Look Johhno in TA you're a laugh a minute but I'll make a deal with you, I'll wipe the spittle (isn't it intriguing how people like you read about orthodox Jews spitting on a journalist and then accuse the person who pointed it out of having spittle on their lips?) off my keyboard if you wipe the shit off your brain.

Of course, you can't deny one thing I've said because it's all true so you have to start snarling puerile insults. You're on a hiding to nothing because no one on this earth can defend the indefensible and that includes you. You think everyone should side with you no matter what Israel does and that's just plain nuts. Only children are allowed to behave like baboons and not be held accountable. And before you start whining about the Arabs, in the 19th century the Arabs weren't doing anything, weren't planting bombs, weren't firing rockets, weren't driving bulldozers through Israeli streets driven mad by having their house demolished yet again, weren't being walled in like crazed animals all paid for by American money, weren't being burned alive with phosphorous bombs, weren't being framed for 9/11, weren't being tortured, raped and sodomized in American concentration camps. To blame what's going on on the degenerate nature of the Arabs is just Nazism rejigged.

And before you go off on a misinformation campaign about 9/11 the fact of the matter is that Newton's law of gravity proves those buildings were blown up and one thing is certain: they weren't blown up by Arabs. The dust from the WTC was full of thermite and the site at Ground Zero smoked for THREE MONTHS and a river of molten steel ran under it. The ground even six weeks after 9/11 registered a temperature of 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit and workers' boots were melting as they walked on it. Leslie Haskin has written a book about being inside one of the towers on 9/11 and what she saw. She saw concrete reduced to ash in seconds (thermite reaches a temperature of 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit in 2 seconds) and felt the building rock from side to side from the explosions, saw the windows blow out and furniture reduced to matchwood and flying out the windows. How stupid do you think people are? Kerosene could never have done any of this. So you can take that particular excuse for Israel's demented hatred of the Arabs and put it where the sun don't shine. The Russians got in first with the bombings in Moscow in September 1999 carried out by the FSB so they could blame the Chechens and invade them. This is a fascist tactic done by Hitler when the Nazis burned down the Reichstag so they could blame the Communists and put them in camps. Once they were out of the way they started on the Jews. I'm not antisemitic but I am anti-fascist and I don't care what religion the fascist is.

where, exactly (please use quotes as proof), is anybody here at Salon "defending violence", by Muslims or any other group you'd care to cite, as a "legitimate" means to achieve "political/economic" goals?

The articles Glenn pens are largely on the subject of "hypocrisy" in demonizing/stereotyping one group so that another group may justify/rationalize its selective use of violence against them to achieve or maintain relative power relationships.

It's always interesting to someone like me, who doesn't self-identify with any group other than "human", to watch the moral contortions group affiliators engage in when their group attempts to justify their resort to "preemptive or retributive" violence to achieve a desired group end. For many people there is always an "ends" that can be invented from wholecloth to justify the "means" no matter how inhuman or brutal.

"...those wedding parties, funerals and homes in Afghanistan? Oh wait, another group that so often kills people not responsible in any way for their alleged oppression?...wait give me a chance, I'll get the hang of this anti-Muslim thing yet."

Again you are fundamentally incapable of defending Muslims on their own merits and relative to their own actions. You can't justify any Muslim violence so you have no recourse but to recriminate about Israel or the U.S., which falsely implies I support those policies.

I'm showing you that you could say the same thing about other "groups". Where you go wrong is ascribing this kind of behavior and uniquely to muslims. You've made no attempt to show that muslims in general in the localities where these events occured actually supported those events. You're literally taking individual crimes and ascribing them to ALL MUSLIMS. That's the worst kind of ignorance.

If anything, the examples I brought up are more emblamatic of the desire of Americans and Israelis to lash out at "people not responsible for their oppression" because we [and the Israelis] actually elected the governments responsible through an ostensibly democratic process. We actually support those actions I described.

What about the plight of Christians in the Occupied Territories, Egypt, Iraq or...well...China? I'm not saying you don't have a point that the Uighur riots might get more press if they were an oppressed Christian minority but it's pretty clear that Americans of all stripes--including Christian conservatives--are not concerned enough about oppression of their co-religionists when it does not serve their political agenda.

If it was Castro doing it, or Hugo Chavez, you can bet they'd be squealing like stuck pigs. Otherwise, nothing. I offer as proof the fact that an excellent article on the emigration of Christians from the Middle East and what it might portend for the situation there did not appear in Time or Newsweek (where it would not have seemed out of place), but in National Geographic magazine.

Of course, NG's treatment was deeper and more sober than an article in a newsweekly would have been, but that's a different subject.

"I'm showing you that you could say the same thing about other 'groups'."

Yeah, sure it's called moral equivocation and you engaged in it not once but twice as the sum and substance of your comments.

"Where you go wrong is ascribing this kind of behavior and uniquely to muslims. You've made no attempt to show that muslims in general in the localities where these events occured actually supported those events."

How about the election of Hamas or Hezbollah for one? Don't elect terrorists to office if you want to convince people of your peaceful nature.

"You're literally taking individual crimes and ascribing them to ALL MUSLIMS. That's the worst kind of ignorance."

Don't be part of an ideology if you don't want to be associated with the actions of your fellow believers. Islam supports and encourages violence against non-Muslims at its doctrinal core as reinforced by Mohammed's career as warlord and the waves of Islamic imperialism which spread after his death (attacking China among others unprovoked).

By being a Muslim you are responsible on some level for the violent consequences of your faith's domineering supremacist ethos. I take the same view with say a Baptist when their leaders spew homophobic bile. Islam is not unique in these things but they are singular in present scope of their violent interactions with a vast array of other groups. Islam really is the worst placed ideology in my opinion for dealing with a secular, pluralistic reality.