For example, Lebanon used to be mostly Christian. So was Turkey. So were many other countries. How did they become Muslim? Through conquest. In the 7th and 8th centuries, Arab hordes left their Peninsula in waves of violent conquest. Yes, there was often a flowering of culture under the Islamic caliphate, and this culture was often superior to Dark Age European barbarism, but this was not due to a “peaceful” Islam. Rather, the Muslims often adopted the practices of the more sophisticated cultures they conquered. And they were willing to let infidels live at peace within their cities as long as they paid a “dhimmi tax” - so, for example, Jewish physicians were free to practice under the Moors, but they paid a huge tax (I believe it was as much as a third of their income.) This was obviously better than the condition of Jews in many European kingdoms.

Now, this tells us that, at the time, Muslims were more tolerant of Jews than most of the Christian kingdoms, but that does not equate to Muslims being peaceful. They weren’t.

They conquered India, parts of Spain, and they were on their way to conquering France when Charles “the Hammer” Martel turned them back at the Battle of Tours. They also were fighting as far North as Russia, and made inroads into Africa. The African slave trade was carried out mostly by Arabs, and to this day, their word for “black person” is khefir, which is also their word for slave.

The Muslims in India ruled the Hindu population, sometimes well, when the Muslim ruler was a “secular” Muslim, sometimes with great brutality when he took his faith seriously. That is because the Koran carries many injunctions against infidels.

For anyone who wants to know what motivates Muslims - read the Koran and the haditha. It seems that the more a Muslim takes their faith seriously, the more they justify barbarism against non-Muslims, but the secular Muslims are usually very nice people. A surfeit of Islam seems to be the culprit.

In comparison to your relating them to kids shows just how pie eyed and ignorant you are to a real threat.
This is only re enforced by your constant minimization of the threat in just about every debate we’ve had.
Its also a stupid analogy because these are not bad kids crying out for attention as you so foolishly believe.
They want to kill people if it means killing themselves. Its hard to receive attention for your deeds when you’re dead.

“(child breaks or steals things for no apparent reason, teenage daughter dates long-haired “bad boys” etc).”

Absolutely wrong, delusional.
They have a reason and a definite motive with an apparent reason.

Jersey, the pirates are just a more recent example of events, I did not say they were active 1400 years ago. And your time line is wrong anyway. Barbary activities began to come into play at the tail end of the 16th century and was peaking in the 17th century. That’s more than a couple hundred years buddy.
Muslim have been accusing western civilizations since the time of their Crusades of rampant Imperialism, for most of the past 1400 years since they founded Islam they have been practicing imperialism and the expansion of Islam through all kinds of political and violent methods which is exactly what Mohammad wanted. Their hierarchy accomplished through violence, intimidation, and annihilation of entire civilizations and taking over entire continents along with being some of the largest purveyors of slavery we have seen.
So, yea, most definitely, this crap of there’s did start 1400 years ago.
Second of all, the Christians we see today are no longer the barbaric fire and brimstone radicals we saw up until a couple hundred years ago.
Unlike Muslims who have not changed with the times since its inception 1400 years ago many of their crude and violent means still exist today.
As a matter of fact, its only gotten worse.
Today , still, the punishment for deviating from Islam or not accepting it is death.
I don’t see Christians killing those who decide on a different faith today, DO YOU ???

JMJ;
“You just can’t make a simplistic assertion like “It is about a radical Islamic culture of violence that has existed for 1400 years.” It simply isn’t true”

Actually, it is true.
I’ve proven it with just a small basic rundown above and any fool can pick up a book and see that they were anything but “peaceful” during the dark ages as you so falsely assert.

http://www.primechoice.com/philosophy/jihad.htm
“The history of political Islam is the destruction of Christianity in the Middle East, Egypt, Turkey and North Africa.
Half of Christianity was lost. Before Islam, North Africa was the southern part of Europe (part of the Roman Empire).
Around 60 million Christians were slaughtered during the jihadic conquest.
Half of the glorious Hindu civilization was annihilated and 80 million Hindus killed.
The first Western Buddhists were the Greeks descended from Alexander the Great’s army in what is now Afghanistan.
Jihad destroyed all of Buddhism along the silk route.
About 10 million Buddhists died. The conquest of Buddhism is the practical result of pacifism.
Zoarasterianism was eliminated from Persia.
The Jews became permanent dhimmis throughout Islam.
In Africa over 120 million Christians and animists have died over the last 1400 years of jihad.
Approximately 270 million nonbelievers died over the last 1400 years for the glory of political Islam.”

You miss the point on relating radical Muslims to Nazi Germany.
Its not that they cant do or have the power to do what Nazi Germany did.
(YET)
ITS THAT THEY WANT TO !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So yea, the left is weak when they take the position you take and say;
Islamic fundamentalists simply do not have the power to do what the Nazis did. Period.”

They idolize Hitler and the Nazi movement for what it stood for in terms of ethnic cleansing and world domination.
You yourself admit to being ignorant of this by saying;
“They want to be considered important players on the international scene.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
They want to be the “ONLY” players.

“I’ve read Mein Kampf too. Does that make me a Nazi? ”

Nice try, but weak.
The point is that the book is selling more amongst one population than another.

“Dumb people will fall for this.”

Best example would be how well Mao’s writings were selling during the 60’s among the radical left movement.
The closer you got to Haight and Ashbury the more copies were being sold.
Do I have to explain to you ?
Or maybe you would care to explain why all of Hezzbolla and Hamas salute in the style of “hail to Hitler”?
I stand by my point with relative facts and examples, you only have an opinion ending with “period”

Sorry bub, in a court room you would loose, big time.

“As SmokinJoe pointed out, an educated, or in this case simply prosperous, people will abhor radicalism. ”

Yes, but your typical evasive and disingenuous self forgot to include the examples offered that prove this not to be true.
Seeing as many of the terrorists captured so far have come from anything but oppressed little villages. But rather are some of the most educated affluent and financially stable individuals we have seen in any movement.

And by the way.
Your constant requests for people to study history is a bunch of crap.
When history has proven you wrong you blame it on the bias of the author.
When it supports your point you are all of a sudden the grand ole “student of history” who’s selective input of world events somehow elevates you to a level of knowledge that makes you superior to those of us who can actually think.
No matter how far back we go, or what rendition of events you choose to apply to today’s circumstances.
It is what it is.
And for you , as a “student of history” to boil it all down to nothing more than bunch of “unruly children” is a level of ignorance so damn scary that it speaks directly to nothing more than defeat.

Here’s the perfect example;

“It’s time we try something else.”

that’s what was said about Iraq from 2002 up until recently when things began improving. As a matter of fact most of those in command are saying the war is won, yet the situation is still fragile.

Had we decided to try something new, as the delusional left wished, we would not be seeing the success that a steady drive of the same method along with the surge which, to use your words was to “drop the hammer harder.” gave us.
That drop worked Holmes.

Yes, the left is weak, impatient kids who when they don’t get what they want immediately are all too quick to resort to anything but consistency and a steady hand, a tenacious drive, unrelentingly placing one foot in front of the other and not faltering from the goal or the method.

This is one reason why Obama won.
Impatient little kids who want everything right away. If it takes too long for hard work and perseverance to pay off by sticking with a plan they will try anything, as long as its different with the hopes, like a crap shoot, that it’ll work.
Or, what’s been most popular lately is to just be bailed out.

You guys suck.

obama said that he and penny pritzker — friend and top fund-raiser, asked to head the commerce Dept — “share certain core values about how to run organizations, and hopefully that will inform how we manage the government.” pritzker is the former chair of now-bankrupt superior bank, which, according to the office of thrift supervision, “suffered as a result of its former high-risk business strategy, which was focused on the generation of significant volumes of subprime mortgage and automobile loans for securitization and sale in the secondary market. the bank also suffered from poor lending practices, improper record keeping and accounting, and ineffective board and management supervision.” this is how obama apparently hopes to manage government. and he’ll have plenty of help from congress. house majority leader steny hoyer said in a speech at the national press club: “A wide consensus of economists tells us that deficit spending is both the way out of a recession like this one and the way to prevent even more catastrophic decline.” of course, because doing more of the same thing which caused a problem is the sure way to solve it.”

i am still trying to stick to issue-related matters when it comes to criticizing the president-elect, but it sure doesn’t look good… and will all you mckinney-detractors at least give her due credit that she called for the end of the fed, and the selection of former comptroller david walker to be head of the treasury, or at least as auditor, overseeing the use of bailout funds.

“Many economists (Keynesians) believe that government spending ought to be countercyclical to dampen the impact of boom-bust cycles. In practice, everyone wants to be a Keynesian during bad times, boosting government spending, but there is no mechanism in place to force restraint, say through increased taxes, during boom times. This ‘restraint’ existed when the gold standard was in place as money was backed by a limited supply of gold. But such restraints were inconvenient and central bankers are now in charge.

There are cushions built into the system already; take unemployment benefits as an example: unemployment benefits reduce the impact of lost wages and stimulate demand during tough times. Note that European countries tend to have more generous unemployment benefits than the U.S.; further in the U.S., most states need to balance their budgets. As a result, when state revenues decline, the downturn in the U.S. economy is particularly exacerbated as government services are cut. There are some that argue that such spending cuts are healthy because the faster we weed out the excesses of the boom, the faster one finds a bottom upon which to have sustainable growth. Further, risk takers might be more cautious if they know that the government won’t bail them out, reducing the risks of systemic failures in the first place. Some may even recall that there used to be a breed called fiscal conservatives in Congress, an almost extinct species. Democrats and Republicans alike are all Keynesians these days.”

- The Road to Financial Ruin: We Have to Spend Money Now
by Axel Merk

JMJ

g, it is unbelievable the things people do. And I am sure, if liberals, or anyone, delved into the reasons people do things, they would hear, from that person, their version of perfect logic that brought them to do whatever heinous deed they chose.

It doesn’t make wrong right.

Neither does two wrongs make a right.

But a baseball bat is sometimes required to get the attention of people….9/11 certainly finally got our attention….even though we’d had ample warning.

We now have a liberal democrat government. Soon…very soon….we will see if tea works.

Let us pray that no more have to die before the party starts.

Father….stay the hands of those who would kill….and protect the innocent from the guilty.

Amen.

“Just as silly to call murder “negative attention””

?

I don’t think you get the analogy. Allow me to try one last time. In my analogy, the terrorists are the bad “children” looking for negative attention from the “parents” (first world nations with international interests there). The “child” does bad things to get the “parents” to pay “negative attention” to them. The “child” ants attention. Period. And if it’s easier or preferable to get that attention by doing something bad rather than something good, they’ll do the bad thing. All parents have seen this in action, especially among very young children or rebelious adolescents (child breaks or steals things for no apparent reason, teenage daughter dates long-haired “bad boys” etc).

The terrorists want attention. They want to be considered important players on the international scene. They want respect, albeit through fear, and gravitas. They want to unite the Muslim world against a common enemy. It didn’t really even matter who the enemy was, as long as it was seemingly formidible enough to strike people as truly an existential threat. America made the perfect patsy in this endeavor. We’ve done the same thing before.

When you look at our history, especially our early history, whenever there was a threat of popular uprising or insurrection, the US government would invent some new enemy against which we would unite to defeat. The Spanish-American war was begun for exactly this reason. The Cold War served a similar purpose but was arguably more for the sake of spending money on an entrenched military industrial complex.

So, the terrorists get the unifying enemy they want, and we get the unifying enemy our government wants. OBL knew this and played his hand perfectly. It’s a shame that Americans were dumb enough to fall for it, again.

“No, its (”It is about a radical Islamic culture of violence that has existed for 1400 years”) correct, going back to the Barbary Pirates who were stealing European ships and the passengers using them in slave labor is a good place to start.

That was only a couple hundred years ago, Micky. 1400 years? you guys are seriously going to contend that the Islamic world has been nothing more than a squirming pile of barabarity over the entirety of its history? C’mon. Get real. Like I said, when Christendom was wallowing in the Dark Ages, Islamic culture flourished in relative peace and prosperity. History moves through regions in cycles. You just ca’t make a simplistic assertion like “It is about a radical Islamic culture of violence that has existed for 1400 years.” It simply isn’t true and anyone with even a perochial knowledge of world history would know that.

As for the Nazis and Islamic fundamentalism the only similarity is the baiting of the Jewish people. It’s disgusting, but it’s as far as the comparison goes. Islamic fundamentalists simply do not have the power to do what the Nazis did. Period.

Bishop,

I’ve read Mein Kampf too. Does that make me a Nazi? Yes, antisemitism is the bait du jour of Islamists these days. Dumb people will fall for this. Eventually, the common people of the Islamic world will wake up to the fact that the bait is for a switch and the real enemy is not the Jews but rather the despotic class of rulers in today’s Islamic world. It would go a long way to make peace between the Jews, Muslims and the West is we in the West would STOP SUPPORTING THOSE DESPOTIC REGIMES. Nazism, like Communism, was very popular in America too, especially during the Depression, but all that dried up once our economy expanded and the great middle class rose after WWII. As SmokinJoe pointed out, an educated, or in this case simply prosperous, people will abhor radicalism.

JMJ

Not well at all, thats the irony.
Just as many Americans, like Jersey, who sympathize with our enemies dont realize that regardless of their positions the terrorist will kill them just as quickly as anyone else.
All this nonsense of adopting a more peaceful solution is euphoric drooling coming from wishful thinking ideological skulls whom no matter what the evidence maintain that we are wrong.
When documented real attacks and deaths are called “negative attention” theres nothing I can say that wouldnt get edited off this page.

maybe except to say that these people who think this way are quite possibly just as dangerous as an enabler giving money to a drunk.