Supporting my viewpoint with factual statements about my religion, even if they are a criticism of my faith, is not strange at all. There are a large number of

Supporting my viewpoint with factual statements about my religion, even if they are a criticism of my faith, is not strange at all. There are a large number of Muslims who live with a "live and let live" approach towards the faith and its dictates, especially with respect to the LGBT question. But on the whole, yes, we are surpassed by an even larger majority who believe that the LGBT community should be oppressed because that's God's will. It's wholly rational in my view to criticize that aspect of the faith (even if the hardline Muslims will disagree with me), lest we end up like some lobotomized sheep with no function of thought. Also, I never criticized the Palestinian community on the whole. I interact with Palestinian diaspora on an almost daily basis, many of whom scoff at the current sad state of affairs in Palestinian governance even internally. Many of them support LGBT rights and scoff at the current state of affairs as run by either Hamas or Fatah. But that's exactly the point I was making. The liberal west has stupidly (and Hamas successfully) pushed for the equation of Hamas/Fatah representation as the rule of the Palestinian people (and not of the Palestinian state). It's the same as how any criticism of Zionism is basically called anti-Semitism these days (as Israel has successfully done). Lastly nowhere did I support the bombing of Palestinians in Gaza, or the Shia in Lebanon. In fact, I would say that Israel's pager move was especially genius because it limited damage to specifically the Hezbollah operatives - hard to be more precise than that on that scale.