Let me axe a cop..........

Pakistan Today has an open letter to Ben Affleck. It's worth reading.

We could discuss it rationally, were there anything to discuss. However, your overall premise doesn't seem to hold water. I can find absolutely no evidence top support the idea that, relative to the size of their population in North America, Muslims contribute to violent crime in North America any more than other groups do relative to their populations. If you have actual stats to dispute this, by all means feel free to present it.

Which crimes of those Zombie listed had nothing to do with religious fanatism?

If anyone posted actual stats showing what groups commit the most violent crimes relative to their population, you honestly don't think name-calling would ensue?

If I implied such a thing, I certainly didn't mean to. Name calling is one of the primary reasons to come here. It's very cathartic, and cheaper than therapy.

The majority of the population of North America are Christians, and a sizable fraction of them believe abortion is murder, and many are quite fanatical in this belief. Yet in the 41 years since Roe v Wade those fanatics have murdered only seven people. In Islamic countries, seven people killed by religious fanatics means it was a quite morning at the fruit market.

Work place violence seems pretty common and it is a stretch to blame it on religion.

It depends on the country. Also you are wrong about the death toll being just seven. Hell, abortion was one of McVay's listed reasons for why he blew up a building in OKC.

Yes, saying we should judge individual criminals based upon their individual actions instead of trying to automatically blame religion is just the same as going "lalalalala".

We're having a bloodthirst competition? Are we going to put the death toll for Bush-2's Iraq war on the roster, or are we going to lie from the outset?

But McVeigh claimed that science was his religion, and about the only minister close to McVeigh's political beliefs would be Jeremiah Wright. Eric Robert Rudolf was the anti-abortion terrorist. McVeigh was focused on the evils and hypocrisy of America bombing Iraqi children.

I thought he was focused on Waco and Ruby Ridge.

Those too, but not on religious grounds. He'd come to see the US government as an evil totalitarianism that gleefully killed any who stood up to it, including those overseas. He also likened the day car center in Oklahoma to the human shields Saddam used.

Bullshit.

Even if the assailant yells "Allahu Akbar" while killing his coworkers?

I hate to rely on Wiki, but
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh#Political_views_and_religious_beliefs

In the 2001 book American Terrorist, McVeigh stated that he did not believe in Hell and that science is his religion.

Yeah, really stupid choice, since it doesn't back your claim at all. The link argues that the bombing was inspired by Waco and Ruby Ridge, no mention of Iraq. And from the section on religious beliefs:

Whatever claims he made about religion and science in 2001, this was not his core belief at the time of the bombing.

Ruby Ridge had almost nothing to do with religion, it had to do with ATF entrapment of a guy who was willing to use a hacksaw to shorten a shotgun barrel. Waco, likewise, had almost nothing to do with religion. It was an investigation into fully automatic conversion kits that blew up in their face. Christians wouldn't even defend the wacko cultists.

Swoosh! You made two claims about McVeigh, your offer of proof contradicted both. Whatever mainstream Christians thought of Koresh is unrelated. Stop with the bullwhip, your lies are easily disproved.

So McVeigh was lying when he said his religion was science. That lying liar.

He and Terry Nichols were anti-government, anti-military nutcases whose actions had nothing to do with God, Jesus, or any other aspect of religion, nor did they cite any religious reasons for their actions. That's why zero US ministers of any denomination felt the need to apologize for them.

That whole passage of time thing, you aren't aware of it? What he said in 2001 regarded his views in... 2001.

Prior to that he obviously didn't give a fig about religion, either. Why would a lapsed Catholic care about a wacko cult or a fundamentalist woman? He didn't. The only concern was the gun/ATF angle.

You might as well spin the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr as a person under the sway of a Methodist Democrat trying to strike a blow at Baptist Republicans, when the issue was racism, not the finer points of theology.

The Christian religious wacko bomber was Eric Robert Rudolf, not Timothy McVeigh.

I think the reality is that there is a problem with extremism in Islam and it's a very current problem in the here and now, and extremism is definitely festering more in Islam then it is in other religions (although let's not kid ourselves that other religions are immune, such as the atrocities of the Lord's Resistance Army and the kiddie fiddling in the Catholic church). We can brush the fact that there is an extremist threat under the carpet if we want, but that would be to our disadvantage. However, it is also worth carrying out an assessment of just who these extremists are. The vast majority of the people who commit these attacks have been young men, mostly in their twenties, sometimes thirties. Thereafter a much smaller group of young women, again, mostly in their twenties, have radicalised. Do you know the two most frequent sources for radicalisation? The internet and social media and radicalisation in jail. So that in itself immediately calls into question whether or not that reflects the demographic of global Islam.

Furthermore, when people go through a list, like @Zombie does above, and say Islam is the commonality with many of terrorist attacks, it does not account for the difference between those who are directly involved in terror plots and those who were lone wolves who were inspired by what they read online. It further doesn't acknowledge that the reason so many attacks and plots are targeted at the West, and seemingly now authority figures in the West, like British, American and Canadian soldiers, the police, parliaments and so on, is quite possible a reaction that is actually political purely than religious. Religion is used as the alleged reason to actually carry out political actions and, in this instance, do we really want to be so obtuse to thing that they attack the west because they "don't like freedom, blah, blah, blah"? No, of course not. It's because we spent over a century invading and messing around with nearly every key Islamic country in the Middle East and are just off the back of a huge and violent misadventure in Iraq and the occupation of Afghanistan. Now, on top of that, we're bombing the people that these impressionable young kids consider their brother-in-arms. All of that is political and not religious and I think people forget that. Saying "oh, it's because it's Islam" is just plain lazy and ignores that fact that we've spent the past decade involved in two wars that have massively fueled Islamic fundamentalism and have essentially given great strength to the enemy that we have no choice but to find and defeat. Finally, it would be as ridiculous to say that every Islamic radical's motivation is that same. This is no more true that saying that myself and, say, @Diacanu , have exactly the same views and motivations because neither of us believes in organised religion or the Abrahamic deity. Some may radicalise because they believe that they are following the true interpretation of Islam. Others may do so because of Western foreign policy. Some will do it as a means to fight what they consider to be a just battle. Others might sympathise with radical ideas and turn a blind eye to wrongdoing, even if they aren't willing to act themselves. Some may fund terrorism but not get involved. Some radicals disagree with others. Some come from different branches of Islam. Many are of different nationalities and cultural backgrounds. Some are white or black born westerners who convert. All these elements highlight how even within fundamentalist circles there can be many different variations of person, motive and action.

So, really, to paint Islam itself as the bogeyman root cause of all of it is therefore falling back on a lazy stereotype, and a stereotype which would seek to categorise people of all different nationalities, backgrounds and cultures as one big mass is ignorant in the extreme.....and I use the word ignorant on this occasion in terms of lack of information rather than bigotry. It's shows a fundamental lack of knowledge or understanding of the current state and nature of Islam around the globe. People who fall back on these sorts of groupings are people who live in a bubble consisting of the media and their little internet rants, while enjoy the relative safety of living in a suburban Nowheresville. They can fall back on their lazy "knowledge" because they get other people to fight the fight for them, be it the intelligence services or the military. But the real truth is that to successfully defeat fundamentalism then you need co-operation from within, and how can we ever expect to do that if we can't even be bothered to education ourselves about the Islamic world? As Sun Tzu said, if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

The fundamental mistake that Mahar made though was to treat Islam as one big whole with one overriding set of beliefs and values. I understand the argument he was trying to make, but through ignorance he quite simply stereotyped and so he undermined and defeated his own argument and expressly laid the groundwork for Affleck's own comments. The author of the letter does not seem to grasp that, despite then going on to say that Affleck should seek out reformers. She also seems oblivious to the fact that not all Muslims in the world live like she does (as it sounds like she has come from a pretty devout family judging by her reference to not being about to go out unchaperoned). Nonetheless, I applaud her efforts for dialogue. I'm not so sure that Affleck is the one she should be advancing them to though.

There is actually a pretty key difference between a hatchet and a gun. chopping firewood with a gun is pretty hard. It is nice that guntards love to get all cynical with all of this, but the reasons why we do not ban other tools that might be used to kill other people is that they have another broader purpose. Guns are pretty much there for the purpose of killing or injuring something at a distance. They really don't do much else.

Though I agree Sean Hannity is a joke of a man, I did not see him at the fox link. I got a fimbo and steve king (who is also a joke of a man). Where is this fun with hannity. I could use a good laugh.

Oh, and yeah I pretty much agree with the rest of your post.

Possibly the page has since been updated. It was serveral days ago I posted that and Hannity was on the video.

You do realize we have these things called police who roam around and arrest criminals? It is not like we just let them do whatever they want. Oh, and cops are pretty damned racist overall when we look at the stats, so you might want to quit your bitchin. You are allowed to rant and rave politically or religiously here in america. We do not want to lose that because of a few wackos.