They might still need our help, remember Italy, Spain and Portugal have historically been poorer than the northern countries, and Greece has certainly needed a lot of aid more recently.

I don't think that any of the major religions' "true" messages are good. I do think all of their sacred texts can be cherry-picked to be good, and that, of course, is what one wants to encourage.

I definitely think that extreme fundamentalist versions of Islam should not be accommodated in the Western legal system.

That is not one of the five pillars of Islam. Of course it can be cherry-picked. Lots of Muslims do already.

He missed a bullet item, but hints at it in the second to last paragraph. Islam is a religion that is tribal in nature. Tribalism is arguably the most primitive form of human civilization, barely rising above the tendency of chimpanzees, gorillas and baboons packs. In any case, that tribes fight other tribes for scarce resources, instead of relying the capitalism to allocate scarce resources. So, Islam is innately violent because of its tribal nature. This is also why Islamic cultures have so much difficulty with western style democracy or republics.

Islam is a religion that is tribal in nature.

Is Islam inherently tribal, or is it just that the societies it dominates happen to be tribal? (This is not a rhetorical question; I don't know enough about Islam to have the answer.)

Now, the West is separating itself from Islam.

In what reality is this statement remotely accurate? Not this one.

We are definitively not separating ourselves from Islam – we're becoming ever-more involved in the Islamic world. We're currently waging war in three Muslim countries, with bonus military engagements in at least two others thanks to the our drone-powered CIA assassination programs. I think it's safe to say that we are more involved with the Islamic world than ever before, and that there is no end in sight.

Further, the world economy depends upon the oil resources of the Middle East, and there is no replacement for that resource coming any time soon. Not only are we not becoming less involved in the Muslim world, there is such a strong economic imperative for being there that we cannot become less involved in the Muslim world.

And because of that islamics use the western ivolvement in the islamic dominated countries as
an excuse to manipulate and control (in a negative manner or violent manner) any nonbelievers that they can bully and intimidate.

The fear and unease caused by islamic bad influence is so traumatizing that more and more nonbelievers would realised that any economical benefit that was brought by islamic is negligible, useless and almost worthless.

When Christianity had it's reformation and counter-reformation, Christians went back to their founding documents. They re-affirmed that you should treat others like you want to be treated, you should render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God's-IOW separation of church and state, and many other benign things. Islam had it's reformation in the Wahhabi tradition in which it went back to it's original documents and learned to kill the Jews and Christians as Mohamed taught.

"Is Islam inherently tribal, or is it just that the societies it dominates happen to be tribal?"

Mohammed himself was a tribal Arab - of the Banu Hashim clan of the Quraysh tribe - and his religion reflects this. Much of the Koran (and Sharia law) is ancient tribal Arab law & custom elevated to divine revelation. His intent was to unite the hundreds of endlessly squabbling & feuding Arabian clans & tribes into one tribe - the ummah, or community of Islam - and then to take over the world. But it's hard for 7th century or 21st century Muslims to transcend tribalism when tribal tradition is equivalent to the will of God.

To continue... the next time you have someone bring up "globalization", make sure that yes, you do understand that American sovereignty is an issue, but One World Order would be a fine thing if only the US Constitution was the rule.

The way to defeat tribalism is to point out that the competition is not with each other directly, but in finding a productive niche and exploiting that.

I think it is unacceptable for us disadvantaged nonbelievers to suffer anonymously just because some backward totalitarian, tribalistic culture used their totalitarian ideology to deny equal opportunity to us disadvantaged individual nonbelievers from achieving our best
or forced us critical nonbelievers to be fearful or anonymous or from speaking out against them.
If we, individualistc nonbelievers were so afraid of offending these extremely totalitarian, backward tribalistic groups that used their totalitarian ideology to create a fearful, annonymous environment rather than a productive and open environment, then there must be something wrong with them and globalisation would only benefit them but not us, who don't have a worldwide agenda.

WLIL:

Nope.

Need to "get it", about Islam?

Here's their signature.

Enjoy.

Wow! Amy likes me! She really likes me! :)

Anyhow, thank you, Amy for highlighting my little rant. Given this weekend's outrageous Muslim murder rampage, and the cringing (and cringe-inducing) responses of Obama and Petraeus, I want to take the liberty of following up my previous comments.

Before, I focused on what Islam is NOT like--it's not like most other religions in several fundamental respects. We make category mistakes in understanding and responding to Islam when we try to understand it as just another religion. There is another institution, with which we are all familiar, that in its social dynamics is very like Islam: The mafia.

The mafia creates a competing political and economic structure in societies (or neighborhoods) it infiltrates or dominates. They take care of widows and orphans, because they are the most fertile field for recruiting new solders. It seldom outright displaces superior Westphalian/Western political structures--instead it suborns and corrupts them, and survives parasitically by shaking down (I almost said sheikh'ing down) honest citizens, especially those with ethnic ties to the dons (big-ass imams), and getting its hooks into legitimate businesses (trash removal, casinos, oil...). There is an elite thugocracy that controls and consumes most of the wealth; a paramilitary second circle of enforcers, and the rest of the populace learns to go along or "that's a nice little shop you got there; hate to see anything happen to it..." There are multiple competing centers of power with amorphous territorial and tribal/family boundaries that are subject to redrawing at the first sign of weakness.

Unfortunately, we have put our thumb on the scales and given the weakest force in Muslim society (government, as the West understands it) disproportionate power.

The West imposed Westphalian structure on the middle east (meaning the ideas of firm borders, civil society and territorial sovereignty that other similarly organized societies must respect except under extraordinary circumstances), hoping that function would follow form. Instead, the middle east has become even more (small b) byzantine and impossible to understand without intimate local knowledge. Stupidly, we have paid off the "governments" we installed, since we reflexively think government trumps other institutions, and that it actually exists in every place where you can draw lines on a globe with a Sharpie. We have upset the natural political ecology of people who didn't get the Westphalia memo. Now there's a raging Middle Yeast infection.

Ok, I don't think I'm going to top that "Middle Yeast infection" crack, so I'll elliptically finish my Islam = The Godfather parallels and get out of here before my wife gets home and catches me commenting again.

Dhimmitude = paying protection money
Omerta = Muslims who speak up take huge risks
Witness Protection Program = nothing -- that little liberal girl cartoonist in Seattle had to go into hiding with a "good luck!" from the FBI.
Leaving the mafia = death penalty for apostates
Vendetta/Contract = Fatwa aimed at heretics (Rushdie, et. al.)
etc.

Lots of Muslims, most, are good people. They can't help it. They're human. They live in Muslim Mafia-dominated neighborhoods, even in America, and are not about to get their boys beat up and their daughters raped and their businesses firebombed for "taking a stand." The thug dictators and imams will survive and thrive until ordinary Muslims who care more about their families than some abstract cause think that supporting the cause is the best way to protect their families. Meaning, till they think the outside world will do more than pay lip service to helping them.

Do you think anything President Toonces has done in the last couple of months inspires courage and commitment in Muslims who wish the mafia would go away, but aren't ready to sacrifice their families to make it happen?

I thought 9-11 was going to be the Muslim St. Valentine's Day Massacre, the point where we'd get serious about Islam like the St.V-day massacre made us get serious about the mafia. I thought George Bush was going to be Elliot Ness. Not hardly.

Here's your humanitarian mission: rescue all those Muslims who don't really give a shit about killing infidels because they're too busy kissing their kids goodnight and hoping some neighborhood mafia/imam asshole doesn't recruit their kid and strap an AK-47 or a suicide vest on to them a few years from now.

Who are going to rescue us nonbelievers from their islamic evil smile, islamic incompetence, islamic rudeness, islamic bad economy, islamic nonsense and unfair islamic imposition?

It is selfish and disgusting of those islamics of various shapes and of various gender and colour and of various stage of extremism, to attack, bully and insult our individual nonbelievers intelligence.

IT is wrong and unacceptable for those pro-islamics and islamics to use their islamic violence to threaten us nonbelievers.
We, good nonbelievers deserve a good life too.

@Christopher, who takes issue with my statement that the West is separating itself from Islam.

I take your point: current events don't back me up.

We're not the whole West, but still, Europe seems to be getting itself more and more Muslim-entangled. My point is things will change, fast.

Europe is getting very close to going medieval on Muslims. It seems they're knuckling under, but I don't believe it. Muslims cost too much and contribute too little to actual wealth, though they have a lot of deals going with the ruling class. I think of this like the fights with public employee unions going on in America. Eventually, the fiscal sledgehammer will decide the issue. But Europe is MEAN. Holocaust and all that. It could get really ugly.

Closer to home: the real issue is that the middle east plutocracies created by the West have overplayed their hands, despite the nearly unlimited infusion of Western dollars and mutual masturbation between those regimes and the American political elite.

I expect--hope--pray--that the emerging "revolutions" will turn the whole Middle East into a bunch of Irans, incompetent, unable to pump oil, and unwilling to let us help them.

Is it really worth it to the rest of the world to put up with their bullshit just to avoid drilling elsewhere?

Islam wouldn't be a problem were it not that they dangled shiny, oily things in front of greedy Westerners willing to hold hands with sheikhs to make money.