On Boston suspects: Maher To Defender Of Islam: Equating Christianity And Islam "Liberal Bullshit"

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150. Dear Mr. Maher. I always enjoy listening to you. I understand your perspective. However,...

... in this case you are wrong.

Westerners always love to lament about the superiority of their culture to others. In particular the Islamic world is a popular object of Western disdain. However, there is one important part missing from this picture: The West is not all that different from the Islamic world.

We like to think we have left the "barbaric" stage of human development way behind us. And true enough, there are some ways in which the West is more modern. However, in particular in the US, conditions such as in the worst
examples of the Islamic world have existed not too long ago. Not in the "middle ages", less than a century ago.

My great-grandmother was "given away" into marriage to a much older man at the age of twelve and subsequently
had 15 kids. This was not Afghanistan, this was rural Tennessee. I am given to understand that this was quite the norm in her times. If the Christian fundamentalists were not outgunned by the secular state, they would go right back
to these times.

The reason people like to beat on Islam is that it reminds us of things we would like to forget about ourselves. It is a way to deflect from the "white man's burden".

Here is the thing: The Western white Christians used to be, and in part are, much much worse than Muslims. And no, I don't mean the middle ages.

I mean the last two centuries. Take the holocaust, two World Wars in which entire cities were bombed to ashes and in which millions died. The creation and use of nuclear weapons by white Western "Christians". Take the slave industry in North America and the systemic discrimination of blacks to this day, with full support of the churches. Take the global consequences of colonialism and imperialism, committed with full support of the churches. The exploitation of Africa. The systematic destruction of the natural environment. Factory farming. Industrialized killing of humans through drone warfare. The invasion of Iraq, labeled a crusade by a GW Bush. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Support of Fascism in Latin America. The financial and military support of the worst of the Islamic theocrats to this day.

So yes, "them" Muslims have some "barbaric" traditions. However, in the broader context, nothing in the Islamic world comes even close to the scale of the atrocities committed by the "Christian West" in the last two centuries. The Muslims have not even close to produced the same body count or spread pain and suffering throughout the world in any comparable way.

Thus, the Muslims are not only different from us. They are better.

To paraphrase Malcolm X: There is no bigger murderer and slave owner in the world than the white "christian" man.