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.
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.