[dogscoff]

I think AMF has said it all about right in his post.

There is a disturbing tendency about at the moment to lump all Muslims together into one group, which is both absurd and dangerous. I mean take Christianity as an example: From afternoon tea with the Church of England vicar to the intense African evangelical denominations to the Roman Catholics to the Greek orthodox to the Amish to the fundamentalist "Intelligent Design" crowd... Now try to appreciate that a similar diversity exists in Islam and you reaise that you simply cannot treat it as a single entity.

Phoenix' "concentration camp" remark was maybe a bit below the belt in this case, but I honestly feel that is the way things are heading. If a newspaper from 2016 were to drop out of a temporal rift and into my lap I would not be at all surprised to read about large numbers of Muslims (or 'islamic-looking' people) being rounded up indiscriminately in the US, UK and other Western countries for deportations, interrogation or worse. People seem to have forgotten the lessons of the holocaust and all the other genocides and massacres that have brought about human rights legislation and the rules of war and so on.
Day after day I am sickened again and again as I hear people talk about human rights as though they are some kind of obstacle to (rather than the cornerstones of) justice and security and what they think of as their 'way of life'. It seems they are more than happy to write off people they have never met or known as someone less than human, someone who doesn't deserve due process and dignity. They will cheerfully allow atrocities be carried out in their name, as long they are free to look the other way and ignore the pain and anguish being generated and the hatred being stored up for the future.

To do away with human rights is to dehumanise people, and from there it is a short step to demonisation, I don't have to tell anyone here what comes next. However the people likely to read this and understand it are in the minority. It looks more and more as though the majority will have to learn all those lessons again, the hard way.

Ignorance will beget ignorance, hate will beget hate, violence will beget violence. None of those things will help us. Things will get a lot worse before they get better.