Worry about Angelica Merkel and your 1.5 million new Muslim citizens she welcomed in who are raping and pillaging and let the U.S. figure out our own problems.
Nice of you to add casual racism to the list of things that Americans can be proud of their soldiers for.
It's feedback from a voice in the same military that supports and aids child rape in Afghanistan, murders innocent civilians through drone strikes on a routine basis, and regularly tortures innocent people in an illegal prison . . . so you know that it really stands on high moral ground.
Hopefully your defense of 'just following orders' works better for you than the Nazis who used it during the Nuremberg trials. I mean, your organization has already set up a concentration camp where members of a particular religion are singled out, abducted, and tortured (and there are a lot of questions about the 'suicides' that have occurred under US military watch) without evidence or fair trial.
Not trying to get in the middle of this. Muslim is not a race it's a religion. Can't be racist against it.
I always find this to be an even lazier response than loosely using the term racism. In this context it is 100% clear that by invoking the term racism they are just referring to potential sign of bigotry. Trying to deflect by saying that something is not "racists" as if that dissolves the accusation is weak at best. We are all a little bigoted against groups far outside of our social norms.
No for a segue.
There is a fine line between being wary of a group because of a shared attribute that may lead to undesirable behavior and making simplistic sweeping generalized assumptions based on that attribute.
You could argue that racism is a special form of bigotry because you can chose a religion and you cant chose your race, therefor discriminating against an inherited group attribute is someone more harmful. But I don't believe that is 100% true either. The concept of race is largely not science based with a significant part of all historical racial identification being rooted in social constructs and visual observations with larges amounts of grey area and bias.
This is partly due to a lack of genetic science to adequately define the biological meaning of race over our long history of racial tribalism, and also partly due to the practice of racial categorization by firm genetically defined boundaries being frowned upon since it generally leads people down the path of eugenics and other socially unethical scientific pursuits.
Those genetic boundaries will deteriorate over time anyway if we maintain efficient global transportation long enough. Genetic isolation of particular groups will become more and more rare if say our industrialized world continues to progress for another few thousand years or more.
I think this is a little bit of an insincere accusation in a decent few cases. Racism is judging someone negatively not on the content of their character and their actions, but instead an arbitrary part of them that they have no control over. Judging someone negatively over their actions and/or beliefs is very different and conflating the two is a very dangerous proposition.
Are there people who are bigoted towards middle eastern people? Definitely and they can of course be racist.
However, it seems in many cases that making similar criticisms of Muslims and Islam in the way that many may criticize Christians and Christianity, which is absolutely not racism, is lumped in as racism/islamophobia and conflating the two is insincere and dangerous in both the sense that it devalues the legitimate stigma against those that would actually be racist, if criticism of belief becomes generally considered racist then being a racist isn't that bad a thing anymore, and at the same time shuts down conversations around beliefs and their impact on the world and people's behaviors.
A good example is Charlie Hebdo who mercilessly attacked the Christian Church/Vatican, Judaism etc and no one bats an eye. However when they do so in regards to Islam people come out of the woodwork to call them racist and Islamophobic and though the attacks are to be condemned it isn't unexpected that this may happen when you treat people this way...
Also your argument as far as that race isn't an inherited attribute is not true. Though through mixing of gene pools it is of course less and less likely for people to be 100% one race or another visually there are definitely genetic markers that are distinguished between races. This actually leads to certain health risks varying between different races due to the differences genetically. However, even disregarding this the point stands separate. I would say racism itself falls under the category of judging someone on something they have no control over, which is what makes it inherently wrong. There are some cases where discriminating on these kinds of characteristics might be valid, however these are extremely limited and should be kept to a minimum since I as many others believe that fairly rewarding someone for their actions/contributions makes for a better society than one where you are rewarded for innate qualities that did not impact your performance.
For example, is it completely fair that people who won the genetic lottery in regards to intelligence happen to dominate many high paying fields? No, but it is their performance and not the innate quality itself is what is appreciated. We are ok with judging based on this largely innate characteristic as it impacts performance and if it still requires hard work to make use of the innate quality.
Though most Muslims are middle eastern this is not the criteria for being a Muslim. You can be a non middle eastern Muslim and you can be middle eastern and not be a Muslim. In fact a large amount of muslims are either African or Asian.
In the end I find it a dangerous idea to equate bigotry in regards to someone's innate qualities whatever they may be to bigotry of ideas/religion. Unfortunately, people with good intent have used this idea to defend those they believe in need and meanwhile some with ill intent have managed to take it and run with it to the point where we have shielded an entire religion from criticism that most other religions in the west are not afforded, because in the end the actual racists aren't deterred by these accusations.
Also what is more racist? Criticizing all religions/beliefs regardless of what happens to be the skin colour of the majority of adherents? Or saying that it's ok to criticize Christianity because the "white" people are reasonable and can take it, but we don't want to offend "brown" people?
I find the latter to be far more insidious.