If you tell a victim of street thugs that the force that the people who beat him and robbed him backed up their demands with was illegitimate, do you think that will make him feel better about having been subjected to it? Do you think if he was afraid something like that would happen to him, the fact that what happened was illegitimate makes his fear paranoid?
Your claim was that the existence or absence of Sharia courts is a triviality, which is horseshit, for the very obvious reason that one scenario grants legal authority, and the other does not. You can have people illegally victimizing others and citing Islam as their justification, but the mere suggestion that this is somehow equivalent to a court imposing Sharia on non-Muslims, and having legal apparatuses to force people to comply with it, is fucking ridiculous. The latter is never going to happen in Europe, which is what Zoidberg accurately pointed out to you. Pointing at the behavior of street thugs, even if you can properly source your claims (you haven't), doesn't make a dent in his observation, nor does appealing to the emotions of the victims.
That would be lovely if police protection were a dependable way to keep people in high-crime areas from being victimized. But when the police investigate a crime and all the witnesses refuse to testify because either they're intimidated by the gangs or they see the police as the enemy, who's going to apply the lawful sanction against the street thugs?
And now, you immediately leap to a scenario in which the Moslems are ruling over their neighborhoods with an iron fist, and the authorities are just oh-so-helpless to stop them. Sharia law is come! Western civilization is at an end!
When you actually have sound evidence to back up your fearmongering and hyperbole, kindly let the rest of us know.
Not if you value your credibility.
Do you have a reason to think such zones don't exist? Or are you taking it for granted that anything one of your political opponent says is automatically false if you sneer at it enough? Supposing, hypothetically, that there were such areas, how do you think we would know? Would a country containing them perhaps publish a public caution on its government website with all the known no-go areas marked on a map?
By all means, tell us what if anything you would regard as evidence for the existence of a no-go area. Conversely, if no observation would persuade you, that means you are a faith-based initiative.
Oh, give me a fucking break. I guess I'm taking it on faith that the U.S. government didn't destroy the World Trade Center and isn't building FEMA camps, right? Because it's
my job to go disproving every batshit crazy claim tossed out by wingnuts.
That I have to explain the difference between "refusing to believe something in spite of evidence" and "not accepting outlandish claims until presented with evidence," on an
atheist forum of all places, is pretty sad.
He who makes assertions, backs them up, using credible sources. If you think that Muslims in Europe have been allowed to establish their own autonomous enclaves and that the police are too scared to assert themselves there, there ought to be plenty of credible sources you can cite to support your claim.
If you can't find any, or can only find gross misrepresentations of evidence and right-wing nuttery, that should tell you that your claim is garbage.
So your theory is what? That criminals keep trying to extort people even though it never works? That everybody who gets threatened if he doesn't pay and warned not to tell the police tells the police? That today's identity-group-based crime gangs are progressive and enlightened, so they follow a strict code of nondiscrimination and would never concentrate on non-members of their identity group?
Are you really this daft? Do you possess any understanding of the concept of burden of proof?
You told us that "Christians have been forced to pay" for being Christians - how in the hell did you arrive at the conclusion that this bears out that claim? For one, the fact that it's in English is a pretty massive red flag about its authenticity, and two, I can't find any English language sources even commenting on this except batshit crazy right-wing blogs. Wonder why? And of course, even if this is genuine, it
still comes nowhere near proving that "Christians have been forced to pay." All it proves is "some asshole typed a highly questionable letter trying to extort people, in the wrong language, using vague undertones of East vs West." Do you have any evidence suggesting that anything actually came of this? I'm pretty sure I know the answer already. For pete's sake, I don't even see any mention of jizya or even Islam anywhere in the whole thing. No rational person will look at this and see it as evidence of a modern jizya in effect.
Seriously - if this is the best you can come up with, you should just stop now. It's not my fucking job to disprove your silly claims, it's yours to back them up using credible evidence. This is a pretty basic concept of discourse that shouldn't need to be explained.
