Sooooo…

> for anyone who's done any measure of reading

…Are you going anywhere with this?

> What does it say about Islam that both
> the Super Bowl in America and the winter
> Olympics in Russia require massive security
> against an attack by jihadists?

[1.] It says that weaknesses of American character (recently) and Russian character (eternally) empower —to their own detriment— adolescent male fascination with constabulary authority for which Islamic primitives serve as pitiably reliable dei ex machina. (This is why redheads and grandmothers get felt up at airports.)

[Besides, Russia stirs neighborly rage in ways and for purposes having little to do with Islam.]

[2.] It says that Jihadis, while illiterate and unworldly, are nevertheless tantalized —through relentless & ongoing penetrations of broadcast and social media— by a world of comfort, dignity and sexual access for which their culture offers no admission. They'll always be able to shed blood, as do their cousins in detachment and incompetence, the local teenage wackjobs bringing gunfire to our schools and campuses. (Of course we're vulnerable; we're civilized.) Jihadis are nonetheless illiterate and unworldly; it doesn't take much modernity to expose jihad as the the whimper of impotence that it is.

[…]

> What the West has yet to grasp is its
> intent on world domination.

Like Idi Amin? Like every fatherless teenage drug dealer in Oakland or Queens? Are the "intentions" of tinpot dictators the "measure" of their muscle?

Islam has no superpowers. It's stumbled clumsily along in isolated corners of an impoverished planet, the places we haven't got around to yet. It holds no surprises for students of human nature; quite the opposite. Those places were always going to be there, awaiting the wash of wealth that's cleansed the rest of us.

Is there something you want us to do, besides affirming that you've read a bunch of stuff?

I think it would be a fun 'exercise' for the Federal government to determine that Islam is basically a terrorist organization and rescind all religious 'rights' as such.

It should

1)immediately shut down all mosques,

2)require all those practicing Islam to 'register' with the State LEO (just as those desiring 'gun control' wish gun owners to do).

Is it a religion or is it a terrorist organization?

Islam is designed to be a terrorist organization. There's a quick read by a friend of mine, Howard Bloom, that lays this out rather neatly: The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead.

Crid, you really know nothing about Islam but persist in posting on this. I suggest you read this. It's only about 150 pages.

Oh, and a warning - there are a few small copyediting errors in the book. Howard's correcting them but they may not be posted to Amazon yet. They won't mar the read. This really is worth reading.

Alan Caruba explains at Canada Free Press

A Canadian Human Rights Commission to investigate Mr. Caruba for racist thought crime in 3..2..1..

I'll leave y'all with a Turkish proverb: If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup.

Watch it escalate...

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/mideast/huge-anti-american-crowds-mark-iran-revolution-n27091

While Islam looks and sounds like a religion, it is more a political and economic entity concerned with controlling those populations where it is dominant, largely keeping them unable to resist the despots, monarchs, and clerics in charge.

Almost any religion starts as an all-encompassing socio-economic system.

The difference is that most Western religions (and many Eastern ones) have had that impulse to control beaten out of them.

The diaspora of the Jews and lack of a Jewish homeland left the majority of Jews living worldwide under non-Jewish socio-economic systems and laws, forcing them to adjust their all-encompassing ancient laws and customs to a modernizing socio-economic order.

The Protestant Reformation broke the political hold the Catholic Church had over Western Europe, freeing the European social and economic orders from the Church's orthodoxy. The Church called charging interest on borrowed money a sin while modern economies call it banking.

Even before the Reformation, Renaissance scientists had thrown the Church's scientific orthodoxy out the window, forcing the Church to retreat from being the arbiter of scientific reality.

Decades of exploitation by militarily superior Western powers and further decades of communism have left in tatters any religion's control over the China's socio-economic order.

The Islamic world finds itself confronted with superior technologies and more vibrant economies in the parts of the world long regarded as inferior - as well as the growing dissatisfaction of a restless peasantry which sees on television Western standards of living and socio-economic mobility that are unavailable (and even forcibly denied) to it.

Islam is now being forced to confront the fact that its ancient socio-economic order no longer works in the world and is resisting making the necessary adjustments. The disorder Islam is causing in the world today is the temper tantrum of a child forced to confront the unpleasant realities of school night bedtimes or of no longer being the center of his parents' world.

Amy, that's offensive and transparently bogus. You are, essentially, lying. I don't know why, if you have so many darling insights, you can't be bothered share them with us.

Learning exotic new pronunciations for Wake up, Sheeple! is a waste of your rhetorical skills, and a squandering of your rhetorical capital.

Crid, saying 'that is offensive' is wasting keystrokes. Feeling offended adds no weight to your argument.

And the purportedly 'illiterate' jihadists?

Ossama was part of a privileged elite and got an excellent education.

Every terrorist on the 9/11 flights came from well to do households, so on and so forth.

Abdul the camel farmer isn't going on Jihad, its Prince Achmed of the elite Saud family.

Its a common narrative that it is the poor and ignorant that commit terrorism, but it simply isn't so.

The ones who embark upon these Jihadi warpaths are the scions of excellent educations...and why might that be? Because they can actually READ the Koran, and accept its teachings. A lot of Muslims are like a lot of Christians, calling themselves something, engaging in tradition and ritual, but not really knowing much about their faith.

When the poor or ignorant go on Jihad, its because someone else (rightly) told them that this is what it takes to restore or spread 'true islam' or fight the oppressive powers of some other nation state.

The cold hard truth crid, is that she is dead fucking ON.

Shia, Sunni, and add Wahabbi of Saudi Arabia.

Does not one part of the Qu'ran say something like 'If an unbeliever is told of Islam but refuses to change, let him be - for that is also part of Allah's plan."

Does not one part of the Qu'ran say something like 'If an unbeliever is told of Islam but refuses to change, let him be - for that is also part of Allah's plan."

The early Koran is much more tolerant of unbelievers. As Islam grew into an empire from its roots as a religion of outsiders, the militancy picks up.

Also, the Koran was assembled a few decades after Mohammed's death from scraps of writing, anecdotes, and the memories of people who were with Mohammed.

It was assembled when Islam was in danger of fragmenting as it imposed itself onto various existing religions and cultures, absorbing elements of these over time.

"Amy, that's offensive and transparently bogus. You are, essentially, lying."

Said the tiresome narcissist, whose only virtue is beautiful prose.
Time and again you've expressed your outrage that someone else might actually know something.

If you are offended, there are other blogs.

Conan, you're thinking of the Hadith -- that's the words of Mohammed and his close followers.

I'm thinking of both actually. The Quran is said to be the word of Allah. It was passed to the faithful in the form of verses spoken by Mohammed.

The Hadith is the life and opinions of Mohammed and the basis for Islamic law.

Zayd ibn Thabit was assigned the task of compiling it by the first caliph and successor of Mohammed, Abu Bakr. Bakr was concerned when too many of the men who had memorized the Quran had died in battle.

Zayd collected verses written on parchments, palm-leaves, thin stones, and from the memories of men who knew the Quran by heart. He produced a hand-written manuscript of the complete book.

The original Quran remained with Abu Bakr until his death.

When the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, noticed that there were differences in pronunciations and customs in different parts of the rapidly expanding Muslim empire, he commissioned a committee headed by Zayd to create an official copy of the Quran in order to preserve the sanctity of the text. The committee used Abu Bakr's copy to guide them.

All of this happened within 20 years of Mohammed's death - Mohammed died in 632 and the official Quran was completed in 650.

Unfortunately for the faithful, the Quran left many aspects of daily life unaddressed. The faithful used the words and deeds of Mohammed as guidelines for living a pious life - after all, if God judged Mohammed worthy, then to live and believe as Mohammed did is to come close to being worthy.

Mohammed had urged the faithful to write down or remember the things he said and did (even the things that were not the word of God). And they did. Or they passed the stories on orally. The collection grew exponentially with many hadiths contradicting others or supporting differing views on the same issue.

In the 9th century, Scholars set out to compile an official Hadith. Sunni and Shia scholars differed in their approaches and so their official hadiths differ and those differences cause friction between the two even today.

Muslim scholars differ on the accuracy and necessity of the Hadith. Some have even called it fiction or propaganda. Many have argued that the Hadith is not binding on Muslims and that the Quran alone contains the word and will of God.

Not your father's holy war:

http://www.thehummusnews.com

Not your father's holy war:

http://www.thehummusnews.com

What went wrong with Islam? - a review of Bernard Lewis' What Went Wrong?:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/27/books/the-real-culture-wars.html

Sometime around 1760, Britain, then France and America took off to another world, one that was increasingly secular, democratic, industrial and tolerant in ways that left many of the other regions gasping at the combined implications of such changes. Certain societies in parts of Latin America or India or Russia felt they had little choice but to follow suit, although hoping to brake the impacts of Western man. The Middle East, powerful a half-millennium earlier, when Europe was a bundle of inchoate, backward states and unworthy of attention, did not. Yet Europe rose while the Muslim world rested on its laurels -- until it was besieged by Western ships, armaments, iron goods and cheap textiles, to all of which it became harder and harder to respond.

The West's cultural messages, especially about democracy, made things even more difficult. Those with power in Muslim societies found it impossible to contemplate the separation of religion and state, or admit to a changed place in society for women or permit the free exchange of ideas, particularly unpleasant ideas, on the lines argued by John Stuart Mill and others. But there is even more to it than that. As Lewis shrewdly points out, the works of Mozart and Shakespeare and Voltaire have traveled around the globe, as for that matter have Stravinsky, jazz and George Orwell. But they all pretty much stop at the frontiers of the Arab world, which has shown little interest in how others think, write, compose; there are few translations of these writers and few performances of these musicians, nor are there great libraries and museums of Western art to match the impressive collections of Muslim culture in the West. (There is no presumption by Lewis here that Western or Slavic or Japanese culture is inherently superior, only that it is disturbing that this troubled part of our planet has never really cared.)