> the point that I keep making --

Yeah...

> is that Islam is an enormously
> pernicious ideology.

Except that it's not really an ideology.

Ideology, Baloney! [...]

We face not an esoteric intellectual but a full-fledged sociological problem in the greater Middle East, one having mainly to do with the stresses of modernization on traditional and, in many cases, still largely tribally structured societies.

And howz come the Moonies or Science-motologists didn't get there first? Is it because of Tom Cruise?

I bet it's because of Tom Cruise.

If I see one more Big-endian blowing up a Little-endian over their interpretation of the Blundecrat, I'm going to swear off eggs forever.

I had a (hot) Iranian co-worker. She and her husband were terrified of the anti-Muslim rhetoric in the US.

Fear Number One: being expelled back to Iran.

Fear Number Two: arriving in Iran to be tortured and murdered for spending time in the USA (and, of course, for being apostates and forsaking Islam, which they did because they had all they could stand of seeing their friends thrown off of buildings and such).

It's a horrible, backwards world, and the escapees want none of it. YMMV.

"I bet it's because of Tom Cruise."

I had no idea Scientology commands the killing of others.

How about if they don't jump on Oprah's couch in the apporved manner?

"Islam is an aggressive, warring, political ideology," Crid.

"In its purest fundamental form, it is a fascist, top down political system. Granted, not all Muslims practice Islam so completely, especially in non-Muslim countries."

https://sites.google.com/site/islamicthreatsimplified/a-religion-or-political-ideology

Ben Shapiro: "The Myth of the Tiny Radical Muslim Minority"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7TAAw3oQvg

Older brothers partner/common law wife/whatever I should be calling her (of 12 years) is Iranian. They fled when the Shah fell. They don't go back to visit the ones who couldn't get out. They are no longer muslim (they LOVE bacon and BBQ pork. Maybe the takeover of Islam needs to be culinary??). They're grateful to be here in the US now, and they think that people defending Islam are fucking insane. Lacking any more knowledge about Islam than a reading of the Quran, and what I see on the news, I'm going to defer to people who know it intimately to decide what needs to be done. And they think it needs to be routed off the earth.

Younger brother's wife is half Palestinian and grew up in the UAE. She was never muslim, but she's absolutely against it from having lived over there and seeing how those who have to live under it, live in fear.

(yeah, both my brothers married middle eastern. They live here, but are still more traditional/subservient than a typical American woman. Brothers like that, I guess. They get hot meals daily. My hubs couldn't tell you the last time I cooked.)

This is why I respect Walid Shoebat so much. He came to the US, integrated into American society, began attending a Christian* church, etc., all with the intent to better understand us so he could better defeat us. What he learned was that everything he was taught about us was a lie, and he renounced jihad and Islam.

*I realize Christianity doesn't speak for the entire country. The point is about the contrast between the most popular religion here (broadly speaking) and the predominant religion where he came from. It hit him hard to witness that the people he had been raised to fight as "the great Satan" were actually praying for people like him. He could not reconcile this, and realized he was on the wrong side.

@ Crid:
Garfinkle is a twit. Here's a report from someone who's actually living with the religion of peace:

http://indianexpress.com/article/world/world-news/dhaka-taslima-nasreen-bangladesh-islam/

Note the counterfactual to Garfinkle's claim about "largely tribally structured societies."

I think this was an awesome act. This is the kind of young man deserving of those legendary 72 virgins.

Early in the morning, the gunmen released a group of women wearing hijabs and offered a young Bangladeshi man, Faraz Hossain, the opportunity to leave, too, said Hishaam Hossain, Mr. Hossain’s nephew, who had heard an account from the hostages who were freed.

Mr. Hossain, a student at Emory University, was accompanied by two women wearing Western clothes, however, and when the gunmen asked the women where they were from, they said India and the United States. The gunmen refused to release them, and Mr. Hossain refused to leave them behind, his relative said. He would be among those found dead on Saturday morning.

> https sites google com site
> islamicthreatsimplified etc.

It's weird how you're so pants-pissingly distressed about this without having previously shown such concern either for or about anyone before.

I mean, for nearly a decade you were crass and condescending about Christians, but that just causes curiosity about whose clever threats need to be simplified for the little people's appreciation in 2023.

Try corresponding with Dr. Zudi Jasser. He's a reform muslim who served (honorably, I presume) in the U.S. Navy. In the meantime . . .

Paul Weston went off on pro-Muslim politicians and it was EPIC

Here's the latest Ramadan Bombathon box score:

Religion of Peace: 228 attacks for 1651 kills.

All other religions combined: 0 for 0.

Islamophobes: 0 for 0

------

> is that Islam is an enormously

> pernicious ideology.

Except that it's not really an ideology.

Ideology, Baloney! [...]

I read the link, and came away with jewels like this:

Theology is a recursive, non-falsifiable system of ideas about abstract matters. Ideology, on the other hand, as abstract as it may be, is at length testable against the flow of historical reality.

Recursive doesn't mean what he thinks it does.

Worse, he makes two otherwise correct statements, then uses them to contradict himself.

Near as I can tell, all religions, other than Islam, are theologies: they make existential statements as a basis to invoke a moral code and establish group identity.

But the difference is that none of them assert any claims about the structure of politics and society, which is where he goes right off the rails.

Islam is more similar to communism than it is to all other religions. Communism had its pantheon, and its sacred text, which were the basis of a universalist plan for society and politics.

Islam is just as much of an ideology as communism.

But wait, there's more!

Moreover, defined properly, there just isn’t very much Islamist ideology. As that term is commonly used in the West, at a minimum an ideology needs to specify: some ideal political economy; some ideal relationship between society, state, and authority; and some ideal relationship between a given society and the world outside it. There is nothing special in these regards about current Islamist thinking.

Has this guy never heard of Iran? Saudi Arabia?

Mass murder driven by rage, guilt, or a collapse of self-worth, sometimes suicidal and sometimes not, has happened in many places—Tasmania, Norway, Columbine, Sandy Hook—where the mass murderers were not Muslims. It can exist amid any way of thinking in which sin and shame and ritual impurity have a place.

FFS, enough with the moral equivalency. Every instance he cites were one-offs without any larger goal (excepting, perhaps, Norway).

For his equivalency to make any sense whatsoever, Columbines should be routine horrors, carried out in the name of something. Kind of like gays exulting Judy Garland and shooting up mosques.

But that is conspicuously not the case. Lots of people are poor and oppressed; Catholics have a lot of experience with sin, shame and impurity.

But, as the Ramadan Bombathon shows, Islam is in a league of its own.

Funny how nobody remembered to describe the incredible new growth markets ("pernicious") for Islamic thought.

Meanwhile, sure, pee your pants.

I'm not sure which characterizes your comment less, coherence or relevance. A real puzzler, that.

And it might be even less coherent than that pompous-ass shut-up-he-explained article to which you linked. Did you even bother to read it first?

Amy pretty much has Islam pegged (and, apparently unlike you, is able to distinguish Islam from Muslim), and is definitely on the money about the creeping cowardice afflicting the west.

How else to explain [redacted] in an unclassified recording which taxpayers own?

Meanwhile, sure, pee your pants.

Where the heck did that come from?

Sure, I'd hack yer keppelah off for leaving Judaism.... but my sharpest knife is dairy, not meat.

Wait til I unpack my Passover dishes...

Sure, I'd hack yer keppelah off for leaving Judaism....

Or, you could turn them into a pillar of kosher salt.