If you were Muslim, I'd accept your rationalization as something that was suitable to your life view. But because you aren't, I suspect this is smokescreen for your real objection, which is that the people in those videos don't fit your assumption that all Muslims fit a very narrow stereotype. And if you had to abandon that stereotype, you'd have to rethink your view of Muslims.
That's fallacious thinking. My viewpoint is not correct or incorrect based upon a personal decision. And
your stereotype argument is further fallacious on all fronts.
I don't care to support or refute either of your positions re: Muslims and Islam, but I did read the discussion. Just to be clear, Arianrhod didn't make an argument re: stereotypes. He stated what he believes to be the reason for the remarks you made. He didn't present an argument of any sort. Unless you are going to assert that he misrepresented what believes, that is, that he doesn't actually believe what he wrote, there's no way what he wrote can be fallacious, or more precisely, false. I can't imagine that you'll be able to demonstrate that he doesn't believe what he said he does.
Arianrhod also made a prediction about how your viewpoint would change were you to dispense with the stereotype that he asserts underpins your statements. HIs prediction can turn out to be false or true. It may be possible to show his prediction to be false or true, but to do either, you or someone would need to develop a very solid argument to show the outcome he predicted must necessarily, or not, come to pass. Frankly, it'd be a very hard one to develop because, for it to be highly acceptable, it'd require showing that you do or don't base your views on any stereotypical understanding and/or representations (generalizations) of Islam/Muslims. Better and easier would be to make the case that your expressed views do not depend on stereotypes.
Doing that effectively unavoidably would call for Arianrhod to alter his belief of why you've made the statements you have. It would also direct the discussion toward themes that lead to a more objectively attainable conclusion.
He was saying that I said all Muslims fit a very narrow stereotype when I never said such things. I don't indulge people putting words in my mouth.
So like you, "my panties get in a bunch" when people put words in my mouth. On occasion, I don't precisely express the thought(s) in my head, but most of the time, I very specifically and comprehensively explain the substance and nuance of my ideas. So, yes, I share and understand your furor over that.
The thing I was pointing out is that Arianrhod didn't exactly do that, although it takes a close and careful read of his remarks to see that to be so. What he wrote says that he speculates/thinks/believes/posits that (1) your comments are a "smokescreen" hiding something else and (2) that "something else" is an "assumption that all Muslims fit a very narrow stereotype."
I grant, however, that the line, between what he wrote and actually putting words in your mouth is faint or "dashed," but it's there nonetheless. How so and why? Well, he opens the governing independent clause of his sentence using "I suspect." That small phrase tells us that, in the words that follow, he's stating what he believes to be so rather than asserting that it is so. The distinction is subtle, but it's there and unmistakably so.
Are there ways to have made the speculative nature of his statement even clearer? Yes, there are. For example, he might have conjugated "to be" in the subjunctive mood, writing "I suspect this be a smokescreen..." Doing so would have reinforced the tone/element of uncertainty introduced by "suspect," and it would have eliminated the ambiguity that resulted caused by the indicative mood conjugation he did use ("...is a smokescreen...") following "suspect." Adding a noun, pronoun or nominal phrase after the demonstrative adjective "this" also would have helped a little bit. Ending his sentence with a question mark would also have helped reinforce the element of doubt that accompanies "I suspect."
The problem, of course, is that this is an Internet forum and the mode of communication is writing. Moreover, in venues like this forum where we are all strangers to one another, one has to grant a good deal of "benefit of the doubt." In person discourse provides a variety of cues that inform the audience in ways that words alone sometimes cannot, most especially when the words aren't presented in strict adherence to the grammatical rules we've all been taught to follow for written expression. The result is that readers like you and me must infer what constructions the writer may have intended, overlooked, etc. and guess what might be the governing character the writer intended. Guesses of that sort are hard to make when the words one sees have jumbled tone/mood.
Make no mistake, even though I try to "get it right," I don't always, and even when I do, some readers aren't as adroitly in command of English as I and, as a result, they may misconstrue what I've written. (I don't often post in "sound bites" because their brevity is often another cause of confusion.) When/if they do, some folks "rear back on their haunches" and commence to defend themselves by attacking me, not my ideas, me. (That's not what you did re: Arianrhod.) Others use the tried and true, and neutral, questioning approach to confirm whether their read of what I wrote is accurate.
So, I'm saying that Arianrhod didn't put words in your mouth, but there's enough ambiguity in the grammatical construction he used to make it hard to be sure whether that was his intent. Asking for clarification would have been a better tack, better because he wrote "I suspect," than outright calling his statement fallacious.
Smoking and Islam's values:
As a practical matter, I think that a fair case can be made that smoking violates at least one principle of Islam. That said, in comparison with the deeds of, say, Osama Bin Laden or those ISIS/ISIL groups who are daily in the news, it's hardly enough to use as a basis for asserting that a Muslim has strayed from the path of Islam. For example, I wouldn't say a Christian person who lives in a U.S. city and who doesn't go to church is not living their religion.
Now, I 'm not a Muslim, and I don't know what tenets of Islam are universal and which of them are ascribed to by various sects of Muslim belief. I do know there are multiple disciplines of Islam just as there are versions of Christianity. Perhaps the guy in the opening post's video is a member of an Islamic sect that doesn't take exception with smoking? I don't know if he is or is not, but I do know I have no basis for judging his actions based on that short clip.
Humans are much to complicated to be defined fairly (in most instances) by and judged by just a couple minutes' depiction of their acts. Even infamous characters like Osama Bin Laden were (are) more multidimensional than is suggested by focusing solely on his orchestration of the 9/11 attack on the WTC and Pentagon. (FWIW, even though Mr. Bin Laden was a Muslim, I hardly would characterize him and his followers as being representative of most Muslims. Nor do I find that his interpretation of Islam is in any what what The Prophet and Allah would have encouraged.)
