[CorsiHockeyLeague]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

http://www.ibtimes.com/isil-isis-isl...erence-2187131
You're so dramatic about political correctness and your subjective view of "sense."

I know what the terms mean, I'm just not sure why Obama prefers ISIL as terminology. I'm just curious as to why. I don't have a particular preference, really, but most people seem to use ISIS, and if I had to choose, ISIS seems more accurate, doesn't it? Might as well have everyone using the same lexicon.

But anyway, if you don't think it's common sense that these are religious people acting for what they see as their religious mandate, then I don't know what to tell you, you've abandoned reality completely.

Originally Posted by Iggy City

Naw man, of all things this tragedy brought up, it's the PC-crowd that we must fight.

Did we not conclude that this had nothing to do with ISIS?

No, it's the religous maniacs who use their religious views to oppress people the world over who we need to fight. The gay people in Saudi Arabia, the women's rights campaigners in Pakistan, the secular writers in Bangladesh. And by refusing to admit there's even a problem that needs to be talked about, rather than defending those vulnerable groups of people who most need it, we abandon them to being thrown from rooftops, disfigured by acid or hacked to death, in all too many cases. So yeah, thinking clearly and talking clearly about this problem is in fact consequential.

Originally Posted by wittynickname

Meanwhile, innocent brown people all over the US are being attacked, harassed, Muslim places of worship are being vandalized, etc, in greater and greater numbers since 9/11. There are huge amounts of innocent Muslims (as well as other people of Middle Eastern descent who aren't even Muslim, i.e. Sikhs) who are regularly being treated horribly because of the Radical Islam boogeyman due to a relatively small number of nutjobs who are twisting the words of their particular faith to support their own terroristic acts.

Hate crimes against Muslims have increased significantly in the USA in just the past three years. It's impossible to tell by how much, because the stats are generally taken from groups like CAIR, which opportunistically treats any crime where the victim is a Muslim as a hate crime, but there's no doubt they've gone up. Which places them... still well behind hate crimes against Jews, for example. This is a problem, but it's not a large-scale one. It's like republicans' fixation on voter ID fraud.

ISIS wants to make this a Western Nations vs. Islam battle. This is not a Western Nations vs. Islam battle. This is humanity vs. ISIS. So you treat ISIS as the fringe element it is, and rather embrace the millions of innocent Muslims who likely are as disgusted by these events as the rest of us.

It's not this simple, though. Muslim majority countries are generally anti-ISIS, but also in many cases support many or all of the things that we generally object to about ISIS. The religious justification of killing gays and apostates is not a fringe phenomenon. Treatment of women as chattels, or at minimum as second-class citizens, is not a fringe phenomenon. The numbers of people who believe firmly in some pretty awful things on religious grounds is depressing, and Islam is one major source of that sort of belief.

There was a poll a couple of years back of British Muslims - we're not talking about Saudi Arabia here - asking a number of questions, one of which was whether homosexuality is morally acceptable. 0% agreed. It's almost impossible to craft a political poll question so stark as to get a 0% concurrence rate. Is it surprising, then, that you get poll results that say a majority of Muslims in Pakistan think honour killings are justified in some circumstances? The rates go up for stoning adulterers and killing people for leaving the faith. You don't have to support ISIS to support some pretty awful stuff.

All of that being said, you're still certainly right that there's no war on Islam, and shouldn't be. But you should recognize that you've just quoted Trump, who in between his usually nonsense and demonstration of complete lack of qualification on this issue as on every other one, called for uniting the civilized world to defeat Islamic terrorism. Neither Hillary nor Obama were willing to say any such thing. They really need to start.

By demonizing Islam, you just push more and more people toward the radical element.

This is a meme that comes up a lot. Just think about what you're saying here. The proposition is that by speaking plainly and directly about the problem - that this is in fact an extremist element that is motivated by religious dogmatism - this will somehow drive other Muslims who otherwise wouldn't be in any way a threat to join up with the ranks of the jihadists.

First, I think that's a highly unrealistic view. That's a hugely uncharitable thing to think about even conservative Muslims. The vast majority of the religious are opposed to violence. They're not going to suddenly become sympathetic to ISIS if everyone frankly acknowledges that ISIS is motivated by their own ideas about what Islam requires of its adherents.

But imagine it was true? That rhetoric was all that was standing between some significant group of religious Muslims and outright radical extremism? That their hold on their peaceful engagement with the world was so tenuous that using impolitic language would be enough to send them all off the deep end? If that were true, it would be terrifying and we should be talking about nothing else.