The problem with threads on such incidents is when they don't put them into the context of the more than one billion Muslims.
Cultural myopia meakes it all too easy for people to 'condemn Islam' for problems with a relatively small part of the group. That's often abused by people with an agenda - and in this case, innocently commited and furthered by people who have fallen victim to that effect.
Let's say it: there is a problem affecting a minority of Muslims with these issue, in our view.
Every time there's such a story though, it needs to be noted that these are not reasons to treat Islam as if the religion itself is some sort of threat, much less to justify war (the old 'you can't reason with those crazy people' type of fallacy whenver there are conflicts that come up).
It helps to see how much of a fallacy that is by reading some of their opinions about us, which are very rarely heard in our media - they can point to our exceptional stories (how about the murder of the 8 year old girl in Tracy), to our 'cultural imperfections' (we have an extremely high rate relatively of teen pregnancy, of incarceration, more executions than any Muslim nation except Iran (and than any other nation except China), a sea of freely available pornography, while they mostly shun our abuses of tobacco and alcohol.
How does it look from their view to point to our tens of thousands of drunk driving crashes, our hundreds of thousand of alcohol-fueld incidents, our hundreds of thousands of preventable people being killed by tobacco, as we cndemn them for their terrible problems of these 'honor killings' and such? Our problems don't justify their, and theirs don't justify ours; we can defend some of ours as 'free choices', but they can rationalize - sometimes very wrongly in our view - some of their choices, analogous to our defense of alcohol, while they are broadly condemning others like the sensational story here, just as we broadly condemn cocaine addiction, but still have a lot of it.
Even if we did not have our problems, we should not exaggerate theirs to condemn the religion - as so many do with ignorant selective quotations of their religion to fuel hate - but the fact we do have our own should help people appreciate how wrong it is to condemnt them for theirs, since if we didn't, while we shuldn't, it's harder for people to understand when they can get on a high horse. We have plenty of people doing it now even with our problems.
Iran has executed thousands for being gay. We should condemn that; we should fight for improvement. But we should not use it to fuel a hate that feeds war, for propaganda.
This cultural myopia I mention - it makes it easy for us to not pay any attention as we condemn, say, Saddam for invading Kuwait, where he at least had more rationale based on the regional history or possible 'sideways drilling' into Iraq's oil than we did for invading Mexics, even if his case was trumped up - Mexico too old, we get a pass? We could look at our encouraging his invasion of Iran with far more casualties. But at least we had an honest, democratic process - oh ya, unless you look at the Kuwaiti government's paying Bush's former chief of staff at an advertising agency to overcome the public's opposition to war with a campaign based on the complete fabrications of 'babies taken out of incubators' told tearfully to Congress by the woman the Congress and public weren't told was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador who wasn't there at the time, with no one ever prosecuted for the lies to get our nation into war. Much less, say, our war to kill two million ietnamese for our own wrong reasons.
The ease with which people ignore the contradictions and hypocrisy is a reminder of this cultural myopia, were we are more forgiving to 'our side' for its flaws than 'their side'.
I'm all for identifying, condemning, working to improve the flaws in Muslim nations - as long as the context is not to incite hate and build support for oppression or war.
Facebook
Twitter