Law and order where there is neither?

But what happened when Bin Laden promoted terror primarily because of massive atrocities committed by the US government against Muslims?

That's the problem right there. Osama bin Laden is hallucinating.

Israel isn't committing atrocities against Muslims. Innocent Muslims are being caught in the middle because of a war of aggression that Hamas is conducting against Israel, yes. This is unfortunate, and it is understandable that the ordinary people of the Gaza Strip will blame Israel for this, as it's Israelis who are directly doing the damage, rather than Hamas.

None of this would be happening if originally the Arab countries around Palestine didn't try to drive Israel into the sea, after the U.N. had only given it the land on which Jews were actually living. Because they took it as affront that Jews should be able to rule themselves on their own land rather than remain as prey to abuse and violence from Muslims, they attacked - and this led to them losing territory, so that Israel could defend itself in future.

And then, in October 1973, the Arab world brought in an oil embargo against the Western world during the Cold War. This was treason against humanity, as it interfered with the effectiveness of the armed forces of the United States of America, which were all that stood between humanity and an eternal night of Communist slavery.

The Muslim world's petty quarrel with Israel is its own fault, not Israel's and not America's. They have no cause to blame the United States for the consequences of their own actions.

Israel isn't committing atrocities against Muslims.

Talk about hallucinating!

jamesd prated: <quote>We do not, in fact, have examples of religions casually ignoring their holy texts.</quote>

On what planet have you been living? No religion pays slavish attention to every jot and tittle of their sacred holy texts. Even so-called inerrantists practice cafeteria <fill in the name of the -ism>.

Cafeteria interpretation of the Old Testament is authorized by Jesus Christ and Paul the apostle.  Cafeteria interpretation of the New Testament is not.   Judaism and Islam do not practice cafeteria interpretation at all.  Christians only practice cafeteria interpretation where authorized by the new Testament, as authorized by the new Testament.

Hinduism, on the other hand, is pretty much all cafeteria interpretation because their prophets and holy books accreted over the ages - they have had no end of prophets introducing a new version.  Sikhs also practice cafeteria interpretation to the extent that Christians do, and for about the same reason - they got in a new prophet and new revelation that radically contradicted the old - but they are pretty faithful to the new revelation - they do not do the cafeteria thing on the new revelation.

But what happened when Bin Laden promoted terror primarily because of massive atrocities committed by the US government against Muslims? 

Terror is everywhere along the borders of Islam.  What atrocities have Thais and Filipinos been committing?

The US support for the house of Saud is only one of Bin Laden's complaints, and does not constitute "massive atrocities".

Bin Laden's indictment goes back to crimes near a thousand years old, and his demands conclude with Americans accepting Islamic law and Islamic supremacy in America.

We have always been at war with Dar al Islam.  We always will be at war with Dar al Islam.  We had a period of relative tranquility from 1830 to 1960 because colonists were taking the heat for us, much as the Jewish settlers in Gaza took the heat for Israel.

It is most small scale war, like the Somali pirates and the French New Towns, with occasional eruptions into large scale war, like the Yom Kippur war.

This appears to be your justification for killing (and maiming and torturing and stealing from and making destitute) huge numbers of innocent people who are oppressed by the Iraq government.

We build schools in Iraq and Iraqis blow them up with the children inside.  It is a funny way of making war.  I wish we were killing and maiming and stealing and making destitute, because that is how wars are won.  We should be blowing up Iraqi schools, but we are building them.

That is not how you win wars.

Jamesd, if you believe that Jews don't practice cafeteria Judaism, you are living on a totally different planet, or perhaps you are simply too lazy to read the Torah in its entirety. Jews pick the stuff which seems reasonable. They seldom kill children for sassing parents, in this day and age. Enslaving women and children of neighboring countries is highly unusual.

The same is surely true of Islam. If you insist on beating every Muslim on the head for every last verse in the Quran, you're just a screwed-up Muslim fanatic, not a rational logician.

Either use the same standards for everyone, or stop making an ass of yourself about the Quran. Tell us how you really feel about the Torah in its entirety, warts and all.

The statists among us may think their arguments are clever, creative, and original, but this is not so. Any intellectually honest statist - if such a creature exists - should study Negroes With Guns; it is not a long read.

The exact arguments were put forth by statist trash when Robert Williams created the Deacons for Defense in response to the KKK bullying his family and neighbors. He had appealed to the government police for help, but the same government police were confiscating negroes' guns by day and returning with sheets at night, so the government police were of no help to Mr. Williams; they were the problem.

He was accused of fomenting violence. He made it clear that he wanted nothing but peace. He was told that his effort to defend himself and his family and neighbors was futile, since he was out-numbered and out-gunned. It turned out that the white supremacist statist trash who were wearing sheets at night did not really want to risk their allegedly "superior" lives in anything close to a fair fight.

In Real Life, as opposed to the hysterical imaginings of the statist trash who opposed the Deacons for Defense, the KKK backed off when confronted with armed people who were willing to defend themselves. In Real Life, the Deacons for Defense did not go on a wild rampage against the statist trash. In Real Life, the neighborhood was more peaceful when people engaged in the AnCap method of defending themselves and their neighborhoods against aggression by voluntary means. No taxes were levied. No monopoly was created. No government was created. A voluntary organization of people chose to pool resources, purchased weapons, learned how to use them, and brought peace to their neighborhoods - against the opposition of statist trash naysayers of both parties and of all races.

We should be blowing up Iraqi schools, but we are building them.

That would make sense if we were at war with Iraq. Blowing up Syrian schools and Iranian schools - since the terrorists blowing up Iraqi schools are supported in those two countries - might make a sort of sense, at least as collateral damage while we're trying to destroy the ability of those two countries to support terrorists.

America didn't stop building American schools during World War II, and building schools in South Vietnam didn't lead to the loss of the Vietnam war.

We should be blowing up Iraqi schools, but we are building them.

That would make sense if we were at war with Iraq. Blowing up Syrian schools and Iranian schools - since the terrorists blowing up Iraqi schools are supported in those two countries - might make a sort of sense, at least as collateral damage while we're trying to destroy the ability of those two countries to support terrorists.

America didn't stop building American schools during World War II, and building schools in South Vietnam didn't lead to the loss of the Vietnam war.

Riddle: When a fool argues with a drunk, how do you tell which one is the fool?
Answer: Eventually the drunk will sober up. The other one is the fool.


Riddle: When a fool argues with an insane fanatic, how do you tell which one is the fool?
Answer: Usually the fool doesn't *sound* like an insane fanatic....

Jamesd, if you believe that Jews don't practice cafeteria Judaism, you are living on a totally different planet, or perhaps you are simply too lazy to read the Torah in its entirety. Jews pick the stuff which seems reasonable.

The Torah is embedded in the Talmud.  The Talmud is a great pile of legalistic weaseling to weasel out of the disturbing parts of the Torah.  Jews don't just blow off the parts of the Torah they do not like.  They put tremendous effort into rationalizing, evading, complexifying, uglifying, and obfuscating.  It took them centuries to compose a Talmud that wriggled out from under the Torah.

We should be blowing up Iraqi schools, but we are building them.

That would make sense if we were at war with Iraq.

We are supposedly not at war with Iraq because we are nation building, trying to create an Iraqi nation, and blowing up schools is no way to build a nation.

We should not be trying to build an Iraqi nation, because Islamic moderates in Iraq only have a plurality, not a majority.  Similarly, Karzai is not an Islamic moderate.

We should not be trying to build nations, because no one knows how to build nations, while everyone knows how to break nations.

People forget how thorough and drastic the pacification of Germany was.  We did not let Nazis or neo Nazis retain any power, or organize, or preach, and we certainly did not allow them to form political parties and participate in elections.  We purged every Nazi from every form of organization and association in Germany. We should not have allowed radical Muslims to retain any power, or organize, or preach, let alone participate in Iraqi elections.  As long as any religious Muslim retains any coercive power, any political power, as long as people who preach the kind of Islam that disturbs us are still masters of their mosques, Iraq is still our enemy.

No preacher who rejects separation of mosque and state should have been allowed to preach, no congregation that rejects separation of mosque and state should have been allowed to assemble.

Because we failed to de-Islamize Iraq the way we de-Nazified Germany, Iraq and Afghanistan are still our enemies, as will become obvious a few years down the road.

If purging them of radical Islam is too horrifying and bloody, and I rather think it might me, then that does not necessarily mean we should make war on them until we so impoverish them as to render them incapable of doing us harm, but we certainly should not be providing them with aid.  If purging them of Islam is more bloody than we are willing to do, then making them into allies rather than enemies is more bloody than we are willing to do.

Well, Jamesd, you admit that Jews wiggle out from portions of the Torah. Now, is it possible that there exists Moslims who do similar wiggling, or who do as many Catholics do in America, ( who simply ignore the weird bits such as "no artificial contraception?" ) Having been brought up Catholic, I can tell you that little effort is invested in finding sophisticated methods of wiggling out from under Catholic doctrine; most people simply follow the Nike slogan "just do it." Frankly, my Jewish friends seldom split Talmudic hairs; that's for rabbis and Talmudic students, not for normal people.


There are at least three well-known branches of Islam - the Sunni, Sufi, and Shia - and from this wikipedia page, it appears to be at least as complicated at the many branches of Christianity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_schools_and_branches

Hence, I am real suspicious of self-described "experts" who claim, on the basis of their dubious, uniformed and biased reading of the Quran, that all 1.6 billion Muslims are rabid enemies of Western Civilization.
 

Well, Jamesd, you admit that Jews wiggle out from portions of the Torah.

But they don't just blow off those parts.  They put a huge amount of effort into creating a rationale for evading them - the Talmud is gigantic pile of rationalization.  They don't just say "well, we don't like that, so we will forget about it."

Now, is it possible that there exists Moslims who do similar wiggling,

Indeed there are, lots, and look what happens to them.

There was one such in Afghanistan, who when the Americans occupied Afghanistan thought it would be safe to issue a Koran with commentary and interpretation, Talmud style.  I forget whether the Karzai government cut off his head, or merely threatened to.  Either way, the commented and interpreted Koran did not get issued.  They did not even wait to see what was in it, because they had a pretty good suspicion of what would be in it.  Jews around 30-70 AD responded to the Christians and the early re-interpreters of the Torah in the same fashion.

When the Americans flattened half of Fallujah, and set up a police state in Fallujah with the police largely composed of terrorists who had switched sides and signed up with the Americans, there was again a Fallujah based effort to start reinterpreting the Koran, but again, now that the Americans are withdrawing .....

In the nineteenth century under British occupation there were Iranian efforts to get in a new prophet to blow off the more revolting parts of the Koran - Bahai faith.  In Iran today, male Bahais are murdered, and the women forcibly "married" to Muslims.

The trouble is that the Koran, as it written, just like the Torah, as it was written, says to kill those who claim a new prophecy or an elaborate re-interpretation.  And in practice, they do kill such people, and we let them kill such people.

Any Muslim who is not a rabid enemy of Western civilization keeps his head down.  And if he sticks his head up, for example by issuing a commentary and re-interpretation weaseling out of the bloodier parts of the Koran, or even proposing to do so, Muslims cut his head off. 

And that includes supposedly moderate democratic Muslim governments like that of Indonesia who are supposedly our allies in the war on terror.

So let me get this straight, JamesD - our allies, people who are being encouraged with American dollars and manpower, are engaged in these brutal acts against moderate Muslims, and you are suggesting this as a productive method of reducing terrorism?

Are you really a Muslim fanatic, and your goal to increase Muslim fanaticism?

If your rational brain were briefly revived. you might notice that when a heavily armed invader starts shooting people, blowing up stuff, and otherwise creating great mayhem, all sorts of violent opposition is the usual response, and the opposition is often as irrational and nasty as the invasion, sometimes even more so. War is hell; it engages all sorts of nasty reptilian primitive parts of the human brain.

This process you are encouraging? Why?

American military and foreign "aid" are stirring up a pot of trouble. You, JamesD, would be happy only if the people who are being shot and otherwise maimed and killed were to throw themselves down en masse and say "Praise America, for we have sinned, and all of our lives are forfeit, do with our miserable carcasses whatever you will. " You take every sign of manly resistance as proof of your bizarre paranoid anti-Islam fantasies.

For the two-kinds-of-Islam folks, including JamesD, I encourage a look at the following article, which sums up the logical and historical problems with your stark raving paranoid fantasies.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig11/combs2.1.1.html

This is an example of how fair and just the Men in Blue in that great liberal city of Denver are:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/63930.html

A passerby offered to testify in court on behalf of a man who was stopped for allegedly running a stop sign. The police beat him up for his insolence - and it was caught on video.

This, we are told, is a great improvement over private security forces who could be disciplined by their customers for such abuses.

Several weeks ago, I challenged the statist apologists to find examples of private security forces engaged in similar misconduct. Since there are more private security forces in America than government forces, this request should be trivially easy to meet. What's the problem here? Time enough to troll, but too lazy to back up your imaginative theories?