What on earth are you talking about? Again, your comment has either nothing to my points, as you are getting aggressively moralistic and missing, ignoring, or misinterpreting and misrepresenting them. You are claiming I am stating things which I am not. Everyone liking this comment should be a bit embarrassed frankly as they clearly decided not to understand what I wrote and just confirm their feeling of moralistic virtue.

I think I should put my cards on the table somewhat and point out that I used to be a very devout Christian, as nearly converted to Islam in my local context as a result of my alienation from Christianity and my desire to retain my spirituality, given that my Muslim friends were essentially marketing it to me as Christianity without the contradictions. I was actually very intellectually and emotionally attracted to Islam at a certain point, but not for too long. I continue to be interested in Islamic philosophy and theology to the present day. I'm saying this simply to get across that this is not a view I'm taking from wherever you clearly think. Of course, someone being intellectually interested in a subject, or having been attracted to a viewpoint in the past, doesn't preclude prejudice in the future, but you have given literally no argument or evidence for how anything which I said was Islamophobic. And again, you're making the same error I've mentioned before: you seem to be intimating that I'm saying something Islamophobic because I'm critical of religions in general (and Islam in particular), and that so are Islamophobes. Which is the same thing as looking at a red square, seeing then that there is a red circle, and saying that the circle is therefore a square. My source of Islam was me repeatedly reading the Quran and the Hadith and works of Islamic philosophy for a year, and discussing it intimately with my Muslim and ex-Muslim friends before deciding it clearly incorrect based in particular on what my ex-Muslim Marxist friends told me. So there were both intellectual and political reasons for rejecting it. Again, you are just fulling a completing vicious and unjustified accusation out of thin air because you are too thin-skinned and intellectually immature to admit that there is an inconsistency between Marxism and religion, or because you don't like something critically pointing it out. Really bizarre.

Where TF did I say not to understand Islam? I am in fact clearly arguing for the opposite in everything that I've said, and that of course requires sensitive conversation and seriously sympathetic understanding and study of the religion and its history, which I have again said is necessary. The fact that you are unable to distinguish be being critical of a religion from an attack on people who happen to believe in it for a variety a material and intellectual reasons says a lot frankly about your own maturity. You seem to just been assuming that a critical view of Islam must be based on ignorance of it. That Muhammad was a warleader is trivial. The idea that he was purely pursuing his conquests purely out of spiritual virtue is so idealistic an opinion as to beggar belief, especially given that that view can only be maintained by simply taking Islamic religious documents' claims at face value, which is absurd for any Marxist, as completely historically uncritical. That he committed war crimes is my opinion. Am I, as a communist, supposed to hide the fact that I don't admire or take as either ethical or political role models a man who had a very young wife, several wives in fact, and beheaded Jews. I am not a Muslim. I'm under no obligation to take those as the valid basis for what is, or is not, a war crime. In any case, I'm not going to intellectually respect a religion in which the mainstream view which is that that those who do not believe after hearing the 'revelation' are doomed to, and deserving of, eternal torture in hell. The idea that I should respect that because it is part of an ideological structure of spiritual value to someone is absurd and cowardly. And again, this has nothing to do with respecting those people. People are, in general, better than the religions they practice.

No where did I claim that anyone should be forcibly converted. In fact I'm pretty critical of the USSR's history related to religion (not that they forcibly deconverted, though they did place, at certain points, intense pressure on religion and were clearly very negative towards it), and think that there was significant Islamophobia. Because, as any Marxist would know, the conditions of people's ideology is not to just be determined by the will of particular groups, but by their broader socio-economic material conditions. Again, that view is for anarchists, not Marxists. But you do not seem to be understanding that part of my basic point is that there is a difference between being open, sensitive, sympathetic, and careful about critique in public and especially when political alliances are required, but that should in no way lead to communists pretending, like a bunch of cowardly liberals, that materialism is not the correct basis not only for a scientific view of the world but also for effective socialist politics. That does not preclude working with non-communists and religious individuals or even groups, but is does inform it. Anything else is intellectual and political cowardice and will be politically counterproductive in the long-run. Communist politics has never, ever, been effectively based on hiding the implications of our views.

Also the fact that you are justified religious war in your comment should have earned you a ban from the mods. I thought this was supposed to be a Marxist forum? So in one sentence you are happy to do a superficially, vulgar materialist maneuver of saying that 'you have to recognize the material reality that there are 1.6 billion Muslims', which is trivial and obvious and adds nothing to the conversation, and then you move to moralistic claim that I should be murdered by holy war, for something which is not only what I have not done, but the precise opposite of what I've called for in my comment. Honestly your comment is either profoundly dishonest and I'd be pretty ashamed if I were you, or deeply ignorant.

I did not claim anywhere that you said that Hamas should rule the universe or that there should be a Caliphate in China. Where in God's green earth did you pull that bullshit from? Honestly there are no real coherent points in anything that you've said. If you don't have anything to contribute except ignorant, vile, vicious and completely unjustified insults then kindly don't respond again. You are poisoning a forum that is supposed to be for principally for Marxists, which you clearly are not.