How not to "dirty" the reputation of Islam

There is a growing movement in Iraq (emphasis mine)...

Sitting on the floor, wearing traditional Islamic clothes and holding an old notebook, Abu Hamizi, 22, spends at least six hours a day searching internet chatrooms linked to gay websites. He is not looking for new friends, but for victims.

"It is the easiest way to find those people who are destroying Islam and who want to dirty the reputation we took centuries to build up," he said. When he finds them, Hamizi arranges for them to be attacked and sometimes killed.

You heard that correctly. He, and presumably the movement he speaks for, is not worried that the reputation that Islam has built up over the last few centuries is one of a sociopathic culture of wackos who are willing to kill for the most trivial of reasons, but that some Muslims may elect to discretely date the same gender. Only through faith can we so mismanage our moral priorities.

So how bad is the problem?

Dr Toby Dodge, of London University's Queen Mary College, believes that the violence may be a consequence of the success of the government of Nouri al-Maliki. "Militia groups whose raison d'être was security in their communities are seeing that function now fulfilled by the police. So their focus has shifted to the moral and cultural sphere, reverting to classic Islamist tactics of policing moral boundaries," Dodge said.

Homosexuality was not criminalised under Saddam Hussein – indeed Iraq in the 1960s and 1970s was known for its relatively liberated gay scene. Violence against gays started in the aftermath of the invasion in 2003. Since 2004, according to Ali Hali, chairman of the Iraqi LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) group, a London-based human-rights group, a total of 680 have died in Iraq, with at least 70 of those in the past five months. The group believes the figures may be higher, as most cases involving married men are not reported. Seven victims were women. According to Hali, Iraq has become "the worst place for homosexuals on Earth".

We invaded Iraq and ousted Saddam Hussein who, though a monster, was iron-fisted enough to keep the three warring Islamic tribes in Iraq from each others' throats. We preened ourselves as we announced that the Iraqi citizens would forge a new, democratic government.

This is it, the government we sent people to die for. When you have a populace enthralled by seventh-century delusional certainty, you are not going to see a government representative of 21st century wisdom. We've seen the results of unquestioning religious faith in plenty of other Islamic nations as well, such as Mali and Yemen.

The killings are brutal, with victims ritually tortured. Azhar al-Saeed's son was one. "He didn't follow what Islamic doctrine tells but he was a good son," she said. "Three days after his kidnapping, I found a note on my door with blood spread over it and a message saying it was my son's purified blood and telling me where to find his body."

She went with police to find her son's remains. "We found his body with signs of torture, his anus filled with glue and without his genitals," she said. "I will carry this image with me until my dying day."

[...]

The roommate of Haydar, 26, was kidnapped and killed three months ago in Baghdad. After Haydar contacted the last person his friend had been chatting with on the net, he found a letter on his front door alerting him "about the dangers of behaving against Islamic rules".

Yes...it is the homosexuals besmirching the reputation of Islam, which currently includes that of daily suicide bombings, flying planes into buildings, and erupting into murderous riots over cartoons.

PZ Myers once said it best...

It is unassailable certainty in their positions that allowed good Christians to march people of another religion into ovens at bayonet point; that allowed good Christians to hang widowed old women for witchcraft; that led to wars and genocide over trivial matters of theology, like the degree of god-nature in Jesus’ existence; that allows racists and homophobes to declare a significant portion of our population to be second-class citizens; that encouraged priests to appease imaginary beings by burning babies; that led to monsters cutting the living hearts out of their neighbors so that the sun might rise. Let’s leave certainty to the oleaginous evangelists, the jingoistic war mongers, and the other con artists selling us bogus solutions to imaginary problems. A little uncertainty, a little willingness to accept that deeper knowledge might change our minds, is a good thing.

This is why we must criticize religion, and why we must do so as loudly as possible. It is why we must provide nothing but the most profound disrespect for unrespectable ideas. Because ideas govern our actions, and unreasonable ideas in the hands of people with nothing but the best of intentions, can produce unreasonable, often deadly behavior.

The problem is not that they have misconstrued faith - the problem is that they have allowed faith to replace reason, and the greater problem is that humanity, often including the skeptics, continues to abide this as though it were harmless.