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1) Yes. Yes. It's a difficult topic, even when breached with a kafir such as yourself, not to mention a believer.
2) You insist on the premise that the majority of Muslims are innocent. I would insist that the majority of Muslims are good people who are on a spectrum of culpability for the worst episodes brought about by Islam.
3) Muslims are people, Islam is a set of ideas. I am critiquing the people in so much as they adhere to the full set of ideas. Ones which chose to toss out most of the bad parts are less deserving of critique and people who cling to the worst parts are most deserving. So my charge is not "You are a Muslim, therefore you are a bad person", it is "Your adherence to the set of ideas known as Islam, as a group, is not helping you be a good people." So, yeah, the Muslim janitor likely does hold bad ideas, in so far as he adheres to the totality of the set of ideas. And I wish to critique those ideas. I don't vilify the person. So far as they are not nominal Muslims, all do hold bad ideas to varying degrees, as I think it is a bad set of ideas. But they also hold ideas outside of this set of ideas. I am not critiquing the person as a whole, I am critiquing a particular set of ideas. For some, this overlap of who they are as a person and who they are as a Muslim may be near complete, and in these cases I suppose I can be said to be vilifying them.
3a) Islam is a lot of things, you surely are on the money here. But while peace and family values can be derived from it, surely you can think of myriad better sources that don't come tethered to throwing homosexuals off cliffs. Goodwins law and all, but, you know, the Nazis had pretty snappy uniforms and an overall great eye for aesthetics-- but just as the interment of the Japanese Americans doesn't on its own paint an accurate picture of America's actions in the war, in isolation designer uniforms and sweet iconography don't tell us much about Nazism.
4) I'll give it to you that it is very important on a subject like this to use the right words. It can be hard diving into it because while "Islamist" describes a specific subset of Muslims, most people, on the left and right think it's synonymous with "Muslim." So even if you chose your words carefully, you can't fully know how they will be read. Further, because I unfortunately am accompanied in critique of Islam by bigots, from the jump my words will often be read as the words of a bigot, because that's who non-bigots are accustomed to hearing ostensibly similar things from.
For example, even today, but certainly in 1942, if you were to say "well, Germany has some really legitimate grievances regarding the terms forced on them in 1918", you'd be heard as a Nazi sympathizer.
Well, now I've doubled up on Goodwin's law in a single post, so I'm going to sign out for the night.
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