The hypocrisy of Islam's apologists

 
Dutch politician Geert Wilders is facing charges of “inciting hatred against the Dutch Moroccan minority.” According to The Guardian:

“Freedom of expression is not absolute, it is paired with obligations and responsibilities,” said the lead prosecutor, Wouter Bos, “the responsibility not to set groups of people against each other.”

“Racism and hatred of foreigners constitute a direct violation of the basis of freedom, democracy and the rule of law,” he added.

State prosecutors say Wilders asked a crowd of supporters in March 2014 whether they wanted more or fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands, triggering the chant “Fewer! Fewer! Fewer!”, to which a smiling Wilders responded: “We’ll take care of that.”

“Freedom of expression is not absolute, it is paired with obligations and responsibilities,” said the lead prosecutor, Wouter Bos, “the responsibility not to set groups of people against each other.”

“Racism and hatred of foreigners constitute a direct violation of the basis of freedom, democracy and the rule of law,” he added.

State prosecutors say Wilders asked a crowd of supporters in March 2014 whether they wanted more or fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands, triggering the chant “Fewer! Fewer! Fewer!”, to which a smiling Wilders responded: “We’ll take care of that.”

The politician, whose decade-old Freedom party holds a commanding lead in Dutch opinion polls but has never been in power, denies any wrongdoing. “Nobody will silence me. Not about Moroccans either,” he tweeted last week. “No terrorist threats … no judge. Nobody.”

The case against Wilders in 2011 centred on his call for a “towel-head” tax and equating the Qur’an with Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He said “Muslim criminals” should be stripped of their Dutch nationality and deported…

Although Wilders’ remarks are offensive to many, he insists he has no grudge against immigrants who accept Dutch laws and customs and has never advocated violence.

Wilders has never called for violence, but he has “incited hatred” against certain groups, specifically Moroccan criminals.
I say, let’s not take his comments literally; let’s subject them to interpretation. If we can interpret the violence of the Qur’an away, then why we can’t we do so with Wilder’s offending comments?
Nabeel Qureshi explains, in an unusually honest column in USA Today, that the Qur’an, and the Hadith, do, indeed, call for violence against non-believers. He writes:

Yet as I began to investigate the Quran and the traditions of Muhammad’s life for myself in college, I found to my genuine surprise that the pages of Islamic history are filled with violence. How could I reconcile this with what I had always been taught about Islam?…

Naturally, I agree that interacting with ISIL recruiters is a bad idea, but I believe what the recruiters themselves say sheds the most insight on the radicalization process. ISIL’s primary recruiting technique is not social or financial but theological. With frequent references to the highest sources of authority in Islam, the Quran and hadith (the collection of the sayings of the prophet Muhammad), ISIL enjoins upon Muslims their duty to fight against the enemies of Islam and to emigrate to the Islamic State once it has been established…

The Quran itself reveals a trajectory of jihad reflected in the almost 23 years of Muhammad’s prophetic career. As I demonstrate carefully in my book, Answering Jihad: A Better Way Forward, starting with peaceful teachings and proclamations of monotheism, Muhammad’s message featured violence with increasing intensity, culminating in surah 9, chronologically the last major chapter of the Quran, and its most expansively violent teaching. Throughout history, Muslim theologians have understood and taught this progression, that the message of the Quran culminates in its ninth chapter…

Surah 9 is a command to disavow all treaties with polytheists and to subjugate Jews and Christians (9.29) so that Islam may “prevail over all religions” (9.33). It is fair to wonder whether any non-Muslims in the world are immune from being attacked, subdued or assimilated under this command. Muslims must fight, according to this final chapter of the Quran, and if they do not, then their faith is called into question and they are counted among the hypocrites (9.44-45). If they do fight, they are promised one of two rewards, either spoils of war or heaven through martyrdom. Allah has made a bargain with the mujahid who obeys: Kill or be killed in battle, and paradise awaits (9.111).

Muslim thought leaders agree that the Quran promotes such violence. Maajid Nawaz, co-founder of the Quilliam Foundation in the United Kingdom, has said, “We Muslims must admit there are challenging Koranic passages that require reinterpretation today. … Only by rejecting vacuous literalism are we able to condemn, in principle, ISIS-style slavery, beheading, lashing, amputation & other medieval practices forever (all of which are in the Quran). … Reformers either win, and get religion-neutral politics, or lose, and get ISIL-style theocracy.” In other words, Muslims must depart from the literal reading of the Quran in order to create a jihad-free Islamic world.

It would be nice if all Muslims left the literal meaning of their sacred texts behind, and adopted peaceful interpretations. This would put them one step closer to their Abrahamic cousins, Jews and Christians. I fear, however, that this would not be enough. Neither Judaism, nor Christianity, even in their raw forms, promote violence to the extent that raw Islam does. the Torah calls for all-out war against peoples that no longer even exist. It calls for conquest of a small sliver of land in the Middle East, not conquest of the whole world.
Since there are “challenging Koranic passages that require reinterpretation,” I would suggest a simpler solution: Let Muslims convert to Buddhism. Many of their ancestors were Buddhists anyway – and they were forced into converting to Islam. This should be reversed. As far as I know, there’s nothing in Buddhist sacred texts that call for jihad, taxation of non-Buddhists, amputations, beheadings, slavery or world-conquest. Authentic Buddhism is an exceedingly wholesome philosophy.
Why is Islam, and religion in general, given a pass – even by atheists? Why is it legal to discriminate against an employee who chooses to sport the Confederate battle flag, but it’s not legal to discriminate against an employee who sports a yarmulke?  If the answer is that the latter considers his ideology to be sacred, and God-given, while the former is naught but personal conviction, then how do we (as a secular society) justify favoring one over the other?
I’ve written about this previously, but here I’d like to approach this matter from a different angle.
We can surmise that religion is part and parcel of one’s ethnic identity. Therefore, discriminating on the basis of religion is almost the same as discriminating on the basis of ethnic/racial background. Personally, I don’t think it should be illegal to discriminate on the basis of either, if you’re a private organization. While there might be a moral argument against treating people poorly based on something that’s out of their control, excluding certain types of people from one’s business or neighborhood is often a matter of safety; it’s irrelevant whether the excluded individuals are at fault or not. We don’t allow wild beasts to roam our streets, even though we don’t blame the beasts personally.
Is one’s religion out of his control? I’m beginning to think that, for most people, it is. It’s easy for flexible-minded people to assume that, since they can change their attitude with relative ease, so can everybody else. But I don’t think this is the case. After several decades of observing human behavior, I’m now convinced that most people lack the ability to break away from ideologies that were inculcated into them from an early age. From a practical point of view, the religious status of the masses is almost as immutable as their race. This is especially true of Muslims, because Islam tends to be pounded into the heads of children far more vigorously than most other religions.
I suspect that Muslim children are frequently, and vividly, told of the horrific punishments that await them should they leave the fold, and of the amazing rewards that will be theirs if they’re faithful. I suspect that these carrots and sticks are calculated to impress young people at their most visceral level. If you’re Muslim, and you have thoughts on this, here’s your chance to comment and correct me if I’m wrong.
On a similar note, I’d like to share some of a newsletter I got from Avaaz:

After women were attacked on New Year’s Eve in Germany, a flood of racism and xenophobia spread. Refugee men responded by handing out flowers to women on the streets as a show of respect. To return the gesture and show solidarity and welcome, a hundred female Avaaz members went out to hand flowers back to refugees in Cologne, the site of the attacks. Their video went viral!

“Refugee men handed out flowers to women as a sign of peace. As Avaaz members we wanted to reciprocate this courageous gesture to show that we counter hate with humanity.”
– Maresa, Avaaz member

Achh, that stuff just lifts your heart doesn’t it?

No, it doesn’t “lift my heart.” It makes me sick. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if some of the same migrants who attacked women on New Years were also handing out flowers. It’s just another attempt to get into those women’s pants.
But even if those flower-migrants were sincere, if the rapefugees are only a small minority of migrants, then wouldn’t it be more respectful of native women to rein in the rapists and thugs, and form patrols to actually protect native women? If I were a woman, I’d much rather be protected from assault than given flowers. Or are they supposed to use those flowers to hit would-be rapists?
The Avaaz letter is insulting in the way it describes the New Years attacks. It fails to mention that it was migrants who were responsible for most of the attacks. It fails to mention that the attacks were on a massive scale, and coordinated. It fails to mention that the attacks have been ongoing for a long time, and continue to this day. And it fails to mention that these attacks are being perpetrated EVERYWHERE these migrants set foot, not just Cologne, and not just Germany. But hey, a few migrants gave flowers to native women – so it’s all okay, right?