I believe different Christian sects were still trying to kill one another as recently as the trouble in Northern Ireland not too many years ago.

That is a non sequitur. The fact remains that some Muslims killed a Western filmmaker, and a Western author had his life nearly destroyed when a fatwa was placed on his head. Several of his translators (or others associated with the novel) were murdered. Westerners feared showing those Cartoons even after they indisputably came to have high news value.

Opposing lunatics such as Roger Simon or Glenn Reynolds surely need not entail denial of the serious chilling of speech (through terror) some Muslims engender.

You will notice that no one here will be able to refute the truth of Islam's doctrine or origins...

That is precisely accurate. No one here will be able to refute to truth of Islam's doctrine or origins, because no one here will be able to affirm it, either.

But the FrontPageMag stinkoes are welcome to come here and try to convince people that their deep yearnings to bomb Moozlims the world over and turn more nations into the warlord chaos hell into which Afghanistan (the first time when Reagan built up the mujahedeen whose offspring actually carried out 9/11 thanks to the Republicans' distaste for actual national security issues) and Iraq have been made.

And they can really, really try to be taken seriously when they claim that their lunatic warlord policies are really all about saving teh gays.

But they'd have far more success arguing that 'no one here will be able to refute the truth of [Christianity, Paganism, Buddhism, etc.]'s doctrine or origin,' because this blog generally deals with real world issues and topics, rather than religious dogmas.

Plus, few here besides the visiting stinkoes are quite as sexually stimulated by the perfidy of Islam as they are.

Certain people on these threads are so filled with hatred that they literally obsess over a religion practiced (with varying degrees of fidelity) by 1.565 billion people. So the question becomes, "what is the best way to deal with all these Muslims?" The people who seem MOST concerned with the problem are usually the ones most likely to advocate warfare as an appropriate response to the problem. I personally consider that prospect insane but I have difficulty with killing small animals let alone a large fraction of all humanity.

Others are less troubled by the prospect.

I personally like the idea expressed upthread, that if you are living well in a free and open society, you might find that people would care to emulate your example. If further you refrain from indiscrimanently killing the coreligionists of the people you are trying to impress, you might have better results with the assimilation effort.

If that means that I've thrown my lot in with the Salonistas then so be it. It beats genocide.

Nobody is trying to skirt the issue of how evil Islam is and what is at its core, and all that rubbish.

Point is: fear of some crazy ideology, be it evil or benign, does not dictate who we are! Get it? They can be as evil as your equally evil imagination makes them out to be, but that does not define us. They can't touch us. We are not in mortal danger. We want to preserve our constitution. We want to be governed by laws. We won't give up our freedoms and our decency no matter how much hate & fear you can muster up.

You want to fight Islam for the sake of fighting Islam, go ahead. You hate them so much you want to smite every last one, go ahead. You've met your match in Osama & Co.

Don't drag the rest of the country into your crusade.

(Of course, I was trying to love the lord ... but bare nakid ladies kept walking in.)

much ado, :

bah.

Via Dan Froomkin, this from Jonathan Alter, at Newsweek, "I Know What You Did Last Summer." An excerpt:

So members of Congress are legitimately afraid that they and their families will get blown up this summer. Fair enough. But then they lost their heads and sold out the Constitution to cover their political rears while keeping the rest of us mostly in the dark. The reason we don't know more about what happened is that the United States has moved sharply in recent years from legitimate secrecy—regarding sources and methods—to the bogus kind the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and others warned will wreck democracies. For instance, the abstract legal arguments used by the shadowy FISA court to strike down Bush's surveillance program are secret. Why? Because they might be politically embarrassing.

Here's what we do know. We know that the Democratic leadership rightly conceded to Adm. Michael McConnell, the once widely respected director of National Intelligence, to allow eavesdropping on foreigner-to-foreigner communications routed through American phone companies (no biggie; we've always spied on foreigners). We know that the Democrats thought they had a deal until McConnell, who is supposed to be nonpartisan, went back to the White House and got fresh marching orders to squelch reasonable judicial oversight by the FISA court. And we know that the administration's new position was that the attorney general (the disgraced Alberto Gonzales) should have the sole authority to spy without a warrant on any American talking to a foreigner, even if it's you and the guy from Mumbai fixing your printer. [A farewell gift from Rove?] [All emphases mine!]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20226453/site/newsweek/page/0/

What can we safely assume when something political comes out of the White House that is too hot to touch? That some how Karl Rove is involved. (Maybe Cheney, too.)

There has been a lot of speculation today about why Rove's really leaving, including why there is not more speculation from members of the M$M who probably know something. Spending more time with his wife and a college-bound son are just not that convincing. However, numerous Bush administration officials have left prior to something big breaking in the news.

The only thing that has ever made sense to me about Ashcroft, Comey and the rest of the DOJ senior leadership threatening to resign... is that they objected to the admin spying on either American citizens, in general, or Republican and/or Democratic members of congress, in particular, (and maybe even using the info to blackmail). Who would possibly have thought there'd be the most to gain by that? My first thought is Rove. Followed by Cheney.

Froomkin has more on both Rove and FISA:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100879.html

[I'll have to weigh in on the Muslim threat later on...]