Source: TW
Initial bias
I remembering seeing comments by Hindus back in 2019 or 2020 saying that they found it comforting to watch the Christchurch Mosque shooting/massacre. I reported a few of the comments, though at the time I largely brushed it aside.
Around 2023, there was a time where I wasn’t sure whether or not several of my extended family members were safe due to the Herat earthquake, yet almost all the comments on my feed were comments from Indian handles talking about Israel’s revenge on Gaza, with several people parroting Zionist/Israeli statements about “flattening Gaza.”
HindutvaKnight and Schandillia (an atheist and former “Leftist”) likely have dozens of posts devoted to mocking dead Gazan children by now. I haven’t kept count.
After the Crocus attack in 2024, I left a comment on VKontakte stating that I empathized with those who lost their loved ones, only to be met with a flurry of racial slurs and abuse from Russians. I wasted two or three hours arguing, but ultimately decided to delete my account.
Defensiveness
After all this, I became somewhat defensive. While my views were largely anti-theistic at the time, I started to identify more strongly as a “cultural” Muslim and felt the need to justify that Islam was not uniquely problematic. Roman Catholicism was the easiest choice for comparison, given its history of violent suppression of other religious views (Massacre of Verden, Albigensian Crusade, etc.), the views of modern TradCaths, and the “Groyper” movement. This led me to dedicate a lot of time to reading about the Bible, Patristics, medieval European history, etc.
Conclusion
Yet I’ve now come to the realization that I was wrong. Islam IS uniquely problematic and intolerant among religions (in the modern era, at least).