Quote:
Originally Posted by 530iAndroid
Yes, in fact I had a girlfriend who was of Persian descent but Jewish and my best friend is Armenian and Christian. But many people don't have such first hand experience or exposure. Having moved to SoCal which has a huge Persian community, I often see people just assume Persians are Arabs because most of them are Muslim and because their physical features aren't vastly different to someone not from the region. They are both from the middle east of course, but try calling a Persian an Arab and see how frustrating it is for them. Which kind of brings me back to my point though. When it comes to telling people apart, lines are often very blurry, and that is especially the case because the social construct of 'race' is incredibly imprecise and subjective, not to mention confusing. Whether right or wrong, many people use race and religion, and as you pointed out, race and culture, interchangeably. Race derives from ethnicity and ethnicity derives from culture, language and religion. One can not categorically draw a line between any of them.
So in my opinion the underlying problem which leads to a lot of misunderstanding is that we pay way too much attention to the wording of things and not the actual content and context of what people are saying. Nowadays any time a group of people wants to avoid being criticized for something it merely needs to pull the race card. Sadly, a lot of Muslims are doing this, therefore not contributing to the dialogue but instead further obscuring things for everyone. By calling other people racist, one does nothing more than promote racism.
Just a side note: An anglo/white westerner may not be able to tell an Arab and a Persian person apart any more than the average South East Asian individual would probably be able to see any difference between a Czech and a Slav, or a Serbian and Croatian, given the the lack of exposure to the cultural or ethnical differences. Sadly, one could get away with calling a white person a racist for making such a mistake whereas the Asian's intentions are likely to not even be questioned in the first place.
In Germany there is a growing problem with Muslim, predominately Turkish, school children acting physically violent towards the the local native German speakers for being non-muslims. These attacks are often accompanied with a common repeated verbal assault where kids are called 'Christ', intended as a derogatory form of Christian. Whether or not the child is really christian or not plays little role so long as they 'look' the part. In the eyes of these Muslim children, and seemingly in those of their parents who are teaching hatred, Christianity is not merely a religion but an ethnicity which they dislike. This again is the blurring of 'race' and religion. Few are willing to publicly talk about this abuse out of fear of being labeled not even xenophobic but 'racist'. The word has become like 'heretic' of the modern world. Say something people don't like or even just makes them feel threatened because it is something they don't understand and they can silence you, strip you of all your credibility and rally people against you in mob mentality fashion.
The truth is that radical Muslims actually want the peaceful Muslims to feel alienated and hated so that they can get them onto their side. People should be careful who they rally behind out of fear of alienation.
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/Sarcasm On
Seems like we need to go back to old skool ways and just do a good old drowning or hanging to see if someone is a terrorist (Like they did for testing to see if someone was a witch back in the days)
We can just round up random folks and test them all
/Sarcasm off
Every group has got to pay their dues, no different for Muslims like it has been for tons of other groups. What I found funny/sad/but still kinda funny... Sikh peeps got it the worst. They in general hate muslims (don't get me wrong I know lot of cool Sikh's), but took the brunt of the issues since they look "arab"-ish.
1) Wear something on their heads (towel head-ish)
2) Don't shave/cut hair on their face/head, have long hair
3) Speak a "foreign" language
4) Often found working at convenience stores or as taxi drivers (like most immigrant workers)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikh
