The first thing I posted on any social media/blog after learning about the Orlando shooting was how angry and sad it made me that the first thing I heard about the shooting was about it being a “terrorist attack,” my first thought being “what besides the Arab-sounding name makes the media think that” and I had to read into an article to find out that the attack was in an LGBTQAIP+ club. It took much longer to find out it was Latinx night.
After finding out about the 911 call in which the shooter pledged allegiance to a variety of extremist organizations, which we now know are all fighting against each other, I was scared about the inevitable. That people would attack innocent Muslim people over it, that bullshit about “stopping the terrorists” would be used to overshadow and ignore the fact that LGBTQAIP+ Latinx and black people were targeted. And that’s exactly what happened.
Muslim prayer on Massachusetts railway platform prompts police alert, heavily armed response
A Muslim Man Was Beaten Outside a Mosque in NYC — Here’s Why It Matters
There have also been multiple threats against Pride events and a man caught with assault weapons and explosives on his way to a pride event.
In my support of both LGBTQAIP+ people and Muslim people on Tumblr, I’ve gotten many Islamophobic messages telling me that I’m part of the problem because Islam is homophobic, and that I’m a bad feminist because Islam is misogynistic.
That is bullshit that I will not tolerate. Is there misogynistic and homophobic stuff in the Quran? Yeah, same as there is in just about every other religious text from any other religion. But it’s Islam that gets targeted. That’s Islamophobia. And the only reason that countries dominated by Muslim people and leaders are more overtly homophobic and misogynistic than others is that the U.S. and it’s white dominated allies have spent the last fuckload of years fucking with, invading, and destabilizing these regions.
The U.S. just recently got same-sex marriage and is losing ground on abortion rights. If we were being constantly fucked with and bombed to shit by some superpower, we would even be this far. You can bet the Christian extremists would have seized power and implemented Biblical law.
I have long maintained that religion is an idea, and an idea can be used as a tool for good or evil, but religion itself cannot be good or evil. People can use it as inspiration to be good or as a tool to do evil, but homophobia and misogyny come from people, not religion. All major religions can be interpreted many different ways, and people have a remarkable ability to interpret things to support shit they already believe. Blaming an entire religion for the shit some people have done under it is called prejudice, and if it’s done to a religious people that has been both locally and globally oppressed, it’s called bigotry.