A fourteen-year-old girl was flogged to death for the crime of being raped.
[Update a day or more later]
This poignant photo gallery seems related somehow.
What was the religion of the people who took over that country three decades ago? Gee, it’s right on the tip of my tongue.
[Bumped]
“Religion of Blame the Victim” Loudly and incessantly.
Alas, we just don’t understand the difference between Islam and Islamism. I see that lack of understanding as a positive, yet people keep telling me it is a negative.
Some, religious fanatics abused their power, blaming the religion Islam is on a par with blaming the religion of Catholicism (rather than the church’s negligence in controlling its staff) for the sexual abuse perpetrated by some priests.
Andrew, one of these is NOT like the other. Bishops and Cardinals did not go around issuing edicts that abusing parishioners was okay. Unlike Imams with world-wide followings who said killing Rushdie and cartoonists was a GOOD thing. The only Muslim leaders who don’t do that sort of thing reside here and they rarely condemn it.
Well, Andrew, except for the fact that rank-and-file Catholics strongly and publically condemned the behaviour of the pederast priests.
Get back to me when rank-and-file Muslims condemn in the strongest possible terms the behaviour of backwoods imams, instead of shuffling their feet, talking about different cultural values and strength in diversity, or changing the subject to the last person who gave their wife in her hijab a cold look at the grocery store.
Carl, for starters, the article Rand linked to cited “rank-and-file” Muslims who condemned the behavior. But beyond that: you’re a scientist, and you’re asking for data. Have you looked for it at all? We’re all sitting in front of the greatest information retrieval system the world has ever seen, giving us access to people’s opinions all over the world. Presumably you could cite a google search that ought to retrieve examples of rank-and-file Muslims condemning stonings and lashings and all sorts of barbarity, but inexplicably to liberals such as myself , don’t retrieve any such thing. Or alternatively, you could do the search, find such condemnations — either way, you’ll be getting new data. Try it. Share your queries and results. We’ll all learn something.
Bob-1 Says:
“the article Rand linked to cited “rank-and-file” Muslims who condemned the behavior.”
The villagers did not condemn the actions. They were the ones that ordered it done.
The reference to others condemning the attack, “Public outrage sparked by that autopsy report prompted the high court to order the exhumation of Hena’s body in February. ” But the article didn’t elaborate any further. What was the nature and scale of the public outrage?
The interesting thing in this case, is that the male was also supposed to be punished, not for rape but for adultery. Also, the young girl was not viewed as a victim of rape but rather as also being adulterous. This scenario is very common in Muslim countries.
Andrew W Says:
“Some, religious fanatics abused their power, blaming the religion Islam is on a par with blaming the religion of Catholicism (rather than the church’s negligence in controlling its staff) for the sexual abuse perpetrated by some priests.”
Why do you always have to bring up Christianity when defending Islam? Why can’t you just say that what happened to the girl was a bad thing?
Geez, Bob, if I have to look for the outrage, doesn’t that kinda suggest it hasn’t risen to 9.0 on the Richter scale? I sure as heck haven’t looked for outrage directed at priest-molesters, but it shoves notice of its existence rudely in my face willy-nilly, like a 30-meter tsunami.
In short, may I suggest your perception of the significance of your proposal for my perceptions is directly proportional to the cogency of my point?
It was the “local imam and village elders” that perpetrated this crime and it had more to do with “the country’s entrenched patriarchal system” than religion. It’s “Public outrage” and “the outcry and media attention that followed her death on January 31.” that’s pushing the investigation and prosecution of those responsible.
“Why do you always have to bring up Christianity when defending Islam?
Why can’t you just say that what happened to the girl was a bad thing?”
Why can’t you just say what happened to the girl was appalling? Why is the opportunity to attack Islam more important to you than this child’s murder?
Why is the opportunity to attack Islam more important to you than this child’s murder?
Because it may be possible, by attacking at least certain aspects of Islam, to prevent quite a number of other children from being murdered in the future.
Carl, other than Rand’s blog, I don’t know where you get your news. I do know you live in the United States, where there are a hell of a lot fewer Muslims than Catholics (or non-Catholics with Catholics in their family, non-Catholics who send their kids to Catholic schools, etc). So: there’s a reporting bias. There is also a political bias, and there is ordinary sensationalism.
If you told me that you read the Jakarta Post every day (available here: http://www.thejakartapost.com ) I’d be more impressed, but I bet you don’t. And you know, you could. You could try reading it every day for two weeks and see if your perceptions change. I read it occasionally, and I’ve seen angry letters to the editor and heart-felt op-ed pieces doing just the kind of condemnation you’re looking for.
Or you could take the google short-cut that I suggested.
Either way, you’d be gathering data, doing preliminary research.
Or you could do a literature review.
Again, you’re a scientist, so act like one!
A lot of people tend to focus on the homosexual pederasty in the Catholic church.
I’ve read that exactly the same thing goes on in Islamic madrassas. Strange that there’s no particular outrage about that.
By the way, I’ve been amused by the Jakarta Post (as in, wow, I’m reading about local politics on the other side of the world) but I didn’t mean to single them out. Try a Senagalese paper instead. Or maybe it would be more apropos to try a newspaper from Bangladesh. This looks like a useful site, if you look past the advertising that clutters its interior pages — it sorts online newspapers by region, country, and language: http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/
Gosh, Bob, you’re kind of missing the point. It’s not my problem to make sure snakes are not really poisonous when I find one in the backyard next to the kiddie pool. It’s the snake’s problem to demonstrate its peaceful intentions before I take its head off with a spade. I might take effort to ascertain the animal’s true threat level if it has some other obvious utility — e.g. if it can be milked or makes honey. But I’m unaware of any obvious benefit to Islam that would make my determination of its net worth a priority for me.
My interest in digging out whether Islam is really a Religion of Peace(TM) is just about zip. I’ve much more interesting things to deploy my research acumen towards.
On the other hand, I tend to think Islam has a strong interest in reaching out to convince me that it is a harmless, peace-loving religion only interested in mosque bake sales and sponsoring college scholarships, given the extremely bad PR some of its adherents have gained for it in my neighborhood, and given my cowboy-like cavalier American disregard — woo hoo you betcha! — for whether, as a whole, the more outspoken of its practiioners are subject to profiling, discrimination, cruel jokes, or being used by the USMC to train recruits in directing UAVs and the occasional JDAM.
Carl, I don’t know why you even try.
Again, I don’t know where you get your news, so your protestations that you aren’t hearing a certain message doesn’t mean very much to me. But you’re making one thing clear: you’re happy to pontificate about what Muslims have to say but you’re uninterested in actually learning what they have to say. I suggested an experiment, and you’re uninterested in that too. This attitude is odd to me — I value learning, and given what you’ve said about your background, I thought you did too. Oh well. Happy bloviating!
“Why is the opportunity to attack Islam more important to you than this child’s murder?”
Talking about Islam is appropriate considering the girl was punished under sharia law and how common place similar incidents are in Muslim countries. That doesn’t mean that ALL of Islam is to blame but there is a significant number of Muslims that hold similar beliefs to warrant a conversation on the topic.
Christianity has absolutely nothing to do with the story.
Bob here is a link for you http://www.kabobfest.com/
Tsk, Bob, be precise. That on which I pontificated (or bloviated) was what I’d heard, not on what some theoretical impassioned letter-writers to the Jakarta Post may have said.
I trust I may be regarded, without citing in approved MLA style my research, as an expert on what I have heard?
I then went on, in my trademark coarse and insensitive style that makes all the girls in estrus tilt their heads thoughtfully, to opine that any distinction between what I’ve heard and what enlightened We Are The World Muslims might be saying is a problem the latter should probably want to solve, badly, which luckily relieves me of the effort of doing so.
I value learning, and given what you’ve said about your background, I thought you did too.
All learning, Bob, bicycle seat sniffer? Aye, that’s a distinction. I fancy myself less gourmand than gourmet, and do pick and choose which veins of knowledge ore on which to expend my limited supply of time and blasting powder.
Thanks Wodun! I browsed, and I’ll browse again. I gather many of them are Palestinian, and of course, I strongly disagree with them about Israel. I found their take on Hamas more unexpected — they seemed happy to criticize Hamas on feminist grounds, but no mention that I saw regarding violence towards Israelis. I suppose it reflects the interests of the contributors, but I saw quite a lot of material promoting the rights of women throughout the Arab world. In general, they seem like liberal-minded intellectuals I could really enjoy talking to, except that they have certain obnoxious biases on the subject of Israel (and I would expect them to like me, but find my blind spots regarding Palestinian injustice to be incredibly aggravating.)
How is it that those of the conservative right can be so (understandably) critical of leftist do-gooding busy-bodies that go around poking their noses into everyones else’s business in their own countries, especially how other people look after their own families. But then turn around and themselves turn into busy-bodies who’re so concerned about injustices happening on the other side of the world, in tiny villages in nations with cultures with which they essentially have nothing in common? Why this obsession with what happens in third world Islamic cultures, were there no children molested in America last week? No rapes? No murders?
I recently came across the claim that if you scratch beneath the surface of any right-wing conservative, you’ll find a lefty inside.
Or is it more realistic to suggest, and more honest to admit, that this conservative right obsession with miscarriages of justice that happen in these tiny villages in nations with cultures with which they essentially have nothing in common, are actually motivated by a form of xenophobia?
It used to be the evils of Soviet communism that the conservative right obsessed over, now that that’s gone, it seems to be all things Islamic. Is it a reality of their nature that the conservative right just has to have foreign enemies, and that the bigger and scarier these enemies can be portrayed, the happier they are? With communism, the Russians by themselves weren’t enough, the conservative right had to dream up a fifth column, a fiction of communist sympathizers that supposedly existed in America, waiting to undermine the US from within. Likewise is it that Al Qaeda by itself isn’t enough? Does the conservative right have to turn the entire Islamic world into a great enemy, supposedly half a world of people foaming at the mouth whose goal in life is to destroy the US, because, well, because their religions tells them so?
My own politics is classical liberal, I know there are some nasty bastards out there, but the power mad nutters are relatively few in number, and are more easily defeated by winning the hearts and minds of their would-be supporters, rather than galvanizing those would-be supporters into die-hard supporters by doing everything possible to alienate them.
Good post Andrew. This time in your defense of Islam you refrained from dragging Christians into the situation and your arguments are much stronger for it.
I have some disagreements but a sentence by sentence breakdown would take too much space.
Andrew, you n00b, a conservative doesn’t object to do-goodism per se. Do unto others, eh? Golden Rule, what? Conservatives believe very strongly in charity, as a matter of fact, and as a rule are more generous with their own money than lefties. They believe in offering a hand to the disadvantaged, and a strong culture of law in which evil behaviour is suppressed and the weak defended from violence and cruelty, by force if necessary.
What conservatives object to is two forms of behaviour falsely labeled “do-goodism” by the Left:
(1) Robin Hoodism masquerading as charity. There’s nothing wrong with giving to the poor, of course — it’s the stealing from the rich part that’s a problem. Because stealing is wrong, as it happens. And a wrong plus a right doesn’t equal a right.
(2) Do goodism where those burdened are real and the beneficiary is imaginary, such as carbon taxes, Head Start, the BATF and UNESCO, wealth transfer programs in general, and the laughable and cruel dictum that the good of the many outweighs the good of the one. The problem is that “the many” (or almost any Lefty “soclal” good) isn’t an actual individual concrete flesh ‘n’ blood entity, the health and happiness of which we can directly observe. It’s a useful fiction, an abstract concept, and the connection of its properties to the well-being of actual living men and women is tenuous at best, relying on loads of dubious reasoning that would embarass a medieval monk pondering the Immaculate Conception.
Hence the conservative (being conservative) objects to real, measureable impositions on real, breathing humans in the service of a theoretically-derived “benefit” for an abstract fiction. (If you think about it, this corresponds to an objection to a state religion.)
Why this obsession with what happens in third world Islamic cultures, were there no children molested in America last week? No rapes? No murders?
Perhaps you may be having a spot of trouble with the definition of “obsession.” Someone obsessed with what happens in Third World Islamic culture would, one imagines, fly there to attack it personally. Donate all his wealth to causes struggling with it. Seek psychotherapeutic help for his inability to get work done because of googling of Third World Islamic atrocity every 90 seconds. Writing a strongly-worded blog comment seems just a trifle short of what the DSM-IV or J. Random Rational Observer would classify as “obsession.”
As for why we feel free to devote a minute or two to pondering Islamic atrocity while at least one child is, somewhere in these United States, not safe — well, even God took the 7th day off. I hear Batman occasionally turns off the hotline to Commissioner Gordon and knocks back a pint while mentally Fourier transforming the time dependence of Christina Hendrick’s decolletage on some mindless tube show, perhaps to ascertain the fundamental frequency, or perhaps just to ward off Alzheimer’s and high-blood pressure.
I want to play Devil’s Advocate on the current topic of Islamocrazies that would KILL a child for having such poor life skills that she allowed herself to become a victim of sexual abuse.
I often wonder, given the fanatacism of the overt Wahabbists worldwide, if the average rank and file Muslims aren’t in the same kind of position average rank and file Germans were in, living in areas run by the fanatical Nazis.
You have the choice of possibly finding yourself under the lash for disagreeing with the fanatical Imams and his followers (In Germany you’d go to a concentration camp for disagreeing with the Nazis) and you jeopardize your entire family and they could be punished too. (the Nazis split up families and sent German children from intellectual families to the gas chambers remember)
I don’t want to defend what they did in any fashion, but given what we know, if YOU, any of you, were living in those countries and it might jeopardize YOUR family would YOU stand up and say killing that girl was wrong? Then YOU get the next fatwah, right?
Even in America, look at the nuts HERE in CAIR, and the liberal idiots in the Universities who invite these Islamofascists to speak. Would YOU denounce them, and then return to the mosque on Friday? I think that’s their conundrum. And except for the obvious religious aspect, and it’s only ‘political death’ or social ostracizing served up here, their situation isn’t a hell of a lot different than Conservatives or Libertarians who would stand up in Town Hall and say,
“…YES, the jails ARE full of black men, but THEY are the ones committing the crimes Mr Mayor. They have NO fathers to teach them, they have no education because African-Americans put ZERO importance on getting an education and black women are JUST as much to blame because, many of them have 3 or 6 kids and they have several different daddies!!
They glorify ‘thug behavior’ and gangsta lifestyle, and they label, as sell outs or toms, any African Americans who DO get educated.
Query Mister Mayor and back to the topic at hand tonight, the increased ‘NEED’ for increased city welfare funding because of inflation. Mister Mayor, who IS the BABY DADDY in those homes where the children are “hungry”?! Why am I, and all of those who work, why are WE paying taxes that feed them, and their daddies do NOTHING and why don’t we hold the parents more responsible?
And just why is a child “hungry” in a home where when he does go to school, he has on $200 basketball shoes, a $150 L.A. Lakers jacket and carries a $300 cell phone?”
Stereotyping? Racism? They’d run you out of town on a rail!! Tarred and feathered, Al Sharptonque and Jesse Jackass would be parked in your front yard along with the usual leftist suspects from MSM cheering them on.
I contend that the moderate or even quasi adherent Muslims are STUCK, just like those of us who would question what we see daily that I slammed all together above over welfare and jail. Just like the political damning we’d suffer, they’re damned (by their Imams and the fanatics) if they DO speak up, and damned (by us in the west) if they don’t speak up. And it’s a death sentence in many of these areas to disagree with the Imams.
Most people don’t have the intestinal fortitude to contribute their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, to right a wrong or to stand up to fanaticism.
Der Schtumpy,
I think in your advocacy of the devil, you make some good points. There’s certainly many motivating (or lack of motivating) factors as to why moderate Muslims don’t decry injustices such as the killing of a 14yr old for allowing herself to be raped. Immediate is certainly the fear of being killed for support of the condemned.
What’s fascinating to me is the desire for non-Muslims in Western societies to condemn people who speak out against such acts. These people are under no immediate threat. They shouldn’t have a reason to fear reprisal. So why not condemn a horrid atrocity for what it is? Why spend any energy arguing with those who do condemn such atrocity?
“My own politics is classical liberal,”
Hardly.
Or is it more realistic to suggest, and more honest to admit, that this conservative right obsession with miscarriages of justice that happen in these tiny villages in nations with cultures with which they essentially have nothing in common, are actually motivated by a form of xenophobia?
I’ll bite.
No.
Here’s a question for Andrew; do you think Hena’s parents are xenophobic, and that is why they are outraged?
In Bangaldesh, 89.7% Muslim, there is free speech (although, like most of the world, speech is much freer in a big city than in an isolated village.) So Carl, Der Schtumpty, and Leland, you speculate on why Muslims don’t condemn the murder of Hena Akhtar, but this morning I looked in a Bangaladeshi newspaper, and I saw an op-ed from last month condemning not only what happened, but how the Bangaladesh legal system responded. (I assume the author is a Muslim, given their references to Islamic law.) Moreover, the op-ed piece references the wave of condemnation that swept the entire country.
Here’s the piece:
http://www.thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=173798
I was about to post, and then I realized I could alter my google search slightly, and I found this piece, another opinion piece, published in the daily star a few days later on the same topic. This time, the scope was widened, to discuss the role of Islam. The piece is even more relevant to the discussion we are having here.
http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=174453
(And maybe today I will learn to spell Bangladesh correctly!)
When it was time for Hena Akhter to have dreams in her eyes, she became a victim of the ill-tutored fatwa of village clerics.
Bad tutoring. Thanks Bob.
Leland, you speculate on why Muslims don’t condemn the murder of Hena Akhtar
Bob, you can read a paper whenever you feel like it. But why is it the Doctor’s claimed the death to be a suicide? Is it wrong for us to be outraged by this, but ok for the editor’s of a newspaper to be outraged? Why do you think the editors ought have such a right, while you argue that we shouldn’t?
I saw an op-ed from last month condemning not only what happened, but how the Bangaladesh legal system responded.
I guess Andrew may consider that paper’s editors to be xenophobic?
Leland, I argued nothing of the sort. You are completely mischaracterizing what I’ve said.
Your response to Hena’s murder was to say “Alas, we just don’t understand the difference between Islam and Islamism. I see that lack of understanding as a positive, yet people keep telling me it is a negative.”
1) This has little to do with Islamism. Islamism is also a huge problem (and threat), but it is a different problem. I’m sorry you are proud of your lack of understanding.
2) It is right for you to be outraged by many different aspects of this outrageous atrocity.
3) It is wrong for you to make certain generalizations about Islam and about Muslims that I think you are making. I could spell this out in detail, but I’ve noticed that going into detail with you and making careful thoughtful distinctions doesn’t have much of a payoff — in the recent past, after I’ve gone to a lot of work, you ignore all of it and instead you proudly trumpet your ignorance.
But why is it the Doctor’s claimed the death to be a suicide?
I guess the answer to that doesn’t fall within the purview of careful thoughtful distinctions.
Or lacks a payoff.
I love how Bob-1 just drops bits like this into an argument, as if they were truths that everyone knows. I’d sure like him to tell us from what unimpeachable source he got this assertion.
Goodness you’re cranky this morning, Bob. Do you need a blowjob?
The first link I offered does mention the bogus autopsy, among other bogus official responses. Contrary to Leland’s assumption, the newspaper pieces weren’t editorials — they were op-ed pieces written by contributors.
Why am I offering them? Because Carl Pham said “Get back to me when rank-and-file Muslims condemn in the strongest possible terms the behaviour of backwoods imams”
Carl: that’s exactly what I got back to you with. The opinion pieces were written by “rank and file” Muslims, they posted in the number 1 (highest circulation) English-language paper in Bangladesh, they condemned the atrocity in the strongest possible terms, and they identified the problem as, as you yourself put it, “backwoods imams”.
Bangladesh is an example of a modern Muslim-majority country with civil rights which has a problem in its impoverished uneducated hinterlands. Concluding that Islam is a “religion of barbarity”, as Rand called it, is severely misdiagnosing what happened to Hena.
Ha! Not from you Carl! But yeah, raising a 1 year old probably did have just the impact you think it did.
Andrea, I looked in Wikipedia for the 89.7% number. As for free speech, I have a friend who works with Rotary clubs in Bangladesh, and he’s commented on their civil society. But for a more critical and impartial look at the situation in Bangladesh, I recommend freedomhouse.org which, rightly, criticizes everything they can in order to promote liberty around the world.
Concluding that Islam is a “religion of barbarity”, as Rand called it, is severely misdiagnosing what happened to Hena.
“Islam” is many religions. Some of them are barbarous.
1) This has little to do with Islamism.
So are you saying that her punishment wasn’t decided by an Imam based on Sharia law? The article you linked to says otherwise. You can claim I’m ignorant, but I know what is an Imam, a Fatwa, and a Madrassa. All of which were implicated as reasons this girl was killed. Maybe you should go back and reread the article you want us to read. Try reading it for comprehension.
2) It is right for you to be outraged by many different aspects of this outrageous atrocity.
Why thanks, but that’s not something I allow you to determine.
3) It is wrong for you to make certain generalizations about Islam and about Muslims that I think you are making.
Well there is your problem. You’re thinking it, but you are projecting your thoughts as being mine. Sorry, but those thoughts of yours are something you need to defend, not me.
Leland, you know, maybe you’ve got a point. I was using the definition of Islamist which refers to political movements. Very often, these political movements are also supremacist organizations (akin to white or black supremacists in America). Using that definition of the word, it is more useful to talk about Islamists when explaining friction with non-Muslims. But yes, I acknowledge there is another meaning of the word which refers more to fundamentalist religious practice — particularly when explaining friction between people who want theocracy and people who want a secular government. The newspaper descriptions didn’t make it sound like what happened to Hena involves either kind of friction – it sounds to me like fundamentalists who were basically evil (in general) and misogynistic (in particular) and used religion as an excuse, but of course I don’t really know what happened in Hena’s village.
Andrew W Says: How is it that those of the conservative right can be so (understandably) critical of leftist do-gooding busy-bodies that go around poking their noses into everyones else’s business in their own countries, especially how other people look after their own families. But then turn around and themselves turn into busy-bodies who’re so concerned about injustices happening on the other side of the world, in tiny villages in nations with cultures with which they essentially have nothing in common?
The human spirit longs to be free. If it isn’t essential to be human. Oh, but that’s right, you know better. You know whats best for everyone better than they do…
Well, we have evidence that he does something with the data.
Leland: “So why not condemn a horrid atrocity for what it is? Why spend any energy arguing with those who do condemn such atrocity?”
Nice try, the argument isn’t over condemning such atrocities, the argument is whether such atrocities justify condemning Islam, maybe Wodun will forgive me this time, but atrocious acts by Christians doesn’t justify condemning Christianity.
Here’s a question for Leland: should Americans change their ways because Muslims in Bangladesh think their behavior is decadent?
Andrew, I think that’s the wrong question. When children are brutally murdered in America, people all over the world can rightly condemn it.
Certain people in Bangladesh should change their ways because they did something evil. I just don’t think Islam is the root cause.
I suspect the rebuttal will be “but, these are Islamic laws that are being followed.”
As one of my links points out, these are actually Jewish laws, from the Old Testament. In Sunday school, I was horrified by laws like this. My rabbi explained: it’s a law, it’s on the books, but the law requires you to have to jump through a million hoops to execute anyone, and that’s almost always impossible – for example – there are almost never four witnesses to a couple having consenting adulterous sex. Even when it is technically possible to jump through all those hoops successfully, no one interested in mercy and decency would actually do it – they’d use the hoops as an excuse (yes, your friends did see your wife having sex with another man in front of an open window, but look how dirty the window is…. ) In Hena’s case, some evil people used the law as an excuse for murder, even though they didn’t bother to worry about the hoops the law requires. The problem isn’t Judaism or Islam – the problem is “backwoods” villagers that want an excuse to kill girls and women.
“Andrew, I think that’s the wrong question.”
Yeah, I would’ve deleted if I could. The act was brutal and should be condemned, the important thing is that it is being condemned, including in Bangladesh, and to suggest that the actions of these villiage thugs is a fair reflection of the wider Bangladeshi community or of Islam is silly.
And to suggest that these actions occur only in muslim countries is probably also silly. Or irrelevant. Just don’t even look there. Meaningless.
that’s exactly what I got back to you with
Not quite, Bob. If a Kos Kid complained that Americans were supporting a vicious detention regime in Guantanamo and unconstitutional wiretapping overseas, would you seriously suggest some editorials inveighing against the Patriot Act in The New York Times proves the contrary? Ha ha.
And the problem of representativity is likely more salient in Bangladesh, where I rather suspect writers to the major English-language daily represent the tiny wealthy and cosmopolitan tip of that society.
The problem isn’t Judaism or Islam – the problem is “backwoods” villagers that want an excuse to kill girls and women.
An interesting theory. Why is it those with leftish tendencies always seem to sink back towards eugenics? Some people are just born bad. And yet, there is an opposing theory that suggests culture and religion and ideology do matter, and, at least at the margins can substantially influence people.
The question is, then, whether certain strains of Islam per se tend to influence people in the wrong direction. Whether, in their absence, we would see less evil. The challenge for its apologists is to explain the significant correlation between bad behaviour and Islamic faith. We do not see Jews flying airplanes into buildings, despite (as you point out) some morally iffy passages in the Torah. Nor Christans, nor Southern Baptists, nor Buddhists or Taoists or animists or snake-handling shroom-smoking cult wackos baked senseless in the Phoenix sun.
What’s up with Islam? One possibiltiy is that, as you say, it’s just a concentration of inherently evil men who just happened to adopt the Muslim faith. Perhaps it’s an attractive faith if you’re a shithead? An odd thing, if true. But the other possibility is that there is something about Islam that excites (or fails to subdue) the evil impulses that crawl beneath the veneer of civilization in some men. Which would make it, by itself, a problem, just like racism and Nazism and Communism are problems.