Sticker,

Re: our discussion in a previous thread:

I told you so. Objective: control the planet (including the US). Interpretation of cartoon jihad outcome: strategic victory. Divisions of mechanized infantry required: 0

No, Hamas isn't Nazi Germany. They share some ambitions (a Muslim "thousand year Reich," extermination of Jews), but they're probably smarter than he was. Their intellectual and religious fellow travelers are conquering Europe (and making progress in the US), and much of Europe and the US dismisses them as "not an existential threat" because they don't look like the Red Army. Which, come to think of it, much of Western Europe though less disturbing than Reagan.

d'ja ever notice that when the rubber hits the road allah always seems to sort of flake out and is never willing

Well, at this point, Eurabia isn't being conquered, as much as colonized. With the enthusiastic support from the elites of the areas being colonized.

Hmm...Doesn't this support the protestors who throw out the "racist" argument that Iraq (and Arabic-Islamic nations in general) cannot handle a democracy since they never actually had one nor aspire to have one?

Eros,

The difficullties are great. There is noclear path.

The deal is: secular government or Wretchard's Third Conjecture.

No matter how badly democratization is going (rinse repeat cycles) it looks like a better deal than the alternative.

Sheesh, I need to print the linked article out and carry the thing in my wallet. Trying to hammer the idea into people’s heads that Islam is not some passive/misunderstood/victim religion has driven me up a wall over the years.

I'm a history major and a history freak, and I can still remember trying to get what they were force feeding me in college (gotta love So Cal higher education in that area!) to fit with what I was learning doing my own research. Heck, go anywhere in the Balkans, or Greece and say the work 'Turks'. I can almost guarantee you won't get a good reaction. They remember quite well what rule by 'benevolent Islam' entails....

Phil,

But, but according to that totally unbiased and objective expert on islam, Steven Schwartz, the history of Islam in the Balkans was and is the very model of religious tolerance (and soooo much better than the Christians ever were) and the Turks were such noble people that they and the culture they left behind are the ultimate testament to the divine message of peace and tolerance that is islam.

Then you ask the Christians of that area.....

BTW, in whose favor was the history of the region whitewashed? You'd think by some accounts that there was no bad blood between Christians and Muslims there and everything was just peachy until some guy exploited the natural hatefulness and inherant intolerance of the Christians. That's not to say that Milosovic and Co werent evil bastards who sought revenge on innocent people who had nothing personally to do with past oppression. Its only to say that the whole and true (his)story of the region is rarely told and human nature and capacity for long memory is rarely taken into account when Christianity can be blamed instead and any other religion praised as some kind of alternative and more enlightened model.

"Then you ask the Christians of that area.....

BTW, in whose favor was the history of the region whitewashed?"

If the Christians thought like the Moslems, we'd be blowing them up and demanding the return of the church of St. John the Baptist in Damascus. From my perspective as a Christian, its a compartively easy thing to motivate the West to intervene when Moslems are being oppressed or massacred, but its darn near impossible to get the West to intervene when Moslems are massacring Christians. See how much hand wringing the EU nations do over the few thousand Palestinian deaths that result after more or less a declaration of war, but when its African Christians getting slaughtered for no more crime than being black, you don't hear a peep. Christian populations cut in half don't warrant attention, but a Moslem population which triples in size is genocide. Go figure. It would amaze me how the Arab league deplores the use of helicopter gunships, but when the Sudan does it against actual civilian targets nothing is said. It would amaze that is, if I hadn't read the Koran. Now, I'd find it amazing if anything else happened.

Anyway, I'm not actually worried mind you. Unlike the Islamics, we Christians never actually expected to rule the world, head armies, form governments, or anything like that. We expected to be marginalized, persecuted, hated, and murdered. Worldly 'defeats' don't throw Christians into a crisis of faith, because we weren't promised worldly victory the way Mohammed promised it to the Arabs. If the world marginalizes, persecutes, hates, and murders us, well we are probably doing something right. It's when the world starts approving of Christianity that I'll worry. You can't kill off the Church by persecuting it, but you can by enriching it, flattering it, and empowering it.

Cartoonish. Today Deutschland. Tomorrow, die Welt.

It's not because of Islam. It's because as long as there exists one sliver of land where the people are richer and happier, it shows the scale of failure of Islam. How could this be?

Celebrim,

Way to nail the difference my friend. Its an attitude that comes in handy for anyone who wants to live as a truly mature well adjusted adult in this world. Rarely do we get our way in everything. Most of the time things dont go our way. That is life. That is reality. All the worlds faith's, with the exception of islam, have built in wisdom and teaching for how to live peacefully when things dont go our way. Islam's promise of sucess and peace in this world is a false promise that leads to paranoia and rage when islam's greaters aims are frustrated and disappointed.

There are two theories about islam. One is that there is a good and true islam that is capable of creating stable, moderate, tolerant and peaceful societies and then there is a corrupted strain that is infecting this good and real islam and causing all the trouble. This theory doesnt jibe with the fact that islam kills off any non-muslim populations that it comes to dominate and doesnt square with the built in class system of islam that relegates all non-muslims to second class citizenship or death for themselves and collective punishment for their families and their communities.

The second theory is mine. Muslim dominated regions are only peaceful to the extent that they are monolithically muslim and unchallenged by any outside influence. The outward face only seems like peace and welcome and order etc but the response to any challenge brings out the beast in every population of muslims. Every single one. Peace, tolerance and moderation that only exists when everything is goes the way the dominant group wants it to is not peace. Its just war waiting to happen.

Like big babies, muslims can be counted on to throw a tantrum, violent or not, everytime. They think that is jihad, strenuous, not accepting anyone's disrespect lying down, eye-popping, fist pumping and veins bulging jihad. We just see a mass of two year olds in adult bodies.

But where do they go for guidance when crises inevitably happen? They look to how mohammed handled himself when the going got the toughest. He started wars and killed people. That will be their eternal example for how to deal with the really big problems in this world.

This is as likely as Brain telling Pinky, "We'll do what we always do, Pinky, try to rule the world!"

It's just that these wackos will kill people trying.

The only power they have is the power the West lets them have. It will stop when we have the will to stop it. We'd had the ability all along.

You appear to have made the mistake of citing Ephraim Karsh as if you expected anything he says to be taken seriously. This is a common error but I expected better of Winds of Change. As for his hobby-horse of islamic imperialism, I could point to a string of historical events painting the exact same picture of Christianity if such non sequiturs weren't such a silly wste of time.

"Anyway, I'm not actually worried mind you. Unlike the Islamics, we Christians never actually expected to rule the world, head armies, form governments, or anything like that."

Not much up on your history of the Catholic Church, are you?

Sorry, I mostly agree with the feel of what you're saying, but I couldn't let that one slide. The Protestant Reformation fundamentally changed the way (European) Christianity addresses the world, but the story before Luther and that son-of-a-bitch Henry in England was one of the Church playing puppetmaster across the whole of the "civilized" world. No one expects the Spanish Inquisition today, but hey.

So let me see if I can restate this.

Christianity has morphed and changed over the years and no longer expects to see its ambitions rewarded in the ways they used to go about things. Rape, murder, pillage, and the rest.

Islam is stuck in a 7th century tribal mode. Rape, murder, and pillage is in order. In addition the alpha male is chosen in the natural way. None of this un-natural democracy crap for them. The old ways are the best ways.

Joe, there's an expanded version of the Efraim Karsh at Commentary. Click here

"Not much up on your history of the Catholic Church, are you?"

Why would you say that? Are you listening or is this some rehersed speach? I'm getting really tired of the 'I cannot let that one slide...' commentators we've been plagued with of late, because all too often they are holding a conversation with the chip on thier shoulder and not anyone in the thread.

Not much up on Christian theology are you? Find me somewhere in the Bible where Christ promised his followers kingdoms on this Earth. The Catholic Church's secular power and claims to secular authority had much more to do with the word 'Roman' than the word 'Christian'. More to the point, even at the height of church power, Europe maintained what was essentially two separate but overlapping branches of government - a Church government and a secular government. The secular power of the church government was grounded in the fact that it had merged with the fuedal system such that its 'princes' were secular lords in thier own right.

That division between government and church is and was even then inherent in Christian doctrine, if admittedly honored more then in the breach than in the practice. That division can be sustained from church doctrine. Divisions like that cannot be sustained in Islamic doctrine, because Mohammed was first and foremost a political figure and Islam first and foremost a political movement. Christianity managed to go some 300 years before becoming a political movement, and some would say that becoming a political movement was the biggest tragedy in its history.

Interestingly enough, the political philosophy we recognize as 'separation of church and state' didn't arise from the Pope meddling in secular affairs, so much as that SOB declaring himself head of both church and state. Some of the worst persecution of protestants occurred (especially in England) by fellow protestants. It was that persecution by the anglican church which inspired so many of our dissident forefathers to come to America.

"No one expects the Spanish Inquisition today, but hey."

Which only goes to show how little you know of the Spanish Inquisition. More than 90% of the trials conducted not by the magistrates of the Church, but by magistrates of local municipalities. The Spanish Inquisition was oldly enough, more of a secular instition than a church one. In fact, people charged with heresy typically fled to the Catholic Church if they could because at least the Church magistrates were professionals, whereas the local magistrate was usually untrained in church law and motivated less by the fact that you were a strange woman who kept cats and more by the fact that you were a widow with little legal and social status who owned land adjacent to his property. For that reason, the conviction rate by the Catholic church is unsurprisingly much lower than that by secular prosecuters.

It comes down to this. Much of what you are talking about is the activities of barely Christianized barbarians whose activities post-conversion differed little from the raiding and pillaging that they would have undertaken as polytheists. The name changed and some of the ritual, but mostly they were still into trials by fire and combat and all the pre-Christian culture. They didn't speak Latin, much less Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic, and for all thier piety they were largely ignorant of the book they based their faith on. If they had read the book, they would have found that it had nothing to say on raiding, pillaging, plundering, and that when it discussed war it used it only metaphorically. And they would have found no promises gauranteeing them empires on this Earth. Now, that doesn't mean that Christians haven't engaged in all these things, as any student of the Crusades knows well. People claiming to be Christians can do all sorts of things.

By contrast, the Koran has very specific advice about plundering, pillaging, war, and even rape. And if you've read the book you know that that advice is not 'Don't do that to your neighbor', but rather that plundering, pillaging, war, and even rape have been allowed by Allah to Mohammed's followers by special dispensation. So when a barely Islamicized barbarian reads his book, it doesn't encourage him to give up the plundering, pillaging, and so forth he engaged in before but rather to continue those things and to continue them with zeal and elan because now he isn't plundering pillaging and murdering solely for himself but for Allah. Now, that is not to say that all Islamics are barely Christianized barbarians, but I would argue that Islam in its primitive form did institutionalize pre-Islamic Arab barbaric practices.

Consider the different ways that the two religions use the word martyr. The Catholic church doesn't uphold soldiers as martyrs. For the most part, it would never occur to a Christian to label a soldier in any cause a martyr. In the Christian church, the roster of martyr's includes a long list of unarmed men and women who went to thier deaths serenely and without resistance. Even to the extent that slain Crusaders were labelled martyrs - which they were not until the 13th century - one could and probably should argue that this conception arose solely in responce to contact with the Islamic faith because it does not exist prior to that, and was found theologically troubling even after that (and has largely been dropped today). Serenity is the primary attribute of a Christian martyr because the prototype is Christ himself. Contrast that with Islam and its conception of the martyr. In Islam, the martyr is first and foremost a soldier who goes to his death while in the act of seeking the death of the enemies of Islam - and not in the act of blessing them. And this too is based on thier sacred text. Indeed, Islam denies that Christ went to his death serenely, or even at all. So it has no prototype of what Christians identify as a martyr.

This is the plain truth. Deal with it. I know 'all religions are fundamentally' alike is real popular right now, and though I can quote B5, Star Trek, Star Wars, Monty Python, and all the rest of the geek stuff as well as you can I also know my history from less popular sources, 'kk? Some of them are boring old books and not TV programs. I don't know if you'd be interested.

"No one expects the Spanish Inquisition today, but hey."

NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!

Celebrim,

Right on brother! (You are a brother, right?)

Its very popular to fixate on externals these days and declare that all religions are essentially the same. It seems that people see what is actually common human behavior and illogically conclude that the same results and appearances externally equals similarity and equality in the content of the message.

I studied many faiths including and especially islam before I became a Christian. Back in the days when noone could have claimed that I did not have a open mind towards other faiths, I saw a drastic difference between the content of the Christian message and that of all other faiths. At the conclusion of this, I came to see that of all the "great" religions there were no more opposite than Christianity and islam in spite of claiming similar territory and ideals.

The thing that I saw most clearly is that the Christian message if followed sincerely results in a much different new kind of human being not seen before in the world. All the other religions to a lesser extent also transform aspects of the natural human being. These ascend gradually down the scale until at last one arrives at the opposite end of the spectrum, islam. Islam leaves human beings as they are. In fact, it trumpets the fact that there is nothing wrong with the natural man that a strict rule of life wont cure. Much is made of the natural man in islam and muslim seekers are encouraged to follow the path of islam because its very easiness and "naturalness" is seen as a positive divine characteristic.

Is the Holy Trinity too hard a concept for your brain, they say? According to islam, the difficulty of understanding this concept is proof that it cant possible be natural or true. Life/belief isnt supposed to be all that hard. There is a magic system that results in perfect peace in this life and all it requires to follow it is a modicum of personal discipline. For most people, personal discipline and regular habits are not that hard to adopt. It barely requires much more than a will to do it and keep doing it. So easy. Seeker, there is nothing wrong with you or your lifelong preferences, gut feelings, and assumptions. You are a muslim quite naturally, just stop trying to make things difficult and accept it. Toss out those pesky hard beliefs. Adopt a slate of rather generic monotheistic beliefs, devote yourself to the social cause of human betterment and adopt a strictly disciplined life and viola! peace. None of this is that hard.

The result of the content of islam's message is that natural men arent transformed. They are simply recruited into an army in service of a cause with a universal mandate to bring the whole world willingly or unwillingly, either by moral means or by deceit, under its rule. These soldiers are expected to follow the rule of life of the army as all armies do. They get a kick and thrill and satisfaction of being part of a large uniform group where there are no differences or disagreements to trouble your mind. These submitters are convinced that the secret to peace in the world is in a large degree of uniformity and can be easily convinced to overlook any inconsistency and to over-ride any objective sense of right and wrong in favor of the islamic redefinition of these to mean whatever mohammed did in life. Before you know it, they are convinced that any attempt to stop the progress of this global uniformity, this easy peace, is a crime against humanity and is evil and therefore almost anything is justified to defend islam and God and his "prophet" against its opposition.

This is what happens when you mix religion with state, army, and earthly worldwide causes.

The Christian separation of these things has been absolutely invaluable to our world even if it hasnt always been strictly followed.

Whatsmore, it makes a huge difference that in the Christian message there is the notion that God can well defend himself and his faith. Again this has not always been followed to the letter, but it is a concept that has its origins in Christ and in the very origins of the Church in that Christianity did not resort to violence in spite of provocation and persecution for a very long time. These peole trusted in the Lord to preserve them and prosper them and he did, without them having to resort to the sword. mohammed only trusted in God as far as he believed that God expected him to fight and gave him victory. He gave God the credit for military victories identical to those that many other men have acheived by more mundane means. How to tell who really had a divine power behind them? The answer is those Christian lambs who succeeded in spite of the brutal and mighty Roman empire and all its arms and power over them.

There are people today, always and forever more that want to condemn Christianity for its middle period while entirely ignoring the uniqueness of its original form and also the fact that with every passing year in recent times, this Church has been hard at work reclaiming and restoring that original form and spirit.

There is no original period like this in islam. Muslims want to claim a middle period that resulted from mixing and watering down the original form of islam with other cultures primarily Christian, Greek, Roman, Persian, Indian/Asian and even Jewish culture as the true form of islam. What is happening today in islam is another movement to reclaim the original form of islam after the collapse and corruption of the middle period in hopes reclaiming that time just as it was and in the belief that all the credit for this period of power, wealth, success and dominance belongs to the original form of islam. What we have today is islam also coming back to itself.

All the commonalities in the world doesnt change this fact. Those who believe in any religion will always return first to its original form and ideal. The origin of islam was/is fatally flawed and anything but divine and none of the sophistry in the world is going to change that. The two faiths are apples and oranges.

Celebrim, I'm an engineer by training, a business process reengineering consultant by trade. As such, I prefer data to theory. The data says neither "Religion of Peace" has a good track record over time of encouraging, you know, peace. Which one ought to work better is kind of a stupid argument to have, in my unhumble opinion.

(My all-time favorite Crusade, BTW, was the Children's Crusade. Just thinking about it makes me wonder how our species has managed to survive its ability to delude itself....)

The more productive discussion might be on how to break the backs of the Islamofascist Immams; a policy of targeted assassinations of anyone caught exhorting violence from the pulpit might work. (Under the theory that if you're peddling 72 virgins, you might as well consider yourself first in line.)

Islam isn't going away. Islam is probably as incoherent and as inconsistent as any other religion. As such, I see no reason to believe that Islam can't exist and thrive in a liberal democratic system. And I really hope I'm right, because otherwise this century is going to be uglier than the last one.

Mark P.,

Celebrim's point is that the core teachings of Islam and the behavior of the Final Prophet, Muhammad, predispose Islamic believers toward violence to non-believers. In contrast, the core teachings of Christianity and the behavior of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, predispose Christian believers toward non-violence to non-believers. (This point was also well argued in Peggy's comments and Efraim Karsh's article).

Closely related is the point that Islam's core teachings and the behavior of the Final Prophet, Muhammad, predispose Islamic believers toward a government that unites Church and State under one authority. In contrast, the core teachings of Christianity and the behavior of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, predispose Christian believers toward a government that separates Church and State under different authorities. ("Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's"; and the willingness of Jesus to accept crucifixion instead of waging war against the Romans to make himself the political/military/religious King of Israel).

You're a business process engineer so I'll restate this in software application terms:

1) Islamic militancy toward non-believers is a feature, not a bug.

2) Islamic preference for non-liberal democratic governments is also a feature, not a bug.

The real kicker for anyone attempting to modify these default settings is this:

The core instructions are hard-coded, not soft-coded

Islam is a literalist faith. Muhammad is the Final Prophet because the Archangel Gabriel dictated the teachings of Allah directly to Muhammad. Muhammad immediately dictated Allah's teachings to a team of scribes who wrote the Koran. The Koran is the literal Word of Allah and is thus not open to major re-interpretation or supersession, short of a new revelation from Allah.

It is always costly and time-consuming to rewrite a hard-coded system. Can you imagine how difficult the task would be if the system periodically re-booted its servers and attempted to kill the programmers and/or take over the workstations on which the programmers were developing the new code?

That's the situation we're in using the Bush Administration's current strategy to modernize Islamic civilization toward a preference for liberal democracy and peaceful acceptance of non-believers.

Alright, I can step up to that one.

I can't begin to approach the Celebrim's eloquence speaking on the religious aspects, but historically Islam has been all about one thing: the further expansion of Islam at the expense of the unbeliever.

The crusades have to be my number one sore spot. Do some digging sometime to check out how they started (Council of Clermont), and it wasn't a bunch of greedy Christians by the way. It was an appeal for help by the Eastern orthodox church because the local Muslim population had decided a great way to make some pocket change would be to start robbing and killing Christian pilgrims trying to visit Jerusalem and the Holy lands. On top of this were the land grabs that Islamic leaders were conducting in Asia Minor, also at the expense of 'unbelievers'. So let's be clear who kicked that one off. Yes the Catholic church and leaders of the time did some truly despicable acts (the Albigensian Crusade actually turns my stomach worse than the Childrens crusade), but lets be clear. The doctrine and writings of the church itself wasn't calling for the conversion of the unbeliever by the sword. Islam does, in exquisite detail.

Pull out the standard King James. Roll through the Old Testament, and it's some pretty rough stuff. They didn't come up with the phrase 'the wrath of God' for nothing. But once you get to the New Testament I defy anybody to show me where Jesus busted out with 'go kill anybody that won't accept me, and go ahead and enslave their wives and children while you're at it'. Islam does, in exquisite detail. Clear down to the part where Mohammad says it's ok to lie through your teeth and break any deal you want with unbelievers because they ARE unbelievers.

So there’s the basis of much of the problems, but take it a bit further. Yes, horrible and despicable things have been done again and again by people proudly going by the name 'Christians' (quite often to other Christians). Some of that continued up to quite recently, but for me 'well, we've done bad stuff too!' just doesn't cut it as an argument. Too much of those things occurred despite how the scriptures say people are supposed to live their lives, not because it told them to. Islam has no such excuse. Show me an area in the world today where Christians are killing off large numbers of Muslims because they won't live under 'Christian' Law. I can think of ten places in the world right now where the reverse is happening without even straining.

But re-reading your post, I see that I'm also missing the issue you brought up. How to do something about the problem right now. I can honestly say I'm having a tough time with that one. Reading Peggy's previous post pretty much sums up how I perceive Islam today, but I put forth that there is another side to the acting juvenile coin. That is when I see the people around me every day refuse to take the way they see people act in the name of 'Islam' again and again and say 'this is unacceptable for a supposedly civilized group of people'.

Refusal to acknowledge a problem until it grows so large it can't be ignored is one of the worst forms of juvenile behavior I can think of. The first step for dealing with a problem should be a correct diagnosis of the cause.

I live in the area of the socialist republic of Seattle, and the conversations I have with people are unbelievable. They range from mis-informed to willfully ignorant in too many cases, and the first step in overcoming this is to cut down on the whole 'religion of peace' argument put forth by Islam and take a hard look at it everywhere in the world. I'm not holding my breath for it to happen any time soon, but I fear for the future my son will inherit if we let it continue on its current track.

Reading over this, I'm afraid I'm sounding much harsher than I was intending when I typed it. I apologize if it sounds like I'm blasting away, that truly isn’t my intent. I’m open to being told I’m wrong, only a fool thinks he knows all.

The one thing I absolutely agree with Mark on is that Islam will not be going away. I also don't believe it can continue without some kind of significant internal changes. Either it will change itself, or it will eventually force the rest of the world to change it. If it reaches that point then it's all to likely the changes will be birthed in fire and blood and that's what frightens me most of all.

Peggy wrote: "The second theory is mine. Muslim dominated regions are only peaceful to the extent that they are monolithically muslim and unchallenged by any outside influence. The outward face only seems like peace and welcome and order etc but the response to any challenge brings out the beast in every population of muslims. Every single one. Peace, tolerance and moderation that only exists when everything is goes the way the dominant group wants it to is not peace. Its just war waiting to happen."

But what about Muslims in countries where they are a minority? China's Muslims (the Government alone estimates 20m of them) are divided generally into the Hui (supposedly ethnic Chinese but who have some ancestors from Central Asian and Arabic regions) and the Uighurs (ethnically related to the Turkic tribes of Central Asia). Whilst the Uighurs have supposedly given the Chinese Government some cause for concern - a number of bomb incidents a few years ago for example - the Hui live in relative peace, and do not (at least according to the Government) pose a significant threat to peace and stability. Personal experience in Hui areas shows that the Hui are very different from the Islamists. Perhaps it is because they live under the shadow of Party rule? Interested in your take on China's Muslims, given the very low profile they have. Could it be possible that the quiet minority are not a threat because they are controlled? Or because they have adopted Islam differently?