Why do Atheists defend Islam?

[CapnAwesome]

I don't know how you think it can be mainly political in nature and yet separate from Islam. Islam (Not all of them!) is a political system as well as a religion. There was never meant to be a separation of Church and State in Islam and in the early days there certainly wasn't. You guys always talk about it like Muslims (Not all of them!) just happen to come from these conflict areas and that Islam itself has nothing to do with it. That's just plain wrong. While some Muslim countries have separation of church and state, Islam has influenced the politics and culture of these areas for hundreds of years. It's not like they grew up somehow separate from one another and Islam and Muslims (Not all of them!) are just unforunate to have shitty cultures/economies/etc. Islam is essential to all of that and to act as though it isn't is pretty mind boggling.

There was never meant to be separation of church and state in Christianity, and there wasn't until the Enlightenment. We had to muzzle Christianity like a rabid dog to stop the bloodshed.

And the politics and culture and history of those areas has shaped Islam for hundred of years. None of this shit is happening in an Islamic vacuum. The West deposed the legally elected president of Iran and replaced him with a hated dictator which led to a revolution where he was replaced with a religious fanatic. The USA backed the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the eighties and continued to supply their schools with textbooks supporting Islamic extremism into the nineties. We back Saudi Arabia militarily and financially, a regime which compromised with fundamentalist clerics after a terrorist attack and became an active exporter of Wahabbist fundamentalism throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Ayaan Hiirsi Ali is no fan of Islam, but in her autobiography she notes how much more oppressive Islam became in Africa when the Saudi Imam/missionaries started showing up. Saddam Hussein was horrific, but when we deposed him, we thoughtlessly ousted the secular Baathist Party from their military and bureaucratic positions and basically threw them in the street...and many of them wound up in Syria forming the backbone of DAESH.

Our problems in the region don't require more than an understanding of blowback to account for them. Islam is just the flavoring.

Actually really early Christianity definitely wasn't set up as a political system, unlike Islam. Really early Christianity was just a different type of Judaism that focused on withdrawl from society. There is also the old 'give on to Ceasars what is Ceasars and give to God what is Gods" Christianity didn't start acting as the state for hundreds of years. Even with Constantine, Christian laws didn't supersede Roman law. Comparatively Islam set up political rules and religious rulers from the very start. It is designed that way.

That's not to take anything away from blowback theory, which I fully agree with. It's just a complicated situation, not a situation which is cut and dry 'it's one of these two things and only one of them.'