This is not a religion of peace (in most of it's interpretations). While fundies are the treat when I see women in a burka I get quite cautious. If your wearing a burka you are definatly a fundy, I don't give a rats ass why your wearing it.

The hijab is worn by many groups and usually can't be differentiated from what Russian gradmas wear when the get that certain kind of old. Using the Nazi example, that's like turning on someone when the swastica is facing the wrong way. To the uniformed they look identical but one is a symbol of oppression and hate and the other is a symbol for prosperity (I think not sure).

I'm all for discrimination when used in such sense but also caution against setting for definitions too broadly.

I always laugh when people try to persuade me to be "tolerant" of ALL cultures -

Oh, you mean I am to be "tolerant" of a culture that allows women to get stoned to death for adultery and doesn't allow women to show their faces or drive... I am to be tolerant of people who blow up Buddhists sculptures, beat women (as the Taliban did/possibly still does) for laughing or making too much noise; I am to be tolerant of people who strap bombs to children and remove girls' clitorises?

Sorry, guess I'm just not that tolerant.

Hey Amy, why not just say what you think straight out without sugarcoating it?

Great post! Your words are a breath of fresh air clearing away the cobwebs of deceit spun by Islamic apologists, except they're really more like a tornado.

Tolerance of evil is evil itself.

Thanks so much, Kirk.

P.S. If anyone knows Rebecca Solnit's e-mail address, my offer still stands on training her on how to speak up when men "explain things" to her.

P.S. I do love when people make the assumption that polite conversation involves this mistaken idea that you'll "tolerate" the intolerable, and give all beliefs equal weight. I'm guessing the ladies approached me in that spirit. They were pretty astonished when I got on my broom. I mean, you married Arafat's spokesterrorist, and you want me to give you a book party for it? Right.

That "Religion of Peace" notion never seems to include the little disclaimer that their concept of peace is everyone bowing to Islam , or dying.Funny that.

heh, such a trouble-maker you :D... I think the answer I will use when confronted with this 'but they're/we're the religion of peace.' Is to say, "are you ready to denounce the people who are hijacking your faith? I'm not railing against those who are peaceful, but against those who incite violence against everyone else. If the one dosn't distance itself from the other, they are implicitly accepting what the others are doing." I realize that this is dangerous for them, but it is better to say nothing than to defend a murderous zealot. He will target them next. 'Course a lot of the defenders aren't Muslim, and may never have even met one... They don't realize how different this is from other religions.

I was reading this article and a little idea came to me:

What if they were Vikings?

Let's think about it; suddenly, in Norway, a religious group chose to revive the old medieval Viking traditions of Odin and all their irks. Let's just say that they are using some Petro-Dollars to finance a huge movement with the goal of reversing modern culture and save the proud heritage of raiding cities living next to the atlantic coast?

If this was the case, how long we would tolerate the presence of armed psychos in the atlantic ocean? Do we will search for excuse is sociology for their pillage and rape of women? How long would it take for the people of Norway to react? Would we be afraid to invade Norway because they are the second global producer of crude oil?

Tolerance is a easy dialogue when the offending party is away.

I saw the "experiment" the older woman was talking about, it was an offshoot of ABC's 20/20, something like "What Would You Do?" I believe every private establishment legally reserves the right to refuse service to anyone they want to, and me, not being an owner or employee, well, I have no say in the matter. There were plenty of people on both sides of the fence that spoke up, but as for me, I wouldn't have said anything one way or the other. None of my business. However, if someone asks me what I think about it, well, they just might regret that. I keep my broom in my back pocket, for just such emergencies. o_O

I completely agree. Private property and free markets means nothing, if people can't decide freely with whom to trade, with whom to cooperate. There is no distinction between social and economic rights.

Amy,

The Catholic Church pedophile scandal was horrible. But I continue as a Catholic, and I am proud of Pope Benedict. Pope Benedict has been establishing himself as one religious leader (are there any others?) who is not afraid to confront Islam. The Pope definitely "gets" the threat of Islam. Remember his famous quoting of Paleologus:
http://www.martinfrost.ws/htmlfiles/july2007/warning_islam.html

Then, more recently, there was Benedict's very public baptism of ex-Muslim Magdi Allam:

http://darwincatholic.blogspot.com/2008/03/pope-benedict-baptises-ex-muslim.html

If western civilization is going to have a "prayer" (pun intended) of surviving the Ilamic onslaught, we are going to need many more Benedicts springing up from the Judeo Christian community.

Amy, your excellent post raises an issue which I have been pondering lately: What would it take actually to win the War on Terror and how would we know when we have won?

The second part is easier to answer than the first. The War on Terror will have been won when there are no more groups in this world who are bent on destroying our culture using the weapons of terrorism -- or at least when there are no more than a handful of weak and isolated groups left.

But the first part is very difficult. I do not think it is possible for those of us in the West to eliminate all of the terrorist cells who want to kill us. They are too intimately intertwined with the rest of the "civilian" Islamic culture. So long as Islamic schools teach jihad to children, so long as mosques preach hatred against the West, so long as homicide-bombers are regarded as heroes and held in high esteem, it will be impossible for us to separate, and thus neutralize, violent Islamists from ordinary Muslims, who, though they may hate us, at least are not trying to kill us.

I do not think that we of the West can win this war. I do think that by constant vigilance and swift, determined action we can stave off defeat, but I do not think that we are the ones who can win it. By our own action alone I believe we can prevent another disaster like 9/11, but we will not be able to end the threat, and so we will not be able to quit and go home.

As you have hinted in your post, Amy, I think it is moderate Muslims who must fight and ultimately win this war. When moderate Muslims -- and I hope and believe there are many -- have the temerity to stand up and speak out against the terrorists, when they refuse to allow terrorists safe haven in their midst, when they deride rather than honor the bombers, then and only then do I think we can begin to hope for an end of the War on Terror.

I believe, then, that the best we can do is find as many moderate Muslims as we can and give them all the support and protection we can muster. I believe this to be our only hope and I think, coincidentally, that it is basically the same strategy that General Petraeus has used with such success in Iraq.

What do the rest of you think? Do any of you have any other ideas?

And at the very least, as Amy has made clear, we have no business making friendly with terrorists, and we need to keep our eyes focused on the big issues -- not trivialities like whether a girl in a hijab can get good service in a restaurant. Sheesh!

Kirk,

With all due respect, terror is only one facet, maybe not even the most threatening facet, of what western civilization is up against. Islam is conquering Europe, as we speak, through demographics. Muslim immigrants are rapidly out-reproducing the indigenous populations of their host European countries. Guess what happens when they become a majority? … Answer: Sharia Law.

How many mosques in the U.S. are currently preaching the Wahhabi version of Islam? I don’t know, but I have seen some vary troubling data from parties who have infiltrated a number of U.S. mosques to answer that very question. The fact that our government doesn’t even bother to ask the question is very troublesome, also.

Let me pose a question to you.

If you were in charge of immigration in this country, and a large number of people were waiting to come in, people, coming from parts of the world where, using your description, “… Islamic schools teach jihad to children, so long as mosques preach hatred against the West, so long as homicide-bombers are regarded as heroes and held in high esteem, it will be impossible for us to separate, and thus neutralize, violent Islamists from ordinary Muslims, who, though they may hate us, at least are not trying to kill us.”

Would you let them in?

With Saudi petro dollars spreading the vilest form of Islam (Wahabbi) over all the globe, I think our first priority is to self preservation and self defense, not “just” defense against terror. Prior generations in the western world were able to turn back Islam because they realized their first priority was to survive. They recognized the threat Islam posed to their very existence, and they were not burdened with political correctness and multiculturalism as we are today.

I think your idea of appealing to moderate Muslims is pie in the sky stuff. Islam has been at war with western civilization for 1400 years. That’s 1400 years that the “moderate” wing of Islam has failed to reel in the fundamentalists. After we have taken the appropriate steps towards self preservation and self defense, perhaps we can then try to appeal to moderate Muslims. Just exactly what are moderate Muslims, anyway? Are they “ordinary Muslims, who, though they may hate us, at least are not trying to kill us” as you put it? How much of the Koran does a Muslim need to refute to be deemed a moderate?

Actually I do believe there are moderate Muslims, but their religion is decidedly not moderate.

One piece of advice … Stop calling this a war on terror. Makes as much sense as declaring a war against sneak attacks after Pearl Harbor. We are at war with Jihadists.

I just heard Patt Morrison interviewing T. Boone Pickens about alternative energy sources he's developing. But for our need for oil, these people would all still be goatherds.

I thought these guys had a pretty wise take on things:

http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2008/04/our-failed-mult.html

I'm telling you people nuke the ice caps, flood out the low lying lands of the middle east, and a bunch of other places. After a few decades of rampant illness and overcrowding society will get back on track.

Got to cull the heard occasionally to keep it from rotting from within

I used to hate Pat the Hat. In retrospect, it was because she wore a hat, which seemed hokey. But in the last year or so she's become my favorite radio performer. She's spotlessly alert to the meaning of the things she's talking about. She never gratuitously interjects her opinions into the topics, but she never lets people get away with brazen bullshit, either. Her interviews at the Milken conference on Tuesday were just golden, money in the bank. In her three broadcasts this week, she's changed my thoughts about a lot of stuff. And it's not like Kitty Feldy didn't do a good job. In a righteous world, she'd have Terry Gross's audience.

I disagree with this from your linked piece:

> Terrorism stems from a religious
> ideological movement that seeks
> our destruction and that that
> movement is widely supported by
> Muslim peoples and states.

Religion is a problem, but it's not the problem. The strictures of Islam (and most other faith) collapse into manageable, attenuated customs once the populations feel the blessings of modernity. I'm not sure that the nations under discussion in that post (Afghanistan and Iraq) are as hip to *germ theory* as they ought to be, let alone market forces and the scientific method and all the rest or our American treats....

Kirk (above) is kinda right: Moderate muslims are the solution. But the best way to moderate religious belief is to give the faithful something better to think about than Allah. Specifically, we need to relieve their suffering and answer their fundamental human aspirations.

Nothing does that better than modernity.