to a woman without a sense of belonging, mere life is all that matters.

It really is very easy.

I am a warrior.

Its the only thing I have ever been besides a student and even that was a means to the end. It permeates everything I do or am. It is the reason I raise my child the way I do, why I am on time, how I drive, the way I think. When I worked in an office, I ran it and did my job like I was in battle against an enemy. it is why I still do PT even though I don't have to. It is what makes me different from my relatives. It is why I have the friends (brothers) that I have. It is why I am in the profession I am in. Everything. Now, whether or not I am a good warrior or not is a different question all together.

Now, this is just my experience, but if you ask a communist what he/she is, they will tell you "I am a communist." When they ask a member of the FARC or SL, they invariably say Farucho or Senderista. I'll bet if you ask an Islamic terrorist, they will say "Muslim" or "Good Muslim". See my point?

You're killing me here. What do you want to belong to? If you're talking about a man, I can't help you, although my brother is a single parent and might be looking, he's a cop, so...:D

If you need an organization to join, you can sign on to my "Free the Oppressed Workers of Thailand", but Green Hat will probably kill us all before we even have the first meeting.

If you're just feeling down, buy yourself a knife from Mr. Harsey or a piece of gear from Eggroll, that would make me feel better.

Or we can start a thread just to make fun of Sacamuelas and if he fights back, I'll ban him. That makes me feel better just thinking about it.

Yes, and even though they think of themselves as warriors, they still identify with a fanatic politio-religious ideology.

And that is the fascinating part. There are people taking advantage of their willingness towards united self-sacrifice.

NDD:

That is how you see yourself. I agree with you, in your case, it describes you accurately.

Others do not have your clarity, and see themselves as they wish they were, rather than how others see them or how they actually are.

You allude to that with your Muslim analogy. I would say that Mohammed Atta and OBL see themselves as good Muslims. I dare say that while most Muslims may agree with them, the majority of the world do not.

Does that make them good Muslims because they and others see them as such, or murderers and terrorists because that is how they are and we see them as such.

In short, do we define ourselves, or do our actions or others' opinions define us?

TR

Oustanding question and straight to the heart of the matter!

IMO, since the Muslim world refuses to define themselves as peaceful Allah-fearing folk, their actions (or lack there of) and our opinions of Islam as a violent ideology bent on our and the Jews extermination is, by default, the definition they will be stuck with.

If you don't define yourself, others will do it for you.

A lesson politicians learn early if they want to stay in politics. Also a lesson learned early on an A Team.

LOL, on all of it. Obviously I cannot join your movement, Mr. Liberator, until I learn the weapons. Perhaps a trip to Western Oregon is in order soon. Maybe I can make it a double feature if there is a gun show.


it is a sad day indeed when the jawbreaker has to substitute for a triple eeeewww.

And therein lies the problem. I agree with you, they would probably say "I am a good Muslim." Their actions of terrorism in their minds do not contradict that self image. They equate being a "good Muslim" with terrorism against us. And they have followers.

That is why I say we are at war with Islam, at this time, in this place, as practiced by the visible adherents in the forefront of the ideology. And they are at war with us. Its kind of silly, IMO, for them to be at war with us in the name of Islam and for us to say we are not at war with them and their Islam.

With the exceptions as noted by GH in Asia and others.

I have to disagree here, NDD. I think we're making an overly-broad generalization. That being, how would the Muslim world define themselves? The earlier comparison to Catholicism is a bit mistaken, I think, in that Catholicism is strictly hierarchical, with one voice at the top. That being, if the Pope "defines" the Catholic world as such, it is such (or else you aren't a Catholic). But there is no corresponding authority in the Muslim world. Getting a sunni, shi'ite, wahabi, and a sufi all together to agree on exactly how to 'define' themselves is just going to end in disaster.

A more apt comparison would be saying, "The Christian world needs to define itself as...." Put in that light, it's obvious that it's a very difficult, if not impossible request. Some groups are so broad that's it's impossible to get a consensus on anything.

As to the matter of Islam at large, no, I don't think we are at war with all Muslims. It's simply the squeaky-wheel problem. You hear every day about a very violent, very media-savvy minority of a billion-plus population. You never hear about the silent majority, if for no other reason than that they're -not- blowing anything up.

--Dan

I'm not asking them to all agree on which side of the plate the salad fork goes or even any particular interpretation of the Quoran. I am simply asking them all to agree that blowing up women and children in a pizza parlor or on a bus or mutilating the bodies of US contractors and laughing about it on tv is a bad thing. I'm not even asking all of them to do that - just their religious leaders who should be setting the example. We can deal with the rest. Like I said, if they won't define themselves as being against terrorism and murder, then we get to define them as being for it. No fence sitting. No fatwas calling for the murder of Americans because they are Americans. Or Jews simply because they are Jews.

I never said we are at war with all Muslims.

They may not have a Pope, but they've sure as hell got their Bishops and Cardinals. And we're looking for most of them.

We dont hear them denouncing the violence either, atleast not as loudly as the minority screaming about killing us.

You don't hear about the silent majority because they are silent.

We expressed more opposition to sending 7 Green Hats to Ft. Benning to be drill instructors than I see from the Muslim world regarding terrorism.

The most you will get, that I have seen is "We regret the loss of life in...today."

That's not denouncing.

Look at the outrage American Catholics expressed over the priest thing. They quit sending money to the church, etc. The lay people were harder on the church than the Pope.

CAIR's Shameful Silence
By Joel Mowbray
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 5, 2004

Witnessing the gruesome attacks on four Americans in Fallujah last week would thoroughly sicken any fellow American—except for one very prominent American-Muslim organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

In a statement issued shortly after the gory murders, CAIR said that it “condemned the mutilation of those killed in Iraq on Wednesday.� The slaughter of these men was not “murder,� though, it was merely a “killing.�

Nowhere in the statement, in fact, did CAIR condemn the murder of the four Americans.

Nowhere in the statement did CAIR condemn setting on fire the cars the men were driving.

Nowhere in the statement did CAIR condemn the parading of the charred bodies through the street or the hanging of one of the headless corpses hanging from a bridge over the Euphrates River as the locals stoned it.

This is no mere oversight or a simple semantic slip. In the press release’s second paragraph, CAIR explains, “The mutilations violated both Islamic and international norms of conduct during times of war.�

What “war�? The war ended long ago, even long before Saddam’s beard was examined for lice and other living creatures. What has been going on since can only be described as “terrorism,� not “war.�

But CAIR clearly sees this as a “war� between legitimate foes, going so far as to call “on all parties to the conflict to respect the sanctity of the dead and the sensitivities of their families.� The only parties, though, are the American-led coalition forces attempting to build a democracy and the terrorists trying to prevent it.

So why is CAIR calling on “all parties� as if there were a war between two legitimate sides? Probably because CAIR doesn’t view terrorists as terrorists.

In other words, an American Muslim organization has taken the same stance as much-publicized Fallujah cleric Sheikh Khalid Ahmed, who condemned only the mutilations as contrary to Islam—CAIR’s reasoning as well—but not the murders.

And this isn’t the only time CAIR has refused to condemn terrorism.

CAIR’s spokesman was given the opportunity to condemn Hamas and Islamic Jihad by the Washington Post in November 2001. His response was telling: “It’s not our job to go around denouncing.� Asked a similar question about Hamas and Hezbollah by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in February 2002, CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper called such queries a “game� and explained, “We’re not in the business of condemning.�

But when Israel is to blame, CAIR seems to be very much “in the business of condemning.�

After Israel recently killed the founder of Hamas—a man responsible for the deaths of 52 mostly young Palestinian suicide bombers and 377 mostly civilian Israelis—CAIR saw fit to “condemn� the Jewish state without a moment’s pause. In its press release, CAIR said it “condemned the assassination of a wheelchair-bound Palestinian Muslim religious leader, calling it an act of ‘state terrorism.’�

CAIR couldn’t bring itself to call the founder of one of the bloodiest terrorist organizations on earth even a “militant,� let alone a “terrorist.� To them, a man with the blood of over 400 people on his hands was a handicapped “religious leader.� Seems awfully instructive about the kind of Islam they must follow if they label terrorist masterminds “religious leaders.�

All of this could be happily ignored if CAIR was some fringe organization, but it is not. The group represents Muslims in the media and to the government and touts itself in its press releases as “America's largest Islamic civil liberties group� with “25 regional offices and chapters nationwide and in Canada.�

Read a news story on American Muslims or on Islamic terrorism or flip on a cable news channel, and there is CAIR, being held up as the representative of American Muslims.

But what kind of American Muslim would want to be represented by a group that refuses to condemn the brutal murder of four Americans or any number of different terrorist organizations? Let’s hope not many.

Sure they do. But there's a misleading implication, I would submit, in a statement like that. The imam leading prayer in a Connecticut mosque is apples and oranges away from the imam hanging idolaters from lamp posts in Pakistan.

You are correct in your idea of definitions, however. I agree; I wasn't arguing that we're (ever) going to have a pan-world Muslim orthodoxy; but it is not too much to ask that Muslims (or anyone else) not blow up innocent folks.

The point of my post was that it's very important to be careful when lumping groups of people together. Would a Christian stick up for the actions of Eric Rudolph? A soldier for William Calley? I would hope not, but they do demonstrate the problems with judging a large, disparate group by the actions of a small (if vocal) minority.

Oh, and as for the 'war with Islam' bit, I wasn't referring to you specifically, but the title of the thread. :)

--Dan, devil's advocate