My issue is not that Muslims don't fight against jihadis. They have been known to do so when their own families and way of life are threatened. Or their country is going to war against another Islamic country for territorial, monetary or political gain. My problem with Muslims is that the majority of Muslims claim that it is a religion of peace and still profess it even though the so called holy book is full of basically hate speech against the rest of the world and extols them to fight a violent religious crusade.
I don't agree with the 3 stages mentioned by
@mendosa and can agree that the average Muslim just wants to live their life like you and I. However, Islam being such a hateful ideology, there is no telling when someone from subsequent generations is radicalized by watching a Youtube video. Heck, all they have to do is to read the Quran faithfully and it is basically a terrorist recruiting manual.
For me to be personally satisfied that the average Muslim is doing enough to fight the jihadis, they would have to denounce the faith and declare that they do not recognize the Quran. Which is obviously never going to happen, hence I will always have an axe to grind against the average non violent peaceful Muslim.
You've said the same thing I am saying : Mainstream Muslims are not pro peace and indulge in Taquiyya to appear peaceful but they are tacit supporters of extremism. I don't know which exact point you are disagreeing on. We are both saying the same thing but you say that you disagree with me.
that the average Muslim just wants to live their life like you and I
By virtue of being warm blooded mammals,
we all need to eat at least two meals a day, and for that we need some form of employment, and for that we all need some form of education. That's common between all human beings. Saying that a Muslim wants to educate their children and fetch jobs, just like Hindu person, doesn't address the extremist views that the Muslim holds. You might as well say, we both have 2 hands and 2 legs so we are all the same and ignore all other aspects of human behavior. The bone of contention here is
the political view which mainstream Muslims profess, and not that they ALSO want their kids to go to school and earn well and eat good quality Basmati rice and carry iPhones. The real story starts after that. What happens after he is done eating his Basmati rice? does he continue to build a strong nation? or does he tell his sons to throw stones at Indian Army, plant bombs in temples, burn a train full of Hindu saints, attend the funeral of terrorists like Yakub and Burhan Wani? Does he use his iPhone to tweet about India's Mars mission? or does he use it to post propaganda about how 'Islam is in danger'?
There are Muslim terrorists who carry guns, and there are ordinary Muslims who don't carry guns but overwhelmingly support terrorism against non-believers (feel free to google for the Pew research about global Muslim attitudes towards various issues). Mainstream Islam itself is an extremist ideology.
If you limit your definition of 'extremist' to someone who holds a gun, then only 1% of the Billion+ Muslim population will fit that definition, but here's a video of the crowd at Yakub Memon's funeral, none of them holds a gun, so technically, these people aren't terrorists by that definition. This is what an average Muslim feels and behaves like at the funeral of a man who killed hundreds of people :
30k 'common Muslims' attended this funeral and social media trends suggested that 8 lakh tweets were made in favor of Yakub Memon on the day of his funeral. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.
Shiv Sena and Bajrang Dal are not going around planting bombs in Pakistan or India so the assertion that all religions have extremist elements is plain subterfuge. Muslims are minority in India but still the above videos are a proof of how they behave like goons and bully the majority. On the other hand, the Hindu minority in Pakistan is hounded daily. Their lands are stolen, their daughters are kidnapped, forcefully married and converted, but how come these Hindus have not become terrorists?
So I summarily reject the false moral equivalence between religions which claims that all religions have extremists. There might be regressive tendencies among uneducated Hindus relating to food and clothing conventions but this doesn't come close to being equal to the actual terrorism perpetrated by Muslims globally.
You can't switch between 'terrorism' and 'extremism' to suit your narrative when convenient. When the issue of Muslim terrorism is brought up, people say 'only a minority of them are gun-carrying terrorists, rest of them are ordinary civilians', and in the same breath they say '[insert any Hindu group]' attacks people who visit pubs so there is extremism in Hinduism. By creating this term 'extremism' it has widened the scope of what behaviors and attitudes can be referred to as extremists and therefore allows liberals to draw false parallels with 'other extremists', while such a comparison is lopsided, since the 'other extremists' are actually hardcore terrorists with guns who have mass murdered millions across the globe in the span of a decade, while our friendly neighborhood 'Hindu extremist' goes around disrupting Valentine's day once a year and then goes home. Are those things on the same moral level?
If you limit the definition of extremism to 'someone who carries a
gun' then there are no Hindu terrorist groups, while there are several Muslim terrorist groups. There are 50+ Muslim terrorist groups in Pakistan alone, and 10+ Muslim terrorist groups in India. There are 0 Hindu terrorist groups in India and Pakistan. This just shows that Muslims have a predisposition to terror as an instrument of social life regardless of whether they are majority or minority.
If you expand the definition of extremism to 'anyone who professes
intolerance towards other groups' then the ordinary Muslims outrank all other religions by a far wider margin in both intensity and breadth of intolerance. Pew research suggests that 80%+ Muslims support Sharia and endorse beheading as a justified punishment for a person who leaves Islam. I don't think 80% Hindus recommend the beheading of people who convert out of Hinduism.
'All religions have extremists' is just a liberal ploy to put Hindus on the backfoot by equating lesser acts of intolerance/anti-social behavior with acts of heinous acts of mass murder, terrorism.
No ullu banawing.
