you don't really get it. I'll try to explain.

I was raised attending a very fundie small Baptist church that was eventually pastored by Norm Olson during the height of his Michigan Militia fame. After the Oklahoma City bombings, the church membership ousted him. Eventually even the people of Alanson, where he had his Alanson Armoury, about 10 miles from where I'm sitting now, had enough of him too. He has since moved to rural Alaska, where he has no position of authority in any church that I am aware of.

People have asked me, since I was involved with Islam for a time, why is it that the people in my small fringey right-wing church could isolate and marginalize a fanatic once his rhetoric got dangerous and volatile, but the Muslims have a poorer track record of being able to do so in their mosques?

This is a good question. The answer that immediately comes into my mind is that the members of the church could read the Bible for themselves. Its harder to drag literate people over that line. Also, although rural and very right wing, they had fairly comfortable lives which they really, when it came down to the crunch, didn't want to sacrifice to take up arms with Norm Olson.

If that's the reason--education and economic security--it still doesn't explain everything. The Muslim notion of "Jihad" is also partly at fault. No other religion has this that I know of. As long as disaffected, depressed people can find meaning in their lives by taking up the Jihad, some incidents of Islamic terrorism will happen, even carried out by educated young people with good economic prospects. Also, you don't have to know much theology to know that what Olson was spouting wasn't very Christlike. But Jihad is honourable in Islam.

But there is really nothing Westerners can do about this, nor is the Jihad as a concept any great threat to our civilization. As is the case now, the victims of the fundie call to Jihad will continue to be mostly other Muslims, and this is something that they will have to deal with within their own community.

It's the huge attraction that Jihad against the West, specifically, has for people thanks to disparities in education and economy that is the greater danger. So education and economic betterment will definitely help. It's possible then that the theological interpretation of Jihad which justifies suicide bombing will become as rare and as lunatic fringe as Christian calls to form militias in the woods of Michigan are today.

Right now the so-called "moderate Muslim" position on Jihad, suicide-bombing-at-tourist-resorts-style, is: "oh, yes that's terrible, just terrible, but you have to understand, the Shahids (martyrs)do have a point..." Understand? They have a point? That's the silent acquiesence that keeps the whole ball rolling, and even escalates these incidents. This is what has to end. This is what the fundie Christians in Olson's church did NOT say, much to their credit I may add. Not one of them said Timothy McVeigh had a point. They said he was a criminal. And when Olson said, yeah, well, but he has a point, Olson was dismissed (actually Olson said he a scapegoat and that the Japanese did it). 'nuff said.

That's all, said my piece. Hope that helps, Juliebird. Comparing Islam to Christianity really does not work. They are evolving differently. We are seeing that day by day. What the end will be depends on various economic, political, and cultural forces currently at work.

Hope so, because I think you are right.

That said I still don't really want her for my president.

Indonesia has the world's largest population of Muslims.

India has the second biggest number of Muslims, and they are largely doing well there, better than their co-religionists in Pakistan, in fact. Indian Muslims are well represented in politics and business and they dominate in the lucrative Bollywood film industry.

The issue in India as per Muslims is, has been, and will be Kashmir.

It's possible to overdo the oppressed minority bit. Gandhi and Martin Luther King both felt that being oppressed did not justify voilence. We have seen that there are other options than violence, and that being oppressed may not excuse, say, cutting the throats of Swiss tourists visitng Luxor or blowing up a small synagogue full of people in Tunisia (both of which happened, but involved Europeans so I guess Americans didn't hear about it).

Lots of people are oppressed, and we can still call murder by its name. And I think it's insulting to the world's 1 billion Muslims (most of whom are the majority within their own countries, not minorities) to keep insisting they are all under the boot of the U.S. and not, 60 years after the close of the colonial era, in control of their own destinies or answerable for their own outcomes. Iraq, okay, we're actually there with the boots. But really, what's Yemen's excuse? or Somalia's? You see what I mean?

while we're on Jihad--Jihad as you know just means "struggle"; by extension it means struggle for Islam. Every Muslim alive is supposed to participate in the Jihad.

Quick! Run!

No, really, it's true--but Jihad is a flexible term. A girl might be told that the pain of childbirth is the jihad of women. A person might say that trying to stay on his deen is a jihad. Jihad can even be used to describe striving for personal spiritual growth and understanding. Lots of things. But embedded within that is the notion of Jihad as a violent, revolutionary political struggle--the word's dark twin, you might say.

I have no idea what all this means in terms of reforming Islam so that it becomes more "peaceful". None. It's too thorny an issue, and it's out of my league.

But really, you say "fatwa" is just a ruling--it's a clerical ruling, as you know, and you really ought to be up front with that.

I'm done babbling now.