By the way do you think out captured army men are being treated with kid gloves ?

The whole rationale behind the Geneva conventions is that by abiding by them, we are also helping to assure that when our soldiers end up in enemy hands, that we have a basis to insist on their proper treatment. It may not be perfect but it is a measure of protection. By repudiating Geneva we have now declared that "anything goes" as far as prisoner treatment goes and we no longer have any basis to complain.

It might not seem important at the moment, but at the rate we're alienating the rest of the world, it will probably come into play faster than we think!

Jesus, as depicted in the New testament, speaks at length about judging one's self rather than one's neighbor and responding to violence with kindness. Why? Because he could see these yahoos coming from centuries away!

Of course there are Muslim religious fanatics who want to harm us. How do they reach that state? By speaking at length about all the the harm that the Christian West wishes to inflict upon them. How do they find their evidence. Hell, all they have to do is get on the internet and google "Jihad" and they'll find all kinds of examples of people who condemn Islam and wish death on its adherents.

I stumbled on this link this afternoon...

http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2007/05/carpet_bomb_gaz.html

...but there's certainly no shortage. Every group of people has those who strive for conflict and those who just want to be left the Hell alone.

The really sad part, is that the people who get emotional satisfaction from feeding the frenzy only contribute the cheerleading. It's our friendly neighborhood arms manufacturers who actually make out like bandits on the deal.

poll that estimates 500,00 Muslims sympathizers of al Qaeda in the United States

And what course of action do we recommend in order to counter this particular threat?

Would it involve education?

Survellance?

Arrest?

Internment?

Torture?

Just keeping a close eye on them?

Do Muslims who drink and don't pray on Friday count?

Or are they MORE dangerous?

Perhaps, as Pamela suggests, we should just carpert bomb them.

After all, They think bad thoughts!

You've yet to answer the question as to what to do about the 500,000 Al Qaeda supporters in our midst.

And just to make it tougher. Your solution can't be more evil than the crime your accusing the 500,000 of committing. Which is to say...thinking bad thoughts.

I'm all for outlawing all religion

The Soviets tried that. It didn't work out so well in the end. What we do need to do is to try and understand it as a natural phenomenon (like language) and learn what we can do to mitigate its more damaging effects.

http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Spell-Religion-Natural-Phenomenon/dp/067003472X

Just for yucks, I just googled "Pinker religion war" because I am very interested in the relationship between religion as an evolved phenomenon and the intraspecies violence that seems to be inevitably associated with it.

The resulting top link...

http://www.edge.org/q2007/q07_1.html

...is a set of essays responding to the question "WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT?"

Read Dennett, then skip down to Pinker and you may, for a brief moment come to think that there's hope for us yet.

1 in 142 US residents now in prison

America's prison population topped 2 million inmates for the first time in history on June 30, 2002 according to a new report from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS).

The 50 states, the District of Columbia and the federal government held 1,355,748 prisoners (two-thirds of the total incarcerated population), and local municipal and county jails held 665,475 inmates.

By midyear 2002, America's jails held 1 in every 142 U.S. residents. Males were incarcerated at the rate of 1,309 inmates per 100,000 U.S. men, while the female incarceration rate was 113 per 100,000 women residents.

http://usgovinfo.about.com/cs/censusstatistic/a/aaprisonpop.htm

With 2,000,000 people currently incarcerated, some for violent crimes, I guess it would be no hardship whatsoever to go ahead and lock up another 500,000 for thought crimes.

After all, one of them might blow up a diner!

Defending Muslims very vigorously here.

What I have seen is people being called out when they spread hatred against people they don't even know based on their membership in a group using completely ignorant misrepresentation of their enemies beliefs and customs as a justification.

That they fail to understand that their actually mirroring the behavior their condemning just compounds the dishonesty that defines the process.

I am still awaiting word on what the proposed solution to the half-million terrorists in our midst should be.

But that would involve actual thought instead of parroting vitriol.

Have you conveniently forgotten that atheists killed more people than religionists by a substantial multiple, last century? Stalin and Mao alone evened the score for a large portion of human history. So much for "reason".

1: Many people have killed many other people.

2: Many people have religious beleifs.

Any conclusions beyond these two are unsupported BS.

For the record, what all the mass murderers have in common is a willingness to classify people into arbitrary but reasonably easily delineated groups and declare members of one of the groups to be "unclean". The stated goal is inevitably the betterment of "mankind" ignoring the fact that mankind is made up of individuals each "created equal" with an equally sacred stake in living, loving and raising families who share their goals and values.

If you are among those, willing to condemn such a group to the point of wishing death upon their members, then you share in the evil that the mass-murderers represent.