Very disturbing Video from an Islamic conference

Now this video is indeed quite disturbing.

It comes from an Islamic conference during a Q&A session. At one point a chap stands up and asks for the camera to be pointed at the audience, then proceeds to ask a few questions:

“Hands up all who are Muslims”, and most hands go up.

“Now hands if if you agree that gender segregation is a good idea”, all hands go up.

“Now hands up if you agree that death, beheading and stoning is the true highest form of justice”, all hands go up

He then proceeds to make the point that it is not about a few daft clerics, these are not ideas from an extreme fringe, but rather this is the heart of Islam.

Here is some of the associated text …

The Chairman of Islam Net, Fahad Ullah Qureshi asked the audience, and the answer was clear. The attendees were common Sunni Muslims. They did not consider themselves as radicals or extremists. They believed that segregation was the right thing to do, both men and women agreed upon this. They even supported stoning or whatever punishment Islam or prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) commanded for adultery or any other crime. They even believed that these practises should be implemented around the world. Now what does that tell us? Either all Muslims and Islam is radical, or the media is Islamophobic and racist in their presentation of Islam

OK, so lets look at those possibilities again …

“Either all Muslims and Islam is radical” – With open public and popular support for barbaric immoral practises such as “Stoning”, we can clearly see that in this room they are indeed radical, but that does not imply that all Muslims buy into that. There are lots of different sects, some do and some don’t support such ideas. Folks who pay to attend a religious conference run by one specific group will naturally self-select and be folks who support their specific ideas. So no, all Muslins are not radical, and in fact as many as 25% do not even believe the religious stuff at all and are simply cultural. Muslims in general will hold a wide and diverse range of different conflicting beliefs with different degrees of certainty.

“or the media is Islamophobic and racist ” – what utter bullshit, Islam is not a race, and those that criticise daft ideas and silly beliefs are not racist.

If you read the Qur’an, you will find intolerance and hate speech, so it is no surprise to find that those that opt to embrace this stuff literally and not simply as poetical metaphor do indeed start promoting radical beliefs. When you have a pervasive problem with religious fundamentalists from many different sects being intolerant, misogynistic, homophobic, and violent , the problem is not that the fundamentalists have misunderstood the belief, the real problem is that they have actually understood it. The issue is that the core of the belief, when embraced quite literally, is indeed radical.

Bad ideas motivate bad behaviour.