Wow, some folks simply have a way with words. That's probably a better way of saying it rather than "to deport..." :)


Yes, thank you...Excellent image....be scraped away and discarded.


Three Soldier Dad...Chuck

I never asserted that any group should have the right to ignore our laws in favor of their religion of choice. They shouldn't.

But the answer to that is to equally enforce our laws upon everyone, religion be damned. Not to outlaw a religion, deport people based upon their religion, or give the govt the power to start administering "loyalty tests" to citizens.

How about these for loyalty tests: Obey the law, stand for our colors, stand for our National Anthem, speak our language. None of these are too difficult and it is a good start. I do not advocate deporting anyone for the practice of a recognized religion, but then as that womanizing, prevaricating, draft dodging, dope smoking husband of one of our presidential candidates might say, "It all depends on what the definition of the word religion is".

Loyalty
 

Let me go a bit beyond merely "Standing for the pledge of allegiance or national anthem." Although, yes, that would be a good start

Where are the Arab American volunteers for our military? Doesn't America have over 2 million Arab Americans? And, aren't most of them 1st or 2nd generation Americans? My Irish American son is currently at Fort Bragg studying Arabic - which is fine. But, why should Uncle Sam pay tens of thousands of $$$ to teach this Kansas kid Arabic when we have hundreds of thousands of Arabic speaking young men and women?

Question: Even with large $$$ bonuses why aren't we getting the young Arabic volunteers? Perhaps, one of the steps or "tests" of loyalty is that military service become quasi-compulsory for the Arab community.

Well, my sense is that they are on the sidelines for a reason. The Arab mind is a survivor mind - Islam has contributed to this psychological orientation. They are prone to backing the winner and what they do when parties are "going at it" in a struggle is to keep their head down...As a people, Arabs have an uncommonly strong attraction to naked power and strength. In the end, the biggest thug will be their their thug, or "LEADER." As I've indicated Islam is uniquely equipped to impose a frame-of-mind that is both cowardly and submissive. In fact, the word Islam itself means submission. Islam is a political system at its heart; yet, it uses religious threats (torture in the next life) and corporal threats (pain in this life) to cower its adherents.

As a political system Islam is viciously effective and quintessentially primal since it skips all the value esoterics of - rights, liberties, patriotism, freedoms, et. al. - and places itself squarely over the most efficient driver for human compliance and/or submission - Fear.

What am suggesting? Well, I am suggesting that simply "keeping their heads down" is not tolerable; not for the brave new world in which we find ourselves. We're done - Homey don't play that, anymore.

Yep, I'm for making folks take sides.

If they won't, okay, I get it...Yeah, I get it, I really do. Fear is real...The fear is pallatable, I can appreciate that. But, life is a bitch. No-ticky-no-washy...

If they are not with us other Americans, they need a one way ticket somewhere else.


Three Soldier Dad...Chuck

If followers of Islam feel that they are required to violate the laws of this nation, then they should celebrate their journey as martyrs when they are fined, incarcerated, scorned, or whatever.

They can be a living demonstration of their faith.
(as opposed to dying demonstration which they seem to prefer)

In this nation, those of us who do not follow Islam are not obliged to eliminate the consequences which they might bear adhering to their faith.

The Crusader Capital Soon to be Conquered by Islam
 

This idiot definiately thinks there is a war going on...

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,351242,00.html

Apes and Pigs
 

I see the Religion of Peace is back on the Apes and Pigs things.

Somebody should tell those Muslims that the nice smell of Bar-B-Que drifting over the Southeastern USA contains pork molecules.

Sniff a pig and go where:D

That's a lot better then the smells that are commonly drifting over Afghanistan or any other country in that part of the world. Doc giving us a detailed briefing on what type of molecules (and the percentage of each) thatmade up those smells the first time we went over definately fell into the category of "Too Much Information".

Smells
 

Smells - we could start a new thread just on smells. 1) 3rd world poor - limited/very few animals 2) 3rd world poor - animal based 3) 3rd world poor animal (maybe not based) but rich enough to produce limited garbage 4) 3rd world poor but going middle class and producing lots of garbage.

I've cruised past some neighborhoods around here and caught a wiff that flashed me back to some odd 3rd world country here or there.

OK, highjack over.

Pete

Not quite over... I guess there would have to be a subcategory that addressed the non-smelly but very fecal matter rich air in places such as ..um, I don't know... Afghanistan.:confused: Nothing like walking around an seeing piles of human excrement marked by little pieces of pink TP (in the more affluent areas)...(not to mention the goat, and sheep excrement) dessecating in the dry air and sun..slowly crumbling and blowing away and becoming part of the air that you breathe...

Third world urban poor is without a doubt the worst.

High population density + lack of working utilities = bad joo-joo

An Anatomy of Surrender
 

Well written and compelling article.

We may want to confront this sooner, rather than later.

TR

Bruce Bawer

An Anatomy of Surrender

Motivated by fear and multiculturalism, too many Westerners are acquiescing to creeping sharia.

http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_...jihadists.html

Islamic Preacher
 

Interesting article. Interesting he is not allowed to speak in Egypt. I would imagine he would be in serious danger from the peace loving Jihadists.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/...n/5725957.html

Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks
 

Excellent article!!!!!!


Sam Harris
Posted May 5, 2008
The Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-ha..._b_100132.html

Geert Wilders, conservative Dutch politician and provocateur, has become the latest projectile in the world's most important culture war: the zero-sum conflict between civil society and traditional Islam. Wilders, who lives under perpetual armed guard due to death threats, recently released a 15 minute film entitled Fitna ("strife" in Arabic) over the internet. The film has been deemed offensive because it juxtaposes images of Muslim violence with passages from the Qur'an. Given that the perpetrators of such violence regularly cite these same passages as justification for their actions, merely depicting this connection in a film would seem uncontroversial. Controversial or not, one surely would expect politicians and journalists in every free society to strenuously defend Wilders' right to make such a film. But then one would be living on another planet, a planet where people do not happily repudiate their most basic freedoms in the name of "religious sensitivity."

Witness the free world's response to Fitna: The Dutch government sought to ban the film outright, and European Union foreign ministers publicly condemned it, as did UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Dutch television refused to air Fitna unedited. When Wilders declared his intention to release the film over the internet, his U.S. web-host, Network Solutions, took his website offline.

Into the breach stepped Liveleak, a British video-sharing website, which finally aired the film on March 27th. It received over 3 million views in the first 24 hours. The next day, however, Liveleak removed Fitna from its servers, having been terrorized into self-censorship by threats to its staff. But the film had spread too far on the internet to be suppressed (and Liveleak, after taking further security measures, has since reinstated it on its site as well).

Of course, there were immediate calls for a boycott of Dutch products throughout the Muslim world. In response, Dutch corporations placed ads in countries like Indonesia, denouncing the film in self-defense. Several Muslim countries blocked YouTube and other video-sharing sites in an effort to keep Wilders' blasphemy from penetrating the minds of their citizens. There have also been isolated protests and attacks on embassies, and ubiquitous demands for Wilders' murder. In Afghanistan, women in burqas could be seen burning the Dutch flag; the Taliban carried out at least two revenge attacks on Dutch troops, resulting in five Dutch casualties; and security concerns have caused the Netherlands to close its embassy in Kabul. It must be said, however, that nothing has yet occurred to rival the ferocious response to the Danish cartoons.

Meanwhile Kurt Westergaard, one of the Danish cartoonists, threatened to sue Wilders for copyright infringement, as Wilders used his drawing of a bomb-laden Muhammad without permission. Westergaard has lived in hiding since 2006 due to death threats of his own, so the Danish Union of Journalists volunteered to file this lawsuit on his behalf. Admittedly, there is something amusing about one hunted man, unable to venture out in public for fear of being killed by religious lunatics, threatening to sue another man in the same predicament over a copyright violation. But it is understandable that Westergaard wouldn't want to be repeatedly hurled at the enemy without his consent. Westergaard is an extraordinarily courageous man whose life has been ruined both by religious fanaticism and the free world's submission to it. In February, the Danish government arrested three Muslims who seemed poised to murder him. Other Danes unfortunate enough to have been born with the name "Kurt Westergaard" have had to take steps to escape being murdered in his place. (Wilder's has since removed the cartoon from the official version of Fitna.)

Wilders, like Westergaard and the other Danish cartoonists, has been widely vilified for "seeking to inflame" the Muslim community. Even if this had been his intention, this criticism represents an almost supernatural coincidence of moral blindness and political imprudence. The point is not (and will never be) that some free person spoke, or wrote, or illustrated in such a manner as to inflame the Muslim community. The point is that only the Muslim community is combustible in this way. The controversy over Fitna, like all such controversies, renders one fact about our world especially salient: Muslims appear to be far more concerned about perceived slights to their religion than about the atrocities committed daily in its name. Our accommodation of this psychopathic skewing of priorities has, more and more, taken the form of craven and blinkered acquiescence.

There is an uncanny irony here that many have noticed. The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we will kill you. Of course, the truth is often more nuanced, but this is about as nuanced as it ever gets: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we peaceful Muslims cannot be held responsible for what our less peaceful brothers and sisters do. When they burn your embassies or kidnap and slaughter your journalists, know that we will hold you primarily responsible and will spend the bulk of our energies criticizing you for "racism" and "Islamophobia."

Our capitulations in the face of these threats have had what is often called "a chilling effect" on our exercise of free speech. I have, in my own small way, experienced this chill first hand. First, and most important, my friend and colleague Ayaan Hirsi Ali happens to be among the hunted. Because of the failure of Western governments to make it safe for people to speak openly about the problem of Islam, I and others must raise a mountain of private funds to help pay for her round-the-clock protection. The problem is not, as is often alleged, that governments cannot afford to protect every person who speaks out against Muslim intolerance. The problem is that so few people do speak out. If there were ten thousand Ayaan Hirsi Ali's, the risk to each would be radically reduced.

As for infringements of my own speech, my first book, The End of Faith, almost did not get published for fear of offending the sensibilities of (probably non-reading) religious fanatics. W.W. Norton, which did publish the book, was widely seen as taking a risk--one probably attenuated by the fact that I am an equal-opportunity offender critical of all religious faith. However, when it came time to make final edits to the galleys of The End of Faith, many of the people I had thanked by name in my acknowledgments (including my agent at the time and my editor at Norton) independently asked to have their names removed from the book. Their concerns were explicitly for their personal safety. Given our shamefully ineffectual response to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, their concerns were perfectly understandable.

Nature, arguably the most influential scientific journal on the planet, recently published a lengthy whitewash of Islam (Z. Sardar "Beyond the troubled relationship." Nature 448, 131-133; 2007). The author began, as though atop a minaret, by simply declaring the religion of Islam to be "intrinsically rational." He then went on to argue, amid a highly idiosyncratic reading of history and theology, that this rational religion's current wallowing in the violent depths of unreason can be fully ascribed to the legacy of colonialism. After some negotiation, Nature also agreed to publish a brief response from me. What readers of my letter to the editor could not know, however, was that it was only published after perfectly factual sentences deemed offensive to Islam were expunged. I understood the editors' concerns at the time: not only did they have Britain's suffocating libel laws to worry about, but Muslim physicians and engineers in the UK had just revealed a penchant for suicide bombing. I was grateful that Nature published my letter at all.

In a thrillingly ironic turn of events, a shorter version of the very essay you are now reading was originally commissioned by the opinion page of Washington Post and then rejected because it was deemed too critical of Islam. Please note, this essay was destined for the opinion page of the paper, which had solicited my response to the controversy over Wilders' film. The irony of its rejection seemed entirely lost on the Post, which responded to my subsequent expression of amazement by offering to pay me a "kill fee." I declined.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-ha..._b_100132.html

I could list other examples of encounters with editors and publishers, as can many writers, all illustrating a single fact: While it remains taboo to criticize religious faith in general, it is considered especially unwise to criticize Islam. Only Muslims hound and hunt and murder their apostates, infidels, and critics in the 21st century. There are, to be sure, reasons why this is so. Some of these reasons have to do with accidents of history and geopolitics, but others can be directly traced to doctrines sanctifying violence which are unique to Islam.

A point of comparison: The controversy of over Fitna was immediately followed by ubiquitous media coverage of a scandal involving the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). In Texas, police raided an FLDS compound and took hundreds of women and underage girls into custody to spare them the continued, sacramental predations of their menfolk. While mainstream Mormonism is now granted the deference accorded to all major religions in the United States, its fundamentalist branch, with its commitment to polygamy, spousal abuse, forced marriage, child brides (and, therefore, child rape) is often portrayed in the press as a depraved cult. But one could easily argue that Islam, considered both in the aggregate and in terms of its most negative instances, is far more despicable than fundamentalist Mormonism. The Muslim world can match the FLDS sin for sin--Muslims commonly practice polygamy, forced-marriage (often between underage girls and older men), and wife-beating--but add to these indiscretions the surpassing evils of honor killing, female "circumcision," widespread support for terrorism, a pornographic fascination with videos showing the butchery of infidels and apostates, a vibrant form of anti-semitism that is explicitly genocidal in its aspirations, and an aptitude for producing children's books and television programs which exalt suicide-bombing and depict Jews as "apes and pigs."

Any honest comparison between these two faiths reveals a bizarre double standard in our treatment of religion. We can openly celebrate the marginalization of FLDS men and the rescue of their women and children. But, leaving aside the practical and political impossibility of doing so, could we even allow ourselves to contemplate liberating the women and children of traditional Islam?

What about all the civil, freedom-loving, moderate Muslims who are just as appalled by Muslim intolerance as I am? No doubt millions of men and women fit this description, but vocal moderates are very difficult to find. Wherever "moderate Islam" does announce itself, one often discovers frank Islamism lurking just a euphemism or two beneath the surface. The subterfuge is rendered all but invisible to the general public by political correctness, wishful thinking, and "white guilt." This is where we find sinister people successfully posing as "moderates"--people like Tariq Ramadan who, while lionized by liberal Europeans as the epitome of cosmopolitan Islam, cannot bring himself to actually condemn honor killing in round terms (he recommends that the practice be suspended, pending further study). Moderation is also attributed to groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an Islamist public relations firm posing as a civil-rights lobby.

Even when one finds a true voice of Muslim moderation, it often seems distinguished by a lack of candor above all things. Take someone like Reza Aslan, author of No God But God: I debated Aslan for Book TV on the general subject of religion and modernity. During the course of our debate, I had a few unkind words to say about the Muslim Brotherhood. While admitting that there is a difference between the Brotherhood and a full-blown jihadist organization like al Qaeda, I said that their ideology was "close enough" to be of concern. Aslan responded with a grandiose, ad hominem attack saying, "that indicates the profound unsophistication that you have about this region. You could not be more wrong" and claiming that I'd taken my view of Islam from "Fox News." Such maneuvers, coming from a polished, Iranian-born scholar of Islam carry the weight of authority, especially in front of an audience of people who are desperate to believe the threat of Islam has been grossly exaggerated. The problem, however, is that the credo of the Muslim Brotherhood actually happens to be "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-ha..._b_100132.html