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'Don't Sabotage Mamdani': 30,000+ Petitioners Urge Gilibrand to Get Behind Progressive NYC Mayoral Candidate
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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Islamophobia, just like antisemitism, is not "not liking someone’s dumbasses religion", it is racism. You wouldn't tolerate anti-black racism and you wouldn't tolerate antisemitism (I assume, given that you're here). You also would not be trivializing any kind of racism by comparing it to rape (again, a good faith assumption). On the same grounds, you shouldn't tolerate islamophobia.
Edit: That said, Franken was never accused of rape. Here are what he was actually accused of: [1] [2]
Islam is actually a religion which does not require any specific heritage.
This is veering into an abstract discussion that is not useful. Islamophobia is a form of cultural racism. So called "scientific" or "biological" racism is not the only kind of racism that exists.
Let's be specific here. Mamdani has not being attacked for being a believer in this or that religion. Gilibrand's attacks were not theological. He's being attacked based on bigoted stereotypes.
That said, even if he was being attacked on religion, what the actual fuck? Would an attack on a candidate because they are Orthodox Christian or Buddist or Mormon or atheist or anything else be acceptable? Are we splitting the hairs of whether this or that type of bigotry are acceptable here? Wtf.
I feel like if you have to change the meanings of words for your argument to have legs then it's a shit argument, mate. The user above claims two evils exist on different magnitudes and your counterpoint is "Uh, nuh uh! Why do you think it's okay to be evil?!"
I feel like you're splitting hairs about types of bigotry as a defense for particular bigots.
"Change the meanings of words"? I didn't do that. I pointed out that there exist multiple meanings to the same word. Work on cultural racism by Balibar et al. is not new either, it's been around for something like 30-40 years. If your worldview is too narrow, then expand it, go educate yourself. Don't give me this kind of anti-intellectual bullshit, especially in a progressive space like this one.
The person I was responding to before you was not simply claiming that "two evils exist on different magnitudes". They were dismissing one of the "two evils" by trivializing the cultural racism of islamophobia as "not liking someone's dumbass religion", i.e., something that boils down to some kind of harmless personal choice, like preferring fries to onion rings.
My argument from the start is that if one type of bigotry is grounds for cancelling, so is the other. And this is literally in the thread about a post about a progressive politican who is being subjected to cultural racism. What do you stand for here buddy?