Believe me, I'm abundantly aware that criticizing Islam right now is messy territory. I've never been a member of the Islamic faith and I've lost friends and jobs over my open criticism of the faith as it stands right now.
Maybe it's time to finally make a few things crystal clear.
No reasonable critic of the faith is saying that all Muslims are terrorists or that most Muslims are ready to kill you for drawing Muhammad. Notice I used the word "reasonable." There are bigots in the world and we shouldn't ignore that.
That said, there are a lot of people in the world who are in complete denial that there's a problem. There is a problem. There are a lot of problems.
No, most Muslims aren't going to shoot you or cut your head off for making fun of Muhammad. Very few would. That's not the problem. The problem is the wide support and apology for those who would which spreads even beyond Muslim communities. 78% of British Muslims said that the Danish cartoonists who drew Muhammad should have been legally punished. That's not Afghanistan, Sudan, or Saudi Arabia. That's England! An Austrian woman was fined and faced jail time for saying that Muhammad liked his girls young in reference to his child bride. After the Charlie Hebdo shooting, Glenn Greenwald immediately attacked, not the shooters, but the victims, in saying that the cartoons in Charlie Hebdo bolster violence against the innocent. Bill Donahue, the head of the Catholic League of all things, said of Charlie's editor, "It's a shame that he didn't see the role he played in his tragic death." Just about every major news network went out if their ways to get people on the air to defame Charlie Hebdo and tacitly defend the shooters.
There are eight countries in the world in which the state will put you to death for apostasy. There are eight countries wherein a former Muslim would be put to death for saying, "I'm a Methodist now." These are laws with overwhelming approval through most of the Middle East and South Asia. People like Sarah Haider, who I've met and admire, who founded Ex-Muslims of North America is constantly under threat. I've attended talks by people like Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz who can't leave their homes without a security detail and Nawaz isn't even an apostate. Nawaz is still a practicing Muslim; but, I guess he's not a real Muslim because of the stated goals of Quilliam.
Female genital mutilation is a massive problem in Muslim communities. As always, liars and charlatans like Reza Aslan come out to call "Islamophobia" and paint it falsely as a "North African" problem. Real journalists actually bothered to call the organizations that conducted the research. Aslan's claim is based on a lack of data on FGM in Arab majority nations. It turns out that the researchers were actually forbidden to do the research in those countries. Surely enough, in Northern Africa, FGM is still almost exclusively done in Muslim communities, even in Christian majority countries. But, people listen to Aslan because he tows the line of political correctness and tells people comfortable lies rather than uncomfortable truths. Linda Sarsour, the former organizer of The Women's March said that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a victim of FGM, "Didn't deserve her vagina." Tens of thousands of lemmings still marched under her direction and leadership in the name of feminism.
FGM is a case where we can actually say that, worldwide, is actually a problem with more than half of Muslims. And that's just FGM. Saudi Arabia just started to allow women to drive. Swaths of the Muslim world require hair coverings at least. Many require women to cover up nearly entirely. The Qu'ran actually does say that a woman's testimony is worth less than a man's; so, we're not making it up when we say that a female rape victim actually needs to produce several male witnesses in some Muslim theocracies or she could face legal punishment for fornication or, if she's married, the death penalty for adultery. Whatever rape numbers we get out of Muslim communities are grossly deflated.
No religion has had a great track record of women's rights...really human liberty. But, the average Christian doesn't see his neighbor mowing the lawn on a Sunday morning and think, "Working on Sunday. I should kill him." I've said before that and if I were around during the 1930s, the Catholic Church would be my biggest enemy. Even living my life as I am now, I've said on numerous occasions that, if there is a Hell, Mother Theresa is there. But, right now, at this time in our history, Islam is a real problem.
The problem, to try to reiterate again, isn't that the majority of Muslims are ready to go join ISIL. Most of them won't. Most of them are disgusted by ISIL, Boko Haram, Al-shabaab, and so on. The percentage of Muslims who will pull a bunch of Coptic Christians off of a train in Egypt and gun them down is low. The percentage of Muslims who would actually engage in something like the Garissa College attack is low. But 1% of two billion people is still twenty million people. It's still enough that hearing about a Draw Muhammad Competition and predicting that somebody will try to shoot it up isn't surprising.
But, again again, the people who are committing the violence aren't the problem. It's the people who will go out of their way to make excuses for them. It's the knowledge that the violent radicals have that even liberal, white, secular Americans will come out on their side out of fear of being called "Islamophobic."
For all of the blood spilled, there aren't enough hands to place it on which are fully deserving.
