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My (hastily written) email to the EFF on this issue: ===== "Even as we mourn the losses at Charlie Hebdo, we must be wary of any attempt to rush through new s

My (hastily written) email to the EFF on this issue: ===== "Even as we mourn the losses at Charlie Hebdo, we must be wary of any attempt to rush through new surveillance and law enforcement powers, which are likely to disproportionately affect Muslims ..." May I suggest the following thought experiment? Imagine if Hebdo staff had been murdered by Neo-NAZIs (it's certainly within the realm of possibility; the publication skewered the political right as much as it did other groups like Muslims, and fascist groups are known for their love of violence). Would you be decrying the possibility that new laws might disproportionately effect Neo-NAZIs? There are many parallels between the politics of Islam and the politics of National Socialism: the rejection of individualism, the anti-semitism, the subordination of all aspects of life to the philosophy, the hero-worship of the leader, etc. etc. The fact that most Muslims are not actively engaged in Jihad has parallels with the observation that most Germans during WWII weren't actively fighting for the NAZI party. To support an evil philosophy is morally wrong, regardless of whether that philosophy is or is not religious in nature. I'm particularly saddened to see the EFF join in the pretence that Islam, in and of itself, is worthy of respect. The philosophy, and the mainstream religious movement itself, is inimically opposed to the freedoms you seek to protect. =====

scrollaway 12y ago
It's very hard to find a way to retort that actually has the potential to change your mind. I will try, though, and I hope you take this with an open mind. First of all, I completely disagree. You yourself admit the email was hastily written and that tells me you didn't take the time to actually consider the opposing point of view. I'm not religious, myself. I know several muslims though, all believers to varying degrees. They all think very differently from one another and have completely different opinions about various parts of islam. One thing they do have in common is that they all condemn those attacks as heinous, disgusting and a disgrace for those people to consider themselves muslims. You talk about an "evil philosophy" as if this is what islam intended. Plenty of murders and bombings, even genocides, have been committed in the name of a much more popular religion, yet I'm fairly certain you do not think of that religion as an "evil philosophy". And if you do, please consider that everyone, no matter their philosophy, also have the freedoms you talk about. Those freedoms do in fact include the freedom of faith. Your reasoning regarding your own thought experiment is flawed. In this world, neo-nazis do not have to fear consequences to such actions. At least not theoretically (which is what your thought experiment suggests), and because neo-nazism is kept off the mainstream media, unlike islam in some countries. Neo-nazism is not a religion. It's easy to drop the N-bomb on islam comparisons but a lot harder to justify it once you get past the fairly childish prejudice that "they're both extremist mindsets, so they're the same". You've drawn some parallels that most muslims have nothing to do with. Will you find a lot of neo-nazis that follow nazism because they find peace and understanding of the universe in it? I could argue a long time on how this logic is flawed but I'm fairly certain it won't go anywhere. I just hope that you, personally, appreciate that an extreme majority of muslims aren't merely passive about such behaviour, they're very actively against it and revolted by it. What do you think they can do about it, exactly? Stop believing in their own god? You're removing their freedom of faith if you ask that of them. I was actually heartwarmed by the european response to the attacks, they have been my own personal light of the past 12 months. I've seen that my country of birth is not as bigoted as I thought, and that its media is in a much better state than I suspected. All of this because they did, in fact, all made a point to make the difference between those wastes of DNA that perpetrated the attacks, and the religion as a whole. Please don't make the mistake France avoided. PS: I upvoted you because I'm hoping for some decent discussion on the issue here. I hope others do the same.
- duncan_bayne 12y ago
  Firstly, thanks for your considered reply. "It's very hard to find a way to retort that actually has the potential to change your mind. I will try, though, and I hope you take this with an open mind." You'd be surprised, I think. I've changed my mind several times on this issue, and I'm still mulling it over. That email represented my current thinking on the matter, quite directly given the speed with which it was written. This is _another_ rushed reply, & I'd like to reply later in more detail if time permits. Some background: I'm an atheist, and I don't (or at least I try not to) distinguish between religious and non-religious philosophies. I happen to think that the greatest religious evil in the world today is perpetrated by Christians against Africa, by way of a prohibition on contraception. Re. freedom of faith, take one example. If your philosophy mandates the execution of apostates, then your philosophy is evil. If you choose to belong to it, to support it, then you yourself are supporting evil even if only by lending it your moral sanction. This is true regardless of whether your philosophy is religious, or not. If your God tells you to murder apostates, then yes, in order to be a decent human being, you need to reject your God - [edited to add]: or, at the very least, find an interpretation of your religion that rejects that mandate. Another example: if you're Catholic, acknowledge the torment and suffering that your religion is inflicting upon the poor in Africa, and change denomination to one that allows contraception. It seems as though you are giving Islam special treatment by virtue of it being a religion.
  - scrollaway 12y ago
    (Disclaimer: I'm an atheist myself. I'll try to make this as coherent as possible, bear with me.) "Everyone has a right to their opinion", as long as it remains an opinion. Right? But let's elaborate a bit on that. Some background first: We, as humans, most likely will never really know the answers to the very existential questions in the universe. If you start asking "Why?" a lot, go all the way outside of the bounds of society, you'll find a lot of very weird questions that you would think you'd get an obvious answer to, but it always tends to come down to "because that's how we defined it". An extreme example: "Why is killing bad?" - An easy question to answer within the bounds of a functional society, but it's not easy to keep answering it if you remove that boundary. Since you're a fan of thought experiments: Many insect species' females eat their mates after copulation. What if our society evolved from such a basis and never quite got past it? You would face the same challenges explaining why not eating your mate would be positive for an established society. (Fun weekend project: Read post-apocalyptic books while keeping such considerations in mind. Authors tend to have a field day with these questions...) Okay, now that that's out of the way: We, humans, do get to define our own ideologies. We get to define what is good and bad, because unlike with mathematics/physics, nature does not dictate rules for philosophy. What I personally believe is that for those potential ideologies to have a chance to prosper, we must never remove their voices. You can choose not to listen to them, but removing the opportunity for them to spread could in fact remove a change for the better. Just like it could prevent a change for the better, but then we go back to the argument earlier: who are we to judge what is good and what is bad? We get to define it, but those that come after us may disagree. At least we have a choice. So no, I'm not giving islam special treatment, I'm just careful of not removing its voice, as much as I can disagree with some of its ideologies (and agree with some others). This is a very tough subject. We don't know where the lines are, different people tend to put them in different places. The law is what we've chosen to draw the lines for us, and we change it all the time. But without differing opinions (christianity, islam, vegetarianism, nazism, kopimism, ...), we can't ever hope to change. And isn't change the reason we are here, exchanging experiences and ideas?
kossTKR 12y ago
I agree that the phrasing was debatable. Replacing the words: "affect muslims" with "affect everyone" would have been more precise and less biased. But the comparison you just made, equaling todays regular law abiding muslings with passive nazi onlookers in the third-reich, is delusional from a historical standpoint, and despicable from a diplomatic one. The state fuelled propaganda targeting the jew population after the German economic struggles was a majority culture fuelled by state propaganda that created a scapegoat with racial overtones. Most muslim "anti-semitism" in the west today stems from a frustration with israels war policy. Not an inherent racial doctrine. Comparing Jihad to State sponsored activities like SS or Hitler Jugend makes no sense. Jihad in western countries is created mostly with foreign training, money and initiative springing from international social media. Being active in the the Nazi army was for most people forced conscription, completely outside of personal volition, e.g. Hitler Jugend, SS etc. Nazism and Radical Islam are of course both extremely right-wing, conservative and fascistic in their nature. They share a lot of common traits, but their roots and causes doesn't compare. Lets be careful before we compare all of our fellow muslim citizens with Nazi sympathizers shall we?
- duncan_bayne 12y ago
  Re. anti-semitism in Islam: to claim that it's a response to Israeli politics is utterly false. It has existed in the religion for centuries, in a similar fashion to anti-semitism in Catholicism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_antisemitism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_antisemitism Re. conscription: participation in Jihad is mandatory in Islamic states. Currently, volunteer Mujahideen are fighting an asymmetric war against Western countries on their own soil. Those who volunteer to fight are in fact more morally culpable than those conscripted into service. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jihad http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jihad Re. sympathy for Sharia: http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-beliefs-about-sharia/ http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religi...
  - kossTKR 12y ago
    "Utterly false". How do you know that? Yes i to can link to a long wikipedia article about Christianity and Antisemitism. Long wiki lists doesn't count as arguments. I don't believe most modern anger against jews stems from religious doctrine, i really do believe it stems from a more general sense of frustration with western foreign policy. All religions hate on each other. I know you want to pick out islam as the root of much evil but i just do not agree with how the whole debate is being framed. I myself am not religious and probably share a good deal of opinions with you. But i have come to despise the way the "new-atheism" conducts itself. It creates tensions and stops conversation. It focuses a beam so narrow, the public discourse has become one dimensional. The current discourse in atheistic communities, and lately also the general consensus in the media - of deriving some sorts of inherent psychological constants from islam, is detrimental from an academic perspective. It disregards so many other factors at play other than the religion itself e.g. geography, local culture, economics, foreign policies, geopolitics, history etc. People and cultures are different, everywhere. Do you think most muslims practice their faith based on intense historical investigation and religious reading? And do you think that they come to the same conclusions? They don't. Most muslims get cherry picked info. They read a little, some don't, many gets lots of info from moderate imams, few get loads of material from radical imams. Some are Sunni, some are Shia, some left-wing like parts of the kurds, some are progressive like much of the youth in Iran. Many people have daily battles with the radical parts of islam all over the middle east. The Arab Spring was a strong testament to this. I have met many progressive muslims from all over the middle east over the years. Highly educated, well spoken. Many of them still cultural muslims whoms most fundamental problems with the west stems from the incessant and extremely detrimental foreign meddling in the middle east. Several countries in the middle east were pretty progressive before war tore them apart in the mid to late twentieth century. Proxy warfare between the US and Russia. CIA funding of assorted radicals up through the decades, coups that lead to theocracies. Israels wars that lead to a radicalisation of large parts of the muslim youth. And western alliance with the largest promoter of radical islam, Saudi Arabia. Furthermore the incredibly incompetent way the US war machine played out Shia against Sunnis, and therefore directly aided the creation of ISIS today. the list goes on. Watch the frontline documentaries on Iraq or Isis to get a gist of how catastrophic the western countries still act to this day. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/losing-iraq/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/losing-iraq/ All of these factors and more, have now created this radical, angry and war-damaged version of Islam, that now clashes increasingly with western values. My point is that i think it is extremely detrimental to focus on Islam as some sort of absolute culprit of the atrocious acts, rather than create an explanatory model with the myriad of factors spanning a century, that has made certain groups of people come this.
bigbugbag 12y ago
godwin point to you sir. Also please do not confuse muslims and islamists.

scrollaway 12y ago

It's very hard to find a way to retort that actually has the potential to change your mind. I will try, though, and I hope you take this with an open mind. First of all, I completely disagree. You yourself admit the email was hastily written and that tells me you didn't take the time to actually consider the opposing point of view. I'm not religious, myself. I know several muslims though, all believers to varying degrees. They all think very differently from one another and have completely different opinions about various parts of islam. One thing they do have in common is that they all condemn those attacks as heinous, disgusting and a disgrace for those people to consider themselves muslims. You talk about an "evil philosophy" as if this is what islam intended. Plenty of murders and bombings, even genocides, have been committed in the name of a much more popular religion, yet I'm fairly certain you do not think of that religion as an "evil philosophy". And if you do, please consider that everyone, no matter their philosophy, also have the freedoms you talk about. Those freedoms do in fact include the freedom of faith. Your reasoning regarding your own thought experiment is flawed. In this world, neo-nazis do not have to fear consequences to such actions. At least not theoretically (which is what your thought experiment suggests), and because neo-nazism is kept off the mainstream media, unlike islam in some countries. Neo-nazism is not a religion. It's easy to drop the N-bomb on islam comparisons but a lot harder to justify it once you get past the fairly childish prejudice that "they're both extremist mindsets, so they're the same". You've drawn some parallels that most muslims have nothing to do with. Will you find a lot of neo-nazis that follow nazism because they find peace and understanding of the universe in it? I could argue a long time on how this logic is flawed but I'm fairly certain it won't go anywhere. I just hope that you, personally, appreciate that an extreme majority of muslims aren't merely passive about such behaviour, they're very actively against it and revolted by it. What do you think they can do about it, exactly? Stop believing in their own god? You're removing their freedom of faith if you ask that of them. I was actually heartwarmed by the european response to the attacks, they have been my own personal light of the past 12 months. I've seen that my country of birth is not as bigoted as I thought, and that its media is in a much better state than I suspected. All of this because they did, in fact, all made a point to make the difference between those wastes of DNA that perpetrated the attacks, and the religion as a whole. Please don't make the mistake France avoided. PS: I upvoted you because I'm hoping for some decent discussion on the issue here. I hope others do the same.

duncan_bayne 12y ago
Firstly, thanks for your considered reply. "It's very hard to find a way to retort that actually has the potential to change your mind. I will try, though, and I hope you take this with an open mind." You'd be surprised, I think. I've changed my mind several times on this issue, and I'm still mulling it over. That email represented my current thinking on the matter, quite directly given the speed with which it was written. This is _another_ rushed reply, & I'd like to reply later in more detail if time permits. Some background: I'm an atheist, and I don't (or at least I try not to) distinguish between religious and non-religious philosophies. I happen to think that the greatest religious evil in the world today is perpetrated by Christians against Africa, by way of a prohibition on contraception. Re. freedom of faith, take one example. If your philosophy mandates the execution of apostates, then your philosophy is evil. If you choose to belong to it, to support it, then you yourself are supporting evil even if only by lending it your moral sanction. This is true regardless of whether your philosophy is religious, or not. If your God tells you to murder apostates, then yes, in order to be a decent human being, you need to reject your God - [edited to add]: or, at the very least, find an interpretation of your religion that rejects that mandate. Another example: if you're Catholic, acknowledge the torment and suffering that your religion is inflicting upon the poor in Africa, and change denomination to one that allows contraception. It seems as though you are giving Islam special treatment by virtue of it being a religion.
- scrollaway 12y ago
  (Disclaimer: I'm an atheist myself. I'll try to make this as coherent as possible, bear with me.) "Everyone has a right to their opinion", as long as it remains an opinion. Right? But let's elaborate a bit on that. Some background first: We, as humans, most likely will never really know the answers to the very existential questions in the universe. If you start asking "Why?" a lot, go all the way outside of the bounds of society, you'll find a lot of very weird questions that you would think you'd get an obvious answer to, but it always tends to come down to "because that's how we defined it". An extreme example: "Why is killing bad?" - An easy question to answer within the bounds of a functional society, but it's not easy to keep answering it if you remove that boundary. Since you're a fan of thought experiments: Many insect species' females eat their mates after copulation. What if our society evolved from such a basis and never quite got past it? You would face the same challenges explaining why not eating your mate would be positive for an established society. (Fun weekend project: Read post-apocalyptic books while keeping such considerations in mind. Authors tend to have a field day with these questions...) Okay, now that that's out of the way: We, humans, do get to define our own ideologies. We get to define what is good and bad, because unlike with mathematics/physics, nature does not dictate rules for philosophy. What I personally believe is that for those potential ideologies to have a chance to prosper, we must never remove their voices. You can choose not to listen to them, but removing the opportunity for them to spread could in fact remove a change for the better. Just like it could prevent a change for the better, but then we go back to the argument earlier: who are we to judge what is good and what is bad? We get to define it, but those that come after us may disagree. At least we have a choice. So no, I'm not giving islam special treatment, I'm just careful of not removing its voice, as much as I can disagree with some of its ideologies (and agree with some others). This is a very tough subject. We don't know where the lines are, different people tend to put them in different places. The law is what we've chosen to draw the lines for us, and we change it all the time. But without differing opinions (christianity, islam, vegetarianism, nazism, kopimism, ...), we can't ever hope to change. And isn't change the reason we are here, exchanging experiences and ideas?

kossTKR 12y ago

I agree that the phrasing was debatable. Replacing the words: "affect muslims" with "affect everyone" would have been more precise and less biased. But the comparison you just made, equaling todays regular law abiding muslings with passive nazi onlookers in the third-reich, is delusional from a historical standpoint, and despicable from a diplomatic one. The state fuelled propaganda targeting the jew population after the German economic struggles was a majority culture fuelled by state propaganda that created a scapegoat with racial overtones. Most muslim "anti-semitism" in the west today stems from a frustration with israels war policy. Not an inherent racial doctrine. Comparing Jihad to State sponsored activities like SS or Hitler Jugend makes no sense. Jihad in western countries is created mostly with foreign training, money and initiative springing from international social media. Being active in the the Nazi army was for most people forced conscription, completely outside of personal volition, e.g. Hitler Jugend, SS etc. Nazism and Radical Islam are of course both extremely right-wing, conservative and fascistic in their nature. They share a lot of common traits, but their roots and causes doesn't compare. Lets be careful before we compare all of our fellow muslim citizens with Nazi sympathizers shall we?

duncan_bayne 12y ago
Re. anti-semitism in Islam: to claim that it's a response to Israeli politics is utterly false. It has existed in the religion for centuries, in a similar fashion to anti-semitism in Catholicism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_antisemitism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_antisemitism Re. conscription: participation in Jihad is mandatory in Islamic states. Currently, volunteer Mujahideen are fighting an asymmetric war against Western countries on their own soil. Those who volunteer to fight are in fact more morally culpable than those conscripted into service. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jihad http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jihad Re. sympathy for Sharia: http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-beliefs-about-sharia/ http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religi...
- kossTKR 12y ago
  "Utterly false". How do you know that? Yes i to can link to a long wikipedia article about Christianity and Antisemitism. Long wiki lists doesn't count as arguments. I don't believe most modern anger against jews stems from religious doctrine, i really do believe it stems from a more general sense of frustration with western foreign policy. All religions hate on each other. I know you want to pick out islam as the root of much evil but i just do not agree with how the whole debate is being framed. I myself am not religious and probably share a good deal of opinions with you. But i have come to despise the way the "new-atheism" conducts itself. It creates tensions and stops conversation. It focuses a beam so narrow, the public discourse has become one dimensional. The current discourse in atheistic communities, and lately also the general consensus in the media - of deriving some sorts of inherent psychological constants from islam, is detrimental from an academic perspective. It disregards so many other factors at play other than the religion itself e.g. geography, local culture, economics, foreign policies, geopolitics, history etc. People and cultures are different, everywhere. Do you think most muslims practice their faith based on intense historical investigation and religious reading? And do you think that they come to the same conclusions? They don't. Most muslims get cherry picked info. They read a little, some don't, many gets lots of info from moderate imams, few get loads of material from radical imams. Some are Sunni, some are Shia, some left-wing like parts of the kurds, some are progressive like much of the youth in Iran. Many people have daily battles with the radical parts of islam all over the middle east. The Arab Spring was a strong testament to this. I have met many progressive muslims from all over the middle east over the years. Highly educated, well spoken. Many of them still cultural muslims whoms most fundamental problems with the west stems from the incessant and extremely detrimental foreign meddling in the middle east. Several countries in the middle east were pretty progressive before war tore them apart in the mid to late twentieth century. Proxy warfare between the US and Russia. CIA funding of assorted radicals up through the decades, coups that lead to theocracies. Israels wars that lead to a radicalisation of large parts of the muslim youth. And western alliance with the largest promoter of radical islam, Saudi Arabia. Furthermore the incredibly incompetent way the US war machine played out Shia against Sunnis, and therefore directly aided the creation of ISIS today. the list goes on. Watch the frontline documentaries on Iraq or Isis to get a gist of how catastrophic the western countries still act to this day. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/losing-iraq/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/losing-iraq/ All of these factors and more, have now created this radical, angry and war-damaged version of Islam, that now clashes increasingly with western values. My point is that i think it is extremely detrimental to focus on Islam as some sort of absolute culprit of the atrocious acts, rather than create an explanatory model with the myriad of factors spanning a century, that has made certain groups of people come this.

bigbugbag 12y ago

godwin point to you sir. Also please do not confuse muslims and islamists.