It's a predictable strategy...

when someone asks you a critical question about your belief system that you can't answer, it's time to bring out the ol' bag of logical fallacies.

This quote from Sam Harris is GOLD: “There is no such thing as “Islamophobia.” This is a term of propaganda designed to protect Islam from the forces of secularism by conflating all criticism of it with racism and xenophobia. And it is doing its job, because people like you have been taken in by it.”

Which makes so much sense to me. Islam is a belief system, conflating criticism of it with something like "homophobia" or "xenophobia" is stupid. People who hate Muslims because of race or ethnic or foreign reasons don't do it on the basis of their belief system, so it's not really Islamophobia. It's a ridiculous term. I can imagine right-wingers here coming up with the term "Christophobia". The whole war on Christmas, wailings of persecution of Christians here in the US rings all too familiarly with many Muslims crying wolf on ANY relevant criticism of Islam. It gets dull.

It was hidden, but not hate filled...

Feel free to point out what was hate filled about the hidden post (I guess I can't repost what I said). Either way, you've now accused me of hating Muslims with nothing to back it up.

Obviously, I disagree with the jury results, but that's not proof of it being hate filled. To me, it's proof that specific jury can't differentiate harsh and relevant criticism of religion from hatred. Religion still gets preferential treatment. As if when I criticize conservative ideology harshly (and which is done all the time on here), I "hate" everyone that holds to it. I don't hate people, I don't hate bigots etc., I disagree with them. Hatred of people is useless to me. I hate certain ideologies and ideas.

People often don't have lots of control over their religion (or even ideologies to a degree), being influenced by things like where they were born, who their parents are, etc. So there is no point to hate someone simply for holding disgusting beliefs, it's not like it was all their choice, they've been indoctrinated into it (almost every time with religion, and also with ideologies), and I view them as victims of themselves and their parents/society/whatever than hated enemies, and also as potential allies if their minds can be changed.

Sharia law is heavily associated with Iran...

and the whole point was that the protesters didn't want it spreading to Tunisia. Iranian mullahs have been caricatured before, often in cartoons, not exactly something new. Similar to caricaturing nuns and other religious figures (which FEMEN has also caricatured before).

I have no idea how it is a caricature of Arab men, or where FEMEN said they were protesting Arab men? You seem to be reading into it what you want to.

Wow, so I hate Muslims because you suck at arguing your points?

Why don't you point out what makes it "pretty clear" I hate Muslims?

Or why don't you answer the fact that I just pointed out your ridiculous "black face" analogy was quite stupid?

No, it's a caricature of Iranian mullahs....

and no, it's not equivalent to black face, on several levels.

Uhh, how?

It's a caricature of Iranian mullahs, where Sharia law is in place. And Iran isn't even Arabic.

I didn't say she was... nt

Who defines what "hate speech" is...

Maybe the mullahs should?

What people consider "hate speech" is completey subjective. What you SHOULD be asking is what is the criticism of, and is it relevant. Here, the criticism is of Islam's misogynistic beliefs. OK, that's not really hateful IMHO. How it's being done, is it relevant? Yes, in context, of course it's relevant.

If you don't like the tactics FEMEN uses, that's fine, but it's not hateful. It's just a way to ridicule a misogynistic belief system. Just because the belief system happens to be a religion doesn't give it special privilege.

No, what a horrible red herring...

I'm all for relevant criticism of Islam (and all religions), like the beliefs Islam itself states it has.

Yes, I understand that many right-wingers are paranoid and attack Islam in ways completely irrelevant (and quite ironic, given many are Christian, and oh boy Christianity is a can of worms as well), but I think people on this site have the intellectual capacity to not link relevant criticisms of Islam with right-wing Islamophobia.

No, there are religions that aren't misogynistic...

and plenty of feminists identify with misogynistic religions, I'm just pointing out that this is intellectually dishonest and engagin in cognitive dissonance.