Let me guess. You're a "libertarian", right?

Yes, and? I'm a generally open borders kind of person, but if I lived in the Netherlands, I'd be insisting that immigrants seeking permanent residence status or citizenship sign on with the civic values of that country. A nation cannot hang together without common civic values, and if a significant contingent of an immigration influx is overtly hostile to said values, they have no right to be accepted by the nation they seek to live in.

As far as I'm concerned, any Hispanic who wishes to live in the U.S. ought to be allowed to, provided s/he has not been convicted of a violent felony in their country of origin. Similarly, I see no reason why the Dutch ought not screen out applicants with a known background in Islamic extremist organizations.

If anyone finds any reference to the piglet story that is not the Mark Steyn posting or one of the 14,243 re-postings thereof... let me know.

Meanwhile, when you forward this post to friends, Microsoft can and will track it ( If you are a Microsoft Windows user) for a two weeks time period.

For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you $245.00...

There's no difference between religious extremism, be it Islamic Wahabism or US Christian rapturists and Armageddon freaks. Islamofascism cannot take over the US, but Chrisofascism has already taken over the white house and the Republican party. Yes, we don't have to wait for an invasion by a fascist religion, they are already here and they have names like Bush, Rove, Inhofe, Brownback, etc.

Right, the creeping exceptionalism and demands for superiority by Islam is all made up to scare people, and is officially an invention of the Evil Loony Corporate Big Money Tinhat Right Wing. Sure.

Actualy, this is where I strongly part ways with you. The right-wing noise machine actually is promoting nonsense about Muslims intended to terrify people. Here in the U.S., we have almost no problems with our Muslim citizens, certainly not more so than the right-wing nutjobs who bomb abortion clinics and the like.

Nor is any frenzied language issuing from this or that imam about the coming Glorious Caliphate anything to take seriously. The GOP and Bush boosters however glom onto that rhetoric as a reason to Fight to Save Civilization and start wars with various Muslim countries, which is evil as well as counterproductive.

The issue with intolerant and/or violent Muslims living in Western democracies and chilling speech via violence and threats of same, is a domestic immigration problem not particularly implicating foreign policy. But the Bushites won't accept that, and do everything possible to depict these Islamic extremists as the latest Nazi threat, which is beyond absurd.

El Cid (clever pseudonym, crummy movie) opines:

<<However, here is one real person, one real woman, in a real Muslim nation, who does not appear to believe that her cause of moderation, equality, and democracy in her society will be advanced by simplistic screeds that Islam against whom all civilized peoples must battle or die.>>

I read it once. Refilled my coffee mug, read it again. Went to the bathroom and washed my face with cold water, and read it a third time. Same as baseball. Only three swings at the ball and you're out. I think you were trying to say something, and maybe quite cleverly in your own mind, but sorry, somewhere between the cup and the lip . . . . alas . . .

In the interest of accuracy

Holy Cow, you're righ!! Sure am glad no Christians have never killed anyone. (no Matthew Shepard, no clinic-bombings, no Oklahoma-city bombing...)

The people who killed Shephard were robbers, not people who were motivated by (or who claimed to be motivated by) Christianity; Timothy McVeigh explicitly rejected Christianity.

The only person ever killed by the bombing of an abortion clinic in the United States was Dr. Robert Sanderson. He was murdered by Eric Rudolph, an adherent of the Christian Identity movement, a descendent of the old British Israelite cult. I suppose you could say that Rudolph was at least nominally (if eccentrically) Christian, but they weren't dancing in the streets in Rome when he committed his crimes. Christian authorities, particularly Catholic authorities, have condemned violent interpretations of Christianity in public, consistent way that their Muslim counterparts have not, for the most part, imitated.

--Anonymous

Just about every claim you make is false. You have no idea what religious background McKinney and Henderson, the killers

of Matthew Shephard had. Their story has changed so many times it isn't any more credible than yours.

I guaranfuckingtee you they are Christians now. Everyone finds God in prison, usually on Death row but those two managed to avoid that.

Religious beliefs

After his parents' divorce, McVeigh lived with his father, and his sisters moved to Florida with their mother. He and his father were devout Roman Catholics who often attended daily Mass. In a recorded interview with Time Magazine he professed his belief in "a God", though he said he had "sort of lost touch with" Catholicism and "never really picked it [back] up." The Guardian reported that McVeigh wrote a letter claiming to be an agnostic, though his execution included a Roman Catholic ceremony.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh#Religious_beliefs

You are just as dumb as dirt and apparently there was at least one more killed by an abortion clinic bombing. I'm sure there were others.

http://cgi.cnn.com/US/9801/29/bombing.update/

You are an ignant little twit. STFU, stoopid. Real Christians don't need apologists like you. Thou shalt not bear false witness. It is the ninth commandment. Perhaps you forgot.

And some of his translators (and/or others involved with the book) WERE killed.

One.

The Sad Tale of Hitoshi Igarashi

Hitoshi Igarashi was stabbed in the face and arms until he died on Tsukuba University's campus in Ibaraki on July 12, 1991.

Igarashi, 44, the translator of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, is believed to have been murdered by an Iranian Shia muslim carrying out the fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Igarashi, known to be one of Japan's leading young Islamic scholars, a man who had lived in Iran, decided to translate Satanic Verses to act as a mediator between Khomeini (and the Muslim world) and Rushdie.

Igarashi's position was that both sides were right: Khomeini was justified in issuing the fatwa on Rushdie by virtue of his position in the Muslim clerical hierarchy; Rushdie, he argued, could be located in the lineage of mystical Sufi thought, and seen as not anti-Islamic but rather, as an Indian moved to England, more like a writer of the literature of exile, and thus not unlike Muhammad.

Igarashi's translation was not an attempt to force the Muslim world to accept the Western value of freedom of expression in an absolute form. It was a third-party effort to show common, middle ground, in order to end the conflict.

As Shigemi Inaga, my main source, puts it in this wise paper on the concept of tolerance between civilisations:

"The irony was that the Islamic tolerance Igarashi wished to demonstrate was in fact intolerable for those to whom he wanted to display tolerance."

Inaga's ideas on tolerance, informed by the murder of Igarashi, are optimistic in their pragmatism.

He is suspicious of tolerance:

"I have to stress that, as a virtue, tolerance is highly vulnerable, for it becomes forceless when confronted with intolerance. If one is tolerant to intolerance, one is forced to accept intolerance; but if one is intolerant to intolerance, one is to provide a double ration to intolerance. Voltaire already pointed this out at the end of the 18th Century. I am afraid humanity has made little progress ever since."

But this suspicion does allows him to arrive at an understanding of what tolerance must mean at an international level:

"My recommendation therefore is to stop talking about tolerance. Instead, we need to think about the conditions for tolerance, because tolerance is never a neutral matter. If tolerance itself is a form of intervention, which necessarily provokes some form of (verbal or physical) violence, by means of passivity or activism ... we have to pinpoint the necessary conditions to help realize tolerance, which is a prerequisite to any dialogue among civilizations, in the true sense of the word."

http://www.raglanroad.org/weblog/archives/000698.html