Richard Dawkins is not an Islamophobe (Salon.com)
Excerpt follows. Full article is here.
An attack on the renowned atheist as anti-Muslim is really designed to squelch honest conversation about religion
By Jeffrey Tayler
No doubt, Nathan Lean, the editor in chief of an Islam-positive online entity called Aslan Media, fired off his recent denunciation of Richard Dawkins’ alleged “Twitter rampage” about the paucity of Muslims among Nobel Prize laureates, and heaved a sigh of satisfaction. Mission accomplished! Godless biologist slapped down, “Islamophobia” denounced!
Lean would do well to stiffen up, however. In tapping out a risible parody of a reasoned critique, he unwittingly both beclowns himself and lends credence to the very scientist and arguments he seeks to discredit. His piece is full of wrongheaded thinking and blundering jabs at Dawkins for pointing out uncomfortable truths about the state of science, or, rather, the lack of it, in Muslim countries. Lean purports to “expose” the “ugly underbelly of (Dawkins’) rational atheistic disguise,” but has authored a tract consisting almost wholly of politically correct shibboleths and befuddled assertions that insult his readers’ intelligence and aim to squelch honest debate about Islam and its role in the world today. If one believes in free speech, one cannot let what he wrote go unchallenged.
...
What Lean is doing here is deleterious to free speech: he is trying to equate criticism of a religion (whose followers, in this case, mostly happen to be nonwhite) with racism. This sophistry cannot be allowed to stand. “Islamophobia” is nothing more than a quack pseudo-diagnosis suggesting pathological prejudice against, and fear of, a supposedly neutral subject, Islam, in the way agoraphobic folk cringe at open places or claustrophobes dread an elevator. Based on the erroneous premise that those who criticize Islam are somehow ill, the term, along with its adjective “Islamophobic,” should be banished from our lexicon as pernicious to rational thinking. People, regardless of race or creed, deserve equal rights and respect; religions, which are essentially hallowed ideologies, merit no a priori respect, but, rather, gimlet-eyed scrutiny, the same scrutiny one would apply to, say, communism, conservatism or liberalism. No one has a right to wield religion as a shield – or as a sword.
...
For Dawkins, says Lean, “everything great about the West is the result of secularism and everything miserable about the rest is the fault of religion.” This is Lean’s reductionism, not Dawkins’, but, I grant, he’s not far off the mark. The Industrial and scientific revolutions, modern medicine, political pluralism, freedom of speech and even freedom of religion (re both, see the U.S. Constitution, First Amendment), equal rights, and all sorts of movements aiming to ameliorate humankind’s lot came about in the West after it smashed the shackles of religion, and those governing in its name, imposed on us for centuries. We should not shy away from declaring this truth loudly and forcefully, and from defending it whenever and wherever it is necessary to do so.
Emphases added by me.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Mainly because (a) even when confronted with direct evidence about what a person said, they still insist that isn't what that person actually meant*, and (b) I don't care what narrow-minded anti-atheist bigots and their defenders have to say. They've made it overwhelmingly clear that the strawman version of Dawkins they've created in their own minds is the only one they're able and willing to address.
*Seriously, there's a person over there who still insists that Christopher Hitchens supported waterboarding even after he made international news by voluntarily experiencing it himself and no amount of direct quotes or links to numerous news articles will convince her otherwise. Remember, this is Hitchens we're talking about, and the man was never one to mince words; he stated unequivocally that it's torture and the U.S. shouldn't have been doing it. Apparently, direct quotes from the man himself don't count as evidence of what he very clearly said, though. 
on the intertubes of him unequivocally repudiating waterboarding after he experienced it, so his words can't be parsed to claim, "Well, what he really meant was...." That isn't good enough evidence, either, apparently. 
posed with any idea that even shades on disagreement with the status quo. It's a pitiful shame. It is beyond me how anyone can so consistently deny and even lie about the tiniest proven facts as some of those in the religion forum. They even try to mind read and tell you what you really mean and one of the most virulent disruptors is on the mir-team. When the facts are in you just spit in the wind if you deny it and it's a disruptive waste of time. Don't post there as it's impossible to get reasonable discussion. What a waste of human mind it is.
And I apologize to any on the religion forum who really do try to create reasonable discourse on subjects that are acceptable to their forum and are able to succeed in doing so. There are many, but I won't see those posts since I trashed that forum due to disruptors gone wild.
As for this OP and Dawkins... how did I already know that?
Good luck skepticscott and thanks for the post.
I get the sense that they still lurk here on the off-chance they'll be able to click "Alert" on posts they don't like. However, as most of us here have seen recently, it's perfectly okay for someone to call all atheists "arseholes" over in Religion and not only do believers not alert on that kind of thing, the person who posted it was simply given a time-out by the hosts and then allowed back in after deleting the aforementioned post. (A later post in a related group showed that no only did he think he hadn't said anything wrong in any his of numerous posts which wound up hidden, he was misrepresenting what he had actually said.)
An atheist who called all believers "arseholes" would probably have been at least blocked if not bounced out of DU entirely, so it's hard not to cast a jaundiced eye on people over there who hit the ceiling whining about tone when religion is criticized but remain completely silent when believers (and some "Atheist, but..." posters) call atheists names.
Edit: Dang! Rexcat responded while I was writing (and rewriting and rewriting...) my post. 