Maybe so, Jim. "At one time or another" perhaps -- tho I don't unquestioningly accept that assertion in regard to all the abuses I have detailed; but this is now, twenty-hundred-&-something, not 14-whatever, not any vague 'some time or other'. It's no good complaining of how unfair I am being to all those dear friends of yours in Tower Hamlets or Handsworth or Bradford. Where Sharia Law obtains, it has in practically very case been imposed by a government properly elected by due process. So you think it OK, do you, that much of today's mainstream Islam, howsoever charming many of its individual adherents of your acquaintance may be, widely persists in operating to what you admit to being a medieval [at best!] moral & jurisprudential code in the C21? You say you don't defend these practices; but appear to be saying that, as it's only some Islamists that persist in them, well that's all right then, and it's somehow 'racist' to feel otherwise. So who precisely, one might then be moved to ask, is the racist?

The point you are so lamentably failing to take on board, Jim, is that these abuses are not incidental to, or adventitiously related to, or coincidental with, Islam; but are directly and intrinsically brought about by the very tenets, self-acknowledged & widely-embraced, of that faith; by the very fact that the elected regimes concerned are Islamic ones ( of various 'races': Saudis, Malays, Nigerians, are not racially identical). So it is idiotic to dismiss as 'racist' any animadversions against Islam, any warnings of its being a potentially mischievous, anti-humane faith & philosophical system whose influence should be resisted, or at least closely monitored, by the rest of the world. Such observations are the very opposite of 'racist'.

But I know it's pissing-down-the-wind or trying-to-stop-a-bandersnatch to make the effort to get all this into the thick, doctrinaire, mind's-made-up-please-don't-confuse-me-with-facts ☠ of James Carroll, with its infallible built-in instamatic racism-detector…

Ho-hum!

~M~