This fuckhead Purinton in Kansas (a few hours drive from me) just killed someone who is not so different from myself, people who "look like Iranians". Needless to say, I'm feeling my ethnicity particularly strongly at the moment. We've had a guy come on campus hollering about the ten commandments and that we're all sinners, brandishing a machete. He was shot dead. We've had folks storming into ethnic studies classrooms proclaiming that they're gonna "kick all you people out of our country" and that they're going to "shut this down".
And I'm supposed to believe that these folks are just against "ideas"? To believe that religion is somehow not part of our ethnicity? It obviously is. It's deeply tied to ethnic and cultural origins. I'm not playing a racist card, I'm calling it exactly what it is. Rethink yourself, Gurgen, because you're absolutely dead wrong. You don't have to call people names, or even be consciously against someone because of their ethnicity, to hold what are fundamentally racist views. Your 7th-century quip is a pretty transparent shield designed to deflect the very things I'm accusing you of, but Islam, whether you like it or not, is a contemporary religion, and the 7th century only offers some historical perspective (which, strangely, you seem to lack when it comes to more recent events that are far more relevant to the here and now). You can always go back far enough to reduce any argument to the absurd, it's a cheap tactic that doesn't hold any water.
You know, part of the problem is that people insist that they are totally not racist. We'd get much further if we'd all just own up. It's all wrapped up together, we all have prejudices, and instead of trying to rationalize them, you should admit it and work on it. I suffer from it, we all do. For me, growing up with intense antisemitism, I quite easily jump to easy conclusions, but you recognize it, accept it, and you work on it and you try to better yourself.
This all has everything to do with Trump, as he is symptomatic of these kinds of racist rationalizations that plague mainstream politics. It's the false divisions that otf is talking about that serve to justify what is otherwise entirely unjustifiable. It's nothing new, and its unsurprising, but it's infuriating to keep hearing and reading these discussions where for some reason we have to accept these points of view as somehow worthy of debate. They simply aren't.
