ScottSA

It's not obscurantism we're fighting against. It's Islam. And looking back in history, you'll find that neither Mustafa Pasha in 1687 nor the Ottomans in 1444, nor any of the numerous clashes between Islam and the west were won by trotting out "freedom" as an end unto itself. Freedom is not working well at the moment either as an antidote to Islam. In fact, I can't think of a single case in which either freedom or enforced politeness working. The only time it has been tried, actually, is the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where there were even more "anti-racism" type laws than there are now in Europe, and we all know how hand-holdingly peaceful that turned out to be. The simplistic slogan claiming that freedom has to be defended is not merely an empty platitude.

ROTFL. You actually believe that banning Islamic garb and symbology would actually 'eradicate' jihadism? Such actions would simply radicalize even more people and would likely lead to more violance - not less. Oh I have no doubt it will lead to violence, at least initially. But there's going to be violence anyway. It's too late to avoid it. There's violence aplenty now. Would you rather wait until western liberalism is in a minority position? Is your position that you'd rather go gently into the night rather than kicking and screaming? Is what you want?

The crusades were simply one of a numerous examples of people using religion as a pretext to justify economic conquestWhy don't you answer the more relevent question: Then explain why your 'solution' to the Jihadist problem is any different from the 'solutions' offered by facists to the problems that they obsessed about? This is not a rhetorical question - I would really like to know why think the entire religion of Islam could be eradicated with anything less than genocide on a massive scale. I'm working on weaponizing bagels. Of course you're asking a rhetorical question. Several people have already answered it, and there's not much more to say about it. France is beginning, with tentative steps, to do what is necessary...banning headscarves. What is required is the banning of all indentifiable Islamic garb and symbology. Not fair? Who gives a shit? Any religion that starts blowing things up as a matter of ongoing course in the name of their religion they should be banned too. It can stew along breeding backwardness in Asian and the middle east to its heart's content until such time as one of its national bases, like Afghanistan, brings itself into the crosshairs. My concern is here in the west and the concessions we keep leaking to it.

The crusaders were mercenaries and thugs out for plunder. They were nominally christian but not much more. Right. On that completely and astoundingly ahistorical note, this conversation has wilted. Go read up on the warrior prince Christianity of the 9th through 12th centuries. Look up "Deus Vult." Get back to me when your knowledge of medieval religion has at least a turtlehead poking out of highschool history class.

Its started and I responed to one already. And you are part of the cover. You are making a cover for the cover to dettract. I know you are with MI-6 and you worked with Mossad and the CIA. Methinks you protest too loudly. Who did you say you were again? Sure, it seems like they planted bombs, and a couple of the so-called bombs almost blew up, and a couple people died on fire while shouting "Allah Akbar", but how do we really know any of this actually happened? Maybe there were no bombs. Maybe the Zionist entity has a mass hypotic existentialist ray they beam into our heads to make us believe we're reading stuff when we're really not.

Wow. you have never met an illogical argument that you love to be on the wrong side of have you? You are in business? haha Then from your logic we have a 245 tier system! (there are 245 countries in the world). If you go to New Guinea for treatment does that mean Canada has a two-tier system? Come on now -- surely you understand... er, maybe not -- with your grade 8 education it must be difficult to wrap your brain around this very convoluted subject. con-vo-lu-ted -- a big word. Sorry Scott -- it means complex. No, no. not a building complex like your grandma's condo! Complex as in complicated. How did I get involved with this? But now that I'm here, "complex" doesn't quite capture the full meaning of convoluted, really, because convoluted connotes a sort of twisting, or multicoiled complexity, while the term "complex" simply means multifaceted or difficult to understand. But thanks for the education. Next?

Fascism can only be compared to Jihadism if you accept that Jihadism is distinct from Islam. If you accept that then Jihadism could, in theory, could be rendered irrelevant like Communism. However, such an outcome is impossible if you insist that Islam and Jihadism are inseparable. Islam is an essential part of the culture of billions of people and it cannot be eradicated unless you are willing to commit genocide on a massive scale. Even then you would likely never succeed. The more you talk about 'eradicating' Islam the more you sound like the fascists that caused so much bloodshed 60 years ago. Right, the old "if you hate fascists, you must be a fascist" line popping up. Must you be so trite? Tell me something...what do you suppose happened to Zoroastrianism? Was it not encultured for centuries into every thought and breath of it's believers? I could probably come up with dozens of eradicated religions with the same characteristics as Islam...and you probably know it as well as I do. Whether I pretend Jihadism is distinct from Islam or not is nothing but an intellectual lark, because it's not. Take a hard long look at Islam...not just the bumpersticker slogans and surface analyses of how "Islam is a religion of peace" and "terrorists are not Islamic," because that is utter hogwash. It's like arguing that Crusaders were not Christian, or Nazis were not fascists.

Personally, I would not want to make any changes to the those two recent examples identified in post #6 up above for one reason only: to illustrate what NOT to do. If you can call that "pass one of the others" so be it. The irony is that this thread was opened over a year ago and we now have (at least) two RECENT examples of threads with non-descriptive titles degenerating rapidly into directionless rants. Yes, no doubt due entirely to the non-descriptive titles. No other threads degenerate in quite the same way.

It'll be a frosty day in hell before you manage to spread the religion of Atheism around the world. It just never seems to catch on for some reason.

Wrong century, wrong continent, wrong enemy, and it's quite likely it was never said. But nice try. The phrase was "Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoset," (kill them all. God will know his own) and it was supposedly, but not very likely, said by the Abbot of Citeaux during the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathar heresy in Southern France. Oh, and today is 2007, btw. Yes and the old saying is the he who does not know and understand history will have to relive it. I did not bring up the subject of the 6th century terrorists. So like an American do you know the world history, it was always my favourite subject in school. I have heard that story but I also followed the history of the Crusades. "Those Who Forget History Are Doomed to Repeat It" was George Santayana, not an "old saying," I am not American, the "Crusades," as a topic, don't as a rule include the Albigensian Crusade, being as it was a different thing entirely, and I hated history in grade school, but loved it ever since. Are we heading somewhere with this discussion?

You are engaging the same hate mongering that you accuse Muslims of. Islam will never be 'eradicated' - there are too many people out there that believe in it. Out of curiousity. Can you give me one example where one group of people has successfully 'eradicated' another? Who do you consider role models in your quest for an Islam-free society? Throughout history peoples have eradicated other peoples, but that's not my argument. I said we ought to eradicate Islam, not that we ought to eradicate all Musselmen. I also said as an alternative that we beat it back. Fascism is a case in point in which an ideology, not entirely dissimilar to Islam, has been beaten back to the point of western irrelevance, if you choose not to call it "eradicated." Communism, although perhaps the coffin lid is not yet sealed, is ailing tremendously. Further, entire religions have been destroyed or eradicated, or beaten to the point of irrelevance...Zoroastrianism comes immediately to mind, not ironically, as does the middle eastern animalism that Islam stamped out. The question is not whether we can beat Islam to the point of irrelevance, but rather whether we have the will to do so before it's too late.

I do not believe that this country should be in the business of "spreading the freedom". Thanks for pointing it out. Another reason to keep an eye on Harper, especially in Afganistan. Harper is not in Afghanistan, and I strongly suspect you won't be bestirring yourself to Afghanistan anytime soon to keep "eyes" on anything.

Calm down Kimmy. It's not like you didn't know the apes and pigs would kill him. The inherent unfairness of the Zionist entity is well known to all...fire a rocket at them in the name of Allah, they fire one back against his will...blow up a pizzareia in the name of Allah, they build a wall against his will...launch a mortar attack in the name of Allah, and they bulldoze houses against his will. Send a man dressed up as a large mouse at them, and what do you expect?

Quite frankly its the allegedly "moderate" Islamic groups, like Cair-can and the CIC who are far more dangerous. While they soft-soap their claims, they play the good cop to the terrorist's bad cop, declaiming terrorism whenever it's politic to do so, but linking the condemnation to demands in order to avoid further terrorist attacks. They have become masters of manipulation, working tirelessly to drag Islam further into our society at every opportunity. I truly wish some of these lefties would set aside their hatred for western society long enough to take a good hard look at what they scorn and what they defend. Whatever machinations Bush has got up to in his "destruction of civil liberties" as absolutely nothing compared to what he is defending against. Here's Tony Blair, now freed from the curbs he once had on what he could say, talking about these types of "assaults of freedom." http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?en..._Terrorism&only

Why do I so strongly suspect that when that interminable cat and mouse game was going on, you were in the forefront of those wringing their hands over 6 trillion Iraqi children dying due to the sanctions and a lack of babymilk factories?

This is becoming an increasing problem. Whole social movements are going unreported or glossed over by the MSM. Rightleaning cultural groups and political parties, and I don't mean cultural groups of the type who sip tea and make approving noises at shitty art and turgid prose, are gaining in popularity from France to Sweden, in response to whole geographic areas being taken over by the Musselmen, who quite openly and proudly prey on the inhabitants. Welfare rolls have swelled beyond any hope of the welfare state continuing, rapes are rampant, and crimes are skyrocketing. The only country fighting back even a bit is Denmark...every other country seems under the thrall of multicult, and everyone is dearly afraid of raising their voice lest they be scorned, or arrested, for "racism." Meanwhile, the pro-eurounion pro-multicult governments...the ones on their way out one way or another...are running around in a sort of neverneverland of meetings and feelgood fetes reminiscent of the last days of Rome or the Berlin bunker. And through all this, the MSM either says nothing or minimizes it to the point of insignificance. What we'll see in the days to come, as the Musselmen get noisier and more dangerous and European governments give way to increasingly hardline governments, is the MSM expressing it's befuddlement. But, if the past is anything to go by, the MSM will at least at first try to atomize the phenomenon and call each overthrow a "protest vote," as it did recently in the French election.

A long kirpan registry may in fact be more in order than a ban. I have drafted legislation that I would like the Government or Private Member to table as soon after April 3, 2006 as possible. It is urgent. Kirpans are perfectly safe when welded to a 10 pounder cannonball. Why bother Sikhs with un-necessary paperwork? Why not simply legislate that each kirpan be welded to a blunt object of regulation shape and weight? Everyone's religion is respected, no paperwork, no lost millions (criminal Sikhs are hardly likely to register their kirpans, after all), no problem.

Many Muslims disagree with you. Who are you to tell them what their religion means?Christian Fundamentalists do not represent all Christians. In fact, they don't even represent a majority of Christians. Yet many people seem to equate Christian Fundamentalism with Christianity. Should Christianity be labelled a religion of neanderthals because a few insist on denying the scientific facts regarding evolution? Islam also has different meanings to different people and it is not reasonable to judge the entire religion because of the actions of a few. Furthermore, Islam is practiced in some form by over a billion people. It is not going to disappear no matter what you might wish. For that reason, you should feel motivated to find some way to accomodate Islamic beliefs. Arguing that the entire religion should be 'stomped out' simply encourages more of the Jihadism that you hate. Yes, and sending Sherman tanks against Panzers simply encourages more Panzer shells, but that startling wisdom aside, Islam will either be destroyed, beaten back and eradicated in the west, or we will be facing perpetual Jihad. The alternative is submission to Islam. Which do you prefer?

Well, we can't have apes and pigs wandering in and out of mosques, now can we? Especially ones who think their wives are their equals. Let's be reasonable here...I mean, Islam is a religion of peace and all, but there are limits y'know...

I didn't suggest banning. I argued in favour of deleting the thread. If we delete this thread instead, can we pass one of the others? Why would you want to delete threads just because it takes an extra second of tittilating curiosity to see what it's about?

Party disipline only has power as long as MPs believe that their political futures are better served by toeing the party line. If the PMO went nuts like the Bush adminstration has you would see the rank and file MPs use their power and depose the PM. Whatever. Pink elephants may thud onto the roof of Centre Block, permanently damaging the copper plate, but that's not within the scope of my example either, so I'll try to avoid that topic too. If you're going to nitpick, then lets say the PMO has much greater potential power than the presidency, even though in my example, during the Chretien years, it was de facto as well.

Have you ever wondered why these things give us such experiences? Could it be that we evolved to appreciate these things? Could be, but to what end?

Bingo. But why don't we use two different words? Jihadism is the ideology that belongs in philosophical scrap heap beside communism or facism. Islam is the religion which promotes many desireable values using cultural metaphors from the societies that created it. Well, because if we did use those words, we'd look like naive PC idiots, so we won't. I won't anyway; you do what you want. It may make you feel cultured and superior to pretend I'm a hillbilly troglodyte, but I assure you it's entirely possible that I have at least the amount of education you do. So perhaps we'd like to drop the superior attitude and open our mind a bit, eh wot? I know, from the Kosovo thread and others, that you operate with a broad knowledge, but it's a knowledge that lacks depth in some areas. Islam is not the sweetness and light counterpart of a dualism in which Jihad is the darkside, nor Islam is some way disassociated from Jihadism. In fact, Jihadism is an integral part of Islam, and is rooted in the very centrality of Islam. It makes sense within western rationalism to make distinctions between the bombers and peaceful Muslims, but in fact this is similar to trying to make distinctions between nasty Nazis and peaceful Nazis. Those distinctions may hold loosely true, but they are largely irrelevant. Allow me to repost a post in another thread that you may not have seen due to it's being buried by another poster's sniping: ...It's easy enough to identify what exactly Nazi began as and why it became what it became. It's common currency to either write off Hitler as mad or as evil incarnate, but he was really neither; he was a revolutionary. He found his ability as an orator, tagged it on to a sort of aboveground/underground racialist philosophy of volk, rather than nationalism, per se, and then flogged it through the 20s, into eclipse in the late 20s, and then blew through the doors of the Reichstag in the 30s. Those who have tried to identify Nazism have always been frustrated, because in the end, it appears that in Hitler's mind Nazism was simply a ongoing revolution of the people, more akin to a sort of Maoist continuing revolution than anything Stalin ever came up with. All his actual policies, of liebenstrau, anti-Jewish laws, everything, were directed at continuing revolution and the ascendency of the Aryan volk. This ideology, if it can be called that, directed his every action. Borrowing from marxism, he treated the niceties of alliance politics as mere bourgeois trifles, which is why what he said to foreign leaders never much mattered. He said what people wanted to hear as a matter of course, merely as an aid to a furtherance of his aim. It wasn't that he had no morals, it was simply that he operated on a different moral scale; similar to a communist revolutionary's; with utter contempt for bourgeois morality and utter contempt for the "weakness" of others. But what was striking is that he had fully exposed his plans two full decades beforehand. Anyone who had read Mein Kampf knew pretty much exactly what he claimed he was going to do, with the Jews, with leibenstrau, with the German volk. Hell, they even knew which direction he was going to go for living space. Hitler and Nazism were really quite simple. So simple in fact that no one quite "got it," because it didn't fit with their way of thinking. Buckets of apologist ink have blaming Versailles for the rise of Hitler, and while his minor and temporary rise in the early 20s might have been explained away through this mechanism, it was moot by 1933. People have blamed the world depression, but that too was largely irrelevant to Hitler's rise. Nazism was simply action mated with racial pride, interpreted as a sort of nationalism that has managed to get a bum rap since. Hitler was a revolutionary who did nothing more than what he said he would do, and managed to succeed not because of any particular cleverness, but because he knew the opposition was weak, and most importantly because the opposition persisted in disbelieving him. In many ways we have the same situation with Islam. There's nothing particularly clever about it; we all know precisely what it wants, because it's not only told to our faces on a weekly basis by the videotaped confessions of bombers, would be bombers, and bin laden himself, but it's written right in the Koran. So-called "moderate" Muslims play the same good cop game of part blackmail and part soothing soto voce, blaming "Israel" when it makes sense, declaiming "radicals" when it helps their cause, claiming Islam is a "religion of peace" as a matter of course, taking care to forget that peace means "submission" within the context of Islam. We know they are full of shit, because we see it not only in the blackmail, but we can read right in the Koran that it is quite acceptable to lie to the non-believer if it will further Islam. They tell us what we need to hear, and we file it away as a promise, while they might as well be passing wind in their own minds. Meanwhile Islam moves steadily forward on every front, in our institutions, and in our midst. There won't be any panzer divisions racing across frontiers, because unless we wake up fairly suddenly, there won't be any need of them. Yet, like the western politicians in the thirties, we're running around constructing the most elaborate conceptual choreographies in an effort to make it make sense in a context of western rationalism. We needn't bother. It's not poverty or Israel or dictators. It's really quite simple.

Uh, can you please run that argument by me again? Nope.

The thing you seem to be missing...well...one of the things anyway...is that you're the one trying to define God. I haven't. I haven't seen Riverwind trying. Yet you are. Why is that? In fact, come to that, you're the one shouting and tossing around accusations like an inquisitor. Islam is an ideology, and that's why I hate it...not because Allah isn't spelled with the right number of letters in the right order. I don't imagine God runs around in a white nightie, and I don't know of anyone who does. That's an analogy, a metaphor. To mock it just makes you look foolish, not God. Running around trying to prove or disprove the existence of meaning in the universe by the standards of 21st century standards of science or rationalism is like an earthworm claiming that humans are not long and wiggly and must therefore not exist. Why are you so concerned? If you're convinced there's no God, then ignore him. But if I were you, I'd prepare myself for a surprise down the road.