I discussed it a bit in another comment, but my thinking boils down to this:

I think it’s important to make a distinction between defending Muslims in Western countries because they are a minority that are often the recipient of discrimination and hatred, and defending Muslims in an islamic country where they are a majority and hold a position of power/oppression.

I strongly support the first one (yet have no tolerance for any beliefs that harms others), but I do not support the second one at all simply because the power balance is drastically different. Unfortunately, a lot of people use critique of islam as critique of brown people, and I know cos I’ve been the recipient of that.

The issue is that the Islamic discussion has been hijacked by the right which forces liberals to defend Islam even though we should be criticizing it too. We need to reappropriate the Islam discussion and make sure it is not used as a weapon for racism.

A perfect example of this is Mila, a young LGBT+ woman in France who said on Instagram that she didn't like Islam after she received homophobic comments from a muslim. One of her biggest defenders was the Front National, France's far-right party, which is utterly bullshit because the FN does not give a fuck about the LGBT community. They were the first to walk on the streets to protest against France's legalisation of gay marriage. So the fact that they were able to hijack a conversation about LGBT+ issues to push their own narrative and gain points (least we forget, they almost won our last elections) is disgusting, and it mostly shows the left's failure to control the discussion as it should have since it was a LGBT+ issue. And we need to get better at that, much better.