All the things she mentions aren't actually products of Islam, but of the backwards-ass tribal cultures where Islam arose and still thrives.

But if your faith makes allowances for and rewards those things.... If your faith doesn't transcend and rise above those things.... If your faith doesn't point you towards better....

If these are the 'fruits' of Islam, what kind of faith is it?

Gray - That's the problem, isn't it? Islam, wherever practised and whether practised by Arabs or not (the two other cesspools of Islam are India and the Southeast Asian islands, both inhabited by completely different ethnic groups) is essentially Dark Ages Arabic tribal "culture" turned into a religion.

Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan both missed a trick. Neither of them hit on the idea of making a religion of their barbarism. If they had, Hun and/or Mongol culture would be a major force in the world right now.

It's easy to say that those phenomena emanate from "tribal cultures" rather than "Islam," but most of them in fact do not occur in any "tribal cultures" other than those dominated by Islam or in close contact with Islam (such as minority Christian dhimmi cultures in Islamic societies). The honor-killing of women, in particular, is unheard of outside of the sphere of Islam. In many cultures, a jealous husband might kill an unfaithful wife in a fit of rage but only in Islam will a mother calmly and with determination murder the daughter whose behavior causes outsiders to doubt the family's "honor." That is an Islamic meme, period. The same is true for most of the other vicious features of life in the Ummah. Where else are adherents of even other versions of Islam, let alone other religions, routinely savaged and murdered? It's sort of what the "progressives" used to say about each and every actual communist country. If you pointed out to them that the Soviet Union was a filthy hellhole, they'd say that the Soviet Union wasn't an example of "true" communism, and go on ad nauseam with more argle bargle about the peculiar features of Russian history that deformed the "communism" that had been installed in a peasant country before the Proletariat had fully emerged and matured . . . on to China . . . more of the same hogwash . . . and so on and so forth. The fact is, every communist country is a stinking hellhole, and so is every Islamic country. No sane man would emigrate to either, and damn few do. On the contrary, millions fled communism and the Ummah for the very West that communists and Muslims so despise. As for what kind of a "faith" Islam really is, it is very evidently the very ideology which promotes, and for 1,000 years promoted, the hellish societies that have developed in its stygian shadow.

Let me add a mention of James DeMeo's interesting book "Saharasia." Based on Wilhelm Reich's theories of character development and an exhaustive anthropological catalogue of societal features, DeMeo locates the origin of the meme of the repressive type of society exemplified in the Ummah in the desertification of central Asia and the Sahara some 6,000 years ago. The clash between the desert cultures and the tropical cultures is evident even today in (For example) Bali.

I beg to differ! Islam is a "religion of peace!"

(I know; because GWB said so!) ;)

Islam is a religion of peace. Muslims who commit acts of terrorism, denigrate women, and practice female circumcision, and other sorts of barbaric practices are not truly living in accord with the teachings of the Koran. True Islam as practiced by the majority of Muslims around the world do not adhere to these practices. Unfortunately, many people in the West judge Islam according to the behavior of ultra conservatives, extremist, and militant Muslims. Because of Western hatred of Islam people (particularly Christians) refuse to make an effort to understand the Islamic faith. Thus, they are left with a false image they insist is correct.

If we were to judge Christianity using the same standard Westerners used to judge Islam, Christianity would also look horrible. Take for instance the Catholic church protecting priests who were raping young boys for decades, or the Serbian Christians attempted genocide of the Bosnian Muslims. And let's not forget that the Christian soldiers enjoyed raping the Muslim women. There is also that Christian group known as the Ku Klux Klan who terrorized Jews, African-Americans, and any nonwhite people for over a hundred years. Let's not forget the Christian Identity groups whose doctrines include hatred of non-whites, or radical Christians who bombed abortion clinics and murdered their doctors. After 9/11 many Christian evangelical pastors practically ignored the acts of the terrorists and instead began preaching hatred of Islam. This hatred was coming out of the mouths of people who claim to be following the teachings of Jesus. Christianity was once so violent that it nearly exterminated other Christian groups the Church considered heretics. During the Spanish Inquisition the church created instruments of torture and forced Muslims, Jews and Christians who belonged to other churches, to convert to Catholic Christianity. Maybe this is why so many Christians are hypocritical by refusing to look at the dirt in their own house and refuse to judge Christianity by using the same standard that they use to judge Islam.

Aaron, With all due respect, your comment illustrates many of the dialectical subterfuges about which I commented, above.

You posit a "true Islam" whose adherents do not practice any of the common everyday practices that are widespread in nearly all cultures and communities profoundly affected by the Islamic idea. But the facts remain (to mention only two) that honor killing is widespread in the Ummah (and only in the Ummah), and that not a single Islamic country recognizes the basic human right of freedom of conscience.

Then you attempt to distract the observer from the problems of the Islamic world, by describing the problems in Christendom. Yet the wars of religion to which you allude took place 500 years ago, and it was as a result of that hell that Christians learned religious toleration. Something Sunnis and Shias do not accord each other, and neither group accords the Ahmadiyya and other minority Islamic offshoots.

Christendom welcomes adherents of every religion, and of atheism. Mosques are being built in every Christian country. There is simply no comparison with the violent and deadly intolerance that prevails in the Muslim world.

And when was the last abortion clinic bombed? And how many abortion clinics were bombed? How many abortionists were murdered? When was the last such killing? To paraphrase Robert Burns, damn few. Those actions truly were the actions of an extreme fringe that did not represent the mainstream of the pro life movement.

Any idea how many people were executed by the Spanish Inquisition? The best historical estimate is about 3,000 over something like 200 years. That's the number Muslim terrorists recently killed in a single day.

And since September 11, 2001, Muslim terrorists have committed more than 12,000 murderous attacks all over the world.

To characterize the Mumbai terrorists as Muslims is not to indulge in sociological profiling, but to accept them on their own terms. That is what they call themselves: Muslims. And they very plainly state that what they are fighting for is Islam. Failure to see that is indeed, in Andrew McCarthy's phrase, willful blindness.

The comments made regarding my statement about true Islam proves my point. Christians refuse to judge Christianity by the same standard that they judge Islam. Punditarian writes that the wars that I alluded to happened 500 years ago. Tell this to the Bosnian Muslims who were being ethnically cleansed by Christians in the 1990s. An estimated 300,000 Muslims were murdered by the Serbian Christians. Let me repeat that, three hundred thousand Muslims murdered.

Regardless of when the last abortion bombings happened, the fact is that it did happen, and Christians were the culprit. As I indicated in my statement the Ku Klux Klan terrorized and murdered thousands of innocent people. They continue to preach racial hatred today not 5 hundred years ago.

The reasons that Muslim extremists commit acts of terrorism today is due to the denigration of Muslims around the world by the Christian West. Tens of thousands of Muslims have died or were killed as a direct result of Western policies in the Muslim world. The war in Iraq resulted in thousands of innocent lives being taken by American bombings although Iraq did not attack America or even have weapons of mass distruction. The war was started by an American conservative Christian president. Yes, Saddam Hussein was a savage dictator who made a point of killing his own people. However, this does not justify the actions taken by this country. Terrorists entered Iraq in droves and started a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. Once more, thousands of lives were taken. This would not have happened if we would have stayed out of that country. This is not meant to justify the Muslim extremist barbaric practices, but it explains in the most simplistic way why they use such savage methods. God willing, their barbarism will be brought to an end soon.

What I like to see is for honest Christians to judge their religion by the same standard that they judge Islam without making excuses. I am a severe critic of radical extremist Muslims. I have always tried to be fair with Christians. I refuse to denigrate their religion or them personally. I refuse to do to Christianity what some hateful Christians do to Islam. I believe that Christianity like Islam, is a peaceful and loving religion. I refuse to associate the evil that many Christians do with the religion of Christianity , even when it's done in the name of Jesus. The comments that I made earlier, pointing out the horrible things that Christians have done in their past and the present, were only to make a point.

It is unfortunate, that many Christians like those writing in this blog continue to criticize the entire Islamic faith based on the behavior of a few of the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world. They continue to say things like why haven't Muslims rose above such practices as female circumcision or honor killings. What they fail to point out is that some Christians also practice female circumcision and honor killings in the Third World, particularly some parts of Africa and the middle east. But only Muslims are blamed. In Haiti many Christians continue to practice pagan voodoo because it is part of their cultural religious tradition, so they merged it with Christianity. I ask the question, why haven't Christians in Haiti rose above this?

The day when Christians and Muslims learn to respect each other and judge each other fairly, if they feel the need to judge at all, and focus on the righteous majority rather than the evil minority, it will be the beginning of peace in this world.

Although it must seem, Aaron, that you and I are the only ones still willing to debate this topic here, I appreciate the candor and civility of your remarks, and I am willing to proceed.

In the Balkans you have found a contemporary example of Muslims massacred, this one time at least, not by other Muslims, but by Orthodox Christians. The facts of the matter you describe, and the numbers cited, are not, as I am sure you know, undisputed. The history of the Balkans, going back to the time of its conquest by Turkish jihadists, is sad and bloody. There have been massacres on all sides, and there have been more than two sides in the repeated wars that have scarred the Balkan lands. Don't forget the 700,000 Orthodox Christians, 50,000 Gypsies, and 20,000 Jews bludgeoned to death by Roman Catholics and Muslims at Jasenovac, for example, in conditions so horrible that even hardened SS observers were appalled.

And yet, other than the example of the Balkans, there have been very few attempts by Christians to defend themselves against the current wave of jihadi expansionism. In Africa, notably in Nigeria and Kenya, Christians have resisted Muslim terror, but most Islamist terror attacks do not elicit a bellicose response.

You are also quick to bring up the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein's murderous regime as a legitimate causus belli for Muslim terrorists. Perhaps you have forgotten that the September Eleventh Atrocities preceded the Iraq war, not the other way around. And it is absurd to blame the flare-up of Sunni-Shi'a intercommunal warfare on the successful removal from power of the mass murderer.

Finally, I would like to emphasize that my opinion of what life under Islam is like, is not based solely on the actions of the Muslim terrorists. (Although those terrorists seem to evoke no mass indignation in the Ummah, by the way.) With or without jihadist terrorism, the Ummah is still a benighted hellhole, where women are subject to genital mutilation and honor-killing, where religious freedom simply does not exist, where freedom of speech does not exist, where the corruption of kings and dictators is unchecked, and where the officially and legally authoritative Scripture categorically exhorts the extermination of infidels.

Finally, there is no organization of "Christian states" in the world, but there is an organization of Muslim States, and it is the Muslim countries that demand to be recognized, and hence judged, as such.

Well, I'm following the discussion.

Thank you, Gerard. Your attention is worth more than that of most multitudes . . .

Gerard,

The link you have today to the article "Enough is enough of radical Islam" says it all.

The sins of Christianity 500 years ago or 5 years ago are not the issue.

Radical Islam is at war with the West.

That is, radical Islam is at war with us.

Radical Islamists want to kill us.

Our leaders, our institutions, our societies have to stop facilitating radical Islam's war, and start opposing it.

Or those of us who survive will be enslaved.

Culturally, we are in a weakened state. It is as if, instead of reporting the facts on the ground about the war in Europe, 1939-1945, our universities and media only wanted to tell us about Mozart, Goethe, and Schiller.

This will be my last response on this blog. I am a Muslim, and as a Muslim I have studied the Islamic faith in detail. I have read the entire Quran multiple times. I am aware of sects and communities that are liberal, moderate, conservative, ultra conservative, and radical extremists. Of all the people writing on this blog I am the only one who is truly educated in the Islamic faith, its history, it's culture, its theology, its world. The Muslim world is not monolithic although those who hate Islam pretend that it is. The overwhelming majority of Muslims in the world are good and peaceful people. However, anyone who watches the news will be bombarded by the horrors of radical militant Muslims. They get 99% of the news coverage. The majority of Muslims in the world who live their lives peacefully get less than 1% news coverage. Some Christians like to hear about these militant Muslims because it allows them to demonize the Islamic faith. This is what I see happening here on this blog.

It is curious that no one has taken up my challenge to judge Islam by the same standards that you judge Christianity. In other words, saying that true Christianity are the teachings of the Ku Klux Klan, the Christian identity groups, the pedaphilia of Christian priest, or the attempted genocide of the Bosnian Muslims. This is concrete evidence that what is written on this blog is due to unadulterated hatred and prejudice.

You cannot dismiss the horrors committed in the name of Christianity by simply saying that "there have been massacres on all sides" as if this makes it O.K.. Imagine if a Muslim were to use that excuse. Punditarian says that perhaps I have forgotten that the September 11 atrocities preceded the Iraq war. I say, perhaps you have forgotten that Iraq had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. The reason we are fighting in Afghanistan is because the Taliban were protecting those who were actually responsible for the September 11 attacks. Iraq is a different situation. The attack on Iraq was totally unjustified. Do anyone really want to go to war against every brutal dictator in the world who have not attacked this country?

Punditarian's opinion of what life is like under Islam is simply untrue and based on prejudice. This is not to say that the Islamic world don't have its problems. There are dictators and corrupt kings but genital mutilations and honor killings are not part of the Islamic faith and is only practiced in a few countries. Notice how nothing was said about honor killings in Hinduism although some Hindus do practice it. Or Christians who also practice genital mutilations and honor killings. Let's also not forget that there is corruption in Western governments including the United States. Many of our own congressman, governors and mayors have been cited on corruption charges. Corruption is also to be found in many of our multi-billion-dollar corporations (remember Enron?). Enron and Lincoln Savings and Loan (the Keating five) were only the tip of the iceberg. This type of corruption is common in America.

What about the charge that the official and legally authoritative scripture categorically exhorts the extermination of infidels. This would be laughable if it wasn't such a serious charge. Obviously, punditarian is extremely ignorant of the Quranic Scripture and Islamic history. Haters of Islam make a point of isolating and taking Quranic versus out of context. This decontextualization is exactly what is done by the Islamic extremist. It is one thing that the extremists on both sides have in common. The verses punditarian is referring to has to do with warfare between the Muslims and the idol worshipers in the time of Mohammed, not extermination. It was the pagan idol worshipers who wanted to exterminate the Muslims not the other way around. The Quran urged the Muslims to kill the pagans wherever they found them (on the battlefield). But it also exhorted the Muslims to stop fighting if the enemy was willing to desist.

In conclusion, I refuse to hate (Christians or anyone else for that matter). I only hope that I have encouraged some of you to take a second look at your hateful views. It is interesting that of all of the hate talk that I encounter, most of it comes from Christians not Muslims. We all know about Al Qaeda and radical Jihadis groups, but when I searched the Internet, read magazines, and watch talk shows, about 99% of the hate talk comes from Christians as is the case on this blog. Not long ago I was reading Newsweek magazine that had an article about American Muslims. It had an interesting story about a Muslim man who was preaching against Christians in the Mosque and was banned from ever preaching there again because he spoke against Christians. Those who banned this man from preaching are true Muslims practicing authentic Islam.

For those of you who wish to continue in your prejudice I know that it is because you need an enemy to hate. Communism has failed. The Soviet Union is dissolved. Many in the West need a new enemy and has chosen Islam. The radical extremist (terrorist) only makes it easier to hate and to justify that hatred.

Well we'll be sorry to see you go. We'll be sorry to see many more moderate muslims go.

I note, however, that regardless of the endless litany of complaint about the endless errors of Christians and the West the fact remains that whenever a terrorist incident occurs in today's world (the one we live in) Muslims seem to be involved in or behind 95% of them.

No other contemporary religion can make that claim.

Dear Aaron,

Sorry to see you abandon the field, although it would be charitable to say that you have done in successive posts much more than simply repeat the assertion that Christianity is just as evil as Islam. You have not challenged the facts that Islamist jihadis are responsible for an ongoing and relentless wave of murderous attacks in the Philippines, Thailand, Bali, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, the Lebanon, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Somalia, Algeria, Nigeria, Morocco, Chechnya, Dagestan, Russia, Spain, France, Great Britain, Germany, Scandinavia, and the United States. My apologies to the innocent victims whose nations I have inadvertently omitted. The official spokesmen for Muslim governments openly call for the genocide of the Jews, the enslavement of the Christians, and the destruction of the United States. And so on.

On your side you have repeated assertions about the Ku Klux Klan, the pedophilia of Catholic priests, bombings of abortion clinics, and a Balkan massacre. When it is pointed out that these phenomena are comparatively minor, for example, that the Ku Klux Klan is not an important agent of Christian action and is actively denounced by Christians in the United States, you respond by asserting that the jihadists are similarly fringe actors in the Ummah, and that the vast majority of moderate Muslims oppose them.

The neo-confucian communist Mao Ze Dong once observed that the guerrillero moves among the people as a fish moves in the sea. The bombers of abortion clinics and the murderers of abortionists were captured, tried, convicted and sentenced. Meanwhile, Syria and the Falastinian Authority award their highest honors to the murderers of innocent children.

Let me bring to your attention two recent columns. One was by Thomas Friedman in the New Duranty Times. He made a series of interesting observations. First, he observed that if Hindu terrorists had landed in Karachi and mudered hundreds of innocent people, the Muslim world would have exploded with indignation and protest. The controversies and crises that followed the publication of the Danish cartoons shows that the Ummah is capable of swift and widespread mobilization when it feels it has an important issue to protest. After the Mumbai Atrocities, there have been only a few scattered editorials and letters-to-the-editor from Muslims criticizing the terror. The inescapable conclusion (which Friedman does not explicitly draw, he is still hoping for those mass protests) is that the broad mass of Muslim moderates actually support or at the very least acquiesce in the terror campaign of the jihadists.

Because the broad mass of Muslim moderates actually supports the goals of the jihadists, i.e. a worldwide caliphate ruling all of us through more or less strict shari'ah law. They may not approve, individually, of every attack or every act of terror. But as a group, moderate Muslims support the goals of the terrorists and are sympathetic to their aims.

That was brought out, by the way, in an article in TIME magazine which the author thought was an apologia for the downtrodden and unhappy Muslims of India. It turns out, however, that the gravamen of their discontent, is that they are no longer lording it over the whole subcontinent, as they did before the British Raj displaced the Mughal court.

The second column to which I would like to direct your attention was published by Mark Steyn (here: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/mumbai-muslims-time-2248410-jews-muslim#)

He makes a number of observations about the failure of the Western press to understand the significance of the fact that a dozen or two Muslim terrorists intent on crippling India's greatest city devoted 20% of their military resources to murdering a handful of Jews in an obscure corner of the city. Those victims were killed because they were Jews, and their killers killed them because they were Muslims.

These terror attacks were conducted by Muslims who call themselves Muslims, in the name of Islam and its God, as an act (in their eyes) of sanctified martyrdom. And the broad masses of the Muslim world are largely silent. That acquiescence is ultimately more significant that even the attacks themselves.

I concur. I also note that while "Silence means consent" in this instance, silence does more here as well. For more and more the people of the world will come to understand the consent of this silence and from that, for Muslims, their continued silence will breed contempt.

Thank you for your gracious concurrence. The tide, however, may be turning.

The enemy requires that we treat him with the utmost deference and respect, forbearing to examine or criticize anything about his way of life, while at the same time directing at our civilization the most vitriolic stream of invective and abuse imaginable. That is indeed the current state of Muslim-Infidel dialogue in the West's own Universities.

But in the East itself, an heroic voice has emerged to take the battle to the enemy, and Father Zakaria Botros, an Egyptian Coptic priest, presents an unashamed critique of Islam in Arabic to a satellite television audience of as many as 60 million viewers -- the overwhelming majority of them, Muslims.

I think that this phenomenon is significant, but I do not mistake the turning of the tide for the ebbing of the tide. Ferocious waves will continue to break on our shores for a long time before the current tide of jihadism ebbs away.

My fear is that the resolution and determination of the West will fade away, or that (if current demographic trends continue) the very population of the West will fade away, before jihadism ultimately collapses.

Here's a recent example that combines Islamist misogyny and intolerance: a well-known Jewish teacher in Reida, Sanaa, Yemen was shot to death the other day by a former pilot, Abed el-Abdi. el-Abdi was convicted of murdering his wife two years ago, a crime for which he was not imprisoned after paying blood money to her family.

Face it, this is a story that could only come about in the Ummah.

"Repulsive Islam" sums up how most Western people now view Islam thanks to 30 years of jihad, beginning in Iran. ("The purest joy in Islam is to kill and be killed for Allah."-Ayatollah Khomeini)

Jihad is permanent war against infidels. Jihad is the core of Islam. Jihad will only end when there are no longer infidels. Any Moslem who does not commit jihad or wish to is excluded from paradise.

It can be argued that Serbians learned the trick of genocide from 500 years of Islamic rule.The lengthy war crimes tribunal may snap them out their supremacist fantasies inherited from the Ottomans.

The repulsive genocide of Bosnians Moslems was closer to 200,000 victims (300 k is rather high).

ALL genocide is repulsive in the extreme! Jihad is purely speaking, genocide.

There is no Islam without genocide.

Why is it that most Islamic nations have bloody borders?

Too bad Aaron isn't around to continue this debate. If he was I would tell him that the issue with moderate vs radical Islam is simply this: radical Islamists behead people, the moderates watch them behead people.

Aaron, there are some of us who do understand Islam and what it teaches. One of the issues which you have highlighted in your insistence that it be judged by the same measure as Christianity, is that there is no underlying centralized "creed" that defines the beliefs for all of Islam. This leads to the dichotomy inherent in your insistence that "Islam is a peaceful religion" and the jihadi's insistence that the only choices for unbelievers are to convert, pay the tax or die. Both adherents take their beliefs back to the Koran and Hadiths and can clearly point out why their fundamental beliefs/actions are "true Islam."

In Christianity, we universally acknowledge the Nicene Creed as the fundamental theological outline of Orthodox Christian beliefs. We take Jesus statement that the heart of the religion is "Love God with your whole, heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself." as the fundamentals that all actions should spring from. Jesus sermon on the mount is a great outline of how Christians are to think and behave. Forgiveness, Humility, Mercy and Kindness are at the heart of it, Christians are to exhibit these characteristics as we acknowledge that we are all sinners saved by Grace, not through any works on our part. The entire Bible is the history of God's redemptive plan based on his vary character of Love incarnate. Any practice or belief "in the name of Jesus" outside of these fundamentals is theologically flawed and outside the bounds of what Christianity ultimately teaches.

I cannot say the same for Islam, and frankly, neither can you. The history of Islamic beliefs is bound by historical lineages back to several warring factions who each claim that they hold the truth. You are not permitted by your religion to independently "search the scriptures" for answers in English, only the "original" Arabic is permitted and then only through the eyes of previous scholars. Older Surahs are "overturned" with "newer" revelations...all of the "peace" writings were earlier than the Jihad writings, therefore their practice must be reexamined in the light of the "convert, tax or kill" commands.

Aaron, I would be interested to hear your thoughts on a few questions: What should the punishment be for someone who blasphemes Mohammed?

Should their be freedom of speech for people or organizations who publish images or words considered to be blasphemous to Islam?

What should the punishment be for a person who leaves Islam and converts to another religion?

Lastly for now, may I recommend the book Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity by Nabeel Qureshi.

This will be my last response on this blog. --Aaron

Well, Thanks for that, anyway....

LoL at Aaron! He must be feeling rather silly at this point.

I too have read the Koran. I have lived in a Muslim nation. I am a student of history. Aaron may be either totally blind or a true believer. He is for sure quite foolish.

This: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=341_1420932161

Me on Muslims
While all is being said, not much is being done.
To address a scourge such as Islam we must think in terms of extermination.
Think: Dresden;
Think: Hiroshima and Nagasaki;
Collateral damage? Every time some unfortunate guy gets beheaded and the video goes viral?
Really, collateral damage? You're worried some kids or old people are gonna get killed?
When they kill one of ours, we kill one hundred of theirs.
It has been seen and experienced in most every other country in the world, from the "super-powers" to the Third World yocky-dock countries: Islam is not a good thing.
It benefits nobody, apparently not even the adherents.
We are all listening to rumors that something bad is gonna happen on 9-11.
Instead of cowering and hoping that it won't happen near us we should be fire-bombing Baghdad and other concentrations of Muslim terrorists. Can't find 'em? Enlarge the target area.

Justification
We have no problem executing a heinous killer, baby raper, mass murderer, so forth;
we have no problem killing an unborn child in mother's womb in the last trimester of pregnancy;
we have no problem carrying a concealed weapon or having a weapon in the home to stop a threat to life and limb which usually leaves the perpetrator dead.
We have a problem, it seems, waging war on a radically psychopathic ethnic group that has killed, raped, maimed, enslaved, brainwashed and destroyed other people since oh, about 1200AD.
We have a problem administering the kind of military actions that will be decisive in eliminating the threat.
Think: Dresden, no problem there.
Think: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no problem there.
We have a problem over-reacting to the situation the way we did at Waco and the Branch Davidian compound, the way we did at Bundy's ranch.
Folks, as unpleasant as it may appear, going against spiritual principles that I and many others espouse in Christianity, the only solution for the Muslim threat is to kill every last one of them, their families, their friends, their neighbors;
to lay waste to their crop lands and salt their wells, to destroy their buildings such that no two stones lay atop one another.
The justification, if one is needed, is that the Muslims are Evil.
Whether we are spiritual or worldly, believers or atheists, young, old, gay or straight, male or female, White or Black, or any other combination of the above, the paradigm in which we all repose dictates that some things are good, some bad, and some Evil.

Very poignant.

@Brian in BC, "....convert, pay the tax or die."

====================

That could be said about the US gov't.

We talk of the danger from radical Islamists. We define these people as Muslims who commit violence against other human beings and justify it in the name of Islam. Yes, they are dangerous and should be dealt with as you would with a rabid dog - elimination.

But what about all those non-violent Muslims? The ones who never pick up a knife, sword, gun, or rocket launcher in anger. I've been thinking about them and asking myself if there is a future where Muslims can co-exist in tolerance with other religions. Can we here in the West accept a religion in our midst that treats women and children as chattel, believes in genital mutilation, accepts child brides, accepts honor killings, insists on dress codes for females, is intolerant of homosexuals, demands special treatment such as foot baths/prayer spaces/censoring of critiques of Islam/sharia courts to settle Muslim domestic disputes/etc., and is generally intolerant of other religions - especially Jews? Even if these Muslims aren't violent, they still hold to tenets of a religion that are inimical to Western values. My conclusion is that Islam, even "moderate" Islam is not amenable to integration into the West. As such, IMHO, we should outlaw Islam as it exists in this country. Only if they reform, such that their tenets are acceptable to Western norms of tolerance, freedom of/from religion, separation of church and state, and freedom of speech, should they be allowed to immigrate to this country.

Let them stay in their Muslim paradises, where they can practice their beliefs without harm to others (except themselves.) When/if they stray out or attack others - go all Attila the Hun on them. It's a waiting game. As Spengler points out, when the oil runs out the Muslim world will devolve into a bunch of camel herders roving their desolate countries with no resources to attack anyone. That suits me just fine.

@grace, I know you are posting tongue-in-cheek, but what exactly would I be required to convert to to live in the US? Do I need to pay a tax above my fellow citizens based on my religious beliefs, not my tax bracket but as a "tax on my haram thoughts?"

Death and taxes are constants in our lives, being told our personal beliefs, regardless of our actions will result in our beheading or prohibitive extra taxes is beyond reprehensible.

Interestingly enough, Revelation speaks of believers losing their heads for not bowing down to the Beast who's followers wear his name on their "hand" or forehead. When I see terrorists with armbands and headbands emblazoned with Arabic beheading Christians, I can't help but wonder.

I pray for Muslims to dream of Jesus as so many of their faith have, and to heed His call to follow Him.

I’d heard morality wasn’t supposed to be based on feelings of revulsion or disgust at the practices of Moslems, homosexuals, abortionists.

All good people, that is, liberals, don’t pay attention to the disgust/purity axis of moral thinking. And they congratulate themselves on not using primitive emotions as a foundation of morality.

When did that change?

A very lively and interesting discussion.
I wish I had more time.
However, I would ask Aaron the following question, if Islam is as tolerant as he claims, why is Israel the only country in the middle east that is considered free with respect to political rights and civil liberties?
Does he think there is no connection between Islam and political subjugation?

Islam is not a wonderful religion of peace and love that has been hijacked and perverted by a few bad apples: the evil Islamic fascists, Islamic militants, Islamic fundamentalists, jihadists, Wahhabism, etc. There has been no hijacking, no perversion. These demented souls are following only the teachings of the Koran; they are walking in the footsteps of the Prophet. The truth is that Osama bin Laden is an ideal Muslim, who is only following the Koranic teachings of Islam as expected of every Muslim. Muslims are responsible for 99% of present day slave trading. Child soldiers and sexually abusing young girls is part of their sick cult.