I’m still not quite ready to throw in with the “no Muslims in power” line of thought. I do grant that there is a likely risk but is there any more so than the same line of reasoning about Kennedy being a Catholic when he took office and how the Pope in Rome was going to effectively govern the United States? Maybe it’s the optimist in me, but I am still willing to keep an open mind when it comes to Presidential candidates over a year from the election.

Yeah, my boy Chad did a hell of a job transferring all this data. Now I’m working through it all to recategorize the posts I want to stay here and delete the crap I’m embarassed I even published.

Good post. I get really sick of hearing people buzz about race and gender in our society. There are prejudices on an individual level, of course, and there always will be. But like you say, the folks usually making a big deal about race are the ones trying to keep America divided rather than having us all be just Americans. Bring back the damn melting pot!

Great new layout, btw.

As Abraham Lincoln is claimed to have said, “If we call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? The answer is four, because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one.” Referring to cultural traits as “racial” doesn’t make them racial, either. Confusing the concepts of race (unimportant, superficial physical traits) and culture (behavior patterns which in some cases are quite important in assessing a person) is a common rhetorical trick of people who are trying to legitimize racism without being open about what they are doing, and it should be vigorously resisted wherever it appears.

Addressing the rest of what you say here (which you freely acknowledge consists mostly of unsupported assumptions) would take a full-length essay. I do plan to write about these matters on my own site at some point, because many Americans who haven’t put some serious study into Islam believe similar things. I will say that my university degrees were in Islamic civilization and I have spent something like two decades studying comparative religion in various senses, and Islam is not similar to Christianity in any of the ways you are assuming. Not even close.

It has been a cliché for decades that all the major religions of the world are basically similar in their teachings. The first step toward any real understanding of the world is getting it through one’s head that this is not true. The cliché has weakened considerably in the US since Sept. 11, because the attack led to a flurry of interest in Islam and millions of people actually read the Koran and other Islamic religious texts, and found out what it was really about. The amount of education that remains to be done is illustrated by the fact that President Bush himself has sometimes said that Islam is basically a “peaceful ” religion which has just been “hijacked by extremists”. I can see that there might be diplomatic reasons for him to say that, but if he actually believes it, God help us.

I don’t deny that there has been incompetence and even self-serving behavior mixed in with the war effort here and there, but that has nothing to do with the problem under discussion. We are confronting an extremely aggressive and violent ideology with an agenda of world conquest, and we need to figure out what to do about it. There was probably some incompetence and profiteering in the US during World War II as well, but obviously Germany and Japan were nevertheless the real issue.

Ignorance of foreign culture sometimes leads Westerners into a bizarre frame of mind in which any evil done or threatened by a non-Western society must somehow be the fault of, or in reaction to, the West — meaning that the faults of the West are the only aspects of the problem worth talking about. This stance is convenient for people who don’t know enough about the non-Western cultures to talk usefully about them, but it is wrong. In this case, the use of violence to spread Islam is an integral part of the religion, and this has been true (and has been acted upon) since the time of Muhammad. The only thing that has ever managed to stop this imperial expansion has been the presence of non-Muslim powers too strong for the Muslims to challenge. If the colonial era had never happened, if Israel had never been established, and if we imported no oil from the Middle East at all, we would still be facing basically the same problem of jihadism.

Again, the Islamic doctrines which generate this problem do not resemble anything in Christianity. Remember, I am not Christian and I have no respect or liking for Christianity at all, so I am not trying to defend it. I am simply stating a fact. I suppose it may be true of all religions “that on an ideological level they each intend the same purpose, trying to put the individual into connection with the mysterious ground of our being…..the space before we exist and the space after we die” — this seems almost tautological in that it’s hard to imagine anything which did not do this being called a “religion” — but again, that’s unrelated to the real issue, which is the set of core beliefs and behaviors which a religion upholds as “good” in its followers. These can be very different from one religion to the next. I’m not much concerned with the minutiae of theology, “salvation”, and suchlike concepts, which in most religions are hopelessly illogical, naive, and, yes, boring. I’m concerned with the real-world behavior a religion generates.

I have a number of criticisms of Bush’s approach. As I said above, I doubt that he grasps the real magnitude or nature of the threat. His strategy of fighting terrorism by spreading democracy in Islamic countries is based on the premise that terrorism is rooted in the tyranny and hopelessness which are currently pervasive in the Islamic world, which is a real oversimplification of the problem. (Nevertheless, since this is the strategy, I support doing whatever we can to help it succeed.) He obviously did not plan well for the occupation of Iraq. He has not attacked Saudi Arabia, which should have been the next target after Afghanistan, given its active role in inflaming worldwide Islamic radicalism and jihadism for years before Sept. 11. His military tactics have been far too timid. So don’t assume I am defending his record. I think I understand the grounds for each of his decisions, but I still think many of them have been mistaken.

He has, of course, succeeded on the point that counts the most: our territory has not been attacked again. Unfortunately, if we withdraw from Iraq without a clear victory, the probability of another major terrorist attack on the US will become much higher (if you don’t understand why this is the case, I’ll be glad to explain it). Worse, the situation in Iraq may have deteriorated to the point that a clear victory is no longer possible. This is why I think Bush’s “surge”, whatever its flaws, is our only hope — given the political climate, it’s the last chance we’re going to get to win this thing.

Summer, that film looks very interesting and I hope someone picks it up so I can watch it when it hits my local library. It actually makes me think of how the media started referring to the displaced residents of the Gulf Coast as “refugees” after Katrina. Your comment about the fringe element has inspired me to write another post, so I’m going to get started on that now. Thanks for stopping in and leaving a comment.

Hey nice peice brother, I have been wanting to get in touch with you for a while, but you know how life is. Well check this out I am going to kick around this site for a while to see if I can find a direct contact to you. if not e-mail me, it goes to my crackberry! :-0