I feel, personally, that when it comes to burning of religious texts, it’s kind of like racism. There’s obviously a clear difference between burning an Islamic text and burning a Christian text. And in this case, it’s being done by a fascist.
All the comments are like this BTW, like genuinely ALL.
I had an argument about this in college where I got told I was a hypocrite for saying if I, a white westerner, had to, I’d burn a Bible but not a Quran.
I think that it should be obvious why that’s ridiculous. The West exists under a dominant Christian, “christofascist” hegemony. Burning a bible could be seen as an act of resistance against an oppressive power structure.
What would I be doing in burning a Quran in one of the most Islamophobic countries in the world? Telling the state I agree with them. Telling Muslims my government oppresses regularly at home and especially abroad that I don’t stand with them, I stand with christofascism. One of the most blatant examples of “punching down” I could think of, and for what? It would in no way represent “anti-theism”, just good old fashioned imperial bigotry.
If someone in Saudi Arabia decided to burn a Quran, that’s a contradiction for them to sort out, living in a theocratic Muslim state. Not my place to agree or disagree with it, but it could be seen as an act of resistance. Cultural context matters, but obviously not to nu atheists.
This is a racism is only punching down kinda take.
You can punch sideways… I guess. What’s your point? Never been good with allusion. I cannot claim to speak to a truly learned understanding of religious and ethnic tensions globally, I speak only from my experience living as a white settler in a white settler-state, one that happens to be ruled in no small part by absolitely insane Christian fascists. Not Muslim ones (despite what my parents have to say about Obama).
What does a non-Muslim in an Islamophobic country burning a Quran signify? Is it ever anything but an affirmation of their hatred of Islam (and Muslims in general?) It serves no one but reactionary-nationalist and anti-immigrant freaks and the fools they’ve duped into giving them money.
I hope you are not alluding to ‘racism’ against white settlers in your assessment of my take. That would be not good.
You almost made it. It’s the allusion to your likely opinion that racism is only punching down, which you confirmed with your first sentence in the response.
The point being, when you think along those lines, you tend to ignore the context of individual situations and look at the whole.
Is it racist if a group of minorities gang up on a majority for a sole reason they are a majority? By your logic, no, it isn’t.
The same applies here. It’s a problem that a white person burns a koran. Yet you’re ignoring the result which is an unnecessarily over the top act of violence. It would likely be the same result if the book being burned was a Bible, yet because in this case minorities like the book, the support goes to the more violent individuals in this case.