Islam & Freedom: A Conversation with Rory Stewart (Episode  

The difference between Nazis and Muslims is that Nazis don't use human shields.

Then later in the conversation realises that's silly and walks being friends with extremists back

Meh, Those are just details, they don't matter very much. 😅

He’s Rory the Tory lol, the only bad people in his world are working class people that disagree with him.

why ya'll gotta be so polarising on this. these two have completely different views on these issues and that is fine, the truth is somewhere between.

What an amazing comment from you and I really appreciate it and it has helped me a lot ❤

Amazing comment. It gives me hope for humanity

The main problem with your religion is the same problem with all religions. None of them appear to align with reality.

Thank you for writing this, as an eastern European, easily to get slandered for "racist" whenever I preface the same arguments to muslims. Thankful there are bright people that are willing to understand that it's not an attack, more of an inquiry on the subject.

@@Reno_Slim The main problem with Islam is that it still jails and kills apostates, outlaws all other religions (or no religion) and it enjoys protection from *progressives* that staunchly defend it for the west.

So does christianity and judaism. Why special focus on islam?

@@tangerinetangerine4400 Ok, so, just remind me of when a major city's central infrastructure was blasted out of existence by a group of Christians or Jews (and I don't mean Israel's heavy-handed reaction to Hamas' attacks)?

@inetangerine4400 The other part of that, I believe, is that Islam contains fundamental principles and teachings that have not been relatively worked out to the extent of other major religions. That's to say that many religious teachings are outdated and even harmful, but some of the Islam faithful seem to be practicing and citing these teachings in their malicious activity with higher degrees of adherence and more frequently than other major religions. That seems to be the claim, at least.

Terms like "islamophobic" are retarded buzzwords to make you stop thinking.

I mean we would need to be in parallel universe but if somehow Jews were poorer and their country of origins was bombed for decades by the west, I'm not convinced they would behave that much better than the muslims tbh. And I just need to watch the blood thirst they're showing in this current war where the only goal seems to be revenge.

The world would be poorer for lack of him. I know it would for me.

He’s ignorant and clearly has ego he was wrong in the past and instead of looking at the bigger picture of what makes people do things he wants to protect his own image by tearing down others by forcing a image that is clearly wrong if you look deeper into any Muslim issue humans are more complicated than what he’s making out

​@@bigm317It's a huge stretch to call Sam Harris ignorant. I agree with you he excessively weighs the ideological causal factor (re Islam > violence) contra other cross-cutting and material factors, but he's right to push the ideological factor harder home in the context of this conversation with this particular guest.

Not really.

Sam is a World Champion Pseudo intellectual. Sammy The Pseudo Harris.

You logic is almost complete: Islam has nothing to do with islam. @user-zt6uu5tw9j

Could you cite examples?

Pretty much hit the nail on the head. I'm very interested to hear what Rory would say in response to this charge.

@@joshuagharis9017 many such examples here en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_in_the_Quran

The verse where Allah advises men to strike their wives if they exhibit arrogance. The texts claim that domestic abuse is warranted if wife disagrees with husband.​@@joshuagharis9017

This is a really good point.

Yeah, good point and the crux of the matter. It also underlines the fact that Islam, like other religuons, is and always has been essentially a political construct used for control.

^^^^ This. Thank you.

I think the point he was making was that neither of them are experts on the faith itself or what it preaches.

This.

He is so disgustingly dishonest and inhuman - a complete rejection of rationality and logic.

@@justgivemethetruth right and he has lived in Afghanistan whereas Sam is going off on Zionist brainwashing as a child and hasn't been able to take a critical view of it as an adult.

I am also living here…punishment for blasphemy is real and enforced. Ask Rory how homosexuals are treated here, etc etc etc etc. he is ignorant af

He doesn’t. Rory basically insists that you must basically be more familiar with the Muslim community before you can be as critical of it (like Sam is) and that there are ‘many Muslims’ etc

It's the way it always is. People who differ in opinion stemming from different intuitions rarely if ever resolve it in dialogue. Resolving it means one of them has to die and be reborn having cut that arm of poisoned knowledge off himself voluntarily. Rory can't cut that arm off. Clearly nothing should be off limits to real critique especially religion. And clearly we are having a problem now with Islam and not as much with Christianity and it doesn't matter how bloody the history was for what religion lf we are getting millions of Muslims migrating in the country yearly.

In the longer paid version he doesn’t really address the apostate issue either. I just listened to it now. He says several times that there are many different Islams, and his friends in those countries were very nice to him so he believes they are mostly good people. And then he says “what about Christianity in the Middle Ages” “what about Russia.” He said he worried for certain vulnerable people, but that every community has dangerous people or extremists who are outliers, but it isn’t unique to Islam and there isn’t any threat that Islam poses to the world.

@@raina4732 Thanks. Those appear to be textbook No True Scotsman and whataboutism fallacies; really disappointing given Rory's supposed pedigree.

As a fellow Arab, I can't agree more with your last two sentences

As an ex-Christian, I think the same could be said even about Christianity. But the concept of "revelation" in Christianity gives much more space to change,/adapt,/develop. In ecology, a system's "health/toxicity" (like a pond or river), can be well assessed by its bio-diversity. E.g. the most polluted pond (lake Karachay) has only two kind of bacteria as living thing in it... I have an idea that a religion's healthiness might be assessed similarly. Buddhism has uncountable denomination. Christianity has a couple dozen. Islam has two or three? For a world religion?

Sam pretty much has said this and it doesn't go well. No one has ever accused him of being TOO easy on it

​@@laca103nobody cares about christianity, so drop the comparisons and look the devil directly in the eye. Whataboutisms and self-inserting narratives in a conversation about another religion is pointless and harmful to an honest discussion about what islam is.

If you compare Christianity to Islam you either know nothing about one of these or both or, in the worst case, is straight up apologist

Not in my opinion. He should have asked Stewart about demographics (in Marseille, for example or Vienna).

Do you reckon he enjoys nailing 'other' things? 🤔

According to Rory, everyone can say positive things about Islam without understanding Arabic, but only an Islamic scholar can say negative things lol. In the words of Sam Harris, this is how you play tennis with no net. Further, I have nice Muslim friends is not an argument. Rory is a western educated liberal so his friends would be of similar kind. They wouldn't be a true representation of the ummah.

And pretending that he is unaware of that is disingenuous af.

Subconscious fear of Islam affects us all

Rory is quite typical of western apologists for Islam. It starts with "I have some Muslim friends." With this type of flawed logic it's amazing he was ever anybody in the UK. Personal anecdotes are not general rules or in any way really contribute much more than confusion to any discussion. He is amazingly illogical and confident at the same time. My German relatives were all quite nice back in the day. But that didn't stop them from being swept up in the German war machine which killed millions of people. How much they believe in the mission only they know but the results of the mission were catastrophic. Islam is also on a mission and there are already a lot of dead.

Doesn’t he literally say here that his objection is to say that you can’t really say there is this thing called islam and it is the thing muslims believe and so it isn’t very helpful to say outright and in a blanketed way that islam is bad? That seems like a pretty mild point and not at all the same thing as “only muslims can criticize islam.” I feel like your criticism of him would be especially ineffective for him because he would literally be able to point out that some muslims criticize the islam of others and that you only take a single version of islam into account when saying it’s not allowed. You aren’t really doing his view justice here.

Or they simply don't have the conviction or courage to follow through with what their religion demands but are quite happy and sympathetic towards the extremists who do.

Diluted versions are versions

@@sennsita01 I would say they have the morals they get from liberal values to not commit atrocity themselves, but the morals are not enough to stop them from supporting such acts.

That’s very insightful

I think western liberal values are more influenced by Islam than the other way around. Sadly. Because that would be possible point of reform that Islam needs.

Aaaand you can...for only £12.99 a month you too can be....

..and be as articulate as Sam….

Indeed, or Rory. Both are excellent

It's not easy for the average person. My nephew has a PHD and can make mincemeat of all my arguments if he disagreed. Mostly doesn't, except over Israel There his logic is unshakable - and wrong!

As a politician, he doesn‘t want to denounce problematic ideas if the demographic group holds voting potential.

Good point

And Harris was obviously unable to disabuse Stewart of his closely held beliefs. People tend to put a lot of stock in their personal experiences, of which Stewart has had many. This discussion was very frustrating to listen to nearly the whole way through. I will admit this about Harris: for years, there has been a part of me that has allowed doubt about Harris' seeming obsession with Islam. I've followed the guy since 2007 after reading Letter to a Christian Nation. I've been a subscriber to his podcast for years. But his arguments remain sound, it seems--so much so that I feel that Harris' claims were better than Stewart's. Frankly, there were times that I grew very tired of Stewart's interrupting Harris, and doing so with poor or fallacious arguments. Harris is a powerful intellectual force, and he seems to rarely, if ever, make intellectually dishonest claims. It's why he's so often vilified by those on the right and the left. And it's why there are those of us who think so highly of him. I don't know if he's always right. But I recognize his brilliance and genuine interest in sifting out what is true in a very complex world.

Harris was interrupting a lot more than Stewart. ​@lonzo61

@@zoyboy1914 His party has been quite happy to tolerate Islamaphobia. Also, I would lay good money on his not running in the forthcoming election. Nevertheless, what demographic do you think he is trying to appeal to within his constituency?

by Sam and truth

​@elanbair4571 Sam Harris doesn't really care about truth. Can you name me a fascist who speaks most honestly about Islam?

Nope

I think they broadly agree on most of the issues, just as sam said they have a different philosophy of mind when approaching the problem. Rory who has lived in many islamic countries feels unsettled and skeptical that attacking islam in the way sam does will create any genuine change for good. additionally, Rory also points out that much of it is contextual and given the same situations around the world with different faiths, equally immoral acts are committed. ultimately both a true to some extent.

Yep

This is unfair. I understand where Rory is coming from.

Yes, exactly. He's less of a proper intellectual, and more of a humanist (which can sound nice but ignores reality)

@@AnAn___ I also understand where he is coming from, even if I disagree, but the enormous number of whataboutisms in this discussion did get on my nerves.

@@wasneeplus There are many different islams. Many of them are very similar to Sam Harris and practice meditation and believe in nonduality (muraqabah irfan sufis) A ton of muslims vote for Trump in the USA, the nonleft in India and conservatives in other parts of the world. There isn't a clear binary between liberal muslims and islamists. There is a deep spectrum in between. And people live in this spectrum and fluid ambiguity. Most people believe many seemingly contradictory things at the same time and are constantly changing and evolving. This deep understanding and nimbleness is needed to dismantle islamism around the world. Rory has also lived in many different muslim countries for a long time. And what Rory believes is right for the places he has lived. They are not right for the UK which might have the most conservative islamist muslims in the world.

Obfuscation is exactly the word I had in my head.

Indeed

👍

Rory is an islam fan boy. He's spent years of his life in islamic nations (as he said). He should def' talk with ex-Muslims.

I honestly don’t think Rory is smart. I think it’s an illusion brought on by his voice and mannerisms.

@@ghostofdayinperson I was being facetious 😉

@@BradJonesus Really? But your comment is much, much better when it is not meant ironically, for Rory should indeed understand that the intellectual turmoil he's experiencing comes from his conscience rebelling against his rejecting reason.

I don't think Rory rejects sam reasons, just his own humanity, and intuition is telling him that ultimately we are all human and that confuting an ideology so deep routed into a society and its people as innately bad, isn't the way to address the issue.

@@Llooktook If that were true, why doesn't Rory say so and explain how he would address Sam's legitimate concerns? - No, Rory is a true islamophobe, sincerely afraid of offending Muslims, because he cannot separate anymore the Muslim sinner from the Muslim supremacist sin. And that is a truly dangerous position, because it means that he has stopped recognising his own humanity in the other side (the Muslims). When you cannot tell your brother anymore why he is seriously wrong, you stopped being his brother, full stop. - The islamists have invented the accusation of islamophobia for their own Muslim supremacist reasons, and the West, like Rory Stewart, out of sincere islamophobia, has largely taken it to heart, which in the eyes of Muslims makes Westerners look devious and insincere. Because it would indeed be far more honest to respond to the charge of islamophobia straightforwardly with a declaration of war against ALL Muslims who do not renounce Muslim supremacism, as we cannot tolerate Muslim intolerance if we want to keep our open and free societies open and free. - When Muslims do not express revulsion at the idea of avenging the Prophet's honour by murdering the entire editorial board of Charlie Hebdo, how can they be surprised at being met with the same revulsion? But surprised they are. And therefore profoundly despised. - In the West we're all far more islamophobic than we care to admit. And not admitting it, even to ourselves, is a profound mistake. Because it reveals that we do not understand ourselves and our so called universal values we keep talking about without knowing how to embody and demonstrate them. And there can be no doubt about who's benefiting most from that confusion, when the West is clearly weakened by it.

Yeah I just finished and Sam’s outro that says “want to listen to the rest of this? Please subscribe.” Nah, man. I’ll pay not to have to listen to any more of that none-sense from Roy.

I don't think you understand Rory. I am a huge fan of his. Love Sam Harris too.

Yes, his set of friends would be a certain kind, not a proper representation of the whole community.

@@nealdee1755 There is a lot more to it than that. Most muslims have not studied the Koran or Hadiths and know little about their religion from a scholarly point of view. They might be into meditation and personal transformation and have liberal femnist lbgtq+ friendly views. Islam in much of asia is syncretic and their views are similar to eastern philosophy. Believing in all religions is common among Asian syncretic muslims.

@@AnAn___ yes, in southeast countries which were previously Hindu/Buddhist such as Indonesia/Malaysia, but this is not the case in Middle East/West Asia where most don't have any interaction with eastern religions

lol YOU should look at the polls. Have you done so recently? Just look at the pew polls from country to country about what the Islamic community supports. Rory is not making arguments based on pure anecdote, he is saying that there are entire countries that behave differently than what Sam is stereotyping them as, and it is supported by the polling data. That is why there are no professional scholars who take Sam's view on this because it is one-sided and overly simplistic...it treats all of Islam as a single group prone to violence. Its an incredibly harmful way to view a religion and its people

​@@radscorpion8care to list some of those polls?

Harris is not exposing "rot" within Islam, but rather he's been consistent in exposing Islam for what it is by virtue of its tenets and the adherence by Muslims of those tenets. It's all written in the Quran and Hadith. The problem is he religion itself. He has called Islam "the mother lode of bad ideas". And Harris admitted to Stewart, and has said as much in the past, that not all Muslims are jihadists. But Islam makes it normal and desirable to be a jihadist and the doctrine spells it all out! If Islam can essentially get with the times as other religions have, it will not pose a threat to western ideals. And by the way, as you know, Harris has been consistently critical of Christianity. But he elegantly spelled out to Stewart the important differences between Islam and all the other religions, contemporaneously speaking and in terms of the horrors they committed in the past.

If they admit that Muhammad was actually a vicious warlord who plagerised his religion and was making up revelations to suit his needs (which is obviously true), then Islam falls apart.

@@Hannibal953able totally agree

Can you list the "many great things about Islam"?

Indeed!

...you end up sounding like Sam Harris.

Rory was not talking about people who were "brainwashed since birth" into following the religion, he was talking about the general population who believe because they found it persuasive

He's not much of an intellectual so he can't understand this.

@@radscorpion8what % are 1st generation believes vs following their parents? is there a study on this somewhere?

@rpion8 You should invest some time studying developmental trajectories. Innocent people vary in levels of susceptibility to manipulation throughout their lifespans. There is no hard cut off point where we start holding someone accountable for being indoctrinated. There is no off and on switch or binary split between being an adult or a child, only in our dualistic minds, not in reality. We need to perceive on a case by case basis and lay our hatred only on the ideas themselves.

@t6uu5tw9j Because he admitted to being incapable of not hating Nazis for what their ideology made them do, implying that he must also hate jihadists as people for what their ideology makes them do. Thus he is unable to accept that a stunningly large number of Muslims sympathize with the extremists, for that would cause him to become prejudice against them as people too. Sam is able to understand that the worst miseries perpetrated by extremists are examples of supreme confusion, indoctrination and mental illness. Since Sam can maintain compassion he is able to face the reality of the Islam problem without hating. Rory needs some therapy to treat his black and white thinking.

Another Chris Hedges!

Exactly. The Pew polling results don't lie.

Yep, you nailed it. I think Sam wasted time doing this to show Rory's problem. He can't admit that Islam poses distinct problems as an ideology.

Absolutely! Those who are nice - I also have muslim friends 😅- mostly either western educated or kept their original culture and values while keeping islam only as an identity or/and a utopia.

It is [actually] dangerous to criticize Islam out loud. The threats are credible, and Islam has demonstrated its willingness to kill those that criticize it.

Was Humza Yousef subjected to Islamaphobia?

Exactly. Even though his apologies seemed sincere, they were still of the "I'm sorry I got caught" sort.

that argument always frustrates me. imagine it being night and you're gonna walk home alone and you think about cutting a shortcut through a town. but your friend says "no don't go through there at night, there's a lot of crime there and a high rate of muggings, you'll get mugged walking alone there at night" and you respond with "how dare you insult the people of that town. i'm sure most people there are normal decent people. how dare you call them muggers because of a few rotten apples" then it misses the point. i guess whenever someone says "but not ALL Muslims" the response should be "okay, so i'm talking about the ones that DO."

Was it failure? Or just his way of conceding the debate without saying so openly?

@@jhibbitt1 What is frustrating and astonishing is that the 'you cannot generalize in this way' defense is still used so routinely, when it is nothing but a red herring. When I say 'Muslims this or that' I don't mean to say 'all Muslims ...' (or I would be saying it) nor 'a negligible number of Muslims ...' (or I wouldn't be talking about them), I mean to say 'too many Muslims ...' for me not to talk about them.

He also relied on quite a bit of what about *other bad things * style deflection. It was a bit disappointing

I'm from the UK and presumably this was recorded before another devastating blow to Rory's argument that Islam is not a threat to open society in the UK - when a vote on Gaza in Parliament was thrown into chaos because the Labour Party feared some of their MPs would face physical threats if they didn't vote for a ceasefire. The Speaker (in charge of the House of Commons) had to change the terms of the vote in light of this threat, causing uproar.

So he can't understand his own experiences because he's a man?

Exactly. Give me the 'lay down arms and turn the other cheek' approach of Christianity any day.

All the Qu'ran does is encourage escalation. Christ offers an alternative way of resolving potentially escalating conflict. JC all the way.

lol Christian’s have killed more people than Islam ever will.

@@d.lav.2198 Just because Islam is the worst of the world religions doesn‘t mean Christianity is therefor true. All of it is non evidence based literature about Gods. You can believe in Zeus for all I care, but it is a close to reality as Lord of the Rings.

​​@@zoyboy1914How dare you compare that drivel to the sacred word!? For Frodo!

*intellectual *sciolist

I tend to think that this 'secular' misunderstanding of religion in the West is a major weakness when dealing with Islam and Muslims. Simply put: faith isn't science, we are all agnostic, i.e. unable to know anything about a transcendent God, and therefore we are all reduced to have faith, even when we do not recognize it as a religion. The question isn't whether you believe in God, the question is what it is you believe in. Religious doctrines are never more than signposts, they aren't the road itself, which leads to Rome even without the signposts. And the doctrines have normally arisen to guard against error, and are not meant to be taken as positive instructions for anything else. I only understood this after discovering Eric Voegelin, a not very well known German-American philosopher of history. Pope Benedict's thinking is close to Voegelin, and I still believe that the pope's Regensburg lecture of 2006 on 'Faith and Reason', in which he criticized both Islamic absolutism and Western scientism as rationally deficient, was the pope's honest and personal attempt to see whether a dialogue with Islam was possible. He was, of course, quickly deterred by the offended and violent reactions coming from the Islamic world, with Erdogan in the lead. In a similar vein, there is Frank van Dun, a not very well known Belgian philosopher of natural law, who has a convincing article on the Decalogue as the 'Perfect Law of Freedom'.

this was one of the biggest issues I had with rory's excuses... he's being deliberately obtuse about the term to "win" a silly point, it's completely dishonest

Quite...

lol

The example would be fitting if the food was poisoned and you can‘t mention it since you aren‘t a chef.

​@@zoyboy1914Yet, you would just have to observe the billions of people consuming this food to realise it's not poisoned

@@jmc5335 sure, Pakistan and Yemen and the other Islamic countries are awesome for homosexuals, human rights, women, and ex-muslims 👍🏼 NO PROBLEMS AT ALL, NOTHING TOO SEE HERE 😂 Bruh nobody is blind but do what you want

@@zoyboy1914 Absolutely love how you put emphasis on a sentence that makes you look like an idiot.

Reminds me of what happened to Farkhunda Malikzada.

Yes, and as long as women cannot talk men out of it, we're stuck I'm afraid. The same goes for the youth-bulge problems, which also contribute to the violence in a major way.

Do you mean "unparalleled in nonIslamic countries"???

Completely agree, brave of both. Rory is a great figure I have been following for some time over here, I love the podcast Rest is Politics and Leading. I felt Sam was dominating this debate with his arguments though, also taking long speech time before allowing Rory to respond.

Sam Harris should talk to Muslims and explain why he feels they should be denied their human rights

Actually I think Rory put a lot of historical facts and statistics that completely rocked Sam back onto his heels and a way he rarely encounters.

François-Xavier Bellamy, the French MEP, has this fine counter-argument: "Islamophobia mostly kills those who are accused of it."

This was absolutely painful.

Sam Harris has been pretty vociferous against Islam for several years now, and it's evidently still possible to hear from him, as demonstrated by the fact that you're commenting under the 356th episode of his podcast.

@@gordonstrong5232 The actual teaching of the book makes Sam's concerns perfectly justified. Who the hell cares about personal beliefs if the book justifies terrorism.

I learned that word today from watching a clip of Destiny pointing out Piers Morgan misused it. Equivocation

​@@hokiturmixHilarious how you missed the point.

In this context the term 'under the bus' is quite apt.

Yes, but none of Rory’s friends were involved in that violence, or at least they didn’t support it, or at least they didn’t tell Rory they supported it. So stop being so negative about Islam. Seriously, that is what his “arguments” came down to. It’s another use of the “lived experience” argument, which is basically immune to any contradiction.

Yes, very disturbing, when you listen to someone like Omar Suleiman and his huge following, who is with the Muslim Brotherhood I believe, and a gentle but relentless holy war against the West propagandist. (He has been interviewed by Lex Fridman, not by Sam Harris, unfortunately.) [Copy of my earlier Comment:] Jihad, and more generally the easy justification of violence, as if it were a legitimate substitute for negotiation, are one aspect of the problem. But more disturbing even is this supreme idea of Islamic justice that seems to go without even the notion of impartiality. As if Muslim suffering by itself were enough to prove injustice and hold the unbelievers to account. In Palestine under the British mandate, as the majority in the country they fought against Jewish immigration for their exclusive right of national self-determination in Palestine (or more exactly: Muslim supremacy), discounting diaspora Jews and refusing compromise, and then very quickly resorted to violence as if it were nothing. Since then they complain about the Nakbah without even mentioning the war that led to it, as if the Zionists were to blame for both the war and the Nakbah.

man was once afraid of his own shadow, but eventually we learned that our shadow does not harm us

Nope, anecdotal evidence is not a "valid perspective" when someone shows mass phenomena.

All of Rory's experience does not excuse him from failing to honestly address Sam's questions.

Was it? I found it slimy and patronising.

@@debbielondon1809 then we saw it very differently :)

Willful deceit, I don't know. But certainly not helpful. Islamophobia is invalid criticism of a distorted perception of the beliefs and teachings of Islam that is meant to denigrate the people who believe in it and therefore offensive to people who do NOT hold these distorted beliefs. Valid criticism of the beliefs and teachings of Islam is not meant to denigrate people and only offensive to people who do hold them. In both cases the offended believers may defend themselves by accusing you of islamophobia. Although I suspect that in the first case the defense will be more often than not of the kind "you're talking islamophobic nonsense, no Muslim holds that kind of distorted belief". Which makes the true islamophobia defense of the kind "you just hate Muslims" utterly suspect as coming from a Muslim who cannot accept valid criticism. And that may be the core of the problem: that Muslims cannot allow their beliefs to be criticized. I mean, the most basic valid criticism of Islam after all is: "Who authorized you to call me an unbeliever?" PS: This 'can you still tell the truth when the truth hurts' conundrum only seems to come up in honour-shame cultures (you feel no shame so long as you're not caught) and in our present victimhood culture, much less in the more classical integrity-guilt culture (you feel guilt even when you're not caught).

@martinj.malliet2218 I hear you. And agree somewhat. I just do not believe that anyone who is saying what Rory is saying is being honest. It is just straight out false. Indefensible. Also, the creation of a purposefully deceptive term like "Islamophobia" is the problem. A phobia is an irrational fear. There is nothing irrational about fearing being killed by a Muslim. It literally happens everyday.

It was invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. This is well documented and accepted. Fear of Islam is absolutely rational. This word is nonsensical.