Not all equal

Most Muslims are not Arabs. But because we in the west, particularly in America, equate Islam with Arabia, any anti-Islam talk gets shouted down and labeled racist and Islamophobic. Ben Affleck losing his shit on Bill Maher's show recently is a perfect example of this.

Where Islamic Sharia holds sway, you can count on it to be a horrible place to live, particularly if you are a woman or a non-Muslim. This is simply a fact and we should not ignore it in the name of religious tolerance.

How does one tolerate what they don't understand? Apologists for Islam insist on presenting it as just the same as other religions; that the central message is love and kindness, and that the barbarism is contextual as in other ancient religious texts. This, friends, is far from the truth.

The central message of Islam is not in line with the modern, secular values of human rights and civil liberties. Unlike the violent passages of the Old Testament, their equivalent in the Quran are typically open-ended, and therefore not limited to or bound by any historical context.

All this aside, the fact remains that it is overwhelmingly Muslims, not Jews or Buddhists, who are engaged in acts of violence across the globe by using religious justification. Christians, for all their faults and backwardness, are simply light-years ahead when it comes to how they view the world.

Many Christians may be homophobic, they may be bigoted, they may be anti-science and these are all things we should strive to overcome; but the Muslim parallel is all of those things plus acting on them violently. The losing battle Christians are having with modernity is fought on social media, and in businesses refusing to serve gay customers; a far cry from stoning a woman to death for being raped.

The problem is not, as I've said many times, the people - it is the ideology. It is simply too easy to justify barbaric behavior within an Islamic context. Holding a sign that says "God hates fags" is much, much better than torturing and killing anyone who openly admits to being gay. Don't believe me? Try it, try it anywhere from Tunisia to Turkey or Indonesia to Pakistan.

It is no surprise that you hear Christians talking about love all the time when discussing religion. With Muslims you almost never hear about love. Instead, you hear about obedience, respect, honor, jihad (of all varieties), submission - and the absurd level of defensiveness when anyone questions any aspect of the Islamic ideology.

It is also a lie that there are many forms of 'violent extremism' and that we should not single out Islam as the only religion which lends itself to violence. Muslim on Muslim violence, not to mention that of Muslim on Unbelievers, is piled high with bodies every single day. And then we are told by the apologists to consider the example of Timothy McVeigh and the like.

There simply is no comparison. The violence committed every day all around the world in the name of - or as mandated by - Islam simply dwarfs the other examples of extremist violence.

But for me, the worst part of Islam is the treatment of women. The Islamic doctrine has convinced hundreds of millions of Muslim women that they are inferior, that their fathers/brothers/husbands should speak for them, that they should never consider their own sexual desires. This all comes from how Muhammad treated women in general and his wives in particular. Is there misogyny in other religions? Undoubtedly, but it is not practiced to nearly the same insidious level as it is within Islam.

We need to wake up to these facts, and to stop pretending that all religions are equal. The view that they are (equal) is promoted by well-meaning idealists, liberal apologists, or Muslims lying through their teeth; and the people who want Islam and Sharia to utterly dominate the world are happy to let them continue doing so.

Islam is not a religion of peace, and it never will be. The peaceful Muslims of the world have tempered the doctrine of Islam with their own secular morality. The most peaceful Muslims are the ones who don't practice Islam in any real sense, who don't fully understand it, and who impose their own morality from the outside.