It seems we have been overtaken by members of the Bill O'Reilly Democratic club today.

I used it here: http://lyssa-strada.bloggyland.com/

It seems the very same people here that insist on subdividing Islam into peaceful democratic types, and radical lunatics, would never do the same for Republicans or the Religious Right.

Some people posit that the difference is cowardice. Radical Islamists will kill you for saying something they dislike, while Republicans and the Religious Right won't. I'd say that sounds just about right.

* the recent murder of a San Franscisco reporter doing a story on a muslim criminal enterprise,...

WTF does this have to do with Muslims? It was a (allegedly) criminal enterprise. Does Sh***er want us to bomb Italy because some mobsters somewhere put out a hit?

* the suspension of immunity by Congress for people pointing out suspicious behavior like the flying Imams who are now suing their accusers.

They did no such thing.

* the use of hate crime legislation to immunize muslims from scrutiny

More hallucinations.

* As pointed out by Mona, the truncation of free speech here by Muslim intimidation elsewhere, as evidenced by the fear of publishing the Danish cartoons.

Sh***er thinks that because he browns his diapers, that we ought to doooooooo something about the boogeymen under his bed.

* Malmo, Sweden is currently 25% Muslim. Swedish administrators are anticipating what will happen when they reach a majority.

Ummm, they'll reach a majority?

* Also in Malmo, as in France, Muslims refuse to assimilate, prefering to live in segregated neighborhoods. Non-muslims are not allowed in, under pain of injury or death.

Wow. Kind of like some places in the U.S., eh? No, couldn't be. We've never had segregation or gated communities and "driving while black"....

* an attempt was made in Toronto to segregate muslims into Sharia seperate from Canadian law.

This is more horsepuckey. IOW, complete bovine scat.

Cheers,

Mona's right. And it's because we have such an open society that our experience has been/is different than in Europe.

Of course, if Bush's cronies were allowed to finish having their way with the Constitution, our civil liberties, and all of those other trivial luxuries, we would no longer enjoy the open society that their GWOT was supposed to defend.

And who knows what things would be like among various religious sects were the RWAs allowed finish up their agenda...

Let's see: [Rushdie'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.

How glib and cute of you. Now the picture of the man and how he suffered that emerges from an interview he gave not long ago to Reason magazine:

For years the fatwa forced Rushdie into hiding in London. It cost him his marriage and isolated him from his young son. The book was banned in India and he was barred from his homeland. Desperate to resume normal life, Rushdie apologized to Muslims and even formally converted to Islam, a move that he later repudiated.

An iconoclast's soul cannot come to terms with tyranny. In Rushdie's case, the ordeal of being hunted and censored heightened the tension between his political and literary sensibilities, sparking--to use the Marxist term--an inner dialectic. That experience has brought him around to a fundamental libertarian concern: freedom.

....

Rushdie: ... One of the things that was interesting was that on both sides of that argument [whether he had brought the fatwa on himself, as some leftists claimed] there were people who wanted to describe this as an exceptional event. People who were on my side wished to say that this was an exceptionally horrible attack on a writer and therefore required exceptional resources to defend it. People who were not on my side said that I had done something so exceptionally horrible that the rules of free speech didn't apply. But on both sides of the argument, there was a desire not to make it typical of anything. It didn't prove that Islam was against free speech. It was just against this horrible abuse of it. It didn't prove that there was a large problem of this sort. It just proved that a particularly insane dying religious leader had made a particularly insane fanatical threat.

And when I tried to say that this is not just me, that it is happening in a lot of places to a lot of writers and you need to look at that larger phenomenon, it was often seen as special pleading. This was seen as me trying to attach my case to others to justify myself. It was very difficult to get anyone to see that there was a growing phenomenon that needed to be taken seriously: the attempt to control thought.

This is at the front line of Islamic radicalism. There are all kinds of things that come behind it. You know what [Iranian sociologist] Ali Shariati called the "revolt against history." That's the project of tyranny and unreason which wishes to freeze a certain view of Islamic culture in time and silence the progressive voices in the Muslim world calling for a free and prosperous future.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/33120.html

Well, the good news is....

it is the most liberal of states that will suffer first. But just in case, some items for the unbelievers here to consider....

Why don't you go tell it to someone that will give a damn about your lies and piss their pants too. Or even listen to you. You know, like Freeperville? We don't need you.

Cheers,

A little respect, please. The "young lady" is a mature woman.

It seems the very same people here that insist on subdividing Islam into peaceful democratic types, and radical lunatics, would never do the same for Republicans or the Religious Right.

I know plenty of Republicans who are perfectly nice reasonable people and I know plenty of Religious people I get along quite well with as well.

But reasonable people don't start wars of aggression, dismantle the Constitution, disparage entire classes of people due to the circumstances of their birth or attempt to legislate on the subject of private behavior that is none of their business.

Its really quite simple.

(But then again anytime shooter says "it seems" you know he's just making $^it up.)