Mocking a religion is a form of bigotry.
Sorry, I'm still not buying that, for starters because it ignores entirely context or justification. Is mocking the Westboro Baptist Church or the Hale-Bopp comet guys "bigotry"? Sometimes mocking is deserved, and no belief system, religious or otherwise, should be considered immune to mocking, satire, or any other form of criticism.
By the way, you did not answer a question I posed earlier. Do you think it should be illegal to mock religions, or in particular, to print disparaging cartons of Muhammed?
We often use the term racism to describe antisemitism, or anti-Jewish sentiment.
You've switched terms now from "bigotry" to the more specific "racism", and for obvious reasons decided to use Jews as the example. I say "obvious" because you know perfectly well that being a "Jew" can have both a racial/ethnic
and a separate religious meaning. That is a distinction that is not applicable to Christianity, or to Islam. Heck, it's inherent in the terms you yourself used. "Semitic" is an ethnic/racial classification. "Muslim" is not.
I know quite a few people who consider themselves Jewish ethnically/culturally because of their birth into that ethnic group, but also consider themselves atheists. In contrast, being a purely secular Christian or Muslim, who does not believe in God at all, is nonsensical. And obviously, if you don't believe in God, Muhammed, and the Koran, you're not be offended at a cartoon depicting Muhammed. You're creating a false equivalency between being a "Muslim" and being a "Jew" when you ignore the specific secular/ethnic sense of being "a Jew".
There is plenty of disparagement/mocking directed at Christians (particularly fundamentalist Christians). Is that "racist" too?
Anti-Islamic sentiment is considered "racist," just as anti-semitism is considered "racist." Those aren't my words, those are words from 7 international well-respected publications particularly Der Spiegel and the New York Times.
It's funny how you'll flip from disparaging any media source (including the NYT) when it doesn't reflect your views, to citing it as conclusive authority when it does. That's a particularly interesting switcheroo when the issue isn't fact, but pure opinion. And wholly apart from you not providing the context in which those opinions were expressed (and it is certainly possible for a particular criticism of a religion to include an express racial element), the personal opinions of editorialists at Der Speigel or the NYT hold no more presumption of validity than the personal opinions of anyone on this Board.
In any case, I'd agree that
anti-Arab sentiment is racist. Criticizing the religious doctrine/practice of Islam in general, and more specifically the doctrine/practice advanced by radical elements in particular, is not.
Your argument is intellectually dishonest because you're failing to understand that point.
No, I understand that point. I simply reject it on the grounds that
it is not bigotry to attack a particular belief system. And actually, nothing makes this distinction more clear than to look at your attempt to analogize criticisms of some aspects of Islam to anti-Semitic (in the Jewish context) sentiment.
Anti-Semites, whether they be Nazis or Middle East radicals who claim that Jews drink the blood of Palestinian babies, generally aren't attacking/criticizing the
religious beliefs of Jews. They don't attack the
religion of Judaism. Heck, both Christian anti-semites and Muslim middle east radicals share a belief in the same religious books as do the Jews. It's not their religion-based belief in keeping kosher, or their religious-based belief that the name of God should not be spoken (which belief they do not attempt to impose on non-Jews, I might add by way of contrast) that is the focus for anti-Semitic ire. Anti-Semitism focuses on the alleged
secular misdeeds of ethnic Jews -- greed, accumulating wealth, having too much power, taking lands, etc.. It is "guilt" motivated primarily by blood and ethnicity, not by which books of the Bible you happen to prefer.
