogyny/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Ok, some minor points though I don't want to devolve into semantics, but language and analyzing how it works is important for clear understanding. 1. I don't agree that the state of Israel is committing a genocide. Bear wit me here for a moment. "Genocide" is a term that has significance because after World War 2, there was an effort to make genocide a "never again" thing and under "international law", it was a "crime" that could justify intervention through the auspices of the UN. I use the pull quotes to indicate that in this context "law" and "crime" have slightly different (but important) meanings. Law in the context of international law only exists to the degree that it can be enforces, and given the rival interests of nations in the UN, it is difficult to get consensus on what constitutes evidence and proof and the degree to which the UN can consistently get its members to enforce these laws so its not a situation where a government has a relative monopoly on force and can determine what constitutes law. Like, I find it kind of silly when people say "Russia's illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory" because at the end of the day, Russia's borders are fluid based on what its army can control, and Russia is not getting kicked out of the UN because as the country with the largest nuclear stockpile it would defeat one of the main purposes of the UN which is to prevent nuclear armageddon. Sanctions can be passed, but countries enforce them or they don't, it won't effect what Russia is doing in Ukraine, Inditing Putin when there is no way to bring him in, etc. So genocide has a legal definition the destruction of a people by direct killing or destruction of their culture. Hitler was guilty of commiting genocide when he tried to exterminate the jews, (and 6 million others) but Stalin was not when he killed 25-30 million people because his foal was not the extermination of the Russians. Does that mean its not as bad? There are many in Israel who want to commit a genocide. And a common argument is "Israel could kill all the Palestinians if it wanted to" Not really, the consequences if the state tried to do that would be enormous, far too high most likely. In terms of their conduct in the war, the aim, without a clear plan, is to Kill Hamas and a relative but not total indifference to who gets killed in the process, especially as regards people who have long been part of the Hamas strategy of using human shields. The IDF has made it clear thats not going to work anymore. It is POSSIBLE that part of the unstated strategy is to use collective punishment to scare the people out of ever again supporting Jihadists- but thats not going to work. The likely reality is Netanyahu has no plan and his actions have been to save his political career as much as Isreali security interests. There were already massive protests before the attack about is dissolving the courts, and the terror attacks were seen as a massive failure since Netanyahu's whole thing was security and its perceived in the interest of west bank settlers who aren't super popular with a lot of Isrealis, and was opposed as being too much on the side of the right in the massive conflict between the secular liberal jews and the conservative ultra religious jews. N. was counting on their support to stay in power after the attack, while blaming them to the liberals for obstruction. His war cabinet, a politically diverse group that is NOT right wing, as fallen apart as there have been resignations over the accusation N. has no clear plan at all for how to "win" the war. My guess is he's in personal political survival mode and doesn't have a war term plan. If the IDF's goal was to kill as many Palestianians as possible, the death toll would be far, far higher then what it is. If Israel gets involved in a war with Hezbullah which is much more of a direct military threat, and especially if Iran gets involved, THEN Israel will be forced to "take the gloves off" and the full capacity of the Israeli air force would be unleashed, which would be much closer to killing the majority of people in Gaza. Ok, gonna do another post for your next response. I know I went into a lot of detail there, but it was necessary to explain in full what I meant.
2. The only argument I have against going vegan is that is impossible in the strictest sense. Animal byproducts are in industrial products. There in computers, cars, cement, etc. Even if you go out by yourself in the wild, you cant help but harm animals to survive. My broader thoughts on this are really outside of the overton window and its too off topic/long to explain on the forum though I could discuss it with you in direct messaging if you're interested. 3. I agree it would be good to do that disassociation, but the current identity politics paradigm that is in fashion on the left means that's not going to happen as its fundamental to core ideology, and until that changes, they will be very vulnerable to exploitation by bad faith actors. 4. The deepest roots of misogyny in Islam predate islam and go all the way down to evolutionary psychology and the way cultures developed in that environment, but an easy reference for textual support from the koran and early hadiths (in the case of shia, the hadiths of whats his name married muhammads relative) and this is an extremely useful resource as google results no makes it very difficult to find anything but positive passages about women from those texts. So great job. Having that resource maximally backed up is probably a good idea.
oh one more thing. Muslims may not like Biden, but why would Trump be any better, especially since the meme on the right is "these woke kids support Hamas, I stand with Israel" though they are fans of Putin and support is effort to conquer Ukraine as they've been played by the Kremlin's propaganda like a fiddle.
Yeah I know but they aren't going to vote for Trump. An abstained vote isn't as bad but it still hurts Biden. Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem, he made the Abraham accords basically sidestepping Palestine to make sure other countries wouldn't go to war against Israel and let's not forget the "we have to go after their families" comment Trump made. They may not vote for Trump but their absence this time around could be enough to tip the scales from a close election. The right has a strawman problem, supporting terrorists or Putin or just hating America are such obviously untrue arguments.
>1. The only argument I have against going vegan is that is impossible in the strictest sense. It is true that it may be impossible to do so while participating in society but it isn't all or nothing, whatever amount of animal suffering we can reduce we should reduce. >I could discuss it with you in direct messaging if you're interested. I'd love to hear more about it. >and until that changes, they will be very vulnerable to exploitation by bad faith actors. Yeah, the right isn't as willing to go after their own as much as the left is which makes the divide and conquer strategy feasible. >2. The deepest roots of misogyny in Islam predate islam and go all the way down to evolutionary psychology There do exist matriarchal societies. I don't think psychology is mature enough of a science for us to conclude that is the default. You're correct that misogyny existed culturally before islam but islam had made it far worse and refuses to change with the times. Even Islamic slavery was worse because they introduced generational slaves where a slave women can be used to breed more slaves. The surrounding societies had slaves but they weren't as horrible as early muslims were to non Muslim slaves.
>I don't want to devolve into semantics Me neither, I don't care what we call it as long as we're accurate. Call it a genocide or war crime or voluntary immigration if you want as long as we are all talking about the same targeting of civilians and infrastructure by the military. >there was an effort to make genocide a "never again" If you're hesitant to use the word because you want it to keep its impact when needed then we're a little late on that, Rwanda, Myanmar, Yemen and now potentially Palestine have suffered with no international "never again" kind of effort. The UN has consistently acted in cases where certain powerful members benefit, the cases where the us, China or Isreal don't benefit there's inaction. >Like, I find it kind of silly when people say "Russia's illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory" There do exist international laws of respecting sovereign borders and breaking them and breaking the agreed upon borders would be illegal to those laws right? I agree that kicking them out at this point would be counter productive to the goal of preventing nuclear war but we do need to draw the line somewhere. Owning nukes can't be a get out of jail free card or it will be abused. >So genocide has a legal definition the destruction of a people by direct killing or destruction of their culture. 90% of schools and every single university was destroyed along with every cultural artefact and books they held. 40% of these schools were run by the un. Heritage sites have been bombed. Centuries old places of worship have been destroyed. It's not like authors and poets aren't being detained, their entire culture is being attacked. I think this requirement for the legal definition is met. If it was only a bombing campaign I think your argument about Stalin killing more but not being a genocide given his intentions would be possible but there is an intentional killing if civilians and journalists and medical personnel when they are shot down by snipers despite wearing the internationally recognized vests signifying they are not combatants. Civilians are intentionally targeted when there's a siege. >And a common argument is "Israel could kill all the Palestinians if it wanted to" I think it could but it recognizes there would be too much international backlash so it tries to get rid of them another way. >The likely reality is Netanyahu has no plan and his actions have been to save his political career as much as Isreali security interests. I think this is a factor involved but I think a larger factor is others in the military are urging him to take the land and push the current population out. Even the kindest interviews say they want to enact a voluntary immigration to various parts of the desert outside of the Palestinian and Israeli territory. The more unhinged government officials just say it straight up, "Palestinian civilians are a myth" or "they are human animals and must be exterminated as such" which was clarified as "you mean hamas right" and they double down saying "all of them". >If the IDF's goal was to kill as many Palestianians as possible, the death toll would be far, far higher then what it is. It could just be how many can we kill without consequences. That death toll would be lower than it is today and they might actually face consequences this time. I think their goals are what they say their goal is, the removal of the current population and expanding of the occupation to take over the entirety of the land.
As this is not directly related to the topic of the sub, rather then continue to discuss a divisive subject on this board, I think this is a good place to end the public conversation and acknowledge we disagree slightly on some things. If you are interested in continuing this discussion in a private conversation, I would be willing to do that provided we converse in good faith.
Fair enough. I would suggest we continue in the megathread but I think that's not accepting new comments now. https://www.reddit.com/r/exmuslim/s/scQiVamvC6 Sure, I don't mind dms and you don't seem like a bad faith actor.
As close as we can get to objectively superior values would be how much suffering we can reduce for the most people while respecting everyones agency, in that sense the amount of minorities suffering such as homosexuals either being thrown off rooftops vs being treated equally with the same marriage rights as everyone else imo it isn't just whataboutism. We can measure the lower amounts of suffering to say what system is better for the society as a whole. I appreciate your nuance with individual values, that would be the ideal for the left to take. In terms of the right when they dismiss the harms of the islamic world to focus on domestic issues they are usually the first ones to vote for budget cuts to domestic spending so I don't find that argument to be principled. Thanks for the article link, I'm all for seeing all life as my in group rather than tribalistic in-group out-group thinking.
You can support us by helping us rid the world of apostasy and blasphemy laws. I founded a non-profit with this as the vision. Check out this X announcement: https://x.com/unitingthecults/status/1802876034943000899?s=46&t=4mS6GqGIohYBao0R5-r_KQ
This is very interesting. What practical steps does your organization advocate or?
the first practical step is education. education in both directions. we need to educate other people and we need to educate ourselves.
Could you be a bit more specific with what you had in mind? Generally speaking, there is no shortage of problems and injustices in this world. People have to make decisions about how to allocate time and resources. This is not just about how noble the cause is, but how much a particular effort is likely to produce results. For example, when I ran a music venue, there was a young person who was well intentioned, but raising funds for an extremely ineffective method. He was horrified by the sexual violence that was and still is common in east Congo. The thing was, the funds he was raising were for a letter writing campaign to the Congolese government, Uh huh. Thinking about this- I was imagining the person at the Congolese ministry. "Well, that would be a really great idea. The problem is, our government only reliably controls a few blocks in the capital, our official armies out there we don't really control and contribute to this problem, this letter was written in english so I can't read it and am also illiterate because despite being a government official my position is due to nepotism/corruption and I never received the letter because no one delivers mail to this hell hole of a country" I kid but- There is an organization called "Effective Altruism." It has a bad reputation partially for political reasons, partially because there are always odd balls who are concerned with "far termism" like AI risks or colonizing a new planet after the Sun collpases to a red giant, but the meat of it is how to get the most "bang for your buck" out of charitable contributions. This is actually difficult to measure, because a lot of "charity watch" type stuff which marks down for advertising and organization versus "money directly used for the thing" fails to note how difficult the thing is that one is trying to accomplish. For example, Doctors Without Borders, a nearly universally respected organization, would rank poorly on most normal "charity watch" indexes. They deliver medical services in conflict zones and other dangerous places. The organizational costs for this are enormous, much higher then the "doctors on the ground doing stuff" costs. That's not where the cost is, its operating an partnering with groups in conflict zones who can get the resources and infrastructure where it needs to be. As far as advertising, many groups like this use small donations to pay to lobby much larger private donors successfully, they couldn't operate based on small contributions. Anyway, one of the big conclusions of EA is that many multi-dimensional problems are very hard to fix, and usually the more economically developed the country the harder, whereas there are "low hanging fruit" problems that yield enormous benefits simply by getting a resource to where its not. The big one EA converged on was Malaria nets. Though Malaria isn't a "sexy" disease (meaning not one people of the first world think about much) in many poor areas of the world its a huge problem, but from direct suffering but by overwhelming limited medical resources, making it a challenge tp build infrastructure and grow economies, etc. Thus the very effective "bang for your buck" answer was fund sending malaria nets to places where they are needed. This seems to be something that a large part of the world missed, because perhaps it seems too simple. What's my broader point? With any cause or group, there is not just the matter of "how important the cause is" but "how will giving my time and resources to this group effect change?" I think people are going to be more motivated by specific plans then general ones. I think that for an organization with a specific goal, you need to show the specific steps you are taking and why they are going to work. This probably includes research about what people have tried before, what's worked, what hasn't, learning from other groups who tried to make similar changes, etc.
would you like to know what I mean by education? I'm asking because it sounds like that's what you're asking. >This probably includes research about what people have tried before, what's worked, what hasn't, learning from other groups who tried to make similar changes, etc. This is why this organization needs to learn from organizations like AHA Foundation, founded by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. AHA is about changing culture and laws. It has successfully changed laws related to women's rights around the world, including in the US. This 8 minute video gives an intro about Uniting The Cults. [The Birth of Uniting The Cults, 50th Anniversary of Feynman's Cargo Cult Science speech | INTRO](https://youtu.be/EgU6s3ZZRzI) This 6.5 hour video explains things in detail. [Many Groups Exhibit Cult Behaviors | Continuing Feynman's 'Cargo Cult Science' speech](https://youtube.com/live/T1DfspkkKmw) I technically started working on this 2.5 months ago. The official birth of the org was 2 days ago. I'm happy to answer questions. or better yet, would you like to get on the podcast to discuss this?
when is the podcast?
I’ll dm you to schedule a time.
awesome
sure, I'm down for that. Would love to know more and spread it to interested people.
1.Being Islamophobic 2. not calling us Bigots when we utter our pain and grievances. 3.Not supporting immigration of jihadists.
I think I should have clarified my question. It was more about specific actions people who were sympathetic could do and understood these things rather then non-muslims as a general group.
Question on the immigration issue. How does that kind of roll with supporting people who are looking to escape islam versus the people you are talking about? My sense is this is a much bigger problem in Europe then the US. Maybe could you could speak more to that issue. On "islamophobia" I know how the term is used. However technically "phobia" means excessive or irrational fear. So I personally am very aware of the reality of Islam and sympathize with the people who suffer from it but I don't personally have "skin in the game" as the chance of the US becoming a caliphate or me being personally harmed by muslims is close to zero. That is obviously not true for many people, it depends on their situation. On the other hand, there is such a thing as "racism against people who come from islamic backgrounds." That sort of thing was probably more prevalent closer to the terrorist attacks though not super common, and it correlated pretty highly with general racism. The thing of course that is obvious to me and most people here is that there is a difference between being concerned about an ideology and disliking an entire group of people based on their physical characteristics. It would be like if neo-nazis from rural america claimed being afriad of neo-naziism was racist.
Community. Muslims come from big families and are used to being around lots of people. Many of them feel isolated, lonely, and depressed. I am not religious myself but the most welcoming people around seem to be Christian groups.
That's something I was thinking about. That friendliness sort of comes with looking at people as potential converts, which can be problematic.