In fact, the official good people perpetrate most of the violence and cause most deaths and fear. The official good people’s violence is delivered by different means, but it’s no less ‘terrorism’ than the official bad people’s violence. It’s designed to convince them (i.e. not us) to despair, give up, and retreat.

You need to be more impartial and consistent.

You already decided that your side does their best to limit damage and the other side are monsters, and people on the other side feel exactly the same way, only the opposite.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/ISL302004.htm
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/02/07/iraq.main/index.html

The military does their best to limit damage to schools, hospitals, mosques and churches. However, if they’re being attacked from those locations or they are serving a military purpose, then they must be attacked like any other position.

Are the once and future hosts the ones in the Netherlands or here in the US? I suppose it could be both… If she does get murdered by Muslim extremists for her outspoken point of view with a note stabbed to her body and all that, would reporting that really be propaganda?

Some people think she’s inflammatory and bigoted (wasn’t she raised a Muslim?), and others think she’s the voice of warning the West desperately needs to hear as a wake up call to who and what we’re dealing with.

I feel that either version deserves protection. If that protection resides in the Netherlands, then that’s where she ought to be.

Actually the Dutch are saying that the provision of security for people living in America is the responsibility of Americans. If Ayaan Hirsi Ali wants to benefit from the Voltaire doctrine she had better remain in the Netherlands.

For Ali’s once and future hosts, on the other hand, it goes like this:

“We heartily applaud your bigotry but don’t fool yourself that we are going to pay a cent for your security. Paying taxes is against our principles and anyway useful idiots are not a scarce resource. However, rest assured that if you are murdered the propaganda value of the event will be exploited to the full. Hell, we will probably ask the USAF to paint your name on a bomb.”

Recently, the press carried a story about a woman who was beaten on a Jerusalem bus for refusing to move to the rear to make way for one of the male travelers. Miriam Shear, an Orthodox Jew, reported that she rides the bus daily to pray at the Western Wall at sunrise. While the bus line she travels is not defined as “sex-segregated,” the custom, primarily since the majority of travelers are haredim has been that women usually sit in the back, while men sit in the front.

In a recent interview, Shear reports: “Every two or three days, someone would tell me to sit in the back. I was always polite and said: ‘No, this is not synagogue. I am not going to sit in the back.’”

Shear then goes on to report how on one morning a man got onto the bus and demanded her seat, even though there were other empty ones – both in the front and in the back of the bus. When Shear refused to get up, the man said: “I am not asking you – I’m telling you,” at which point he spat at her. She was cursed, slapped and beaten – with nary an objection by others on the bus, including the cowardly bus driver.

Or should this one be addressed in a more balanced and nuanced way? Tell me, brother.

Also, obviously Hamas and other organizations in Palestine and elsewhere would prefer to target the military with modern weapons. But of course they don’t have any modern weapons and military targets are well protected, so your condemnation pretty much amounts to the demand that those with superior military should be able to do whatever they want to everybody else.

Incidentally, isn’t it lucky that by a sheer coincidence you find yourself on the side with a superior military? Is this how your moral compass operates? I suspect it is.

It doesn’t matter who I am and what I consider myself. And didn’t leap to anything; notice that this is a thread about Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Sorry, but your insinuations don’t help your case.

…if you think that some of my assertions were false or irrelevant then you should be able to list them.

Some of your assertions I did address, others are too rhetorical to address (“terrorist-promoting parties”?), others are just wrong: “In dozens of countries around the world where Muslims are a majority, other religions are persecuted“. I know only one Muslim country where other religions are persecuted – it’s Saudi Arabia.

And, of course, you failed to establish the cause and effect, the relevance. Why do some Muslims support terrorism? Is it because they are Muslims or is it because they feel persecuted and powerless, or is it for some other reason or a combination or reasons?

Again, this is exactly how anti-semites operate: they list a bunch of names of bankers and media figures and say: see, the conclusion is obvious. You seemingly dismissing any other possible explanation out of hand is just as problematic, in my opinion.

Second, I certainly think that suicide bombers who target civilians are more objectionable than aerial bombings that target military and infrastructure sites. Don’t you? Of course if the US were using planes to deliberately bomb schools and hospitals in order to terrorize the populace, that would be horrible, right? But that’s exactly the kind of targets that suicide bombers go for. American bombs are military weapons: they are used to destroy the enemy’s power to make war. Suicide bombers are terrorist weapons: they are used to terrify people into submission. Surely you have enough moral compass to see the difference here. You do, don’t you?

Third, I find your last sentence unconvincing. I just don’t believe that you have ever defended Christians the way that you leaped to defend Muslims. Now, if you are a Muslim, then I guess that is excusable, but if consider yourself a person of the Left, then you really need to find some plausible reason for the double standard—at least if you are at all interested in maintaining intellectual respect.

I eagerly await your links to the times that you have made the same point about intemperate language against Christianity, the religion of 2.1 billion people. Until then, I don’t think that even you buy this point, so I won’t bother refuting it.

OK, you got it: demonizing all Christians is wrong and stupid. Now you can respond.

Just trying to be rhetorically effective with sarcasm. Delicately, of course.

Go find any anti-semitic site on the Web and they’ll explain to you in very similar terms why the Jews represent an evil nihilistic cult.

It’s never a good idea – to demonize a large group of people based on some arbitrary criterion; but when your target group is this large – 1 – 1.5 billion people – it’s just plain stupid.

But if you absolutely must do it, find a smaller group. Try Wahhabism or something. Yeah, Wahhabism is an evil cult destroying the civilization – I remember it was a popular mantra a just few years ago.

*But sarcasm can be rhetorically effective when done with a bit of delicacy and in support of an actual point.

Oh those niggardly Dutch.

It’s never a good idea – to demonize a large group of people based on some arbitrary criterion; but when your target group is this large – 1 – 1.5 billion people – it’s just plain stupid.

But if you absolutely must do it, find a smaller group. Try Wahhabism or something. Yeah, Wahhabism is an evil cult destroying the civilization – I remember it was a popular mantra a just few years ago.

By contrast, there is a very significant sense in which Islam is a death cult: polls consistently show very high support for suicide bombers among Muslims all over the world. A party known for its suicide bombers won an election in Palestine. Polls show that if there were open elections in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or various other Muslim nations, the terrorist-promoting parties would win handily. In dozens of countries around the world where Muslims are a majority, other religions are persecuted and where Muslims are a large minority, there are home-grown Muslims terrorist trying to intimidate the majority. Let’s not get into the argument of whether the Koran objectively promotes the subjugation or women or war against other religions, but the most influential interpreters of the Koran in Islam today argue that it does so teach, and there is very little dispute from these hypothetical moderate Muslims that we are always hearing about but seldom from.

I’m not saying that all Muslims are evil people, but that there is overwhelming evidence that Islam is a force for evil in the world today. And if you are going to respond with indignation to that statement, please include a link to where you responded with indignation when someone said that Christianity is a force for evil. If you spend any time on the internet, you’ve had plenty of opportunities to do that.