Yeah, I feel like I understand most of this. A friend of mine recently converted to Judaism -- white guy, male, all that. Now he won't spell out the word "God" anymore ("G-d") and I assume he must attribute some degree of veracity to the Torah, if he has converted into the faith from the outside. I showed him a quote from Noam Chomsky, a secular Jew obviously, calling the Bible "genocidal." He sort of shrugged it off. "Yeah, he's a secular Jew."
Having said that, I understand the stuff about race being socially constructed but most folks Ive ever met act as if it isn't, and, so, yeah, I also think it's fair to call things racist even though I think race is an arbitrary, artificial construct, historically and socially defined phenomenon. Where that "race" murkiness ends, and where a religion like Islam begins -- well, that's the murkiness a lot of anti-Arab folks are exploiting to say the cartoons aren't racist --hey, they just criticize the religion. For them there's no attempt to make any sort of nuanced distinction, as you've done, between the Arab ethnicity and the religion of Islam, because, you're right, an Arab may be a Jew or Christians (tons of'em, obviously, esp. in Syria) and a Muslim conversely may be some white guy in Bosnia. But the folks I've seen reveling in what they see as a hilarious reaction from the Muslim world -- they think the outrage redounds to the simpleton-ness & idiocy of Arabs first and foremost, with no clear distinction between Arab-as-racial-group-that-could-convert-to-any-faith, and Islam.
-B.
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Jim Devine wrote:
"As for race, that's really not a good scientific category. It's more of a sociological category than a biological one. That is, it's the same as ethnicity. However, the word "racism" can still be apt. Racism involves (1) believing that biologically-based "races" are valid non-sociological categories; and (2) believing that some races are better than others."