I have no doubt that GoldenBoy lives in fear that Islam is going to ruin his life, or take over his town. He is just one of the many Islamophobes who are picking up the reins from those terrified folks running around in the 1950s building bomb shelters and turning in their friends and neighbors as Commies.

And sadly enough, not a whole lot different from those that listened to the folks that were telling them that Jews drank Chis'shun baby blood, ran the international banker's conspiracy, and were secretly trying to take over the world. They were willing to sign on to the program, and to do (or approve) "whatever it takes" to rid themselves of the malignant incipient Evil in their midst.

Cheers,

Well, the good news is it is the most liberal of states that will suffer first.

Trust you to actually celebrate death and murder.

Do you have any idea how much that decimated Rushdie's life?

Let's see: he's just as not dead as the NYT reporter but now he is rich, famous and married to a super-model. "decimated" is an exaggeration. Granted, fame & fortune may not be worth the trouble of looking over one's shoulder, but he got more: a chance to defend his professional freedoms. He became a symbol of freedom of speech. His life had/has a purpose.

of the islamo-phobes:

1) the claim that 'muslims are gonna get you' echoes the most radical Islamic claims that 'Christians are gonna get you.' That is, they are essentially supporting the radical Islamic claim that 'the west is anti-Islamic.'

2) what they desire - some kind of broad-based, government sanctioned anti-muslim enterprise (what exactly?) - is the hallmark of those countries in the middle-east that they claim to so hate (i.e. those who think kicking out the Christians and Jews will solve their problems).

3) so generally, their stance embodies what they claim hate about their enemy, which is I think how such things tend to go. ("They are intolerant of us! I hate them because they hate us! They hate peace! Let's kill them!")

For what it's worth:

Rate of change of Christians and Muslims:

Of the two largest religions, the "market share" of Christianity appears to be fairly constant:

U.S. Center for World Mission estimated in 1997 that the percentage of humans who regard themselves as Christians rose from 33.7% in 1970 to 33.9% in 1996. 2 Its total number of adherents is growing at about 2.3% annually. This is approximately equal to the growth rate of the world's population. Islam is growing faster: about 2.9% and is thus increasing its market share.

"World Christian Encyclopedia: A comparative survey of churches and religions - AD 30 to 2200," estimates that as of 2000, Christians make up 33% of the world's population, with close to two billion followers.

Author Samuel Huntington disagrees: "The percentage of Christians in the world peaked at about 30 % in the 1980s, leveled off, is now declining, and will probably approximate to about 25% of the world's population by 2025. As a result of their extremely high rates of population growth, the proportion of Muslims in the world will continue to increase dramatically, amounting to 20 percent of the world's population about the turn of the century, surpassing the number of Christians some years later, and probably accounting for about 30 percent of the world's population by 2025."

The UK Christian Handbook has lower figures. They estimate that 28.3% of the world's population identified themselves as Christians in 1990. They expect this to drop to 27.7% by the year 2000, and to 27.1 in 2010. They attribute the drop to the lower birth rate among Christians compared to followers of other religions.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/worldrel.htm

Even though they're mostly Catholic, maybe we should be nicer to Mexicans and other Latin American immigrants. They may be the only real chance Christianity has to keep up with Islam.

What are you gonna do now that Rove is gone? Who's gonna sign the checks?

We'll miss you. Stop by sometime.

This is a complex issue. Illiberal elements willing to do violence for this or that cause exist even in otherwise liberal societies; they have existed and do exist here. At times we've dealt with them well, at times not so well. Radical Muslims are but one of these elements, and not at the moment the most threatening of them at that.

Ann Coulter's rhetoric is just rhetoric, but the crowd she addresses, which believes itself disenfranchised and victimized by liberals and traitors has in its midst people who will -- and have -- committed murder. So to single out Muslims as particularly illiberal seems to me an unworthy prejudice masquerading as reason.

Which, was my point, Mona, and not one actually directed at you. It's characteristic of you, though, that you'd assume it was.

What can I say? When your horse gets this high, Mona, as it frequently does, I've never seen the point in whacking at its fetlocks; I'd prefer just to look under it to see what's on the other side -- while avoiding the nether end, of course.

As long as white America suffers, I'm good. Exterminate them all. Call it the caliphate or whatever you want. You're getting yours. Be it Christian or Muslim, makes no which never mind to me.

PS this is Salon, blame it on the Jews, that always flies.

So no, we will not be invaded by force. Like the Swedes and the Dutch have amply demonstrated it will be by the familiar intimidation of Political Correctness... When they get around to closing gay bars and banning bacon and ham sandwiches, I'm sure conservatives will be right behind you. What was that poem "When they came for..."?

Gosh. It almost makes one think that we should be standing up for a fierce commitment to maximal freedom and democracy in this country now, so that there is the strongest institutional and cultural defense against repression in the future.

After all, who is more likely to strangle American freedom and democracy?

Those ruling right wing turds who continually argue that it must be repressed here in order to fight the giant Muslim hydra which is about to crush us all sort of except not really just maybe they'll take our ham sandwiches, or that mass of us liberals and lefties who fight every attempt to throttle and demean the Bill of Rights?

By the way, the #1 greatest weapon against high birth rates among whatever population you do or don't like is to make sure that their women are economically strong, highly educated, and have full legal access to contraceptives and abortifacients. So if you've got a problem with birth rates among, say, American Muslims, why not make sure that their women experience the heights of Western development which ensures a dropping birth rate?