Islamic State Claims Responsibility for Attack in Nice

The fruits of fundamentalist religion

Once again religion, and fundamentalist Islam in particular, is proving that it is a scourge on humanity, as the ISIS claims responsibility for the mass murders in Nice, France on the night of July 14, 2016.   The Washington Post looks at the claim and also the Tunisian citizen who murdered so many, including 10 children.  Like the shooter in Orlando, he seems to have been a loser with a failed marriage and even a petty criminal record but without known ties to ISIS or extremists.  If the facts play out, it will be another example of religion preying on losers and promising them rewards in an afterlife with a mythical, magical friend in the sky.  It's pitiful.  Yet over the centuries religion, including Christianity,  has made such promises over and over again.  Also note that in the body of the piece ISIS references the crusaders who slaughtered Muslims nearly a thousand years ago.  The toxicity of religion simply never ends. Here are highlights from the Post story:

NICE, France — The Islamic State on Saturday claimed responsibility for an attack that killed 84 in this coastal French city, the organization’s news agency said Saturday, as French prosecutors took three more people into custody in connection with the attack.

It remained unclear whether the Islamic State had directed the attack, whether they were taking responsibility for an attack that they may have inspired, or whether they were simply seeking publicity from an attack entirely disconnected from them. The Islamic-State-connected Amaq news agency cited an “insider source” saying that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, “was a soldier of the Islamic State.” The Islamic-State-connected Amaq news agency cited an “insider source” saying that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, “was a soldier of the Islamic State.”  “He executed the operation in response to calls to target citizens of coalition nations that fight the Islamic State,” the news agency wrote.

But the oblique claim of responsibility left open the question of whether Bouhlel had acted alone or had any prior communication with the group, which has also claimed ties to the attacks that struck Paris twice last year and Brussels in March. French authorities have been scrambling to determine whether Bouhlel had a support network in Nice, where he appears to have been living for at least six years. 

Investigators on Saturday detained three additional people in connection with the attack, including one person who is believed to have spoken to Bouhlel by phone minutes before he started his deadly journey down Nice’s Promenade des Anglais,  and an additional man was detained late Friday, according to the office of Paris prosecutor François Molins. Authorities also detained Bouhlel’s ex-wife Friday and were questioning her.

The scale of the carnage wrought by a Bouhlel came into grim focus Friday, with 10 children among the dead and 202 people injured. Among the wounded, 50 were “between life and death,” according to French President François Hollande. 

The attack with a 19-ton rented Renault truck — the third mass casualty assault to hit to France in 18 months — shocked the nation and sparked questions about whether authorities had done enough to safeguard a country that is an obvious target of terrorist groups.

The identities of the victims testified to France’s diverse society and to the international appeal of the tony French Riviera. A vacationing father and his 11-year-old son from Lakeway, Tex. A headscarf-wearing Muslim woman who came to celebrate Bastille Day with her nieces and nephews. A French high school teacher, his wife, daughter and grandson. Others from Russia, Switzerland, Germany, Australia. 

Bouhlel was a Tunisian citizen who had lived in Nice since at least 2010, when he first ran afoul of authorities by engaging in petty theft, according to Molins, the prosecutor. Most recently, he had been given a suspended six-month prison sentence related to a January assault, Molins said. In that case, Bouhlel’s former attorney told the local Nice-Matin newspaper, a motorist complained the truck driver was blocking the road during a delivery. Bouhlel took a swing at the motorist with a wooden beam, causing a deep wound, according to the lawyer’s account. Bouhlel is divorced and has three children, neighbors said. The prosecutor said the suspect’s ex-wife was taken in for questioning. 

Saudi Arabia: A Case Study in the Evil of Religion

For religious fundamentalists of all faiths, one of the most terrifying things is the prospect of having to think for oneself and to reach moral decisions without someone telling you what those decisions should be.  For leaders of such faiths, the thought of the faithful thinking for themselves is even more terrifying because thinking on the part of the faithful threatens their power and control - and often the plush financial benefits that go with such control.  Saudi Arabia is a case study in this phenomenon and demonstrates the manner in which power hungry and self-centered clerics perverted what they allege to be "holy scripture" and turn the faith they claim to be protecting into something far different than what it was originally.  There are, of course, similar parallels with fundamentalist Christianity where the Gospel message has become almost completely ignored as focus is directed to selective passages that further the agenda - and provide salve to the psychosis of - the faith leadership.  In whatever its form, fundamentalist religion is anti-knowledge and anti-human rights.  It deserves no respect and zero deference.  A piece in the New York Times looks at who Islam has become truly evil within Saudi Arabia and how the evil has has been exported.  Here are excerpts:

For most of his adult life, Ahmed Qassim al-Ghamdi worked among the bearded enforcers of Saudi Arabia. He was a dedicated employee of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice — known abroad as the religious police — serving with the front-line troops protecting the Islamic kingdom from Westernization, secularism and anything but the most conservative Islamic practices. . . . But the men of “the Commission,” as Saudis call it, spent most of their time maintaining the puritanical public norms that set Saudi Arabia apart not only from the West, but from most of the Muslim world.

For years, Mr. Ghamdi stuck with the program and was eventually put in charge of the Commission for the region of Mecca, Islam’s holiest city. Then he had a reckoning and began to question the rules. So he turned to the Quran and the stories of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions, considered the exemplars of Islamic conduct. What he found was striking and life altering: There had been plenty of mixing among the first generation of Muslims, and no one had seemed to mind.

[H]e argued that much of what Saudis practiced as religion was in fact Arabian cultural practices that had been mixed up with their faith.  There was no need to close shops for prayer, he said, nor to bar women from driving, as Saudi Arabia does.

It was like a bomb inside the kingdom’s religious establishment, threatening the social order that granted prominence to the sheikhs and made them the arbiters of right and wrong in all aspects of life. He threatened their control.

Mr. Ghamdi’s colleagues at work refused to speak to him. Angry calls poured into his cellphone and anonymous death threats hit him on Twitter. Prominent sheikhs took to the airwaves to denounce him as an ignorant upstart who should be punished, tried — and even tortured.

Inside the kingdom, all other religions are suppressed. Not only are there no public churches, there is no Church’s Chicken. (It is called Texas Chicken in the kingdom.) When asked about this, Saudis deny that this reflects intolerance. They compare their country to the Vatican, saying it is a unique place for Muslims, with its own rules.

Officials I spoke with were upset by the kingdom’s increasingly troubled reputation abroad and said over and over that they supported “moderate Islam.”

But what exactly did they mean by “moderate Islam”? Unpacking that term made it clear how wide the values gap is between Saudi Arabia and its American ally. The kingdom’s “moderate Islam” publicly beheads criminals, punishes apostates and prevents women from traveling abroad without the permission of a male “guardian.”  Don’t even ask about gay rights.

The Saudi royal family is terrified that the jihadist fervor inflaming the region will catch fire at home and threaten its control. So it has marshaled the state’s religious apparatus to condemn the jihadists and proclaim the religious duty of obedience to the rulers.

In the early 18th century, Sheikh Mohammed ibn Abdul-Wahhab called for a religious reformation in central Arabia. Feeling that Islam had been corrupted by practices like the veneration of saints and tombs, he called for the stripping away of “innovations” and the return to what he considered the pure religion.

He formed an alliance with a chieftain named Mohammed ibn Saud that has underpinned the area’s history ever since. Then the Saud family assumed political leadership while Sheikh Abdul-Wahhab and his descendants gave legitimacy to their rule and managed religious affairs.

That mix proved potent among the warring Arabian tribes, as Wahhabi clerics provided justification for military conquest in some cases: Those who resisted the House of Saud were not just enemies, but infidels who deserved the sword.

Fast forward to 2016, and the main players have transformed because of time and oil wealth. The royal family has grown from a group of scrappy desert dwellers into a sprawling clan awash in palaces and private jets. The Wahhabi establishment has evolved from a puritan reform movement into a bloated state bureaucracy.

It consists of universities that churn out graduates trained in religious disciplines; a legal system in which judges apply Shariah law; a council of top clerics who advise the king; a network of offices that dispense fatwas, or religious opinions; a force of religious police who monitor public behavior; and tens of thousands of mosque imams who can be tapped to deliver the government’s message from the pulpit.

And there are fatwas that arm extremists with religious justification. There is one fatwa, still available in English on a government website and signed by the previous grand mufti, that states, “Whoever refuses to follow the straight path deserves to be killed or enslaved in order to establish justice, maintain security and peace and safeguard lives, honor and property.”

It goes on: “Slavery in Islam is like a purifying machine or sauna in which those who are captured enter to wash off their dirt and then they come out clean, pure and safe, from another door.”

If the clerical attacks on Mr. Ghamdi were loud, the blowback from society was more painful. His tribe issued a statement, disowning him and calling him “troubled and confused.” His cellphone rang day and night with callers shouting at him. He came home to find graffiti on the wall of his house. And a group of men showed up at his door, demanding to “mix” with the family’s women. His sons — he has nine children — called the police.

Mr. Ghamdi had not broken any laws and never faced legal action. But in Saudi Arabia’s close-knit society, the attacks echoed through his family. The relatives of his eldest son’s fiancée called off their wedding, not wanting to associate their family with his.

But there is a split in society between the conservatives who want to maintain what they consider the kingdom’s pure Islamic identity and the liberals (in the Saudi context) who want more personal freedoms. Liberals make cases like Mr. Ghamdi’s all the time. But sheikhs don’t, which is why he was branded a traitor.

“We sent our message, and the goal was not for us to keep appearing and to get famous,” she said. “It was to send a message to society that religion is not customs and traditions. Religion is something else.”
 

Why Religious Fundamentalists Are Sex Obsessed

There's a reason that religious fundamentalists of both the Christian and Islamic variety share a common obsession with sex.  It is all about control.  Control of people's lives and, at least in the minds of the theocrats, control of people's thoughts.  Thoughts that might lead the populous to over throw the theocrats' influence and control, especially political control.   In Iran, the religious extremist government is waging a war against women who fail to wear head covers.  While utterly different on the surface from the American Christofascists' war on LGBT citizens, the root motivation is the same: power and control - and thought control so that the masses don't begin to release that they are being sold a bunch of fairy tales that help keep their religious elite in power.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at both the sex obsession of Iran's rulers and how it translates to American Christofascists.  Here are excerpts:

Welcome to Operation Spider 2. Yes, Iran’s War Against Hair even has a code name. In a sting led by no less significant a unit than Iran’s cybercrimes division, eight other models were arrested and charged with “promoting western promiscuity.” State prosecutor for cybercrimes Javad Babaei confirmed that his unit was focused on Instagram and is concerned with “sterilizing popular cyberspaces.” Many of the country’s leading models have reportedly suffered this clampdown. They are accused of promoting "immoral and un-Islamic culture and promiscuity.”

As moderate political forces continue to gain ground in Iran’s educated city centers, establishment clampdowns against “Western promiscuity” are becoming more visible, and more desperate. 

A desire to restrict any of these voices is a desire to control. When enforced on others, religion becomes nothing but a tool of power and control. Sexuality, in particular, obsesses male theocrats more so than any other topic. 

Whether in Iran and Saudi Arabia, where women’s dress is government enforced, or in Syria and Afghanistan, where Islamist terrorists seek to enforce it, or across Muslim-majority nations more generally, sexual expression has fast become a dividing line for fundamentalists harboring presumptuous assumptions about a “pure” East and a “promiscuous” West. 

Oddly, hundreds of years ago it was the opposite. A Europe in the Dark Ages, plagued by the Inquisition and conflicts caused by religious intolerance, placed a similar premium on sexuality. Back then, it was the East that European Orientalists fetishized as overly “promiscuous,” while the West valued its prudishness. The one common factor is a correlation between the rise of theocratic demands anywhere, and restrictions on sexuality.

In this way, sexuality has become the axis upon which enlightened values and progress have pivoted between nations. Sexual freedoms have become a litmus test between open societies and closed ones. The drug that dogmatic ideologues are usually addicted to is control, and the thirst for control almost always manifests itself in sexual control. This is why the subject of sex among women, gays and “unmarried” youth fascinates extremists of all bents. And it is why—regardless of our gender or sexual orientation—the struggle against controlling sexuality should preoccupy us all. 

Serial Killing in the Name of God

I nearly did a post based on a spoof in Patheos that pretended that Iceland had declared Christianity to be a public health hazard.  Sadly, while I believe the premise of the spoof piece to be true, the scope is too limited.  It should apply to all religion, or certainly the conservative variety.  As a piece in The Daily Beast reports, in Bangladesh, Islamic fundamentalists are on a killing spree murdering free thinkers, the educated and, naturally those who are LGBT and/or support LGBT rights.  Anyone who threatens compliance with their interpretation of the ravings of a man who would nowadays likely be declared to be mentally ill and certainly not be revered.  Modern knowledge and intellect are the enemies of not just American Christofascists, but their similarly hate and fear filled cousins who cling to Islam and prefer a revival of a Medieval mindset rather than let go of the myths they cling to.  Here are article highlights:

There really is no other way to put this. Free thinkers in Bangladesh are being serially hacked to death in their homes. An infamous hit list appeared in 2013 naming 84 “atheist bloggers.” By the end of 2015 there had been seven such murder sacross the country, and, tragically, this past week alone claimed three more victims.

Rezaul Karim Siddique, a professor of English at Rajshahi University in the country’s northwest, was set upon outside his house as he left for work. Siddique founded a literary magazine called Kamolgandhar and wanted to start a music school in his village as a way to involve his students in extra-curricular activities. But instead he died where he fell, succumbing to severe wounds after he was hacked in the back of the neck by cowards on a passing motorbike.

Only two days later, U.S. embassy employee Xulhaz Mannan, who was one of Bangladesh’s top gay-rights activists and editor of the country’s only LGBT magazine,Roopbaan, was murdered by machete in his home. His friend, another gay rights activist Tanay Mojumdar was also killed. Xulhaz and Tanay were behind the annual “Rainbow Rally,” held April 14 on the Bengali New Year.

The so-called “Islamic State in Bangladesh” has claimed responsibilityfor the killing of Professor Siddique. Its media mouthpiece, called Amaq, stated ISIS fighters “assassinated a university professor for calling to atheism in the city of Rajshahi in Bangladesh.”

And despite the Bangladeshi government’s rejection of this claim, ISIS English-language magazine Dabiq carried an interview earlier this month with their purported leader in Bangladesh, Abu Ibrahim al-Hanif, who claimed that the country had become its base of operations in South Asia.

Whether or not ISIS was behind this attack is secondary. The effect is the same. Jihadist terrorists are systematically hunting down leading free thinkers in Bangladesh—one by one—and hacking them to death.

It is “open season” on atheists in Bangladesh.

And though Professor Siddique’s daughter, Rizwana Hasin, has said that her father was not in fact an atheist, among jihadists that definition is incredibly broad.

Anyone who advocates liberal secularism, free inquiry, arts and culture, is considered an “atheist” or “apostate.” Anyone who “supports” or “sides” with atheists, supports freedom of religion as well as from religion, and anyone who maintains the primacy of free speech, including and especially the human right to “blaspheme,” is deemed an atheist, whether they declare themselves to be or not.

So beleaguered is this minority that you can be put to death for atheism in no less than 13 countries around the world. In 39 countries the law mandates a prison sentence for blasphemy, and six of these are Western countries.

Saudi Arabia [America's false ally] has even declared being an atheist a terrorist offense. Nobel Prize Nominee and Amnesty International Prisoner of Conscience Raif Badawi still languishes in jail there “accused” of atheism.

Meanwhile Bangladesh’s best-known blogger, Imran Sarker—who led major secular protests in Dhaka against Islamist leaders in 2013—said that he had received a death threat on Sunday from a U.K. number saying he would be killed “very soon.”

By visibly killing off dissenters in such a public way, extremists seek to scare us all into silence. The targeting starts with atheists and “blasphemers,” but almost always moves on to the sexually diverse, liberals, secularists, and minority sects—Muslim or otherwise—that rely on such pluralism to flourish.

The killers’ aim is to elicit our fearful compliance, like Charb’s super-surveillance camera. Those who murder in the name of the Master of the Universe lay claim to what came before life, what comes during life and what is to come after life.

No totalitarianism can be more total than that claimed in God’s name. This is why no resistance is more urgent than that waged to protect the right to our own individual conscience. For ISIS, we are all atheists.

Make no mistake, there are right wing Christians who would be only to happy to engage in similar bloodshed - e.g., "preachers" who call for the execution of gays.  Moreover, if one knows history, Christianity has left a huge trail of blood of those murdered for being "heretics" or non-believer.  Religion is a curse on mankind.  

The Civilized and the Damned

Since the terror attacks in Paris a week ago, the Republican presidential candidates have been in overdrive providing propaganda materials to the extremists of ISIS who seek to demonstrate that the West is at war against Islam as a whole rather than the blood thirsty savages of ISIS.  Ted Cruz, Donald Trump (who proposed making Muslims in America wear ID badges akin to Jews in Nazi Germany), Chris Christie and Marco Rubio have provided a cavalcade of video clips and sound bites that must be viewed as gifts by the ISIS hate merchants.  Perhaps most ironic - or, perhaps sick is a better description - is that these Republicans are making their foul statements as they pander to the element base of the GOP that like ISIS cites an supposed holy book to justify hate and misogyny.  Indeed, the Christofascists hate the same things as ISIS: gays, women's equality, science and knowledge, independent thought, and modernity itself.  A piece in the New York Times looks at how fundamentalist religion is the enemy of human rights and  the values of The Enlightenment that built the positive aspects of western civilization:

Earlier this year, before most of us started paying close attention, the death cult of the Islamic State released a video of two men being thrown from the rooftop of a building. They were executed before an approving mob for the crime of being gay — part of a systematic campaign to hunt down and exterminate suspected homosexuals.

At about the same time, a woman accused of committing adultery was stoned to death, an occurrence that rarely draws a second look inside the psychopathic bubble of the Islamic State. For that is a place of brutal, ritualistic rape of children, a place that released a manual explaining that it is permissible, under religious law, to “have intercourse with a female slave who hasn’t reached puberty.” Allah would approve, it claimed.

After this confederacy of killers took credit for the slaughter of innocents in Paris, its reasons were in keeping with the anti-humanist hatred at the core of its beliefs.

The massacre proved Voltaire’s observation — “those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

So when somebody says we’re in the midst of a clash of civilizations — as Senator Marco Rubio did in the days of hysteria following the Paris attack — it’s an insult to the civilized world. Framing it that way gives the barbarians of the Islamic State a narrative for the toxicants they spread in the guise of religion. The Islamic State is not, by any stretch, a civilization.

Civilization is boulevards of people sipping wine in cafes, or listening to secular music — both crimes in Islamic State-controlled territory. “They were trying to kill our very culture,” a young woman in Paris told my colleague Liz Alderman in The Times. “They will not succeed.”

Civilization is defiance, embodied in the words of President François Hollande, directed at people who hate all that France stands for. “The terrorists want to erase everything: culture, youth, life, and also history and memory,” he said. “We will not yield to terrorism by suspending our way of life.”

But that’s what some politicians in the United States are pushing for — discarding the honorable in a tremor of fear.

Civilization does not close its door to an orphaned toddler looking to start a new life in the United States, as Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has proposed. Civilization does not apply a religious test to victims of religious fanaticism, as Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, wants to do. Only those who pray to Jesus, in his plan, would be allowed to resettle the United States. . . . saying non-Christians are unworthy of being given shelter in our country only feeds an Islamic State recruitment pitch.

A bigger fear than a homeless victim of a savage war is a homegrown crazy with an assault rifle. If only the two-year vetting process now applied to those seeking refuge were used to screen unstable Americans purchasing guns at the mall.

A great crisis can act as a valuable filter, a winnowing that separates true leaders from all the rest, the courageous from the cowards. Hollande, who has been impressive beyond expectations, has also called out the clash-of-worlds fear-mongers.

“We are not committed to a war of civilizations, because these assassins don’t represent any civilization,” he said. “We are at war against terrorism, jihadism, which threatens the whole world.”

The world’s worst terrorists are Muslim in name, and Muslim in warped practice, with Muslims as most of their victims. That truth should not be denied. They cite a holy book to do horrible things. They are damned today by all but a handful of nations. And they are doomed, as all hate ideologies eventually are, because civilization is more sustainable than a cult that worships suicide.

Hollande Blames ISIS for ‘Act of War’ on Paris

With ISIS now claiming responsibility for the horrific attacks in Paris yesterday that so far have taken 127 lives, in my view, it is time to treat the foul members of ISIS for what they are: savage rabid animals that need to be exterminated just like a rabid dog.  It is also time to admit that religion - and I mean ALL religion - is ultimately a great evil and that the "deeply religious" no matter their faith tradition suffer from deep and often dangerous psychological issues.  Nothing else other than psychological illness explains clinging to religious traditions that trace back to ignorant unknown authors or, in the case of "The Prophet" a likely psychotic.  It will be easy for many on the far right to attempt to single out Islam as the problem, yet just last weekend we had GOP presidential nominees, including Ted Cruz, attending a hate fest where the execution of gays was promoted repeatedly.  ISIS is an evil, but so is fundamentalist Christianity and both religious factions are rebelling against modernity itself which threatens their increasingly unsustainable fairy tale belief systems.   The New York Times looks at the horrible events in Paris.  Here are excerpts:

President François Hollande called the terrorist attacks that killed 127 people in Paris on Friday night an “act of war,” and blamed the slaughter on the Islamic State.

“It is an act of war that was committed by a terrorist army, a jihadist army, Daesh, against France,” Mr. Hollande said from the Élysée Palace, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “It is an act of war that was prepared, organized and planned from abroad, with complicity from the inside, which the investigation will help establish.”

The Islamic State on Saturday claimed responsibility for the attacks, calling them “miracles” in a statement released by one of its publications and distributed on Twitter — a claim that could not be independently verified.

The authorities continued to look for possible accomplices of the eight attackers known so far, all of whom died on Friday: seven by detonating suicide bombs and one in a shootout with the police at a concert hall, the Bataclan, where gunmen methodically killed at least 80 people.

Dozens of others died in apparently coordinated attacks outside the Stade de France, where the French and German soccer teams were playing an exhibition match, and four other restaurants and bars in the city. Nearly 200 others were wounded, at least 80 of them in critical condition, French television reported.

Witnesses on French television said the scene at the concert hall, which can seat as many as 1,500 people, was a massacre, describing how gunmen with automatic weapons shot bursts of bullets into the crowd.  “What you are doing in Syria, you are going to pay for it now,” one of the gunmen shouted, a witness said.

The main shooting broke out at around 9 p.m. at the Bataclan, where the American rock band Eagles of Death Metal was among those playing.  A witness told BFM television that he heard rounds of automatic rifle fire and someone shouting “Allahu akbar!” at the Bataclan.

Unlike the attacks against Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in January, terrorism experts said, the attacks on the targets on Friday had no apparent rationale. Instead, assailants appeared to strike at random in hip neighborhoods on a Friday night when many people would be starting to enjoy the weekend.

“It’s a Friday night, and there’s a lot of people out, a lot of tourists out,” said a senior European counterterrorism official. “If you want maximum exposure, you do it like this, in the dark, when it’s scarier and more difficult for police to act.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in my view, summed up what this is really all about:

“Those who we mourn were murdered in front of cafes, in restaurants, in a concert hall or on the open street. They wanted to live the life of free people in a city that celebrates life,” . . . . . “And they met with murderers who hate this life of freedom.”

Contrast Merkel's statement with that in the purported ISIS statement:

“Today brothers from all across the world set foot in Gaul and remind the kaffir (disbelievers) in dur Al Kuffr (the land of disbelievers) that we live beside you,”

Why Paris?   Because it symbolizes everything that fundamentalist Islam (and Christianity) is not and that terrifies the fundamentalist religious extremists of both religions.  Paris is an educated, secular, multi-racial city where logic and enlightenment are respected and the ignorance of religion is increasingly disregarded and headed toward the trash heap of history where it belongs.  It is the antithesis of everything ISIS stands for, including the embrace of Medieval religious fundamentalism.  P.S. I am part French, so this is personal to me for that reason as well.

Religious Extremeist Injures Six at Jerusalem Gay Pride

UPDATED:17 year old Shira Banki (pictured above) has died from the wounds inflicted on her by right wing orthodox extremist Yishai Schlissel.  Take a good look.  Death, hate and bigotry are the fruits of fundamentalist religion.  Personally, I would like to see Schlissel drawn and quartered.  Yes, it is a barbaric punishment, but a message needs to be sent to members of fundamentalist religions of all faiths that modern societies will not tolerate their hate and poison and that they will be dealt with in the most brutal and forceful ways possible.  Fundamentalism of every stripe is a poison that needs to be eradicated from the face of the earth.

American Christofascists do not have a monopoly on anti-gay hate and animus.  This week at Jerusalem's gay pride event, Yishai Schlissel, a knife wielding ultra-Orthodox Jew, stab six people leaving a sixteen year old girl still in critical condition.  The photos above via Huffington Post show some of the carnage and Schlissel in custody.  Take a good look.  This is the true face of conservative religion.  Hate and violence, and often death.   Conservative, fundamentalist religion, be it Christian, Jewish or Muslim, is a pestilence that deserves no respect or deference in the modern world.   Here are more details from Huffington Post:

An anti-gay ultra-Orthodox extremist suspected of stabbing revelers at Jerusalem's Gay Pride Parade appeared in court on Friday and the judge ordered that he remain in custody.

The suspected attacker, Yishai Schlissel, was arrested at the pride parade the previous day, after he brandished a knife and stabbed six people. The court extended his arrest by 12 days as the investigation against him continues, police spokeswoman Luba Samri said.

Schlissel was convicted of a similar attack that wounded several people at a gay pride parade in Jerusalem in 2005. Schlissel had been released from prison just three weeks ago after serving his sentence. 

Israeli hospital officials said Friday that a 16-year-old girl remained in critical condition after the attack, with wounds to her chest and shoulder. Three others are in hospital but their conditions are not life threatening, while the remaining two have been discharged, hospital officials said.

The Gay Pride Parade was proceeding as planned with party music, Israeli flags and rainbow-clad marchers wending their way through central Jerusalem's barricaded streets, under a heavy police presence, when the attacker entered the throng of people. Within seconds he raised a knife and began stabbing people in the back.

Police pounced on him and arrested him. The crowd's carefree cheers suddenly gave way to screams.

A world without fundamentalist religion - perhaps without religion entirely - would be a far better world.  It's telling that everyone of the death threats I have receive via comments on this blog (I never publish their venom) have come from "godly Christians."

Death and Sadness - The True Fruits of Fundamentalist Religion

Almost daily we hear of horrors and brutal atrocities committed by ISIS in the Middle East and other locations where its foul form of fundamentalist Islam brings death and injury to others merely trying to lead their lives and find some degree of happiness.  But fundamentalist religion, both Christian and Muslim, have a less visible wake of death and unhappiness in their wake.  It takes many forms that range from gays living unhappy lives in the closet because of deep family homophobia, women remaining with abusive foul husbands because their "faith" tells them to be subservient wives, ignorance embracing bigots who cling to myths and fairy tales who mistreat others.  The permutations are endless.  And then there are those driven to suicide by family rejection and parents/family who care more for the words of delusional maniacs and/or nomadic goat herders than for their own children.   A piece in The Guardian looks at a tragically lost life thanks to family rejection (read the entire piece - it will make your blood boil and want to make a donation to this foundation).  Here are excerpts:

In the spring of last year, Matthew Ogston and Nazim Mahmood moved into their dream home. The apartment, on the top floor of a mansion block in north-west London, offered stunning panoramic views of London. Nazim was a doctor who ran three London clinics, Matthew a web designer.

The life Nazim enjoyed seemed a world away from the working-class traditional Muslim community in which he had been raised. It was that world – conservative and closed – that he had left behind for a new life. In their first week in the flat, the two men stood on the balcony as London glittered in front of them. Matthew looked at Nazim and said, “Darling, I think we’ve finally made it.” They both smiled. Four months later, Nazim jumped off the edge of that same balcony to his death. He was 34.

On the rare occasions they [Nazim's family] visited London, Matthew had to spend the night in a bed and breakfast. “We had to ‘de-gay’ the house,” says Matthew. “That meant putting pictures of Kylie into the cupboard, Cher too – and any photo or memento that suggested a relationship had to go.”

Nazim didn’t like to talk about his family. He had left Birmingham and felt that to talk about pain or sadness or guilt would have infected the new life they had created in London – he was resigned to playing the dutiful Muslim boy to his family in Birmingham when, in fact, he was a happily gay man in London.

The following year, Matthew came out to his parents, who were loving and accepting of both of them, but for Nazim, whose family were culturally conservative Muslims, the only strategy was to keep the solid borderlines between the old life in Birmingham and the new life in London.

On the last Saturday of July 2014, Nazim and Matthew drove north to Birmingham. It was a strange time: a close friend had died and they had to be back in London on the Monday for his memorial service. It was also the weekend of Eid, the Muslim festival.

When he arrived, Nazim’s family were annoyed that he was late for the Eid celebrations and planned to leave early for the memorial. Things were said – Matthew does not know what, exactly – that left Nazim distraught. “I am a good person,” Nazim said, weeping. “Why can’t people accept me for who I am?”

“Is it because you like men?” his mother had asked him, out of the blue. And Nazim, who had spent years hiding and pretending, to protect his relationship with Matthew, did something he had never expected to do: on the spur of the moment, he told them everything.

Nazim was in a state of shock as he drove back to London. It emerged at the inquest in December 2014 that he had told his mother he was gay and had been in a relationship with a man for 13 years, and planned to marry him. Her response was to tell Nazim to consult a psychiatrist with a view to being “cured”.

The couple went to the service for their dead friend that evening and a second ceremony the following day, but Matthew recalls Nazim being distant, but trying to put on a brave face. On Tuesday evening, Nazim helped with paperwork for the new job Matthew would start the following morning and then they retired to bed.

In the office next day, Matthew got a text from his sister, saying simply “call me now”. It was early evening on Wednesday 30 July. He rang her and was told to go home immediately; she would not say why. It couldn’t be Nazim – they had talked at lunchtime and Nazim had called again at just after 3pm and then twice after 5pm, but it was Matthew’s first day in a new office and he had been too busy in meetings to take the calls, though he had tried to call Nazim back. 

“I was pushing people out of the way and as I came round the corner I saw flashing blue lights and police cordon tape, then I saw this red blanket on the floor covering something up.”  He began to scream. He was bundled into a police car as friends started to show up, faces grey with shock.

Matthew arrived at Handsworth cemetery early on the day of Nazim’s funeral. . . .  With less than half an hour to go, nobody else had arrived and Matthew began to worry. In the distance he could see a burial taking place. “I went over and asked one of the officials where Nazim was being buried,” he said. “She said, ‘I’m really sorry – they have already buried him.’” . . . . Nazim’s family had apparently given him the wrong time for the funeral.

He is convinced that Nazim spoke to him, telling him to set up a foundation to help other young gay men and women driven to depression because of religious homophobia. He had a reason to go on at last.  The Naz and Matt Foundation was announced at a special service held in London for Nazim, two weeks after his funeral.

Who does Matthew blame for Nazim’s death? “I blame a community that is so closed minded to allow these bigoted views that make families believe that their honour is more important than loving their children,” he says. “The respect and honour of the family is more important than the happiness of the children they gave birth to. How sick is that?”

The purpose of the Naz and Matt Foundation is to confront and challenge these views. 

Make a donation to this important work here.   Meanwhile, never forget that the fruits of fundamentalist religion of every stripe is hate, division, mistreatment of others and death.  Fundamentalist religion needs to be eradicated from the face of the planet.  It is a pervasive evil.

Christian Activist Files California Ballot Measure For Executing All Homosexuals

While the "godly folk" have been going to great lengths to condemn the atrocities being committed by ISIS and argued that Christianity has never led to such horrors, one Christofacist activist in California has helped to underscore that the differences between ISIS and Christofascists in reality is only a matter of to what degree they will engage in widespread violence and murder.  When it comes to extremist dogma and putting unreasoning faith in the writings of ignorant individuals (or, in the case of Mohammed, someone who belonged in a mental ward), there really is little difference otherwise.  Here are highlights from the New Civil Rights Movement:

A Christian activist would like to see all gay people in California executed by firing squad, just so the rest of the citizenry can avoid having to endure God's "wrath." Matthew McLaughlin last week paid $200 to file a ballot initiative with the Attorney General in Sacramento that proposes his Sodomite Suppression Act become law.

McLaughlin calls homosexual sex "buggery," and "sodomy," and labels it "a monstrous evil that Almighty God, giver of freedom and liberty, commands us to suppress on pain of our utter destruction even as he overthrew Sodom and Gomorrha [sic]."

He says that it's "better" that non-gay Californians kill the gays rather than have to suffer God's punishment.

"Seeing that it is better that offenders should die rather than that all of us should be killed by God's just wrath against us for the folly of tolerating-wickedness in our midst, the People of California wisely command, in the fear of God, that any person who willingly touches another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual gratification be put to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method."

McLaughlin does not state if minors – say, high school students – would be treated as adults and included in the execution mandate.

And McLaughlin's bill would make it illegal for any gay person to hold public office, be employed by the state, or be granted any benefits, such as welfare, social security, or use any public assets, such as roads.

McLaughlin will have to get 365,000 legitimate California residents to sign up to support the Sodomite Suppression Act in order for it to move forward.

Wonkette has done its research and says that McLaughlin is likely the same person who in 2004 attempted to get the Bible in curriculum studies in public schools, an effort that would probably have been unconstitutional and cost the state about $200 million.

It's not without reason that I refer to folks like McLaughlin as the Christian Taliban.  Perhaps the term needs to be updated to the "Christian ISIS."

What ISIS Really Wants

Barack Obama and European leaders among others continue to dance around the issue of facing the reality that ISIS is driven ultimately by a horrific form of Islam.  And while millions of Muslim disagree with its goals and tactics, including genocide and brutal murders, to say it does not represent Islam is like claiming that hate-filled American Christofascists do not represent Christianity.  In both groups the root of their hate - and, in my view, one could say mental illness - traces right back to religion.  Yes, religion, one of the most perverse forces throughout history.  Both groups want to force their beliefs on all and the only difference is the level of violence they are willing to use to achieve their desired theocracy.  A lengthy and detailed piece in The Atlantic makes the case that cancer like form of Islam is at the heart of ISIS' agenda.  Here are excerpts:

What is the Islamic State? Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers.

Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has spoken on camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State’s countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the caliphate’s supporters have toiled mightily to make their project knowable. We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.

The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the West know its enemy and predict its behavior.

We have misunderstood the nature of the Islamic State in at least two ways. First, we tend to see jihadism as monolithic, and to apply the logic of al‑Qaeda to an organization that has decisively eclipsed it. The Islamic State supporters I spoke with still refer to Osama bin Laden as “Sheikh Osama,” a title of honor. But jihadism has evolved since al-Qaeda’s heyday, from about 1998 to 2003, and many jihadists disdain the group’s priorities and current leadership.

Bin Laden viewed his terrorism as a prologue to a caliphate he did not expect to see in his lifetime. His organization was flexible, operating as a geographically diffuse network of autonomous cells.  The Islamic State, by contrast, requires territory to remain legitimate, and a top-down structure to rule it. (Its bureaucracy is divided into civil and military arms, and its territory into provinces.)

We are misled in a second way, by a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature. 

There is a temptation to rehearse this observation—that jihadists are modern secular people, with modern political concerns, wearing medieval religious disguise—and make it fit the Islamic State. In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.

The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.

Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it.

Denying the holiness of the Koran or the prophecies of Muhammad is straightforward apostasy. But Zarqawi and the state he spawned take the position that many other acts can remove a Muslim from Islam. These include, in certain cases, selling alcohol or drugs, wearing Western clothes or shaving one’s beard, voting in an election—even for a Muslim candidate—and being lax about calling other people apostates. Being a Shiite, as most Iraqi Arabs are, meets the standard as well, because the Islamic State regards Shiism as innovation, and to innovate on the Koran is to deny its initial perfection. . . . That means roughly 200 million Shia are marked for death. So too are the heads of state of every Muslim country, who have elevated man-made law above Sharia by running for office or enforcing laws not made by God. 

Following takfiri doctrine, the Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people. The lack of objective reporting from its territory makes the true extent of the slaughter unknowable, but social-media posts from the region suggest that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass executions every few weeks. Muslim “apostates” are the most common victims. 

Centuries have passed since the wars of religion ceased in Europe, and since men stopped dying in large numbers because of arcane theological disputes. Hence, perhaps, the incredulity and denial with which Westerners have greeted news of the theology and practices of the Islamic State. Many refuse to believe that this group is as devout as it claims to be, or as backward-looking or apocalyptic as its actions and statements suggest.

[T]he exclusion of ideology reflects another kind of Western bias: that if religious ideology doesn’t matter much in Washington or Berlin, surely it must be equally irrelevant in Raqqa or Mosul. When a masked executioner says Allahu akbar while beheading an apostate, sometimes he’s doing so for religious reasons.

Many mainstream Muslim organizations have gone so far as to say the Islamic State is, in fact, un-Islamic. It is, of course, reassuring to know that the vast majority of Muslims have zero interest in replacing Hollywood movies with public executions as evening entertainment. But Muslims who call the Islamic State un-Islamic are typically, as the Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel, the leading expert on the group’s theology, told me, “embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion” that neglects “what their religion has historically and legally required.” Many denials of the Islamic State’s religious nature, he said, are rooted in an “interfaith-Christian-nonsense tradition.”

According to Haykel, the ranks of the Islamic State are deeply infused with religious vigor. Koranic quotations are ubiquitous. “Even the foot soldiers spout this stuff constantly,” Haykel said. “They mug for their cameras and repeat their basic doctrines in formulaic fashion, and they do it all the time.” He regards the claim that the Islamic State has distorted the texts of Islam as preposterous, sustainable only through willful ignorance.

In Haykel’s estimation, the fighters of the Islamic State are authentic throwbacks to early Islam and are faithfully reproducing its norms of war. This behavior includes a number of practices that modern Muslims tend to prefer not to acknowledge as integral to their sacred texts. “Slavery, crucifixion, and beheadings are not something that freakish [jihadists] are cherry-picking from the medieval tradition,” Haykel said. Islamic State fighters “are smack in the middle of the medieval tradition and are bringing it wholesale into the present day.”

The Islamic State differs from nearly every other current jihadist movement in believing that it is written into God’s script as a central character. It is in this casting that the Islamic State is most boldly distinctive from its predecessors, and clearest in the religious nature of its mission.

The biggest proponent of an American invasion is the Islamic State itself. The provocative videos, in which a black-hooded executioner addresses President Obama by name, are clearly made to draw America into the fight. An invasion would be a huge propaganda victory for jihadists worldwide: irrespective of whether they have given baya’a to the caliph, they all believe that the United States wants to embark on a modern-day Crusade and kill Muslims. Yet another invasion and occupation would confirm that suspicion, and bolster recruitment.

There is much more and none of it encouraging.  ISIS underscores the dangers of fundamentalist belief based on myths and fairy tales or the writings of someone - i.e., the "Prophet" - who nowadays would be permanently residing in a mental ward.  Fundamentalist religion whether Christian or Muslim is evil.  It needs to be eradicated from the Earth.

 

Conservative Christianity’s Effect on the Mind

It's a times a question of which came first: mental illness or extreme conservative Christian beliefs.  Stated another way, does one have to be crazy to fall into conservative Christianity's grips or does becoming immersed in conservative Christian dogma make you crazy.  A new study suggest that it may be the latter and that conservative Christianity does alter the mind, and not for the better.  Some of the symptoms?  Anxiety and paranoia among others.  Here are lengthy excerpts from a piece in Salon:

If a former believer says that Christianity made her depressed, obsessive, or post-traumatic, she is likely to be dismissed as an exaggerator. She might describe panic attacks about the rapture; moods that swung from ecstasy about God’s overwhelming love to suicidal self-loathing about repeated sins; or an obsession with sexual purity.

A symptom like one of these clearly has a religious component, yet many people instinctively blame the victim. They will say that the wounded former believer was prone to anxiety or depression or obsession in the first place—that his Christianity somehow got corrupted by his predisposition to psychological problems. Or they will say that he wasn’t a real Christian. If only he had prayed in faith believing or loved God with all his heart, soul and mind, if only he had really been saved—then he would have experienced the peace that passes all understanding.

But the reality is far more complex. It is true that symptoms like depression or panic attacks most often strike those of us who are vulnerable, perhaps because of genetics or perhaps because situational stressors have worn us down. But certain aspects of Christian beliefs and Christian living also can create those stressors, even setting up multigenerational patterns of abuse, trauma, and self-abuse. Also, over time some religious beliefs can create habitual thought patterns that actually alter brain function, making it difficult for people to heal or grow.

[W]e focus on the variants of Christianity that are based on a literal interpretation of the Bible. These include Evangelical and fundamentalist churches, the Church of Latter Day Saints, and other conservative sects. These groups share the characteristics of requiring conformity for membership, a view that humans need salvation, and a focus on the spiritual world as superior to the natural world.

Religion Exploits Normal Human Mental Processes.  To understand the power of religion, it is helpful to understand a bit about the structure of the human mind. Much of our mental activity has little to do with rationality and is utterly inaccessible to the conscious mind. The preferences, intentions and decisions that shape our lives are in turn shaped by memories and associations that can get laid down before we even develop the capacity for rational analysis. . . . Religion derives its power in large part because it shapes these unconscious processes: the frames, metaphors, intuitions and emotions that operate before we even have a chance at conscious thought.

Some Religious Beliefs and Practices are More Harmful Than Others.  When it comes to psychological damage, certain religious beliefs and practices are reliably more toxic than others. . . .
identifies three characteristics of religious groups that are particularly prone to harming children. Clinical work with reclaimers, that is, people who are reclaiming their lives and in recovery from toxic religion, suggests that these same qualities put adults at risk, along with a particular set of manipulations found in fundamentalist Christian churches and biblical literalism.

1) Authoritarianism, creates a rigid power hierarchy and demands unquestioning obedience. . . . Authoritarian Christian sects often teach that “male headship” is God’s will. Parents may go so far as beating or starving their children on the authority of godly leaders.

2) Isolation or separatism, is promoted as a means of maintaining spiritual purity. Evangelical Christians warn against being “unequally yoked” with nonbelievers in marriages and even friendships. New converts often are encouraged to pull away from extended family members and old friends . . . . Home schoolers and the Christian equivalent of madrassas cut off children from outside sources of information, often teaching rote learning and unquestioning obedience rather than broad curiosity.

3) Fear of sin, hell, a looming “end-times” apocalypse, or amoral heathens binds people to the group, which then provides the only safe escape from the horrifying dangers on the outside.  . . . .
Since the religious group is the only alternative to these horrors, anything that threatens the group itself—like criticism, taxation, scientific findings, or civil rights regulations—also becomes a target of fear.

Bible Belief Creates an Authoritarian, Isolative, Threat-based Model of Reality   In Bible-believing Christianity, psychological mind-control mechanisms are coupled with beliefs from the Iron Age, including the belief that women and children are possessions of men, that children who are not hit become spoiled, that each of us is born “utterly depraved”, and that a supernatural being demands unquestioning obedience. In this view, the salvation and righteousness of believers is constantly under threat from outsiders and dark spiritual forces. Consequently, Christians need to separate themselves emotionally, spiritually, and socially from the world. . . . Small wonder then, that many Christians emerge wounded.

The Bible-based Christian population however, might be considered a subset of the general population that is still within the old framework, that is, supernaturalism.

Children are Targeted for Indoctrination Because the Child Mind is Uniquely Vulnerable. . . .

Nowhere is the contrast of viewpoints more stark than in the secular and religious understandings of childhood. In the biblical view, a child is not a being that is born with amazing capabilities that will emerge with the right conditions like a beautiful flower in a well-attended garden. Rather, a child is born in sin, weak, ignorant, and rebellious, needing discipline to learn obedience. Independent thinking is dangerous pride.

Because the child’s mind is uniquely susceptible to religious ideas, religious indoctrination particularly targets vulnerable young children. Cognitive development before age seven lacks abstract reasoning.

When assaulted with such images and ideas at a young age, a child has no chance of emotional self-defense. Christian teachings that sound truewhen they are embedded in the child’s mind at this tender age can feel true for a lifetime. Even decades later former believers who intellectually reject these ideas can feel intense fear or shame when their unconscious mind is triggered.

Harms Range From Mild to Catastrophic. . . . Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS) is a new term, coined by Marlene Winell to name a recognizable set of symptoms experienced as a result of prolonged exposure to a toxic religious environment and/or the trauma of leaving the religion. It is akin to Complex PTSD, which is defined as ‘a psychological injury that results from protracted exposure to prolonged social and/or interpersonal trauma with lack or loss of control, disempowerment, and in the context of either captivity or entrapment, i.e. the lack of a viable escape route for the victim’.

Though related to other kinds of chronic trauma, religious trauma is uniquely mind-twisting. The logic of the religion is circular and blames the victim for problems; the system demands deference to spiritual authorities no matter what they do; and the larger society may not identify a problem or intervene as in cases of physical or sexual abuse, even though the same symptoms of depression and anxiety and panic attacks can occur.

Religious trauma is difficult to see because it is camouflaged by the respectability of religion in culture. To date, parents are afforded the right to teach their own children whatever doctrines they like, no matter how heinous, degrading, or mentally unhealthy. Even helping professionals largely perceive Christianity as benign. This will need to change for treatment methods to be developed and people to get help that allows them to truly reclaim their lives.

 Having been raised conservative Catholic, it took me years to get over the psychological damage.  And my upbringing was mild compared to what one sees in fundamentalist denominations.  As I've said before, raising children in evangelical/fundamentalist homes is a form of child abuse.  It needs to end.

The Islamic State is Also Homophobic

the homophobia starts at around 7:25.

The reasons to oppose the self-style "Islamic State" or ISIS are many beginning first and foremost with the fact that it embraces a fundamentalist religious agenda that seeks to force its will and beliefs on others.  Its from this source of extreme Sharia law that all the rest of the horrors and atrocities flow: rape, murder, beheadings, mistreatment of women - and hatred of gays.  Like all fundamentalist strains of Abrahamic religions, gays are targets for hate and murder.  The Washington Post  follows up on the Washington Blade and reminds us that in the minds of the Islamic State - as with the "godly Christian" set in America - we gays are the lowest of the low and deserve death.  Fundamentalist religion truly is a perverse evil that needs to be eradicated from the earth. Here are article highlights:

The young men swarming across Syria and Iraq in black balaclavas commit genocide, chop off journalists’ heads, kidnap aid workers, rape women and seek to impose a theocracy on millions who don’t want it.

And one more thing: They’re homophobic.

In a video first reported by the Daily Mirror in April, a man it identified as a former professional soccer player describes the benefits of jihad. It’s the typical Islamic State recruitment video — an English-speaking adherent trying to bring fellow travelers to the cause.

On Tuesday, the Washington Blade took another look at the video, focusing on its anti-gay content. Toward the end of the video, an Islamic state fighter holds forth on children’s exposure to homosexuals in public schools.

“Who’s gonna teach your children?” the fighter says. “It’s gonna be maybe a gay, maybe a drug dealer, maybe a pedophile, you know? So it’s very important for you to protect your children from these animals, from these dirty people, Allah says that they are the worst of creatures.”

“The treatment of LGBT people by Islamic extremists is one of the most overlooked human rights issues there is,” Jimmy LaSalvia, co-founder of the gay conservative organization GoProud, told the Blade. “Many world leaders routinely site radical Islam’s treatment of woman and religious minorities, we have certainly heard a lot about how ISIS treats Christians, but rarely do political leaders or the media draw attention to the plight of LGBT people in that part of the world.”

Islam’s connection with homophobia is hard to shake. In a list of the “Top Twelve Most Homophobic Nations in the World” published in February, Newsweek included Saudi Arabia for its religious-based anti-gay position. “Basing its law, it says, on a strict interpretation of Islamic law, the current Saudi regime has made gay sex punishable by death by the lash,” the magazine wrote.

Meanwhile, others were critical of those putting the spotlight on the Islamic State’s homophobia. The self-described “right-leaning” Web site Downtrend published a piece critical of of the Blade report.

It's easy to understand why the American right wing doesn't like too much focus on Islamic homophobia - the right wing Christians are peddling a very similar message and some of them have even  argued for concentration camps and/or death for gays.  They don't want the public to connect the dots and realize that it  is fundamentalist religion of every stripe that is the real evil be it Islamic or Christian. Hate, mistreatment of others, the rejection of modern knowledge and the perpetration of evil are the principal fruits either way.