Atheists Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris face Islamophobia backlash

[MellowDem]

11. 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.