Maybe I have wrongly formulated (putting political correctness instead of not taking offense), but here what I want/was trying to say:
Free mind made a statement that Muslims have some sort of mentality. It would have clearly been more accurately to say 'many' or 'most' Muslims have some sort of mentality. Seems to me, that people(even here, open minded as they are) are very touchy, very sensitive with reference to generalizations(about Muslims or other types of communities), when I think we have to give a little bit more space to people willing to give offence in such cases. I'm sure that in many cases, people are reading statements as being offensive to some sort of communities, when in fact this was not the intent of the poster.
This should be better. If you’ve got a resting bitch face then nobody should blame you for giving a lot of saccharine smiles. No, not that. If the contention really were about phraseology, Free Mind could easily have jumped the hurdle by starting off the OP with a warning that what follows are his opinions based on his subjective experience. Indeed, isn’t that what you and I do to neutralise any perceived charges of ill will and prejudice when we are being polemical on Muslim related phenomena? Isn’t this the customary disclaimer of online forums?
It’s the generalisability of the said mentality in practice (“All Muslims share the same feeling and ideology. It is not acceptable to say or believe in something else”) which I doubt and deprecate. I view what Free Mind says as a misapplication of what I suspect to exist in theoretical Islam, its promoting as well as justifying texts. The material facts of the case at hand, of the Syrian refugee whom Free Mind accuses of fraudulence and then strides to generalise to include “Muslims”, are really limited in practice.
Such a view is beyond objective falsification which is why I took Free Mind to task over another fine point of not all Muslims ending up in the *highest* level of paradise. I sought nuance and offered a practical solution to the particularity of this case (a case which is so individual in nature that it would’ve been a personal attack if the individual concerned were a member of the forum). Free Mind showed interactional illiteracy when he came back to thank those who agreed with his point of view; this would normally be my cue to shuffle off any discussion. There are other cracks in Free Mind’s reasoning (such as him seeming to think that those Syrians who participated in “the revolution” are somehow more worthy to be granted Refugee Status in Britain) which he would have stood to benefit by their closer scrutiny, as this is the purpose of any discussion, but Free Mind appears to have come here to list his convictions and whoever disagrees with them risks becoming a pious Muslim.
However, I hear what you say about unwittingly and unintentionally giving offence, which is a welcome diversion from the cul-de-sac into which Free Mind was, probably for ongoing personal reasons, driving this discussion.
If so, then I have recently adopted the laziness of reading the Daily Mail Online every day (including the DON’T MISS bar where everyone’s derriere is pert, and their tums taut or had better be in the process of becoming so soon). This paper has a habit of publishing stories that involve the criminalities, shenanigans as well as peccadillos of Muslims.
Day after day I see something negative about Muslim people on its website. These stories aren’t all or mostly untrue or even mostly inaccurate. If you dig deeper into any particular story (especially after the Leveson Inquiry and its unprecedented recommendation to constitute a press regulatory body of sort in the UK) you are likely to find them to be loosely true. This tabloid is the second biggest-selling in the UK, and it regularly editorialises news and claims its unabashed coverage of such Muslim stories is to fight the scourge of political correctness, offending Muslims or giving offence in general.
It’s the habitual negative coverage, day in day out, which falsely enlarges and over-represents the particular criminalities of Muslim people. Nobody’s denying that Muslims kill, steal, lie, rape, cheat and defraud the taxpayer. But not all of them at the same time or in this particular order which is the impression DM’s coverage liberally gives on a daily basis.
Muslim Benefit Cheat Caught, reads a headline. Council BANS Christmas Decorations Not to Offend Muslims, would read another. Muslim Family in SEVEN Bedroom House On Taxpayers, reads a third. Plans to Build MEGA-MOSQUE in Newham. Underage Girls Passed Around As Piece of MEAT by Asian Muslim Gang Paedophile Ring.
These mock headlines have no doubt more than a kernel of truth behind them. They're not, in other words, a tissue of syndicated lies. But this faultfinding focus on a particular segment of people in society, with a repeated reference to their being Muslim, will inevitably result in demonising and otherising them as well as putting them on the defensive when it comes to their ownership of the country. (The readership has in its non-PC fold a multitude of useful idiots — and a thoroughly misinformed man who mistakenly assaulted a paediatrician because he thought it had something to do with paedophilia — and other emotional types not all too easily given to introspection and critical analysis, as so they appear to me if their comments underneath such articles is anything to go by, that puts these negative stories into a perspective, away from the usual moral panics.)
There's truth to black people like me being over-represented in the justice system in the UK but a big reason for this over-representation is a police tactic called "Stop and Search" which, as you probably know, is applied six times more in your case if you are black or Asian in comparison to your white counterpart. The Macpherson report has convincingly silenced the battery of those who doubt that the UK police is institutionally racist. Further, judges tend to give you custodial sentences if you are black and so, the wheel goes round. All that does not, not for a minute, take away the fact of black people committing crimes or that, just like Romanian travellers and others, they do not have a habit of street socialising, say, in weed-infested Brixton; a habit which others might find threatening or interpret as suspicious loitering outside their homes which makes them report it to the police. But blame magnifying their criminal follies to the point of causing moral panic wholly on them? And do that lock, stock and barrel?
Also, it is no accident that ethnic minorities are statistically over represented in mental health institutions (and even foster care) because of situational difficulties which the current, holistic, socio-psychobiological understanding of the causes of mental unhealth retraces back to. (Not to exclude or underestimate the causative link being claimed to exist between cannabis and psychotic breakdowns, as for as people like Peter Hitchens are concerned, which is the putative health-based argument for not legalising ganja in the UK.)
Race campaigners such as Lee Jasper have been making these points, including the negativism of racial reportage in the media which perpetuates myths about black criminality, since 1980s; I would've given a small fortune to see the look on his face when Jason Rilley published his book
Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder For Blacks To Succeed). Situtional social difficulties are a significant factor in the case of asylum seekers being over represented in the mental health system.
Would I have gone far if I argue that my and possibly other Ex Muslims' post Islam depression and mental health problems have social situtional causes away from our life style choices? I doubt that.
I know little about social psychology but I have read
Propaganda by Edward Bernays. That is to say, it is the repetition of half truths and individualistic Muslim cases that couldn't be representative of the generality of their population that is at fault and causing social damage to real people out there, whose terrible sin is to have been born into a Muslim family that brought them up Muslim.
It is for this sin of being that others generalise against these Muslims with unctuous relish; pillory and attack them on purpose in their dearly held personal centre (their humanity) in the name of truth telling; and regularly imply character as well as behavioural kinship between them and their most notorious co-religionists.
I think highly enough of the people on this forum to hope and trust they can walk the tightrope between rightfully caricaturing Islam and wrongfully demonising Muslims. Equally, I do get the restrictive psychological pressure of trying not to offend through one's style of discourse, probably because when I write, I try to write like an angel while thinking like the Devil.
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Fully updated.
Topic: Who is better?