[ConstantineX]

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Another black eye for Islam as well?

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The humane thing to do would have been to waterboard her. I guess these Muslims are just too barbaric.

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Is this an attempt to equivocate US actions of water-boarding with Saudi Actions in the story?

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It's a sarcastic attempt to discern from adios why the Saudi actions in the story are "a black eye for Islam". When governments run by Muslims do bad things to people, it's a black eye for the religion. When the American government does bad things to people, is it a condemnation of Christianity? Most of the leaders in our government are Christian.

Okay, so the expected right-wing bigot response here is: "zomg but wait, these laws are borne out of Wahhabism; American rule of law isn't dictated by Biblical code -- zomg the inhumanity of Islam!!!!!"

But again, it's nothing but standard demagoguery: find extremist elements of said religion, find when they do a bad thing, say bad thing is black eye on whole religion. Or instead of outright saying it, just wonder aloud and see if the [censored] sticks.

Cue adios backtracking, John Killduff/MMMMMM two-thousand word essays on the evils of Islam.

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There's a sizable difference between the two situations. First, and annoyingly, there's an obvious distinction between scope - whatever you think the US may have perpetrated in the War on Terror (is it yet a factual?) and the repeated brutality we see in the Saudi Kingdom.

But the real question should be the idea of "controlling for" in statistics. Across different types of governments, Muslim' countries tend to have this systematic application of brutal laws and policies. Across different types of governments for Christian nations, you don't see the same trend. Brutality seems independent of Christianity, while positively correlated to Muslim ones. Of course we could not be using other variables, like poverty, development, so on.

But it does suggest a causative link.

Also, which way is the underlying society applying pressure? In America, tentatively it's the government RESISTING calls by a minority its populace to enforce religious norms. In Saudi Arabia its the government ENFORCING calls by its populace (and not a minority of it, either) to enforce those religious norms.

It's not all equal.