fuck me, my subconscious definitely picked up on some kind of extra racial weirdness when i was going through all this shit arguing with people on r*ddit, but yeah it didnt quite click until you mentioned it that this is exactly what it was

and yeah im just realising as well that there was lots of talk about religious persecution etc, but very little talk about islam - rarely called "islamophobia", and i have a strong feeling that if you looked at all the articles with this in mind youd find that as much as they focused on religious buildings that they really downplayed "mosques" in favour of other terms or generic "houses of worship" etc (this last bit might actually be legit though, it does seem from my very limited knowledge that their version of islam is a bit different in its religious buildings from "mainstream" islam)

this shit probably should have been immediately obvious but there was so much other bullshit to wade through that i guess i didnt really notice