Spectrism

The choice between wrongfully being called antisemitic and actually supporting a genocide is not a difficult one. Saying this as a German.

Agreed, but I also don't think that it's wrong to directly quote someone. It doesn't necessarily reflect the author's opinion on the matter or make them "disgusting".

That's a quote from another commenter in this thread, not from the AJ article. So how is this relevant?

How so? AJ is just quoting CENTCOM here.

To quote from the article itself:

The number of young men applying to be conscientious objectors and refuse armed military service in Germany has risen sharply this year, undermining a drive by Berlin to create Europe’s strongest conventional army and deter the Russian threat.

And the "Russian threat" simply isn't really there (at least not to NATO), so it's just a lame excuse for militarisation. This is not even a tankie opinion.

The Bundeswehr isn't really directly involved with the occupying forces in Palestine, so this has nothing do with it.

Minor correction: RT actually stands for "Russia Today"

I'd say that's not related to atheism as a whole. Atheism doesn't have some requirement of being an Islamophobe, in fact it doesn't have any ideological requirements at all. There's no guiding book or organisation giving atheists any ideas, it's just a subset of people who are atheist and mixed that with intolerant beliefs of their own making. You could compare it to Islam and ISIS, where one certain group within this whole set of beliefs made up their own BS, but that doesn't make their ideology the basis for Islam. [Theistic] religions however already have harmful beliefs baked into their scriptures (i.e. Quran, Bible, Tanakh, etc.), which are the basis for the religion as a whole instead of just for a subset of people making up their own stuff, as well as an established culture independent of those scriptures that is often anything but tolerant and open-minded, fueled by the, generally speaking, religiously inherent lack of critical thinking.

So as I said, atheists can be manipulated and whatnot, for which you provided a great example, but their beliefs do not stem from atheism.

Atheists can of course also be manipulated, but not based on their atheism. There's no organisation behind atheism, there are no specific set of beliefs that you could be indoctrinated with, etc.

I know what the issue is and as I said in another comment, I also disagree with it. But that doesn't make the statement by the commenter above wrong.

That is true and isn't what I would support, but the comment above wasn't blanket hostility, not in this context anyway. Pointing out the often prevalent cases of religion being used as a tool of oppression and that it's all based on indoctrination is absolutely valid when discussing the motivation for France's measures. You can of course disagree with it and with the measures discussed here, independently of each other even, but if this is already "blanket hostility" to some people, they should stop viewing religions through rose-colored glasses. I mean, do you genuinely believe that religions are NOT used for this purpose at all? I have a hard time believing that any actual Marxist would see religions uncritically, even with the understanding of them being the way they are as the result of material conditions, and even less so as Marxists-Leninists if one has actually read Lenin's "Socialism and Religion".

And even if you were to consider it blanket hostility, why would this be worthy of a ban and comment removal instead of simply engaging with the comment in an intellectually honest way and possibly providing the commenter a different perspective?

I would say it's an aspect of secularism when done in a sane way.

What anyone considers sane is subjective, but if that's what you consider a more sane approach to secularism, I can't argue against that.

Well, I would say that ultimately all theocracies are that. In my view there aren't any deities, so all theocracies which claim to base their legitimacy on a supreme being are, well, wrong. They are really enforcers of cultural norms that just happen to have a belief in a particular deity as one of those norms.

Buddhism doesn't really have specific cultural norms, though, does it? As far as I know, Buddhism is based on guiding principles (wisdom, ethics, mental discipline), not on specific rules as it's the case with theistic religions. So there's not really a way for states to enforce any laws from Buddhism itself, they can only abide by its principles to make their own laws, whereas theocracies enforce laws not thought of by themselves but based on things written hundreds or thousands of years ago, often with little to no consideration about ethics, logic or usefulness.

The part where you have enough social liberty that you don't have government officials telling you how to dress.

That would be good indeed, but isn't really an aspect of secularism.

'secular theocracy' is wordplay making fun of their attempts to secularize in such a way that they take on features of a theocracy, such as dress codes.

Fair point.

You could presumably have a Buddhist theocracy without any sort of belief in a supreme ruling deity.

I think that wouldn't make it a theocracy, as it's more of a philosophy or way of life rather than a belief in a higher being that has a strict set of rules that a state could enforce. But I don't really know that much about buddhism, so I might be wrong.

I agree that these measures are a bit over the top, but I don't really get your points.

Which good parts of secularism do you think are missing here?

And "secular theocracy" is an oxymoron. Theocracies require the belief in at least one deity as a supreme ruling authority to guide the state, which is not the case at all here, completely the opposite even. So what makes you think that it's a "secular theocracy"?