This is farcical — or it would be if it weren’t so utterly misguided and dangerous a notion.

It’s disingenuous (if not ludicrous) to play the “we (Westerners, Christians, humanists, liberals — take your pick) did bad things in the past, so we can’t point fingers now” game of ethical relativism. Sorry, but no. It’s a fact that NOW, in 2011, that Islam is the greatest impediment to human rights, equality and basic decency in the world. It’s a fact that Islam institutionally marginalizes women and demonizes anyone who isn’t exactly heterosexual (despite the fact that so many paragons of Muhammadan “virtues” are also pederasts). It’s a fact that Islam is utterly intolerant of differences of opinion, of heterodoxy, of criticism, even of satire. Do you know what Islam demands for apostasy? Death. How do you plan to spin that in your “noble savage “fantasy of Islam? Indeed, the odds are that you yourself would be condemned to death by Muslim clergy for your own lifestyle (pre/extra-marital sex? Alcohol? Blasphemy?)

In short, the “informed consideration” you are suggesting that we non-Muslims need is precisely inverted: what is needed is for Islam and Muslims is an “informed consideration” with which to recognize that it is no longer the Medieval era, that women deserve equal rights in EVERY arena, that any culture worth its salt must embrace differences of opinion, and that there must be a wall of separation between church and state (as Thomas Jefferson wrote) that precludes clerics from passing and enforcing death sentences on women rape victims or homosexuals, or demanding fatwas against cartoonists.

Let me know when Islam has managed to catch up with the 21st (or even the 17th) century world. I’m sure that their doing so will do more than a thousand apologist tomes like Reza Aslan’s to bring the West into some form of respect for a religion that, at present, thinks and acts as if it is still the 7th century. Muslim enablers in the West such as you are too full of self-congratulatory in your fantasy of being “tolerant” of the world’s least tolerant faith to recognize that you’re more than traitors to the West and its freedoms of expression; you’re traitors to anything like good sense.

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