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

well, at least the fimbo was easier on the eyes than hannity. Steve king is a toss up.

I don't know much about King unfortunately. I checked the link btw, and the video has indeed changed.

Even many Muslims think the problem is Islam, in which politics and religion are intertwined and inseparable. Real politics as we know it can only exist within a largely homogeneous Islamic society because if the young fanatics get fired up, they become extremely intolerant and either start to fester a building rage, or take actions to purify society by returning it to true Islam. As Churchill said, Muslims are always either at your feet or at your throat.

This behavior comes from both the Koran and the Hadiths, which lay out what is obligatory, what is permissible and what must be punished. Questioning these can be apostasy, punishable by death, and Islam has no end of willing enforcers. Islam also proscribes death for anyone who leads the flock away from true Islam, so the leaders in Islamic countries either have to appease the imams or crush them, while the imams have to keep the rank and file satisfied that they're following true Islam or get murdered at the doors of the mosque, a quite common historical fate.

Prior to Western colonization, they mostly just murdered each other and wouldn't live in a non-Muslim country, since doing so was forbidden by many fatwas. Interactions with the advancing West gave them an inferiority complex, but they still made sure most Western ideas were kept out, and made sure that new concepts ranging from medicine to electricity didn't contain any ideas that were contrary to Islam. The doors started to slowly open, and the inferiority complex built, and then WW-I happened, convincing the Muslims opposed to Westernizing reforms that the West was indeed a cesspit of violence (the land of war). That's also when the Ottoman empire got split up, with the West carving up the Middle East into states and ruling over them, making everything subsequent to that both highly political and any interactions between the West and Islam very religiously political.

In the West, we commonly do things that would get a Muslim executed in a heartbeat. We also place secular law above God's law as laid out in sharia. We pretend that we know better than God, who is all knowing, which is why we refuse to stone rape victims to death, even though God has decreed such a punishment in his truly infinite wisdom. So even as older, wiser Muslims decide to skip all the stoning, there's always a new crop of true believers who will insist on it, and whenever they have some societal upset the true believers try to win the upper hand, and quite often they succeed.

The US didn't break Arab culture, Muhammed did, by giving them a big reset button that says "break glass to return to Allah's fold and the 7th century." There are many among them who think that going backwards is going forwards because it marks a return to true Islam and the glories of the early caliphates, and they're a bit like Nazis or Marxists who think their society's problems are caused by not being sufficiently devoted to Hitler or Marx. In times of struggle, they point fingers at deviations from the true path, and think that by purging or re-educating the deviants, their society will return to an even keel and regain its natural world-conquering dominance. All past setbacks can be set right with the appropriate application of force, will, and devotion. This attitude, unfortunately, is also conveyed heavily in the Koran and the Hadiths. Muslims who go to drink from the fountain can get reinfected, especially young angry males.

All we've done is give them something to be angry about, but then everything seems to make them angry. They're angry at African animists, Indian Buddhists, Sikhs, Christians, Jews, Russians, and the Dutch. They're even more angry with Sunnis and Shias. ISIS didn't attack the West, they attacked everyone in the Sunni regions of Syria and western Iraq, with a goal of eventually overrunning and killing the area's non-Sunni Muslims, along with any Sunnis who had the temerity to step out of the 7th century or slack off on achieving world conquest.

The one thing the West has never tried is confronting Islam itself. We don't because the Muslims have always completely freaked out about it, but it's probably the one thing that will actually work. Many Muslims would welcome it because they're tired of living in fear. Islamic professors and students acknowledge that they can't even study Islam except in the West, where they can ask real questions about it. They're in the same boat that a scholar of Christianity would've been in back in 14th century Europe, unable to ask any really fundamental questions or come up with fundamentally knew insights because they might get burned at the stake. Even just being in the West has improved the reputation of many imams, especially ones in the US, where they have to shed the local traditions they grew up with and look at Islam anew, in an alien environment, and wrestle with flocks that come from many different countries and traditions, much as Hollywood dominated rivals by distilling out the cultural baggage of each European country to leave what Europeans shared as a common culture. There are many things that they have yet to pick up, and one of those big things is gnawing doubt about the basis and truth of a religion.

We are all post-Enlightenment Westerners. We question everything (or should). Questions are fascinating, and so are the unexpected answers. We can't not do that. It's who we are. At the very least we should let the Muslims know this, and that if they did convert us we would destroy Islam from the inside in about two years - of asking obvious questions that they cannot answer. We turned Christianity into a shell of its former self while we were just warming up. Islamists think they will conquer us, but to fundamentalist religion, we are Ebola. We are the people where true religion comes to die, yet where true religion is reborn anew. We transform what we touch, because what we touch we make real. I actually know which rock songs Jesus likes, and it took a while to bring him around on some of them, especially Free Bird, which is now one of his favorites. We do not obey our God, we make him obey us, which is why we can act with such conviction that we are in agreement with His will. The Bible's Yahwist author, who wrote the character that we know as God, controlled him. She wrote him into being. The America that liberals laugh at have somewhat redeveloped that power, and what a power it is. We can write knew scripts and the Muslims cannot, because although they can imagine Allah as angry, angrier, or angriest, they cannot imagine Him having whole knew thoughts about right and wrong, good and evil, or His role in the world, whereas we can speak with absolute conviction that He has changed his mind, and plotted a new course, which we must follow, because he's in our heads and we know what he thinks, and we've all been given space and time enough to convince ourselves that anyone arguing against us about God's will is obviously wrong, because at this point we know him personally.

So the next time some Muslim gets in your face about Allah, just tell him that he's wrong, and that you just ran in to Allah down at the Waffle House, and Allah said ______.

@gturner

Westerners are enlightened? What a crock of shit. We've got our fair share of foam at the mouth, nasty and violent nutcases. Don't get carried away with the idea that we don't. It's also highly debatable just how many people in the West these days truly understand the principles of freedom and democracy.

As for the rest of your post, I appreciate the effort you put into it, but you fall back on the lazy trope of "they" which demonstrates your lac of knowledge about the Islam world, just as I had discussed a few posts back. I mean seriously, your supposed claimed knowledge about the Koran extends to nothing more than you deciding what a literal interpretation of it means and them lumping that onto all followers of the religion, radical or liberal, Sunni or Shia alike. If you take the Christian bible literally than you can be equally lazy and believe that all Christinas think that all non Chritsians are the followers of Satan who deserve to be put to death for heresy so that they might go to hell since the bible advocates the killing of non-believers and followers of other religions (They entered into a covenant to seek the Lord, the God of their fathers, with all their heart and soul; and everyone who would not seek the Lord, the God of Israel, was to be put to death, whether small or great, whether man or woman, 2 Chronicles 15:12, to give you an example). Islam, like the other Abrahamic and non-Abramic religions are ultimately a human invention. Anyone can interpret them in any number of different ways, just as people do. Just as, for instance, Orthodox Jews will follow a dress code that moderate Jews deem unwarranted. The attempt to lump it all together as one and apply your own determination of the meaning of the Koran is, I'm afraid to say, downright stupid...and information that would illustrate to you that the world just isn't that simplistic is probably sitting in your local library right now.

Three things:

1. Hannity is a whack job.
2. Islam is a violent religion that is full of psychopaths, including these losers up in Canada.
3. Europe is a shit hole full of pussified takers. Probably like you.

So to make it fair, cops should carry hatchets! Let's start with your town first.

Great post, I have been too lazy to address the Zombies with anything more than a phrase or two to call them wrong or stupid. If he reads this, he will reject it, but just the same, it was important that somebody say it.

We should just rename "guns" "Muslims." That way when some lunatic shoots up a place before offing himself, all the liberals will say "just because one Muslim was involved in an unfortunate incident, you can't condemn the millions of law-abiding Muslims out there."

I must be overlooking all the stories about the epidemic of Western Christians rounding up people for execution by firing squad, crucifixion, or decapitation, while keeping the women as sex slaves and justifying the practice on religious grounds. I must've missed the stories about all the ministers preaching that democracy is incompatible with Christianity and that it must therefore be overthrown and abandoned.

What I say about the Islamic world comes from vast numbers of Muslim writers who talk about the Islamic world. Read them, especially the ex-Muslim bloggers. There are countless Muslim bloggers who try desperately to wrestle with the Islam's social demons, and there are plenty of Islamic professors who put their struggle for free-thought into a broader context. One Saudi professor eloquently related an aspect of the West that makes Muslims very afraid because they see us and then have to look in the mirror. She likening the situation to riding in cramped, starving life boat while watching a Western yacht full of happy revelers sail past, and knowing that everyone in the lifeboat could have been on their own yacht, but everyone who started down the path that would have led to being a happy reveler on a yacht was violently murdered for daring to think out of the box. To her, the history of Islamic thought was a history of killing all the brilliant thinkers who went so far as to suggest they not be so strict, literal, and violent about everything.

One book I highly recommend is The History of Islamic Political Thought. (Meanwhile, the jihadists are reading books like Islam for Dummies.)

Islam indeed takes many forms and has many interpretations in different cultures. For example, I watched an interesting documentary on Afghanistan's version of "Got Talent", which followed the liberalizing, Western leaning, post-Taliban Afghanistanis who wanted to get up on stage and sing, reveling in their new freedoms. One of the women who'd advanced in the competition came out and swayed during a song. Everyone was mortified. She had sort of danced! Her parents called her and told her not to come back to her village because all the neighbors were waiting to kill her. They interviewed her fellow 'enlightened' competitors and they expressed shock and dismay that their friend had danced, and were very sad about it because of course she must be killed. They didn't want to kill her themselves, but they agreed that someone had to. She ended up fleeing the country. In contrast, Egyptian Muslims used to belly-dance in fancy bikinis. Good post on that.

When you browse lots of Muslim bloggers from around the world, the one thing they have in common is Islam itself. They're all trying to find a space within Islam where they can be a normal person, thinking and acting freely just as a Westerner would, and for most of them it is a real struggle. All of them have a great fear of serious Muslims, and the degree to which they can feel free is determined by how much political clout serious Muslims have in their country. Many of the Muslim bloggers I've followed have stopped blogging when they become worried that people might figure out who they are. Others are just really, really brave.

But very few Christians do take the Bible literally, and the greater numbers who claim they do - don't. What they take literally is generally a post-Enlightenment interpretation of the Bible that happens to almost completely agree with all their beliefs, and much of what they believe isn't actually in the Bible. For example, you'd be hard pressed to find a Christian whose core belief isn't that Christ died for our sins. Yet the Bible doesn't say that. It took Christians over a thousand years to even come up with that interpretation. That's why that idea is found nowhere in Islam.

If you seriously said that Islam was a human invention in many Muslim countries, they would ask you to explain yourself and recant your statement, and if you didn't they might well kill you. Lumping it all together and applying a determination on the meaning of the Koran is what imams do for a living. In Judaism and Christianity, it's a struggle to extract coherent meaning from a huge pile of accumulated stories, many of which are in contradiction. In contrast, the Koran didn't slowly accrue. It was written by one man and would be better compared to Mormonism, but with the focus on conquest and strict social discipline instead of smiling at everyone. Muslims can carve out quite a lot of room within Islam, and have in the past (the 50's and 60's were in many places pretty glorious and free), but in so doing they're pushing back against Islam itself, acting more as lapsed or lay Muslims than ardent social warriors for Allah, trying to establish and maintain a comfort zone and hoping that more ardent Muslims don't break the glass and hit the big reset button.