of course i'm all about mutual aid.

but mutual aid has to be mutual, which means you don't push for it if you're pretty sure you're not going to get it back. and, there has to be common cause to make sense of it, too. so, that means no mutual aid with fascists. obvious, right? but, is islam a fascist thought system or not?

i'm more willing to extend solidarity and support and aid to the people trying to escape islam than the people trying to establish it. that means solidarity for secularists in the middle east, and it means solidarity for atheists and secularists in the west, too. i would have common cause with a kid trying to escape their muslim parents, rather than the muslim parents trying to enforce themselves on the kid. and, of course, i'd say the same thing about christians, too.

so, it's a question of the poverty of the breadcrumbs one expects to receive in return for mutual aid with muslim groups, which isn't missing the point but rather clarifying it.

mutual aid is often attributed to kroptkin, which i think is at least useful, even if you can find somebody else older than him. what's forgotten is that kropotkin was a scientist and his concept of mutual aid as an anarchist social idea was actually a corollary of his evolutionary theory. dawkins doesn't like the comparison, but i think he's being obsequious to cultural censorship in denying it; his own work, as described for popular consumption in the film nice guys finish first, is really a clarification of the evolutionary concept of mutual aid, and an expansion of it to a modern treatment and understanding. using computer trials and game theory, he's able to demonstrate that successful social behaviour treats mutual aid as an assumption, but is also quick to deny it upon any sort of betrayal. one could argue that this is essentially a mathematical proof of the lesson that anarchists should have taken from their own struggles, most famously the difficult question of alliances in the spanish revolution, where they've had the best chance of serious implementation.

what that means is that you need to calculate where mutual aid is an effective strategy and where it's likely to lead to being taken advantage of and then adjust accordingly. and, i can't imagine how providing mutual aid to this system of dominance and oppression is going to lead to anything but a catastrophic outcome for people on the left, with leftist values and leftist aspirations. providing mutual aid to muslims can only lead to the undoing of any kind of leftist struggle.

but, it also follows that it is important to extend mutual aid to the people that you expect to return it, which very explicitly includes those that are trying to get out of the mental and physical grips of the religious system: apostates, queers, feminists, academics, anarchists, socialists, atheists, punks, rebels, lumpen and other people that are standing against what the religion stands for.

there was no reason for you to be confused about where i stand on this, and i'm happy to acknowledge that we may disagree, if you identify as a member of the "christian left" or as a theist or as a "progressive". i'm none of these things, and i've never claimed common cause with you, either. but, i hope that this clarifies my perspective - which is that of the anarchist or libertarian left, if slightly updated with the replacement of kropotkin with dawkins - if you were previously confused about it.