(January 6, 2015 at 8:47 pm)Mental Outlaw Wrote: Okay, so it seems like quite a few people here do not think Islamophobia is justified, and those who don't gave some very good reasons. I just want to ask a follow up question, not to necessarily change your mind, but to see how you would react to something similar yet different. Say a group of Neo Nazi's moved into the house across the street from you, they collect Nazi propaganda, have swastikas tatted on their bodies, fly a Nazi flag in the front yard, meet at Nazi and kkk rallies regularly, carry a copy of Mein Kampf with them, and often times bring up conversations about how great they think Hitler was, occasionally some of them might try to convert you to their way of thinking, but they are not overly pushy about it. Would you treat them exactly the same as in "if they arn't violent, then there is nothing to worry about." Or would the group of Nazi's make you a little more uneasy?
I grew up in the deep South and spent two years in a maximum security prison. I'm a gay intellectual Buddhism. I've learned not to care about the what people officially believe. I judge people by their actions and history. For the history part, I consider the context. In prison my clique (the D&D people) included a child molester. I know what he did, I can't even think about it. But he was in prison and will stay there for the rest of his life. Given that, I don't have a problem eating dinner with him every day, or even helping him out sometimes. True, if I thought he might get out of prison I might have to stop that, but in the context, you deal with people.
Can you imagine what it's like to be a 'straight-acting' gay man in the closet in prison? The Nazi's don't hold back. I see what people absolutely believe - and honestly, it's not that bad. Racism was the status quo when I was growing up - I went to an all white elementary school.
But from my family, that and prison, the first time I encountered real racism was from a guy I dated. He was a clinically narcissistic end-stage alcoholic. Once, in a movie theater downtown ATL, he decided he was going to explain the movie to me - loudly. A lady ssshh'd him, then politely asked him to be quite. He called her a 'n-word c-word', loudly. We barely got out of there alive (okay, he was hot, very free with money and a doomed soul, I get off on that, but in the end, I beat the smack out of him with a baseball bat. My only excuse is that it was 100% deserved). That's one of the VERY few people I've ever met that actually had that putrid hate inside of him, and all of it came from self-hate, from blaming himself for his sister's suicide. In short, it was a pathology.
To conclude this ramble, my observation is that real hate, real bigotry, is a serious mental pathology. It really doesn't have anything to do with the belief system, though certainly some belief systems attract the bigots. You can learn to recognize those people, and what creed they fallow is not a good tell.
My book, a setting for fantasy role playing games based on Bantu mythology: Ubantu
