Good stuff, very eye opening.

This time it is an intellectual front confronting the conflict between religion and violence. A religion of peace can’t be advocating violence as a path to God. Likewise, advocating violence as a path to belief, doesn’t create belief, only fear. Without true belief, there is no religion. So there is a conflict within Islam.

Besides, if Allah had wanted us all to be Muslims, it would have been so. To believe otherwise, is to question Allah.

Now, of course, every imam from here to Mecca is going to feel threaten. Damn, their trump card of “death and paradise” is under attack in a battle of words and ideas.

A hundred years ago, the elites of America would have taken up the challenge to engage as well. Unfortunately, the elites are now so elite that most have put God and church outside their doors, so don’t expect a real intellectual discussion from that direction. It might spoil their weekend.

It never fails that when a charter member of the bien pensant cognescenti like Rushdie publicly expresses agreement with, or sympathy for, a hopelessly beyond the pale figure like the Pope, he has to let his fellow cognescenti know that, nudge-nudge wink-wink, this in no way changes the in-ness of “us” and the outness of “them.” Oofah!

http://tinyurl.com/s3ccg

Please see this, pass on to as many as possible. Sharing the link is the smallest possible thing I can do, but I hope people see it.
Thank you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwy-7KvRsUs

As I mentioned YESTERDAY, please DO NOT use long URLs in your comments as they tend to ruin the reading experience for everyone by distorting browsers. I had to delte one from the post above. Use tiny URLs. Thank you.

http://badhairblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/brief-debunking-of-list-of-top-20.html

Item #14, numbering: The system of numbering in use all round the world is probably Indian in origin but the style of the numerals is Arabic and first appears in print in the work of the Muslim mathematicians al-Khwarizmi and al-Kindi around 825. Algebra was named after al-Khwarizmi’s book, Al-Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah, much of whose contents are still in use.

In The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (And the Crusades) Robert Spencer explains (again, p. 93):

in fact, the principles upon which al-Khawarizmi worked were discovered centuries before he was born — including the zero, which is often attributed to Muslims. Even what we know today as “Arabic numerals” did not originate in Arabia, but in pre-Islamic India — and they are not used in the Arabic language today.