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A phobia is an abnormal or morbid fear. I would also contend that a phobia is by its nature irrational. There are things that people should have a rational and normal fear of such as a fear of crashing a car. There is no such thing as leophobia. Fearing dangerous lions and other big cats is not abnormal or irrational. It could be morbid if it stopped you living your life or filled your thoughts when there wasn't the remotest prospect of encountering a lion. It would not be irrational, abnormal or morbid if you were face to face with a lion without protection or a weapon.

In what way is a fear of Islam irrational? Islam has no concept of tolerating non-believers. Tolerance exists only for “people of the book” which means Jews and Christians who get to experience the joy of being treated as second class citizens if they pay a special tax, jizya. Incidentally this second class citizen status is not an Islamic invention, it is based upon the way the Byzantine empire treated Jews. There is no Islamic duty of tolerance towards Hindus, pagans, atheists, hippies, Buddhists or the religiously apathetic, they all fall under the category of kuffār (the plural of kāfir, meaning rejecter or ingrate, often translated as infidel or heathen) who are unbelievers and regarded rather like two-legged vermin. Killing kuffār is not supported in Islam unless they have attacked Muslims or driven them from their homes, in which case the whole community can be regarded as fair game for annihilation.

Islam is very clear about slavery and kuffār are easily made slaves with the full blessing of sharia law and the religion of peaceful surrender. You may be familiar with the racial epithet kaffir or kaffer from South Africa (you can find yourself arrested for aiming this word at a black man in South Africa today) which derives from the same source. Arab traders sold black slaves across Africa and the word kāfir became associated with black people, as a commodity, trade goods. Since there has been no reform to Islam or Sharia law, nor can there ever be, slavery of kuffār has never been denunciated by Islam, nor can it ever be. That's why revealed religions are dangerous. Religion is inherently dangerous, revealed religions can never be civilized. Under Islam liberal and civilized values will always take second place to the written records of hearsay accounts of the prejudices of an uneducated illiterate man who thought it was perfectly acceptable in the eyes of his god to bed his nine year old polygamous wife.

If somebody declares me to be their mortal enemy and declares they have every right to treat me as a slave in what way is it irrational to be fearful of them? It's not paranoia when they really are out to get you. It is not a phobia that makes men go armed in country where they are likely to encounter grizzly or polar bears, it is rational prudence.

It is irrational to be afraid of all Muslims everywhere. The vast majority of Muslims do not intend you or me any harm but accepting that as a fact does not make a deep concern about Islam and especially militant nationalist Islamist and Islamofascist flavours of Islam paranoid or alarmist. I don't need all Muslims to be out to get me for me to be alarmed, a few thousand is quite enough, and there certainly are thousands of them. In the wrong place at the wrong time one can be enough, as Theo van Gogh found out.

Islam has the concept of Jihad as-sayf, holy struggle with the sword, to spread itself. Muhammad himself led wars of expansion in Arabia which led to forcible conversion of kuffār to Islam. This set the precedent, if Muhammad did it how could it be wrong?

There are some nutty Christians out there, especially in the hicker parts of the Bible Belt but these people are not following a mainstream and orthodox reading of their holy books, they are just maniacs with as feeble a grasp on scripture as they have on rationality. The Bible is quite clear, unless you are a Canaanite in the way of the chosen people's sacred lebensraum you do not deserve to be smitten by the godly just because of what you believe or fail to believe. A Christian's duty is to convert the heathen rather than to slaughter them.

If anybody who thinks a bit differently comes to power they don't last long.

In contrast the extremist Muslim who wishes to slaughter the infidels has plenty of scriptural support to back him up, and, rather critically, not much in the way of formal Islamic hierarchy to tell him to stop being so silly.

The Catholic Church in particular is rather well inoculated against out-of-control radicalism because of its hierarchy which naturally tends to see the promotion of conservatively minded leadership. If anybody who thinks a bit differently comes to power they don't last long.

An episcopal system tends to produce conservatism rather than revolutionary leadership, as is also seen in the Orthodox, Anglican/Episcopal and Mormon churches who all have a similar structure of formal religious authority. In Islam there is nothing equivalent to the episcopal system: have beard and turban, will rant. If you can recite big chunks of Islamic scripture and talk a good talk you can pass yourself off as an authority on Islam, which is of course rather similar to what happens in American Protestant churches. If your authority comes along with your gift of preaching directly from God there is nobody around to tell you that you're dead wrong, except perhaps the IRS. And there is plenty of Qur'anic proof available that extremism and violence is what Muhammad and Allah intended.

There have been many voices raised in the west calling for an Islamic reformation and enlightenment. I'm all for an enlightenment but Islam is already well along the road to decentralized power structures which far from promoting people-power, liberalism, socialism or democracy allow the rise of independent and uncontrollable psycho-preachers, which is not good for the prospects of a peaceful world for our children to live in.

There is nothing that outsiders can do to change a religion to make it more to their taste. Even expressing our opinion may make them dig their heels in the harder. By definition our views are wrong, if we were smart we would be on their side, as we are not on their side we must either be stupid or motivated by evil. Most Muslims seem to go for the satanic explanation.

I don't think that Islam can be “repaired” because it isn't broken, it is just distasteful. But it is fundamentally distasteful and fundamentally wrong. It is not possible to redesign something that not only you have no influence over but nobody is in control of. The west trying to redesign Islam is like Greenpeace trying to redesign monster trucks or Sir Alex Ferguson picking the Chelsea team.

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