[pickledish]

I think you might be taking this line too seriously. In this piece I don't think the author is trying to lay out a well-thought-out, validated, and rhetorically-correct argument for his point of view -- if he were trying to do that, you'd be totally right and that line would have no place in it.

But in this case I think the article is pretty clearly more stream of consciousness, just what the author believed at the time, legitimate or not -- and even though it's reductive and just genuinely a pretty bad reason, it's also easy to see how his subconscious might be thinking along the lines of "islam? Nah can't do islam, I'm not brown". Our minds generate totally faulty lines of reasoning like that all the time.

(especially if he came into this with a predisposition towards Buddhism, which I wouldn't be surprised about, since Buddhism tends to be viewed as very "cool" to westerners but Islam not as much)

Edit: ok or it was a joke :p