“How can you be racists to Muslims if they’re not a race?”
Much confusion seems to exist these days about just what the word "racism" denotes. To probably the majority of people familiar with the word (which would include virtually everyone with access to Western media old enough to crawl), racism denotes primarily a prejudice against a group of people based on its skin color or ethnicity. More recently, the term has been extended by some academics and anti-racism activists to encompass systems of advantage based on skin color or ethnicity, even where overt prejudicial attitudes have declined (hence the phrase "racism without racists"). Fincke has raised the important question of whether anti-Muslim prejudice can be termed "racism".
Well, it depends. To the extent that many in the West erroneously conflate Arab or Middle Eastern identity with the religion of Islam, a veneer of anti-Muslim prejudice may well serve as a cover for what is really anti-Arab racism. But hatred of Muslims that extends to all Muslims regardless of race or skin color, as Muslims, cannot be called racism, and more than hatred of women as women can be called racism--though it certainly is an execrable form of bigotry.
That said, Fincke devotes most of his discussion of this issue of the question of whether criticism of Islam's supposed culture of violence, which ignores the history of violence and genocide perpetrated in the name of other religious traditions, can be termed racism. As wrongheaded as it is to criticize another religious tradition of things one's own is equally guilty of, I would again have to say no: it does not constitute prejudice based on ethnicity or skin color. Such cognitive distortions seem to me to be part of the human experience, at the level of the individual, the tribe, the nation, the faith. Virtually all people have the tendency to notice the sins of others while forgetting their own. So common is this phenomenon that psychology has even developed a name--Fundamental Attribution Error--to denote the tendency to ascribe other peoples' or groups' actions to their character while attributing one's own or one's group's actions to one's circumstances. Self-deception is as old as humanity itself. I doubt that some new dawn of irreligion will bring it to an end.
“Almost no Muslims support assaults on conscience so it’s unfair to blame Islam itself for theocracy or terrorism.”
Fincke seems to want to have his cake and eat it too. This is the only conclusion I can reach on his decision to place this meme about Islam and the Charlie Hebdo attacks immediately following the discussion I outlined in the paragraph above. It is wrong for non-Muslims to claim that Islam is inherently violent--except that Fincke trots out polling statistics from varying Muslim countries to show that a large proportion of the world's Muslims support punishment for blasphemy against Islam and even the death penalty for apostasy. It seems too obvious to ask what similar polls of Christians in Albania or Arkansas would say about support for the death penalty for apostasy from Christianity.
The question of whether Islam as a whole can be blamed for assaults on nonbelievers' consciences committed in its name cannot be separated from a question Fincke takes up later in his post--whether there exists any distinction between "true" and "false" believers of a religion. Religion seems to be the only form of voluntaristic identity for which a person's claim to belong or to adhere must be taken at face value. We don't doubt that there are true and false environmentalists, true and false feminists, true and false devotees of the philosopher Friedrich Neitzsche. Yet somehow a widely prevailing anti-religious discourse insists that there are no true and false Christians, true and false Jews, or true and false Islams. Both the Ku Klux Klan and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People have claimed to be true exponents of Americanism (for many years, the Klan even used the slogan "100% Americanism"). Few secularists in America or elsewhere would go so far as to argue that both of their claims must be taken at face value and that all who claim to believe in "the American way of life" (however defined) must have their claim accepted by others. Why a different standard applies when assessing claims of true and false adherence to a religion is beyond my comprehension.
