Anti-Islam speech

Ruth at Chaos Theory criticises the “Death to Islam” essay by Lindsay Perigo, and calls for death to hate speech.

At my core I am not a “groupist” and I reject judging anyone on the basis of their religion, race, gender, sexual orientation skin colour (hair colour is okay though!) or nationality. Sometimes one has to make certain judgements on the basis of group membership, but they should be a last resort. People are all individuals.

Therefore any call for action against an entire religion is a bad thing. I have tried to always differentiate between extreme Islam and Islam. Just as there is a difference between Islamism (political Islam) and the religion of Islam.

I do believe the Islamic religion has some rather large flaws (inability to easily modernise), but on a personal level am very respectful of an individual’s religious choices. One nice thing about my involvement with ICANN has been meeting and befriending people from almost every major religion and race.

A few blogs have pointed out at times that the biggest victims of extreme Islam, are moderate Muslims. Certainly in Iraq more Muslims are killed by radicals than non-Muslims. And it must be awful to have your religion so identified with what is an extreme minority. They are a numerically significant minority, but still a minority.