People really seem to struggle to realise how different they are. Hamas is not ISIS, that should be obvious to anyone with cursory knowledge on the history of the region. Hamas, Hezbollah and Ansar’Allah are not going to, nor have the capacity to, gut gay people and women who don’t wear a niqab or hijab. They are not Salafists, for the love of Christ.
The only reason people compare these wildly different groups, is because they all (at least claim to) adhere to Islamic principles. If you think for even a second, you’d realise how ridiculous this is. It’s like comparing the CDU to the KKK or even the Spanish Falange because they’re all Christian, in some way or another.
It’s plain ridiculous, though the liberal (and conservative) types never seem to get it.
That’s a good response.
I don’t know. I do know that the MAGA world in which I live (the southern US) is inundated with religion, like fish are inundated with water, and it’s religion that is used by the elites to influence regular folks.
(Btw, I may be a right-wing shitlib relative to you guys, but out here where I live I’m basically a commie. It’s relative.)
So yeah, maybe all this is colored by my own experiences. I’m not a Middle East expert by any stretch. But I do have an axe to grind. I admit that.
Every discussion with MAGA eventually invokes religion in some way, explicitly or implicitly. And it is severely frustrating and exhausting. If I talk about “material conditions” (as best I can, I’m not brilliant about these things either), e.g., collective bargaining, taxing wealth instead of labor, how spreading health care coverage risk across the entire population and detangling insurance from employment actually frees people to start small businesses, and so on, they’ll nod along with me, and say things like they “actually like Bernie,” but eventually the conversation gets turned to some culture war issue informed by religion. I have to keep Bible quotes in my memory just to talk with these people and rebut their culture war bullshit.
I fucking hate it, man. The churches, mosques, and synagogues, how I hate them. 🔥🔥🔥
Maybe I didn’t belong in this thread. I’ve never been to the Middle East.
There’s a part of me that would like to see all priests, mullahs, and rabbis strung up and hanged, and every church, mosque, and synagogue set ablaze. I guess that’s not very Liberal or Progressive of me (or Socialist or Social Democratic either, for that matter, even though I don’t label myself that way, especially around here), and I should work on that. Maybe it’s not healthy or helpful, and writing things helped me examine it a bit more closely.
I can empathize. I don’t live in the US, but where I am, we are ruled by a right wing comprador colonial government that also uses religion to justify itself.
I think you’re doing good work by trying to focus on material conditions when talking with the people around you. That’s the most important thing. If they focus on culture war issues, I think it often is the best approach to try to circumvent direct engagement with those topics (still unequivocally say that trans rights are human rights, gay people deserve marriage and not recognizing their marriage is a slippery slope to invalidating all other kinds of marriage that aren’t between two aryans in a Lebensraum homestead, etc) and to try to steer the conversation into the actual nature of power and authority. At the end of the day, you aren’t gonna achieve anything by convincing them to agree with the Democratic agenda, and even voting for Bernie is largely useless. The goal is to bring them into the fold in a socialist movement through mutual aid programs, direct action, agitation, education, and whatever other arenas of struggle are available to advance the cause. Getting them to be perfect is not a necessary part of that process.